It Looks Like I Won't Be Getting Into Buffy Any Time Soon
Like many people, I keep a long, half-assed mental list of pop culture I vaguely intend to get around to experiencing at some point. And, like most people, there is a VERY good chance that I will probably never get around to consuming even a small fraction of the pop culture on that list.
How could I? I’m a grown-ass adult with a wife and children and a fragile small business to run. When would I possibly have time to, for example, watch the five seasons of The Sopranos I never quite got around to?
I know what you’re probably saying: you should watch The Sopranos. It’s fucking great! I know! It’s famous for being fucking great. That’s why it’s on the list!
Up until about a month ago Buffy the Vampire Slayer occupied a place somewhere on this list of important pop culture I vaguely intended to consume along with plenty of other stuff that is right up my alley that I’ve never watched, like Stranger Things.
The cult of Buffy is essentially the cult of its creator, Joss Whedon. Whedon’s reputation has taken a series of hits over the years. In 2017 Whedon’s ex-wife Kai Cole took the unusual step of writing a guest blog for The Wrap about what a horrible person her ex-husband is.
In the piece, she depicted Whedon as a shameless adulterer who flagrantly abused his power over the beautiful young women he worked with, emotionally abused her and utterly failed to live up the feminist ideals he espoused in his work. She wrote that he was a liar and a fraud and a fundamentally toxic human being.
I was fascinated by Cole’s article because she was not accusing her ex-husband of sexual assault or sexual harassment or physical abuse, like so many revelations of the #MeToo era. Instead she was saying that Whedon was a horrible person, and not someone people should admire or want to work with. It turns out you have to be a REALLY bad person in order for your awfulness to blow up and become a big Hollywood story/scandal.
But it’s almost never merely a matter of being amoral and unethical; Carpenter’s account suggests that there were issues of sexual harassment and verbal abuse as well.
Then Ray Fisher made headlines when he accused Whedon of misconduct while he was directing Justice League and cast-mates like Jason Momoa stood behind him.
The lack of specificity in Fisher’s accusations made them easy to dismiss but when Charisma Carpenter came forward to not only co-sign Fisher and Cole but to add plenty of damning details about the ways in which she was treated abusively and callously, and Michele Trachtenberg said that there was a rule on the set of Buffy that Whedon was never to be left alone with her (bear in mind she was fifteen when she started working on the show) Whedon’s reputation took a blow it might never recover from.
This left fans, particularly women who felt empowered and inspired by Buffy in a painful predicament. How do you separate the art you love from an artist you now hate?
I found myself asking those very same questions when Kanye West and Louis CK, cult artists I once revered as something approaching Gods, fell from grace.
In a heartbeat everything about CK that I loved became toxic, radioactive, deeply painful. The idea of going back and watching Louie is inconceivable to me.
The same is true of Kanye’s catalog. Whenever I hear one of his songs, even if it’s just something that he only produced, I experience a Pavlovian shiver of joy and pleasure followed immediately by the profound ache that the Kanye that I fell in love with, identified with and rooted for has been replaced by a glowering Trump super-fan I do not understand or even recognize anymore.
Kanye ruined Kanye for me. Louis CK ruined Louis CK. They cancelled themselves and have done nothing to try to win back the hearts of folks like me.
I hope that the awful toxicity of Whedon’s personality doesn’t similarly keep people who have found meaning and joy and liberation in his work from being able to enjoy it the way they used to. Don’t give him that awful power. He probably gets off on it.
Truth be told, I was probably never going to get around to watching Buffy or Firefly or Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog even without all of the ugliness. Now there is a zero percent chance that I will dabble in the Whedonverse going forward but I know how painful it can be to believe in an artist and feel like they have failed you on a personal as well as professional level, by being bad people and not just flawed human beings so I can empathize with what you’re going through.
Thankfully there are plenty of other creators out there to discover and fall in love with, and plenty of them are women and people of color who can use the support a whole lot more than a malevolent mogul like Whedon.
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Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang!
Only 23 dollars signed, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here