Reading Joss Whedon

Introduction: Much Ado about Whedon

1 Introduction Much Ado about Whedon R H O N D A V . W I L C O X In May 2012, Marvel’s The Avengers, a film written and directed by Joss Whedon , broke box-office records for a US opening weekend, having already succeeded wildly in international markets—and the film’s audience, as of this writing, continues to grow. In 2011, between production and postproduction work on this superhero summer blockbuster, Whedon and his wife, Kai Cole, had planned to take a vacation. But instead, they chose to spend their recreation time to make a film of Shakespeare’s romantic comedy Much Ado about Nothing. For those unfamiliar with Whedon, the step from Marvel Comics movie to Shakespeare may seem incongruous, but to many it seems a natural move, part of a unified body of work. Scholarly writing on Whedon has been produced at a faster rate than on any other figure in television studies. Whedon is important not only because of his television series, but also because he works in more than one medium—as a film writer-director, a composer, a producer, a comic book writer, and an Internet miniseries creator. But it is his television work that has driven the academic engine. His texts are of both social and aesthetic significance; he creates canonical television. Furthermore, he has managed this artistic success on broadcast networks, not HBO. He has to date helmed four noteworthy television series: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003); Angel (1999–2004); Firefly (2002), with its accompanying film, Serenity (2005); and Dollhouse (2009–10), as well as the Internet musical miniseries Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (2008). Then in 2012 came the release of The Cabin in the Woods (which Whedon cowrote with director Drew Goddard), followed by The Avengers and (in 2013) Much Ado.1 1. Much Ado was shown during the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival and distributed in wide release through Lionsgate in 2013. 2 ✴ Reading Joss Whedon Since the beginning of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, dozens of academic books have been published, including Marcus Recht’s 2011 German monograph and Barbara Maio’s 2007 Italian edited collection—evidence of Whedon’s reputation among international scholars. Many hundreds of serious articles have been published, including (as of January 2013) twelve years of the peer-reviewed journal devoted to Whedon’s work, Slayage. There have been more than ten international conferences on Whedon, in locales from Tennessee to Turkey. And in 2008 the Whedon Studies Association was established as a legal nonprofit organization. This continuing phenomenon of scholarly response to Whedon supports the claim that he is a major artist. His recent film work is a continuation of, not a departure from, that artistic career. For this volume, which explores the fullness of Whedon’s career (rather than a single element), it seems appropriate to start with his most recent choice. Explaining how Much Ado and Whedon are a good match (though, like Beatrice and Benedick, on the surface at odds) should serve to introduce some of the methods and themes that anchor the analyses in this collection. Admirers of Whedon have long known of his interest in Shakespeare. During the run of his first and most famous television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Whedon invited cast members to his home for weekend dramatic readings of Shakespeare. Although he has asserted that he watched relatively little television growing up, Whedon told James Longworth that he did enjoy the BBC versions of Shakespeare’s plays (Lavery and Burkhead 2011, 51). That intersection of people constituted of Shakespeare lovers who are also Whedon aficionados might take pleasure in thinking of As You Like It’s forest upon learning that Whedon has a child named Arden (Shakespeare’s mother was born Mary Arden). Connections flow back and forth between life and art. For their part, many fans of Whedon are willing to make comparisons between the two authors, both (we would do well to remember) popular culture figures of their own day. The director of Atlanta’s Shakespeare Tavern , for one, declares that “if William Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be Joss Whedon” (Watkins 2012). Not all admirers may be willing to endorse such an equation; after all, Shakespeare is Shakespeare, and Joss Whedon is himself alone. But it is certainly true that Whedon’s interest in Shakespeare helps clarify the fact that he is part of a long stream of dramatic literature and a writer aware of his inheritance...