The Joss Whedon post we-had-to-have, or Joss Whedon and feminism - part one

I haven’t seen Angel so I can’t really discuss it, but in Firefly Whedon also presents sympathetic, largely interesting and non-stereotypical female characters. Zoe is probably the most “masculine” character aboard Serenity, considering the positive traits typically ascribed to the masculine - she is stoic, calm, strong, heroic and so on. Then there’s Kaylee, who is unabashedly sexual without being overly sexualised, and of course there’s the Buffy-esque (only crazy) figure of River who is both strong and fragile, broken and yet integral.

Beyond the specifically feministy slant of both shows, the other reasons many feminists love Whedon’s work is because he’s not afraid of moral complexity. Take, in BtVS, the view on the killing of humans. Yes, lots of vampires and other monsters are disposed of fairly heartlessly, but when humans die, the consequences are depicted as complex, far-rangeing and real in a way that you rarely see on television. Most of the characters who are dispatched in Buffy are mourned and mourned deeply - the best example, of course, is Joyce, Buffy’s mother.

These aren’t specifically feminist concerns, of course, but I think that any feminist critique of pop culture is interested not just in depictions of women but in depictions of relationships and all their complexity. It could also be argued that female-centric modes of story-telling have usually been constructed as being about relationships - see the dichotomy between stereotypical men’s films, or “action” movies, and women’s films - chick flicks, romantic comedies.

Whedon’s shows destabilises these boundaries because he gives us action and relationships: he gives us “talk” about women’s feelings and beliefs, and also gives us “action”. He further destabilises the boundaries by making Buffy not an honorary male - like, say, Ripley in the Alien movies. Buffy remains an extremely feminine girl even while she does typically masculine things like rescuing others and exhibiting huge strength, and that this very girlie-ness breaks down the typical distinctions between male and female.

In Firefly and Serenity, Whedon’s moral complexity is more about society as a whole and how it operates. Firefly is a more conventional outsider narrative - the scrappy band of heroes fighting against the powers that be - but I think the Reavers and their creation is a really interesting development that I would have loved to have seen given the long-form treatment as a series. Not saying that the movie wasn’t great, but TV shows offer a far greater scope for teasing out ideas, threads, and characters in a way that is impossible with the necessarily truncated world of cinema.

In Firefly, Whedon is also implicitly concerned with ideas about “family” and the ways that post-modern families are cobbled together not out of blood relations - though these are also important. From a feminist perspective, the idea that you can make a family out of those who share common goals is important: the collective that respects the individual is an important part of feminism. I may be stretching it a bit here, because I don’t think Firefly is as implicitly feminist as BtVS, which I'll get to later.

Okay, that's enough for now.