Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

Deconstructing Dr. Horrible. If you haven’t watched it, and you want to for free, better do it in the next few hours or you’ll have to buy it off iTunes, which we did anyway. I hate streaming video, and I’m happy to tuck a fin or two in Mr. Whedon’s pocket. I don’t have the link to the free broadcast handy, but you know how to use Google, don’t you?

This post contains mad spoilers. I also warn that I am going to take a funny, silly, amusing show and be boringly, depressingly serious about it. If your response to these sorts of nitpicks is ’durr it’s just a show’ — you’re right. So don’t click.

I liked it and hated it at the same time. There were enough laugh-out-loud moments that made it fun for me. The Bad Horse songs were my favorite, and the best line is where Billy’s singing about how Penny’s tears will dry when he gives her the keys to her brand new Australia. The Whedon wit is there, and that’s what I show up for. It’s silly fun, not a political statement.

Except that it is totally a political statement, one I suspect is quite calculated on Joss’ part.

Amidst the silly fun, there is a premise here with which we are all too nauseatingly familiar. Nice Guy (and what does it say when the ’nice guy’ is the villain who wants to burn, destroy etc.) vs. Mean Jerk (the day-saving hero who’s in it for the cootchie) fight for the affection of Sweet Helpless Female (who unlike most of Joss’ female protagonists is every bit the simpering damsel she seems to be, except she’s not and I’ll get to that).

My good friend [info]cmdr_zoom mentioned in his LJ his own issues with this setup, and though I am not here to dispute them, I would like to offer my take.

First, I’m going to talk about Joss. Before I saw the episodes, I commented on Zoomie’s blog something that sparked a fairly intense discussion with [info]pjack about Joss, feminism, and my own issues with the blind adoration of anything Whedon when, in the man’s own (here paraphrased) words, he’s only doing what everyone else ought to be doing anyway.

I didn’t mean to imply he’s not a feminist. I just don’t think he’s the god of all things feminism, all hail Joss. He’s doing what everyone ought to be doing anyway. That’s a passing grade, not an A++. The fact that he’s got these views and happens to possess a penis does not make him a god among men. It makes him a man. Period. Anything less than that isn’t making the grade. That’s my point, and I’m not so sure he’d disagree.

The fact that I do think he could do better is a compliment. You can improve on a good thing, so by definition, he’s got a good thing here, with the movies and the funny, and the stuff.

One of the things that intensified the debate with my husband, I believe, and what made it personal for him, was that many guys look to Joss for how to get it right, and me saying ’bah’ when people hail him for being such an awesome feminist can easily be interpreted as me saying ’he’s not a feminist and neither are you, so don’t bother trying.’ While I think that’s reading an awful lot into ’bah,’ the concern deserves to be addressed.

However, I do think that some of his female characters are kind of one-dimensional, even if it’s an awesome dimension. Also, providing me with an impossibly beautiful/perky/kick-ass female role model I could never live up to isn’t that much different than slapping a size 0 supermodel on a runway. I refer here mostly on Firefly, which I enjoy a lot, but the female characters didn’t resonate with me as much as the male characters did, and I thought long and hard about why. That’s a post for another time, wherein I deconstruct Firefly, but I mention it here to put into context the things I commented on Zoomie’s blog. Basically, fetishizing strong women is still objectifying them. They are still objects of desire rather than real people.

I would have loved to have seen a Shepherd Book character who was a woman. Strong, but not sexy. Older, earthier, torn by deep moral and ethical issues, fulfilling a role that has nothing at all to do with eye candy. That would have been powerful. I liked the actor who played Book, and I’m glad he was on the show, but that role as a woman would have meant a lot to me.

I don’t mean to disparage the good things Joss has done. I just don’t think the statements he makes are any more spectacular than what every guy out there could just as easily make himself. Furthermore, I don’t think those statements ought to be considered that much more spectacular just because it’s a guy who’s doing them. That smacks too much of Mr. Man doing us little ladies a huge favor and we should swoon about it. Isn’t that exactly what he takes a stab at in Dr. Horrible?

As for Joss being the figurehead of the male feminist contingent, that is also a whole other post worth of material. The long and the short of it is: I like Joss. But he’s not a hero. He’s a guy who makes movies, tv shows, etc. He’s a funny man, and I enjoy a lot of what he does. Sure, I would gleefully tear him a new one about how he handles LGBT issues, but only because I care enough about his work to get riled about it. Which is a whole other post. That’s three. I could start a Joss blog at this point.

Click on the link for more :

http://karjack.livejournal.com/656327.html?format=light