Showing posts with label television. Show all posts
Showing posts with label television. Show all posts

Friday, February 12, 2021

Joss Whedon is a Creep. So?

Joss Whedon is to my mind one of the great geniuses of television. I would rank Buffy the Vampire Slayer as my third favorite TV series, after Star Trek and The X-Files. I really enjoyed what little there was of Firefly.

When I heard there were "allegations" against him, I thought, oh, great, who did he rape?

But honestly I am having trouble figuring out exactly what Whedon did wrong. Here is Slate's version:

On Wednesday, actress Charisma Carpenter accused Joss Whedon, the celebrated screenwriter and director behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Avengers, of “abusing his power” when she worked with him.

“Joss has a history of being casually cruel. He has created hostile and toxic work environments since his early career,” Carpenter wrote in a statement posted to Twitter. “I know because I experienced it first-hand. Repeatedly.”

Carpenter is best known for her role as mean-girl-turned-demon-fighter Cordelia Chase on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff show Angel. In her statement, Carpenter says Whedon berated her over her appearance — reprimanding her for getting a tattoo, calling her “fat” when she was pregnant — and became vindictive when, after refusing multiple phone calls from her agent, he learned of her pregnancy.

Carpenter has stated publicly before that she believes she was written off of Angel in 2003 as retaliation because she became pregnant. . . . .

But in her new statement, for the first time, Carpenter says that upon learning that she was expecting a baby, Whedon asked her if she was “going to keep it” and then accused her of sabotaging the show. She also adds that after her doctor recommended shortening her work hours, she was told to report to set at 1 am, and in the midst of the resultant stress, she experienced Braxton Hicks contractions. “It was clear to me the 1:00 AM call was retaliatory,” she writes.

Gee, if you hate your boss and think your work environment is toxic, maybe you should, I don't know, quit? And if you stay because you think the million a year makes it worth it, you have just lost all my sympathy. For all that she complains about the toxic environment, Carpenter's biggest gripe is that she got fired. She didn't see it as a release? If it was so awful, why not?

Whedon comes across as a monomaniacal jerk who cares not a whit about the personal lives of the people around him and expects them to be as relentlessly devoted to the show as he is. Like, I don't know, all the famous directors and producers of the whole twentieth century.

Repeat after me: all creative geniuses are monsters.

It isn't literally true, but it is pretty close, and honestly Joss Whedon is minor league compared to many of the other big art world figures of recent decades. Balanchine. Andy Warhol. Francis Bacon. 

I found it interesting that Anthony Stewart, the only grown-up among the Buffy regulars, says he had no idea there was anything unpleasant going on. I imagine this is because having already spent 15 years on stage and in television he was used to high-pressure acting, and he probably considered Whedon no worse than other directors he had worked with. For the young stars who grew up on the show, Whedon was all they knew. I suppose that did give him power over them, and made his insults hurt. But not because he was worse than many others.

Or perhaps Anthony Stewart just isn't the kind of person who feels abused. One of our themes here over the past year has been "nothing makes sense except in light of inter-individual variation," and maybe that's what we're seeing. But anyway, whatever Joss Whedon was doing, half the crew didn't think it was worth commenting on.

But various online commenters have tied all this up with Whedon's work since Firefly, which they find insufficiently feminist. I don't watch superhero movies, so I don't have much to say about The Avengers. But here is Slate again:

The feminist backlash against Joss Whedon began in earnest in 2015. Back then, it centered on a scene in Avengers: Age of Ultron, written and directed by Whedon, in which Black Widow appeared to say that because she can’t have children, she’s a monster.

“What about me, Joss Whedon?” wrote one disillusioned fan. “Do you think my broken ovary and useless fallopian tube make me a monster?”

Um, maybe you shouldn't have your self-esteem wrapped up in the pronouncements of comic book superheroes?  But even Slate admits that was a misinterpretation of Black Widow's actual words, and Whedon was guilty only of "clumsy writing." In a superhero movie? I am completely shocked.

The backlash developed further in 2017, when Whedon’s unproduced 2004 script for Wonder Woman leaked, mostly because of a lengthy sequence it contains in which Diana is put into chains and forced to say, “I submit,” repeatedly.

The scene is clearly intended to critique the patriarchal power structures that force Diana into submission. But it’s a sharp contrast to the joyous empowerment offered by 2017’s Wonder Woman (written by Allan Heinberg and directed by Patty Jenkins): Instead of glorying in Diana’s iconic stride through No Man’s Land, Whedon’s imagined audience is instead asked to suffer through her humiliation with her.

And where the Patty Jenkins Wonder Woman is explicitly told from Diana’s point of view, Whedon’s leaked script frames the character through the point of view of her love interest, who speaks in the signature quippy patterns Whedon usually grants to his authorial avatars (think Buffy’s Xander, Dollhouse’s Topher, or Firefly’s Wash). One viral Twitter thread described the script as “viscerally insulting.”

Anyone puzzled that Wonder Woman should be tied up and abused never saw the comic, because that happened in nearly every issue. And anyway Wonder Woman is an unbelievably stupid character with an unbelievably stupid story, and if you take it seriously you have far worse problems than Joss Whedon.

The narrative these critics are pushing might be summarized as "Joss Whedon should never have been a feminist hero." And I agree! If you take your cues about the important things in life from entertaining television, you're committing a category mistake. Whedon has a fascination with attractive young women who turn out to be really tough. That is not feminist philosophy. If your idea of feminism is, "women should kick men's butts on television," you're not getting it.

If star artists commit crimes, they should go to jail like anyone else. I have no patience with rapists. But going public with a bunch of complaints about other people being jerks isn't progressive politics. It's demeaning for everyone, but especially for the people doing the whining.

Saturday, January 23, 2021

Jenny of Oldstones

High in the halls of the kings who are gone
Jenny would dance with her ghosts
The ones she had lost and the ones she had found
And the ones who had loved her the most
The ones who'd been gone for so very long
She couldn't remember their names
They spun her around on the damp old stones
Spun away all her sorrow and pain
And she never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave
Never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave
They danced through the day
And into the night through the snow that swept through the hall
From winter to summer then winter again
'Til the walls did crumble and fall
And she never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave.

The song was imagined and mentioned by George R.R. Martin in one of the Song of Ice and Fire books. The producers of the Game of Thrones TV series had Ramin Djawadi, who wrote a lot of the show's music, write a tune, and they expanded the lyrical hints provided by Martin into this song.

Version sung by Podrick Payne in the episode "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms," which simplifies the tune.

Florence and the Machine version, closer to the way Djawadi wrote it.

Monday, November 30, 2020

The Queen's Gambit


My wife and I very much enjoyed The Queen's Gambit on Netflix, a 7-episode series about a female American chess prodigy of the 1960s. Some things about her character, including her chess style and her prickly personality, are said to have been based on Bobby Fischer, the top American player of that era.

The series is partly about the weird world of competitive chess and the peculiar characters who thrive there, but also about the struggles of a strange, somewhat crazy person to emerge from an awful childhood and find a decent adult life.

If you're curious about the chess, my favorite chess vlogger has an analysis of the final game. The first 2/3 is based a game played in 1993 by Vasyl Ivanchuk, but at a certain point the makers of the series found a better move for their heroine that leads to her winning a game that Ivanchuk drew.

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

The Tapestry of Thrones

In the Ulster Museum, modeled of course on the Bayeux Tapestry. This video has the first seven seasons, of which this is only a small sample.






Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Game of Thrones and the Difficulty of Being Clever

Of all the complaints about the last two seasons of Game of Thrones, the one that resonates with me most is: why did the clever characters get so stupid?

One of the distinctive things about George Martin's world was the prominence of clever schemers. Much of the action in the books was dominated, not by the big guys with swords, but by backstage operators like Littlefinger and Varys the Spider. Even Tywin Lannister seemed to accomplish more by treachery than battle. When Robb Stark was a successful fighter it was by trickery as much as by courage. The best character was the smartest, the dwarf Tryion.

Once the TV show outran the books, all that fell away. Jon Snow's apparent imbecility has become a meme, and after Tryion went two whole seasons without having a single good idea the other characters started mocking him for it. Which was amusing, but a poor substitute for characters actually doing smart, interesting things.

Various writers have offered theories online about why the showrunners "abandoned the smart characters," you know, something about giving up on plot and just going to dragons and fireballs and other easy stunts.

The real reason, I think, that the show stopped having clever tricks or brilliant stratagems is that the writers couldn't think of any. It is hard to come up with clever plots or stunning battlefield maneuvers. A brilliantly sinister ploy like the one Littlefinger nearly pulled off is just hard to imagine; of all the fantasy authors I have ever read, none have come close to Martin in this department. As commenter Observer29830 put it on Youtube:
First rule of writing fiction: You cannot write a character that is smarter than yourself. And the authors of the last season are not particularly stellar.
(Not that the Game of Thrones writers are unique in this; their battles are works of genius compared to the Imperial Bungling at Hoth.)

As I have watched the final season with my children I have continually pointed out better strategies all the commanders could have used in battle, to the point that my children have started to telling me to write my own damn series.

Hmmmmm.

Monday, May 20, 2019

Game of Thrones and the Nazi Punching Problem

More than 100,000 people have signed an online petition demanding that the last season of Game of Thrones be remade. I am not really sure what they are mad about. Yes, it was badly rushed and some parts felt phoned it, but at least Weiss and Benioff managed to finish this gigantic story, which is more than George Martin will ever do.

I suspect that people are really just mad that the ending didn't come out like they wanted. Case in point is how many people are furious about the treatment of the dragon queen Daenerys Targaryen. The end of the series revealed her as a dangerous, violent megalomaniac, and thousands complained that this was simply not justified by her character arc. "You don't get to do this!" someone wailed on Slate. "You didn't do the work!"

Every time I read this I think, you obviously don't know what dangerous, violent megalomania looks like.

It does not look – most of the time, anyway – like people storming around being bad for the sake of badness. It looks like people fooling themselves into believing that all of their actions are justified, all of their enemies are evil, and all of their victims deserve it.

Like, in other words, Daenerys Targaryen. Daenerys kills thousands over the course of her rise to power. Most of them, it is true, are either bad people or soldiers in the pay of bad people. But really no person with a conscience should revel in killing, and you should be intensely suspicious of anybody who does. In one famous scene, Daenerys makes a deal with a slave master, trading one of her dragons for an army of slave soldiers. Then she has her new army kill the slaver's men and orders the dragon – which, despite being sold, is still loyal to her – to burn him alive. Cue cheering.

This brings me to what I call the Nazi Punching Problem. Millions of Americans cheered when some guy walked up to Richard Spencer on the street and punched him in the face, then laughed when establishment fuddy-duddies like me said, you know, there are reasons why we don't encourage punching our political opponents in the face. But there are. Civilization doesn't depend everybody being good all the time; that's impossible, Civilization depends on people following the rules. Because if we throw the rules out, it won't be the good people who win, it will be the powerful, the rich, and the ones with the biggest guns.

There are reasons why we don't encourage people who have made deals with wicked people to then double cross them and burn them alive.

This is of course a very broad problem with our popular culture and has been for thousands of years. We love stories in which the good guys throw out the rules and gun down the bad guys in cold blood, in which bold rebels smash the system so the world can be rebuilt in a more pure and beautiful way.

But George Martin, devotee of sado-masochism at a disturbing level, is a deep student of the darkness that lurks in all of our hearts. He constructed Daenerys as a modern revolutionary messiah: a survivor of horrible abuse, a hater of injustice, a liberator of slaves, a slayer of tyrants. He well understands how these things tug at our hears. But for the very reason they appeal to us so strongly, they are supremely dangerous.

Game of Thrones ends with a parable about violence and utopia like the ones written by so many liberals in 1945. If you believe that you are working for paradise, then surely it is worth burning a few cities to get there? Daenerys believes she is fated to lead the world to paradise. That makes her the most dangerous kind of person, but also in a certain way the most appealing. If we had faith, would we not follow her? If we do not believe in the future she promises, what do we believe in? If we do not believe that burning cities may somehow  lead us to a better future, then why do cities keep burning?

Contrast her with the story's other transcendent star, singled out by fate for greatness: Jon Snow. Jon has been mocked for years by fans (including me) for his constant brooding, his reluctance to find joy in life, and his indecision at crucial moments. But really this is because he, unlike Daenerys, cannot escape the consequences of what he does. Born into an aristocratic family in the violent borderlands of a violent age, he cannot escape becoming a soldier. Indeed he has a natural gift for it and is soon celebrated as both a great warrior and a great leader of men. But he cannot forget all those he kills, and all his followers who die. Eventually he ends up in a sort of civil war and has to kill many of his former friends. This wounds him nearly to death. And this makes him, as the story shows, a questionable choice for leadership in violent times. He at least is convinced that he would be a terrible king. But if the Jon Snows of the world are too sad and indecisive for leadership, and the Daenerys Targaryens are too dangerous, where does that leave us?

Mired in the ordinary. Where life, outside stories, is lived.

It the problem were just a few street brawls with Nazis, then our fondness for bold rule breaking would hardly be a big deal. But the desire to "break the wheel," as Game of Thrones puts it, is close to universal and has led to far, far worse. It has been the battle cry of every modern revolutionary. It inspired George W. Bush and the people around him to invade Iraq, sure that if they overthrew Saddam something far better would rise from the rubble. At the dark end it inspired Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to genocide.

From the wreckage of World War II and the terror of the Cold War we should have learned this: killing and burning are not the way to a better future. Smashing our enemies, either with bombs or our fists, is not the way. If the modern dream is true, if our science and our machines and our devotion to freedom can truly make a better world for us, then it will come gradually and painfully, or it will not come at all. If a messiah arises who promises to smash the wicked and create a better world all at once, walk swiftly in the other direction.

Saturday, May 18, 2019

Chernobyl

I've just watched the first two episodes of HBO's Chernobyl and I have never seen anything more gripping on television. Amazing.