Why he keeps answering that question: Joss Whedon and Feminism as Marketing Strategy

Q: So, why do you write these strong female characters?

A: Because you’re still asking me that question. – Joss Whedon

If you haven’t seen this quote in some sort of a graphic bandied about Facebook in the past year or so, I congratulate you. Because I can’t seem to escape it.

Recently, there was an impressive piece making the rounds about the problems of Strong Female Characters. Also, the hit book of 2012, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, makes an excellent case against the Cool Girls. I am partially troubled by Whedon because, despite his talk (and to be fair, the fact he often overcomes the Smurffette principal), he seems to be writing a never-ending parade of Cool Girls and Strong Female Characters. They seem to be his concept of feminism's logical end.

What disturbs me more, however, is how Whedon has coopted the language of feminism into a form of self-aggrandizing marketing. He's the Feminist Comic/Nerd Writer. He deserves endless praise for how he dares to write Strong Female Characters. In the end, the above quote (which notably, never actually happened) in its meme form - and the dialogue around it in any Facebook comments section - becomes less a strong statement on the case of feminism and the problems of female representation and power in the media industry. Ultimately, it's more a case of basking in how awesome Joss Whedon is to say it.

[SIDE NOTE: Before I begin this entry, I should note that I am committing two of the major sins of paranoid reading. First and foremost, I’m critiquing something of which I’m not entirely versed. Secondly, I’m critiquing something I don't like much anyway. The first is the more grevious offense (but I have an excuse in a second), the second is more of a pet peeve. I get annoyed paranoid readings of things the writer dislikes because ultimately the thesis seems to be “and here is why I am right for hating it aesthetically, because it is politically bad.” Admittedly, I may be in the minority here.

As for these problems and my issues with Joss Whedon, I’ll try to excuse myself the best I can. Concerning the first, this critique is only about what I’ve seen of his (Avengers, the first eight or so episodes of Firefly, his X-Men run, Alien 3, Toy Story, and Doctor Horrible) and, much more importantly, about his self-presentation in the media. Therefore, this ccritqiue does not apply at all to Buffy or Dollhouse or anything else. That being said, having seen a few movies, about 5 or 6 hours of a television show, and some comics, I feel like I'm at least not a Whedon-virgin.

As for the second, I’ll at least be up front about it. I think Whedon’s work is forever hindered by the fact that all of his characters talk in the exact same register (i.e. like Joss Whedon). This problem prevents me from ever seeing his charactters as people – they can never become more than author avatars (Fiction Suits as Grant Morrison would say). There may be something intrinsically linked with this problem and the problem this blog addresses (i.e. Whedon writes women as men), but that's a topic for another entry I suppose.

Oh, and for anyone wanting to defend Whedon by saying that he did not write all of those Firefly eps, I’m invoking “show runner as TV auteur” theory. Whedon had a large amount of input in those episodes. He gets a fair share of the credit for them; thus he deserves any blame as well.]

I’m sure Whedon’s heart is in the right place. I know he does identify as feminist, which in and of itself is a good thing and not to be undervalued. So what bothers me? Perhaps the fact that his idea of feminism isn’t all too complicated of one…and yet he never shuts up about it. Most interviews with Whedon seem to be about how he’s a feminist…and a man (gasp!), but never really about any of the nitty gritties of feminism. Feminism for Whedon often does not seem to go beyond the point of “Let the lady kick ass.” In Firefly, we have a Strong Female Character (Zoe, playing into many of the stereotypes of Black Women and strength), two Cool Girls (Manic Pixie Dreamgirl Kaylee and Inara, a sexworker who is able to be dignified by Whedon only once he completely untangles sex work from its current reality and removes any complexities in the situation), and one Victim (River). Black Widow is the Cool Strong Female Character. Emma Frost and Kitty Pryde don’t fare much better. And I don’t even remember any details of the love interest form Doctor Horrible.

To be fair, sometimes Whedon evolves from this position to “Let the ladies kick ass, and let there be a more proportionate number of ladies to men as the ass-kicking commences,” and that’s a good thing. But he’s been playing the game this way for 20 years. Isn’t it about time someone who likes using feminism so much as he does starts thinking more deeply about the concept? This form of self-branding that’s probably gotten him a serious amount of cash by politically minded nerd-girls and socially-conscious nerd boys should be more than simply a marketing strategy, right?

Instead, what we get is a Whedon who continues to tout feminism in a reductive manner. This manner would be refreshing to hear from someone just starting his writing career or who up until now has not be reknowned for his takes on female characters. But for someone who has espoused it as long as Whedon, it feels lazy, perhaps even a bit disinterested.

When talking about Avengers, Whedon complains about the lack of female characters he could use. When asked about his being a male feminist, his response is less an attack on the men who would accuse him of playing traitor and more a defense against the imaginary women who think men can’t be feminists. There’s also an odd “transgender people complain too much” comment that weirdly sticks out. And, when asked about the rise of vampire fiction in contrast to his Buffy works, he said, “The Twilight thing and a lot of these franchise attempts coming out, everything rests on what this girl will do, but she’s completely passive, or not really knowing what the hell is going on...A lot of things aimed at the younger kids is just Choosing Boyfriends: The Movie.”

Whedon wants to play Feminist but doesn’t want to get his hands dirty. His confrontations with anything resembling a patriarchy (comic fans' expectations, movie execs) feel just as staged as any of the fights he’s written in which a tall, statuesque woman defeats ten men. He acts as if complaining about the lack of women in the movie he wrote and directed completely exculpates him from any accountability. Again, it'd be one issue coming from an up-and-comer. But Whedon's in a position now where a real feminist would ask himself: "Well, now what am I gonna do about it?"

Currently it sounds like we’ll be getting three new characters in Avengers: Ultron, Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver. Once more the numbers don’t look all that good for representation. In fact, despite his huffing and puffing, his sequel has the gender makeup of the average summer blockbuster (the Smurffette principal is slowly becoming the Smurfette and Friend one). But couldn’t Whedon, if he cared, do something about it? Rumors existed that Whedon is getting paid 100 million dollars for the next Avengers. He fervently denies this number, but I imagine it’s not too far off. In short, Whedon is a desireable commodity for Disney/Marvel. Why not use that leverage? Ask for more ladies, a lot more, or he walks? Again, not every director needs to do these things. But ones who like to talk on and on about their politics are more accountable.

His male feminist response is almost too odd for response. It feels as if Whedon’s foe there is a branch of feminism that seems more or less gone: i.e. the separatist movement. Not only that, that movement has really not contributed all too much since Whedon started his career. It has and had occasional gasps, but by now the current strain feels more in the root of men acknowledging their privilege before enterting discussion. Why in his answer does he position himself against women even though there's tons of imaginary men against whom he could pitch his answer?

My knowledge of Whedon’s own queer-politics is admittedly too limited to go into here, so I won’t approach that angle for now...except to say it sounded not incredibly ally-like.

And then there’s Twilight. What can be more feminist than hating Twilight, right? Right? Everyone hates Twilight! Except, you know, its fans…most of which are female.

While admittedly Twilight has many problems and is by no means the most exemplary case of feminism, I always find myself a bit unnerved by all the hate it gets. A lot of this goes back to issues of genre/gender that I won’t go into much here, so I’ll just focus on the attacks on it from the Whedonesque POV – i.e. those that are trying to appear feminist.

The issue with these critiques is that they never really take anything resembling sexism or anything resembling a patriarchy to task. They often come down to “Look at the dumb female [fans/writer/protagonist]. [Aren’t they/isn’t she] silly for [liking this book/writing this book/not fighting for herself]?” It’s a criticism that never extends its contempt beyond the female sphere and is content with making women the object of scorn and ridicule. It never questions the larger structures that may create this issue, never wonders why these books are appealing to girls, and how else we may work to improve entertainment beyond shaming the readers and the writer. Whedon's argument sadly seems to be "Ladies, time to man up!"

As for “Choosing Boyfriends: The Movie”…why is choosing a boyfriend necessarily a bad plot? Despite the fact that Whedon adapted a Shakespearean comedy (and that’s all any of them are really - how to pick a mate), he somehow assumes that reducing a female-aimed YA down to one plot becomes immediate shorthand for its inadequacy compared to the endless kicking and world-saving of his narratives. Last time I checked, picking a boyfriend is tough – it’s filled with emotional struggles and self-interrogation and lots of meaty twists and drama. Sure, Twilight or its ilk may not always provide that deepness, but neither does a much of YA literature fully explore such concepts in the same manner that adult literary fiction would (nor does really it need to).

Whedon’s equation of romance with worthless storytelling brings to mind a Virginia Woolf quote:

Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial’. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop — everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.

And this quote really sums up my issue with Whedon as a feminist. His buttkikcing blonde may have been a great first step – but since then he seems to have, in various ways, coasted and boasted. Were he committed to feminism, really committed to it, he would have to take the time to not only consider how to put women into the roles typically inhabited by men, but perhaps to valorize typically feminine attributes. How could he make a sex worker a compelling, dignified character without elevating her to an ambassador? How can he work on less masculine genres and give them the same dignity and nerd-cred that he’s gotten for his other works?

Admitteldy, I am asking a lot of Whedon. But I ask it to him particularly because he truly does seem to want to be a feminist. In twenty years, you would think a feminist writer would have come across this Woolf quote. Or have picked up one of the hundreds of books of theory which try to push past simply the Strong Female Character. So much of writing is research and yet in his interviews and recent works, Whedon shows very little of his, if he’s even doing it.

Of course, there’s always a more paranoid reading. That Whedon really is just branding himself as the Feminist Nerd Writer. It’s possible, and very possibly an aspect, intentionally or not, though even I’m inclined to think he’s being sincere. If so though, I’ll end this essay undercutting my own reading. In this age where feminism is becoming a dirty word, where we have less Leslie Gores singing against male ownership and more Lady Gagas talking about worshipping men and avidly denying the label of feminism, maybe there’s something not entirely awful in even being willing to use feminism as a marketing strategy. Maybe it’s like the ads with same-sex couples in them: certainly a bit of a clever move to tug on the heartstrings of the liberals and get them to open their wallets…but I suppose it’s better than the alternative.

And that’s the concession I’ll give Whedon. If nothing else, at least he thinks feminism can be a marketing strategy. And we could use more of that.

The Real Mystery is "Do I even care anymore?" (JJ Abrams, Tomorrowland, and Too-Coy Marketing)

Rant Prologue

This past weekend, I was a good Disney Crazy and attended the D23 Expo in Anaheim. For those of you not in the know, this expo is essentially Comic Con-lite: booths, panels, costumes, and swag on everything Disney (of course, with the company’s ownership of Star Wars and Marvel, it has a decent amount of geek muscle in it by now).

There were a few things I was looking forward to in the convention:

1. The Animation Panel and seeing what Pixar had in store for us with their non-sequel movies as well as learning more about Frozen

2. The Movie Panel and previewing Saving Mr. Banks as well as learning what the heck Tomorrowland is about

3. Richard Sherman and Alan Mencken in concert

4. The Imagineering Pavilion and learning what was on the slate for Imagineering now that Cars Land is a roaring success and all New Fantasyland needs is the finished Mine Cart ride.

1 and 3 did not disappoint. Neither did the first half of 2. But then, there were the other parts….

Somehow, between the 20 minutes at the booth and the 10-15 minutes that Brad Bird and Damon Lindelof talked at the movie panel, I still have no freaking clue what Tomorrowland is about. Instead of, I dunno, showing concept art, talking about how they came up with the story, showing clips, or doing whatever it is that every other film did at the two panels, we were “treated” to an elaborate song and dance about how they found this box in the Disney studios morgue and it was full of stuff, and all the stuff was super secret and all filled with mysteries (photoshopped picture of Walt and Amelia Earheart), labyrinth under Small World, scratched up early laserdisc that showed a pastiche of 50s images of the future, etc.). For those of you not following Tomorrowlnad, this mystery box and its mysterious contents have been all we’ve been hearing about the film since the beginning of this year. There also has been some type of “alternate reality game” involving somebody blogging about her father, but who has time for that? (More on that later)

Eventually, there was also a booth which was mysteriously guarded in a blue tarp and wasn’t revealed till halfway through the convention (which meant hellish lines afterwards). The booth contained an exhibition of “random” artifacts from the box. To tour the booth, you needed to rent an iPad and carry it about as it gave you an audio tour, spending about three minutes on each object. If you took your time at the booth, it could easily take over half an hour…after waiting an hour on line (needless to say, the overly complex nature of this booth made it far more time intensive and with far longer lines than your average movie booth).

And throughout all of this, you still would not know what the movie was about. Is it a mockumentary about espionage and such during the World’s Fair? Is it a sci-fi time travel film? Is it a period piece? Will Walt be in it or has Tom Hanks filled our "people playing Walt" quota for the decade? Who knows…

Meanwhile, Imagineering’s exhibit seemed mostly like a retrospective on their techniques and accomplishements. Except for three things.

1. Cartons saying “Orange Harvest” out of which R2-D2 broke out, wearing a castmember badge.

2. A booth that seemed to be on Animal Kingdom but, according to some reports, actually had stuff on Avatarland.

3. If you asked to “see something weird” you would receive the poster shown at the top of this post.

Orange Harvest is the least egregious of these offenders, almost to be a non-offender. Its placement was obvious, its message clear and already building off prominent rumors. Star Wars Land is in the works. But the other two, combined with the marketing of Tomorrowland, provide the subject of this rant.

Rant Proper

I knew a gal once who would be prone to saying things like this: “Oh I know a story, but it’s so dirty, I really shouldn’t tell it!” After which, naturally, she would wait for people to beg her to tell it. It was a simple, desperate attempt for attention, to make the story seem more interesting than it probably was. And the worst thing you could do was say “Well, if you don’t want to tell it, let’s move on, shall we?”

For years, a marketing trend has gained steamed among Hollywood, thanks mainly to JJ Abrams and his cronies (of which Lindelof is one) that resembles this young woman’s storytelling technique. It asks fans to beg the filmmakers for more information, to do an intense amount of research and devote far too many hours to what is ultimately a wild goose chase, where the most "fans" (and I use this term loosely) can do is speculate, guess, and beg the filmmakers for another labyrinth…all the while having to deal with the creators not giving them even the most basic of information (genre, premise, characters).

As I said, JJ Abrams with Cloverfield and Super 8 is, if not the main culprit, certainly the personification of this problem. He even inexplicably remained coy about the villain of the second Star Trek film even though everyone had already guessed it. Some think that this coyness is exactly what led Into the Darkness to underperform at the box office (after all, we all know the primary antagonist for our average summer blockbuster). Either way, I think it’s time that we tell Abrams and his ilk that we’re changing the conversation?

Why does this bug me?

It assumes I’m a fan and that I care enough to do the marketers work for them. As I said, Tomorrowland is expecting more time from its fans than the length of the movie itself. Similarly, Disney Imagineering was attempting to put me on a quest that would put that for all Hidden Mickeys to shame. Quite frankly, you need to earn it. I don’t watch the DVD extras before I watch the movie. That’s ridiculous. Why should I devote hours of my time immersing myself in a world before I even know if I like this world…hell, to even find out what this world is? Ultimately at the end of the day, while “Shut up and take my money” is an ideal situation for an entertainment company to be in, they should not assume that will be the case. They should be trying to sell me on paying fifteen bucks to see Tomorrowland at the multiplex, not hoping that I will be so intrigued with so little that I will be begging them to take fifteen bucks so I can learn the secret to an obtuse mystery. I don’t have time to do this research, and quite frankly, if you can’t tell me what your movie is even about, there are a lot of other movies for me to choose from. Come on JJ Abrams/David Lindelof…some of us have work in the morning.

Not all mysteries are created equal. Were I to post a blog entry and say, “This next blog entry is about something” I really shouldn’t expect to become an overnight sensation. And were I to, it wouldn’t be earned. What I worry about Tomorrowland, about the fact that it is so incredibly vague, is that the mystery will overpower the story. Super 8, after all (despite the praise it got), was nothing more than

a cheap mashup of ET and Stand By Me. It might have razzle-dazzled some people who were just so happy to solve the mystery of “What’s this movie about?” but ultimately, the film feels hollow and now that the secret's out, will probably not stand the test of time. Similarly, Tomorrowland’s marketing has me less likely to be dying to see this film than I was when the title and creative team were first announced. Similarly, my reaction to the Imagineering poster was not the salivation I had upon viewing each sketch of Cars Land, but something more akin to “What is this shit?”

Of course, this is not to say that there aren’t right ways to do this marketing. After all, everything in moderation…

Not all speculation is bad, but you need to earn it. Obviously, theories about the last Harry Potter books were rampant the second people would finish the latest one. But why is this different than Tomorrowland or Cloverfield? Because Harry Potter as a property had earned the time people would devote to it. It did not expect virgin – nay, potential – fans to act like diehards. Furthermore, the genre/general narrative had already been established (I knew what I was getting into more or less with each HP book) and any questions actually posed by the author for fans to speculate on were relatively straightforward (What is the Goblet of Fire? Who will die in this book?), not overly ambiguous like “Here’s a magazine from the 20s! Here’s a poem that you can get from random words in this magazine! What does it mean?!” (yes, that did happen with Tomorrowland).

I’m not asking for a trailer to give everything away, but I am asking to know what I’m getting into. Marketing is supposed to make you want something, not give you all of it, nor assume you already want it.

Extra world building for those who care is fine. Days of the Future

Past already has a website up for Trask Industries, the company that makes the Sentinels. Even with my “You have to earn it” out of the way, this technique is fine even before a trailer because anyone with Google can immediately find out the general jist of the movie. It’s based off one of the most famous and beloved X-Men stories of all time and probably won’t stray too far from the basic premise. Anything that may want to hide in the recesses of a website then is gravy.

You can have a little bit of a bait-and-switch (like Tomorrowland is doing with the mystery box), but the gag gets old fast. Disney also did this strategy better at D23 with the short “Get a Horse!” For the week or so beforehand, D23 was touting this short as a recovered 1928 Mickey Mouse short. They even brought it out to the animation

panel with the director dressed as and pretending to be a film historian. Of couse, very soon it became obvious what the truth was. Why did this work? Because it did not leave too much time for speculation and frustration. It was a week or two until the payoff. Furthermore, there was actually no perceived mystery. Whereas we all know by now that Tomorrowland isn’t actually about the F&#!ing Box (which I think I may henceforth call it), Get a Horse easily could have just been a recoverd short for the lack of pomp around it. Tomorrowland, meanwhile, has been dragging out the pretense of the F&#!ing Box for eight months and, honestly, I would not be surprised if they do so for the next year.

Call me old fashioned, but in the age of viral marketing, transmedia, and so forth, I still want there at the end of the day to be a basic advertisement at the heart. What is the movie about and why the hell should I give you any of my money to see it? If you can’t answer that, well then, I’ll just change the conversation.

EDIT: I just realized that the photo makes it look like Photography is Permitted in the Tomorrowland booth. There was a no in front...my fat thumb was just blocking it.