Joss Whedon

For those who believe that popular culture, and especially popular narratives, can be an important place to explore meaningful ideas, Joss Whedon has been something of a patron saint. Whedon’s focus on female strength tends to be the most visible part of his work—this has much to do with his self-professed feminism. In what follows, I’ll be looking at a set of somewhat different, though not wholly unrelated aspects of his life and work. The first is his humanism, which I will then relate to his ideas of heroism. Given the breadth of his creative output, I’ll focus on two examples, Firefly/Serenity and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I’ll suggest that in addition to telling good stories that raise important issues about gender, they’re both also thoughtful considerations of heroism in contemporary humanistic terms; specifically, both re-examine the relationship between the hero and the larger community. (For the purposes of this piece I’m taking Firefly and Serenity as a continuous narrative whole, thus the Firefly/Serenity notation. When I am speaking specifically of an episode of the show or of the film, I will note them separately.)

Remember that amazing moment when the Sunnydale High School students acknowledge Buffy’s place as class protector and then give her an umbrella, a moment that should be cheesy, but is somehow perfect? Or when the townspeople want to burn River as a witch and Mal says, “Yeah, but she’s our witch”? Those moments feel good because they’re nice, but I’ll be suggesting that there’s more to them than that.

It’s true that Whedon often reshapes the hero most noticeably by changing her gender, but his versatility as a storyteller has allowed him to speak with insight and nuance on a range of important ideas. Alongside his intentional focus on girls with killer roundhouse kicks, his work has repeatedly taken up a network of ethical concerns. Who are we? How should we live, act, choose, love, fight, die, value? Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly/Serenity take up these questions from different angles, and the most reliable constants seem to be that the questions are difficult, that the answers will shift just as the characters in question (and, by extension, the viewers) become comfortable with them, and that the odds are not usually in our hero’s favor. These dark odds do not, however, lead to a fatalistic viewpoint; there is usually a glimmer of hope, though it may be a faint one.

Given the recurrence of these ethical concerns, we might wonder what sort of worldview underlies them. Without delving too deeply into theories of authorial intent, a glance at outside events and relatively recent history may provide some useful context. In 2007, Harvard University’s Humanist Chaplaincy sponsored a three-day conference called “The New Humanism.” The Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy refers to many definitions in its online literature, including this one from the American Humanist Association: “Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.” (Humanism and Its Aspirants: Humanist Manifesto III, a successor to the Humanist Manifesto of 1933)

Their goal was to highlight humanism as the philosophy most representative of the majority of people around the world who self-identify as having no religion, and to show that this can be a “diverse, inclusive, inspiring way to live… a way of uniting those [nonreligious] people into a positive community that can make a major contribution to a more peaceful, more stable world.” (Greg Epstein, quoted by Arianna Markel in The Harvard Crimson, April 23, 2007).

At that conference in 2007, the first annual Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism went to Salmon Rushdie. In 2009, their third went to Joss Whedon. In his acceptance speech, Whedon spoke very little about his creative work, focusing mainly on his understanding of humanism, and its relationship to religion and faith. He described religion as a tool created by human beings to answer a need that is not going away, then differentiated religion from faith, saying that neither, especially the latter, is the opposite, or in his language “the enemy,” of humanism.

“The enemy of humanism is not faith. The enemy of humanism is hate, is fear, is ignorance, is the darker part of man that is in every humanist, every person in the world. That is the thing we have to fight. Faith is something we have to embrace. Faith in God means believing absolutely in something with no proof whatsoever. Faith in humanity means believing absolutely in something with a huge amount of proof to the contrary. We are, in point of fact, the most cockeyed optimists, and we deserve to take our place as such.” (JWCH)

At the core of Whedon’s worldview, then, is actually an act of faith, not in God, but in humanity. And, this faith is necessary in the face of the enemies of humanism, most notably the darkness in everyone, which must be fought. Put in these terms, the “ism” brought most strongly to mind by the rhetorical cues of the quote is not optimism, as stated, but heroism (though I’d argue that the two are not unrelated). This returns us, then, to the question of reshaping the hero.

In strictly humanist terms, one needs no special chosenness for this type of heroism, though it seems clear from the rest of his comments that there are weapons—education, community, courage—that make the battle somewhat less overwhelming, if not necessarily easier. You don’t get any super powers, but neither does the enemy. And the heroic act itself is the deceptively simple task of embracing humanity. “There’s a case to be made for hating people,” Whedon says, “called history,” but the humanist has the difficult task of resisting seemingly justified anger, keeping an open mind and not only passively refraining from harming others, but actively embracing a faith in humanity.

So, this is a way of understanding humanism, which turns out to be a rather heroic stance towards the world. What I’m suggesting is that we can see this humanism reflected in Whedon’s narratives, in which the real acts of heroism are often acts of humanism: to become truly a part of a community, to believe in the potential goodness of humanity itself, to take personal responsibility, and to allow others the power that will enable them to do the same. These humanistic values exist in different relationships to the more traditional heroic narrative expected by the audience (or perhaps by the network).

Take Firefly, for example. In Whedon’s choice for an introduction to the characters we begin with a scene that unequivocally sets Mal and Zoë up as a particular type of war hero: both are brave, and outgunned, Mal is slightly rash, Zoë is competent and loyal. During the battle scene, Mal speaks of the angels that will come to their rescue, and the God who will not let his men die; he is disappointed on both counts. Later, it is made absolutely clear that they are now criminals—scavengers, they’re called—and that winning and losing will be contested vocabulary. This introduction raises a host of questions about their heroism. Are they heroes if they lose? How do they think about their moral framework now that the rules have changed so dramatically? And who is the weird guy with the dinosaurs?

In the first episode that actually aired, we meet Mal and Zoë in a way that only hints at this complexity. We open on what feels like a saloon, calling up vague images of the Wild West and segue into a good old Western style brawl. We still see Mal, slightly rash, Zoë loyal and competent, and we get the information that they were on the losing side of a big war. But the tone here leans more towards bolstering the audience’s positive identification with a different heroic myth, that of the American West and the cowboy (generally a loner with a strong moral compass, also often outgunned, brave, and potentially rash, tied to a largely imagined history and a misunderstood sense of pride) than towards a consideration of the murkier questions raised in the original pilot. (There is also the problematic, at least for this viewer, identification with the Confederacy, further complicating things.)

As the series progresses, however, these two threads begin to come together: the defeat in Serenity Valley is both military and moral, and it estranges Mal from both God and other people. It is only through a series of interactions with others—especially those interactions that force him truly to expand his crew, taking new people into his “family” and admitting that he has done so—that he overcomes one side of this, and begins truly to participate in his community. This is where his mythically resonant hero and his humanistic hero can converge: in taking up the humanistic challenge to aspire once more to the greater good, he cannot help but take up River’s cause. “No more running,” he says in Serenity. Or, as Whedon has said, “What Mal needs is to care, to care about what he’s doing, to admit that he cares about what he’s doing, and the good works will follow from there.” (JWCH)

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the types of heroism were always in greater tension, and I would argue that the humanistic hero won out in a big way. (I should clarify, just in case that I’m only talking about the run of the television series, and I’m not including anything from the timeline or narrative continuity of the Season 8 comic.) If we look at the classical hero that Buffy so often parallels and parodies, there is the obvious gender difference, but also the position in which the hero stands between the normal realm and the realm of higher powers. That hero is often descended from or in some sense chosen by the gods. In the latter case, this is usually seen as a sign of favor. That doesn’t mean that the hero’s relationship with the gods is uncomplicated, but it does mean that the classical heroic posture is usually one of honor, and also of being set apart from mere mortals, marked out as special. This obviously describes Buffy, to an extent. “In every generation, there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.” But from the beginning, Buffy herself fights this chosenness, wanting no part of it.

Giles: Into each generation, a slayer is born. One girl in all the world—a chosen one. One born with the strength and skill…

Buffy: ... to hunt the vampires. To stop the spread of their evil blah blah blah (Buffy 1.1)

This back and forth, between Buffy’s “divine” calling as the Slayer (we find later, of course, that it was man-made, and from demonic power)—an elevated but isolated place in the community—and her desire to be a normal girl, perhaps to hold a place in society less but also less separate, will be one of the prevailing narrative tensions of the show. She will save the world (a lot), but she will repeatedly do so in ways that increasingly undermine the very separateness of her Slayerhood, from the immediate formation of the Scoobies to the ultimate arc of the Potentials, placing a humanistic model of fighting for the greater good from within a community (as opposed to on behalf of one) on top at almost every turn.

It is, in fact, arguable that Buffy makes her worst decisions when she does not follow this model, as when she runs away at the end of Season Two, draws too close to Faith’s reckless disregard for the good of others in Season Three, or abuses her power from the leadership position she is forced to take on in Season Seven. At each of these moments, there seems to be a different sort of reconnection with her community that must take place—the turn to them for comfort, the reminder that she does, in fact, have moral duties to them, and figuring out “that power is something you share, that being a chosen one is not nearly as interesting as being one of the many.” (JWCH)

Thus far, I have tried to show a connection between Whedon’s heroically characterized humanism and his humanistically characterized heroism by examining the relationship between heroes and their respective communities in two of his previous works, Firefly/Serenity and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In closing, I turn momentarily to his forthcoming work, The Avengers. I haven’t heard much yet about the film, but what I have heard leads me to believe that we will see the same sort of interplay between the separate specialness of these heroes and whatever mission is laid out for them and the humanistic demands of communal existence and responsibility. Or, as Whedon put it in an interview in the summer of 2010:

“The whole movie is about the idea of finding yourself through community, and finding that you not only belong together, but you need each other very much. Obviously, this will be expressed through punching, but it will be the heart of the film.” (io9, July 24, 2010, Joss Whedon Says Captain American and Iron Man won’t be pals in his “Avengers.”)

Humanistic heroism. Avengers assemble!