Firefly - Existential Self Indulgence
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http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/22/magazine/22WHEDON.html?tntemail1
September 22, 2002
Must-See Metaphysics
By EMILY NUSSBAUM
very once in a while, I'll just look up and say, 'My spaceship!''' says
Joss Whedon, bouncing on the tips of his sneakers. The 38-year-old
creator of ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer'' grins and gazes up at the
Serenity, a pirate vessel of the future. The ship dominates the
Hollywood set of Whedon's newest genre-bender, ''Firefly'' -- a show
that is part cowboy shoot-'em-up, part space opera, with a sneaky
existential streak. At once majestic and junky, the Serenity resembles a
blown-up kid's toy, and its interior has been filled with oddball
details. A tiny plastic bobble-headed dog sits on the dashboard, and the
ship's low-tech engine is reminiscent of an overgrown eggbeater.
As he delivers notes to Nathan Fillion, the strapping actor who plays
the Serenity's captain, Mal Reynolds, Whedon looks notably less than
strapping -- and more like a frazzled grad student who missed laundry
day. (''Write 'doughy,''' he suggests, hovering over my reporter's
notebook. ''Write 'jowly.''') But his schlubbiness is a bit of an act,
concealing a charismatic, prickly intensity. After one successful take,
he jumps up with a cry of ''Sweeeet!'' then murmurs: ''Don't give him
coffee! You don't know what he will become.'' Between scenes, he edits
scripts for ''Buffy'' and its spinoff, ''Angel.'' Like more than one
ex-nerd of my acquaintance, Whedon compulsively peppers his speech with
self-deprecating asides: ''Oh, my God, I am a hack,'' he moans as we
watch Fillion, his thumbs hooked in the belt loops of his skintight
slacks, swagger back onto the ship's bridge. But like his show's hero,
Whedon exudes confidence.
And why shouldn't he? After all, Whedon has created one of the most
intelligent, and most underestimated, shows on television. Like the
Serenity, ''Buffy'' might look at first sight like a disposable toy,
something cobbled from materials that most adults dismiss out of hand:
teen banter, karate chops and bloodsucking monsters. Before the show
went on the air in 1997, executives at the fledgling WB network begged
him to change the whimsical title, arguing that the show would never
reach intelligent viewers. But it did. ''Buffy'' is about a teenage girl
staking monsters in the heart, but her true demons are personal, and the
show's innovative mix of fantasy elements and psychological acuity
transcends easy categorization. Despite being perpetually snubbed at the
Emmy Awards, ''Buffy'' has become a critics' darling and inspired a
fervent fan base among teenage girls and academics alike. The show's
influence can be felt everywhere on television these days, from tawdry
knockoffs like ''Charmed'' to more impressive copycats like ''Alias.''
''Firefly,'' which began its run this Friday on Fox, is an opportunity
for Whedon to build a fresh new mythology, what he calls a ''drama with
landscape.'' Audaciously combining two more neglected juvenile genres,
westerns and science fiction, the series began as Whedon's most
experimental yet -- until Fox rejected the pilot and forced him to whip
up a more accessible premiere episode. But although the new season
opener has a kickier and more commercial structure than the meditative
pilot he originally devised, Whedon was able to maintain his central
vision. Yes, it's a space show, but it's also an intellectual drama
about nine underdogs struggling in the moral chaos of a postglobalist
universe. Adventure and ethical debate are melded in one sexy package.
''It's about the search for meaning,'' he explains. ''And did I mention
there's a whore?''
As technicians nudge a glowing white spaceship into the sky, Whedon
talks about his frustration with those who mistake his creations for
guilty pleasures. ''I hate it when people talk about 'Buffy' as being
campy,'' he says, scarfing takeout chicken with a plastic fork. ''I hate
camp. I don't enjoy dumb TV. I believe Aaron Spelling has
single-handedly lowered SAT scores.'' But despite these inevitable
misreadings, Whedon's heart will always be with genre fiction. Like
Buffy herself, genre fiction is easily undervalued, seen as powerless
fluff. But Whedon finds it uniquely forceful: using its vivid strokes,
you can be speculative, philosophical -- and create stories that are not
merely true to life but are metaphors for a deeper level of human
experience. ''It's better to be a spy in the house of love, you know?''
he jokes. ''If I made 'Buffy the Lesbian Separatist,' a series of
lectures on PBS on why there should be feminism, no one would be coming
to the party, and it would be boring. The idea of changing culture is
important to me, and it can only be done in a popular medium.''
oss Whedon's family has worked in television for generations: his father
wrote scripts for ''Alice'' and ''The Golden Girls,'' while his
grandfather worked on ''The Donna Reed Show'' and ''The Dick Van Dyke
Show.'' But in many ways, Whedon says, his deepest influence is his
mother, Lee Stearns, a high-school teacher who wrote novels during her
summers, novels that were never published. ''She was very smart,
uncompromising, cool as hell,'' he recalls. ''You had to prove yourself
-- not that she wouldn't come through if you didn't, but she expected
you to hold your own.''
His parents divorced when he was 9 (a ''good divorce,'' he says). He
lived with his dad, but he spent summers with his mom and stepdad at an
artists' commune in upstate New York. As a teenager, Whedon attended a
private boys' school in England; he became ''the world's biggest
Sondheim freak'' as well as an avid comics fan. But at Wesleyan
University, his sights narrowed to film. ''I'd go out and see three
classic films, stagger home at 2 a.m. and then watch whatever was on
HBO,'' he recalls. ''It was glorious.'' Majoring in film and immersing
himself in women's studies, Whedon became convinced that the pop genres
he loved -- sci-fi and horror movies among them -- could be more than
just entertainment. They could carry subversive ideas into the
mainstream.
After college, Whedon drifted out to Los Angeles. An eccentric wannabe
auteur with bright red hair down to his waist, he fiddled with weird
projects like a musical parody of the Oliver North hearings; despite his
father's industry connections, he had disastrous pitch meetings. Then he
got his big break: a staff writer's job on ''Roseanne.'' By the time he
left, he had a solid writer's rep. For several years, Whedon worked as a
bored but well-compensated script doctor, contributing to good films
(''Toy Story,'' for which he received an Oscar nomination) and many bad
ones (''Waterworld''). But he had an escape plan in the works, a
screenplay with a mission statement. Whedon wanted to create an iconic
female hero, but also ''a world in which adolescent boys would see a
girl who takes charge as the sexiest goddamn thing they ever saw.'' His
mother died in 1992, but they had talked about his ''Buffy'' screenplay,
and, he says, she knew he was on his way.
Then, in a classic Hollywood tale of disillusionment, he lost control of
his screenplay -- only to see his vision of ''populist feminism'' turned
into a schlocky comedy. He recalls sitting in the theater, crying. ''I
really thought I'd never work again,'' he recalls of the experience.
''It was that devastating.'' But in a second chance few get, Whedon was
able to resurrect ''Buffy'' on television, restoring the show's powerful
central metaphor: adolescence is hell, and any girl who makes it through
is a superhero.
With each of Buffy's six television seasons, Whedon's reputation grew.
The show took startling structural risks. There was the silent episode,
''Hush'' -- a virtuoso spook show with wordless scenes as witty as any
dialogue. In ''The Body,'' Whedon broke television taboo by treating the
death of Buffy's mother with raw, mournful realism. In the fifth-season
finale, the heroine herself died, a scenario that managed to resonate as
both a beautiful Christ-like sacrifice and an act of suicidal despair.
Last season featured her painful resurrection -- she literally dug
herself out of a grave -- as well as an exhilarating all-musical
episode, ''Once More With Feeling.'' (The soundtrack comes out on
Tuesday.) Over time, the show's mythology has become as rich and
multilayered as any work of literature -- eternally complicating its own
notions of morality, allowing characters to grow up in a way rare for
television and generating enough internal allusions to fuel its own
media-studies department. Indeed, several academic anthologies focus on
the show; other high-flown analyses appear on ''Slayage: The Online
International Journal of Buffy Studies.'' The show's daring and
complexity have earned it many smarty-pants fans, from those who
contribute to the show's insanely challenging Internet discussion groups
(some of which feature posts from Whedon himself) to Ira Glass, the host
of the radio program ''This American Life.''
Television creators like David E. Kelley and Aaron Sorkin may be better
known, but to many critics, Whedon is the more original artist, one who
has been unfairly denied prizes and high ratings. To J.J. Abrams,
creator of ''Alias'' -- a show about a tough female spy -- Whedon is a
pioneer, stubbornly resisting the pressure to take the easy route to
cultural respect. ''He's not the normal adult in any way that I can
see,'' Abrams says. ''He's the mischievous kid and the wise-adult kid in
one package. You know, if he wanted to be taken seriously in the
conventional way, he could write a medical show or a legal show. But he
cares more about telling stories he wants to tell, and he's being taken
seriously on his terms. It's like the title 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer':
if you don't smile, you're not going to get the show anyway.''
he messy anteroom to Whedon's office at Mutant Enemy, his Los Angeles
production company, is filled with ''Buffy'' memorabilia and piles of
videotapes. On the walls hang glossy framed posters: ''The Matrix,''
''Written on the Wind,'' a pen-and-ink drawing of Mickey Mouse hanging
by a noose. Whedon hands me a snapshot of a fellow redhead with a wicked
grin; it's his wife, Kai Cole. ''The funniest woman I've ever met,'' he
says. On their honeymoon, Whedon scribbled the names of ''Buffy''
characters in a notepad. And it was on a long-overdue London vacation
with Kai that Whedon found the inspiration for ''Firefly.'' When the
jet-lagged couple read through the night, Whedon dived into ''The Killer
Angels,'' Michael Shaara's fictional recreation of the Battle of
Gettysburg. ''I thought, That's the show I want to make!'' he recalls.
''It was about the minutiae of the soldiers' lives. And I wanted to play
with that classic notion of the frontier: not the people who made
history, but the people history stepped on -- the people for whom every
act is the creation of civilization. Then again, there's also gunfights
and action.''
From this blueprint, Whedon has built a show that, like ''Buffy,''
twists comic-book structures into novel shapes. It's science fiction,
but there are gunfights instead of laser battles, and no alien foreheads
to be seen. ''This is my first nonlatex show,'' he tells me, grinning.
''The show is set 500 years in the future, but humans are still acting
worse than any monster.'' It's a character-rich drama, but one full of
violence and slapstick comedy. And while ''Firefly'' contains plenty of
Whedon's favorite TV-friendly tropes -- whip-smart caper plots and
ricocheting sexual subtext -- the show has a grubby, realistic look to
it, quite unlike the shiny suburb of Sunnydale on ''Buffy.'' Such
juxtapositions can seem at once down to earth and charmingly weird. As
the Serenity drifts through space, it's accompanied by twangy music
right out of a Civil War documentary. ''I want viewers to equate the
past, the present and the future,'' Whedon explains, ''not to think of
the future as 'that glowy thing that's distant and far away.'''
And woven into the action, there's a juicy (and prescient) political
allegory. At Wesleyan, Whedon was deeply influenced by his professor
Richard Slotkin, the creator of the theory of ''regeneration through
violence'': the notion that frontier myths allowed conquerors --
including the pioneers of the American West -- to rewrite bloody history
as heroic fairy tale. ''Firefly'' is set in just such a postimperialist
universe, after China and America have formed a corporate
supergovernment, the Alliance. In essence, it's Coca-Cola as the White
House. Our heroes are post-Reconstruction crooks scraping by on the
serrated edge of the law, and depending on which way you turn the moral
prism, they might resemble an antiglobalization cadre or followers of an
outer-space jihad. In the show's first episode, Captain Reynolds taunts
a drunken Alliance member with the Confederate refrain ''We shall rise
again,'' and the implication is clear: these characters may be
underdogs, but whether they are heroes (even to themselves) is a loaded
question.
But as with Whedon's other shows, ''Firefly'' is as much a character
study as it is an abstract debate. The ensemble includes a courtesan, a
thug, a preacher, a rich-boy doctor, a tomboy engineer and a psychic.
They are all archetypes with inner lives. Leading this crew is Mal
Reynolds, who is, like Buffy Summers, a singularly thorny pop creation:
a mordant, dark-humored fellow with bile boiling just beneath the
surface. (Think Han Solo, only with more interiority.) His former enemy
is now his government, and frankly, he's not coping well. When Whedon
cast Nathan Fillion, he encouraged him to watch John Wayne films, aiming
to help him capture elements of Wayne's physical grace as well as his
dark undertones.
''Mal's politics are very reactionary and 'Big government is bad' and
'Don't interfere with my life,''' Whedon explains. ''And sometimes he's
wrong -- because sometimes the Alliance is America, this beautiful
shining light of democracy. But sometimes the Alliance is America in
Vietnam: we have a lot of petty politics, we are way out of our league
and we have no right to control these people. And yet! Sometimes the
Alliance is America in Nazi Germany. And Mal can't see that, because he
was a Vietnamese.''
The show's other central concern diverges intriguingly from Buffy's
universe, where fate and destiny loom large. ''I'm a very hard-line,
angry atheist,'' Whedon says. ''Yet I am fascinated by the concept of
devotion. And I want to explore that.'' (His existential revelation
arrived during an adolescent viewing of ''Close Encounters of the Third
Kind'' -- an experience soon followed by a reading of Sartre's
''Nausea.'') Mal tells the preacher who is a passenger on his ship,
''You're welcome on my boat; God ain't.'' If Buffy is the chosen one,
forced to struggle with a responsibility that comes from outside, Mal is
defiant in his belief that his fate is meaningless. ''This is a man who
has learned that when he believed in something it destroyed him,''
Whedon explains. ''So what he believes in is the next job, the next
paycheck and keeping his crew safe.'' It is a typical Whedonian
inversion: much the way Buffy is a demon-killer obsessed with the
morality of killing, Mal is a man of action frozen by his conviction
that nothing really matters, a man forced to choose his morality at each
juncture. ''Whatever I may think of him politically, he's a guy who
looks into the void and sees nothing but the void -- and says there is
no moral structure, there is no help, no one's coming, no one gets it, I
have to do it.''
an Whedon bring these bleak undercurrents to television intact? If
''Buffy'' is any indication, the answer is yes -- but only if
''Firefly'' wins an audience. For despite Whedon's clout, the show
wasn't easy to get on the air. The original two-hour pilot was
idiosyncratic, with slow, John Ford-style pacing that thrilled Whedon
but baffled Fox. He agreed to speed things up, but the network wanted
other changes, like turning a married couple into flirting singles. He
refused. ''I wanted a marriage on my show, not 'Melrose Space,''' he
says. Such prickly negotiations flashed Whedon back to his earliest
experiences in Hollywood -- and left him nursing a very Mal-like
resentment against the strictures of Fox, his own personal Alliance.
Whedon discusses these frustrations with me one night over dinner.
''There were so many times I thought, It's time to retire in rage and
confusion,'' he says. ''Some of this was just forgetting how difficult
it is getting a pilot on the air. And some of it was hubris.'' He pauses
to sip some chardonnay. ''As I learned, pride goeth before a fall
season. Or, as my writer Mere Smith put it, 'There are no atheists in
Fox shows.'''
But if Whedon is expert at nursing a grudge with the suits, he is also
buoyed by the recognition that he commands a deeply loyal audience. His
fans have been waiting for ''Firefly'' with a mix of eagerness and
trepidation -- and a sometimes unnerving sense of ownership. The
previous eventing, at a pre-Emmy panel discussion in the lush Academy of
Television Arts and Sciences auditorium in North Hollywood, Whedon was
pelted with demanding questions: Why was Buffy's last season so dark?
(''Oops!'' he replied.) Was he spread too thin, cheating on his other
shows in favor of his new creation?
But afterward, as he crouched by the stage, these critics turned
worshipful, clutching DVD's and Sunnydale High School yearbooks, their
faces dented with the desire to say one smart thing to the guy who
created their favorite show. ''In the season finale, Xander's crayon
speech -- did you mean that to have Christian imagery?'' a middle-aged
man inquired. A 9-year-old girl told him that she wanted to join the
''Buffy'' cast. And then a dewy young woman leaned forward and gripped
his hand between hers, pulling him in for enforced eye contact: ''I just
want you to know -- we trust you. We know you know what you're doing. We
know it will be great.''
Such damp effusions are the kind of thing that many television creators
would shy away from. But Whedon loves it down there in the geek
trenches. ''That's the only reason I'm alive!'' he says, placing his
palms flat on the tablecloth. ''We're paying homage to the same thing:
the storytelling. I wanted to create a fiction that would affect
people's lives. And this has affected people's lives. It's affected my
life. Without it my life is meaningless.''
Atheist though he may be, Joss Whedon has a kind of faith -- in
narrative passion, the kind that creates lasting loyalties. ''Every time
people say, 'You've transcended the genre,' I'm like: No! I believe in
genre.'' For Whedon, fantasy inspires a visceral response that realism
can't match. ''Law and Order' is the most enjoyable thing in the
world!'' He laughs. ''But I do not go through life imagining myself as
Sam Waterston, breakin' a case, prosecutin' a guy.''
There are other, more ambitious TV shows that he admires, ''The West
Wing'' among them. But Whedon is clearly not tempted to create that kind
of ''grown-up'' show -- no matter how many Emmys he'd win. ''I'm not an
adult!'' he says, shaking his head. ''I don't want to create responsible
shows with lawyers in them. I want to invade people's dreams.''
Emily Nussbaum is the ''Summary Judgment'' columnist for Slate.