From feminist hero to punching bag: how Buffy creator Joss Whedon failed the 'woke' test

Robert Kilroy-Silk didn’t survive the Nineties. Neither did Hootie and the Blowfish, nor the humble Laserdisc. Their gradual removal from pop culture memory came as rapidly as our realisation that they were never that essential in the first place. Joss Whedon spent the Nineties creating and scripting some of its most seminal work: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Toy Story, Speed.

Their pop culture legacies, each serving as blueprints for so much of what came after them, rescued Whedon from similar 21st century oblivion. And rather than just passively influencing what came next, he instead transferred his style and wit into new shapes. He was a Hollywood survivor. Then, as if he were a vampire bursting into dust, he suddenly wasn’t.

Next year, the fledgling US streaming service HBO Max will premiere Justice League: The Snyder Cut, a fan-demanded, reworked and re-edited version of the 2017 superhero team-up movie. It is the product of one of the strangest social media campaigns in recent memory – one that demanded more of a not very good DC Comics sequel which was only decided wasn’t good because it’s director, Zack Snyder, wasn’t allowed to see his vision through to the end. Regardless that Snyder had directed the film’s two not very good predecessors, it was Whedon, his shoehorned-in replacement, who had ruined it. Or so the fans claimed.

Regardless of the mental gymnastics required to defend Justice League, the film has left a further stain on Whedon himself. DC obsessives are the latest in a run of fanbases to distance themselves from him. First there were Marvel fans, Whedon having scrambled the Avengers movies after being tasked with building the Marvel Universe.

Then there were those who considered Whedon one of pop culture’s foremost feminists, who held their heads in their hands when his decade-old and worryingly salacious script for a Wonder Woman movie leaked online. A series of allegations courtesy of Whedon’s ex wife, relating to Whedon’s infidelities and treatment of women on his TV series, only drove home the perceived betrayal. How on earth did we get here?

Beloved by nerds and considered by critics to be one of television’s greatest storytellers, Whedon at one point seemed untouchable. A third-generation screenwriter, he would work as a script doctor on films including Speed, X-Men and Twister, and score an Oscar nod for co-writing Toy Story, but find his home on the small screen.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is now available in its entirety on All4, starred Sarah Michelle Gellar as an ordinary teenage girl fighting blood-suckers, demons and the forces of evil. It didn’t invent good television drama, but it was part of a holy Nineties quartet that changed it forever. Along with Twin Peaks, The X-Files and ER, Buffy made TV the new cinema, playing with form and genre and casting actors of quality.

Buffy beget Angel, a spin-off series, and subsequently Firefly – a rapidly cancelled but adored space western that was given an unexpected reprieve in the form of a movie follow-up titled Serenity. There were smaller detours in the aftermath: a musical web series called Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, a cripplingly ambitious TV series titled Dollhouse, and the acclaimed horror satire The Cabin in the Woods. All were largely well received, Whedon seamlessly transitioning into film after years of television. But then the wheels flew off.

Considering Whedon’s dismal reputation in fanboy circles, it’s odd that so much of modern blockbuster cinema is fiercely indebted to him. Recruited in 2010 to write and direct The Avengers, the first major comic book movie to feature a large ensemble of A-list superheroes, Whedon shaped the Marvel Universe in his image. If Jon Favreau laid the basic groundwork for the franchise with 2008’s Iron Man, Whedon introduced an exhaustingly quippy energy to proceedings.

His tone has always been vaguely Shakespearean and theatrical, if full of deadpan jokes, resistance to sincerity and boundless snark. All of the Marvel Universe, even if Whedon has been entirely absent from it since 2015, still bears his fingerprints. So does much of big-budget filmmaking today.

He had problems within such a large machine, though. Avengers: Age of Ultron, the 2015 sequel to the 2012 smash, received mixed reviews upon release and has been largely forgotten about in the half-decade since. Despite his television history with ensemble casts and elaborate story arcs, Whedon struggled to guide such a substantial narrative, while also appearing to collapse amid criticism about his creative choices.

Filming was reportedly exhausting, Whedon struggling to align his vision for the film with that of Marvel’s chief executives, and becoming riddled with self-doubt. “It’s been dark,” he told BuzzFeed ahead of the film’s release. “It’s been weird. It’s been horrible... I feel every day like, I didn’t do enough ... I wasn’t ready. Here’s failure. Here’s compromise.”

Upon the film’s release, Whedon closed his Twitter account after fans complained that he had poorly handled Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow in the movie. A line of dialogue about her infertility led some to call Whedon a misogynist. Speaking to BuzzFeed, he denied that he had quit social media for any other reason than being burned out. “Believe me, I have been attacked by militant feminists since I got on Twitter,” he explained. “That’s something I’m used to. Every breed of feminism is attacking every other breed, and every subsection of liberalism is always busy attacking another subsection of liberalism, because god forbid they should all band together and actually fight for the cause.”

Whedon’s comments, which baffled observers who had long seen him as the kind of person who wouldn’t casually throw around the term “militant feminist”, resurfaced previous instances of uncomfortable behaviour from his time on Buffy and Angel. There were claims that he had effectively punished actor Charisma Carpenter with bad storylines and an eventual dismissal from Angel after she fell pregnant and scuppered his plans for her character. Quibbles arose about Buffy’s sexual politics, and what some felt was an erasure of a principal character’s bisexuality.

Buffy’s reputation as a feminist triumph also began to dim. In tandem with the rise of social media and shifts in ideas of representation in entertainment, viewers and critics started to reevaluate its messaging and where Whedon existed in the feminist canon. It was something previously unthinkable, with Whedon so often heralded as a male feminist hero.

Glance back, however, and Whedon’s feminism was always vaguely embarrassing. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2000, Whedon said that he found the image of “a woman kicking ass” to be “extraordinarily sexy, always”. He created the character of Buffy out of a want to see the archetypal pretty and blonde horror movie victim not being slaughtered by a villain, but karate-chopping said villain to death instead.

The political symbolism of such a character never seemed of particular interest. He also seemed more invested in making feminism palatable for male audiences, rather than creating a complex female character for young feminists to look up to. “If I can make teenage boys comfortable with a girl who takes charge of a situation without their knowing that’s what’s happening, it’s better than sitting down and selling them on feminism,” he told Time Magazine in 1997.

The usefulness of critiquing art from 20 years ago for its adherence to the standards of today remains questionable, but tales of Whedon’s checkered history suddenly felt pointed – as if an entire persona was slightly more contrived than we realised at the time. The 2017 leak of Whedon’s script for an aborted Wonder Woman movie, one that appeared online soon after Patty Jenkins’ version of the character opened to raves and enormous box office, only enhanced the backlash.

Wonder Woman herself is sexualised throughout, Whedon endlessly referring to her physical shape, curves and feet. She performs a “sensual and wicked sexy” dance to entice the film’s villain, and the script closes on a joke about her potentially sapphic experiences in her female-only homeland. He later argued that people merely thought it wasn’t “woke enough”.

To make Whedon’s 2017 even more embarrassing, he was the subject of an unbearably intimate essay by his ex-wife Kai Cole, who accused him of using his “male feminist” public image as a shield for years of affairs and emotional abuse. He allegedly told her it was impossible to stay faithful on the Buffy set, surrounded as he was by “beautiful, needy, aggressive young women”. Cole said she was left “broken” by the marriage, which ended in 2012, and that she was diagnosed with “complex post-traumatic stress” in its aftermath.

Coming so soon after the Wonder Woman debacle, the essay proved too much for the internet’s number one Whedon fansite, Whedonesque.com, which closed its doors within a day of the essay’s publication.

By this point, Marvel fans had also moved on from Whedon – Joe and Anthony Russo had been tasked with guiding the franchise, and they had somehow towed the company line, kept the franchise in profit and kept the fans on their side. Being unknown prior to their involvement with the corporation, they also weren’t burdened with fan expectations about how they ought to conduct themselves creatively.

That Black Widow remained a cipher long after Whedon departed the franchise, yet sparked little high-profile backlash for the Russos, spoke to the seriousness of Whedon’s progressive persona among fans. The Russos didn’t loudly proclaim themselves girl-power feminists for much of their careers, so standards for them were far lower.

Upsetting DC fanboys came next. Whedon was brought into the DC fold at a stage in 2016, amid a corporation getting cold feet about much of its film output. Zack Snyder, previously tasked with guiding the fledgling franchise, had sought a tone of relentless brooding and nighttime hues, even turning the giddy, all-American Superman into a downbeat anti-hero with daddy issues. The critical response to Snyder’s Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which varied from mixed to negative, saw DC bosses panic about Justice League – a movie designed to be their version of The Avengers.

What happened next has inspired years of debate and rumour. Officially, Snyder dropped out towards the end of production following the death of his daughter, leaving Whedon to conduct a minor polish of the script and direct a handful of reshoots. Snyder fans, meanwhile, have claimed that he had been forced out of the movie long before his family tragedy, with Whedon demolishing his original vision and adding quips and levity and mishandling characters and the film’s plot. A hashtag campaign was born,#ReleaseTheSnyderCut, demanding that DC reinstate Snyder’s vision and wipe Whedon’s involvement from history.

In its melodrama, it exposed a further truth – Whedon no longer had a tribe to speak of. The nerd culture wars of the 2010’s have divided fandom, particularly in comic books and fantasy entertainment, into two camps: those that are outspokenly progressive, calling on publishers and studios to boost representation and diversity in terms of race, gender and sexuality, and those who find such wants unnecessary. Or, alternatively, those calling for progress to be worthy of targeted harassment and trolling.

If the people outraged at Whedon’s handling of Black Widow, and betrayed by Cole’s claims of his performative feminism, dominate the former category, then the Snyder fanboys calling for Whedon’s head embody the latter. Writing for Vulture, journalist Abraham Riesman described the #SnyderCut tribe as being responsible for the “online bullying of critics, executives and average schmoes who don’t agree with them”. Others have noted crossover between those active in the campaign and those responsible for controversy surrounding the use of women and characters of colour in Star Wars, and complaints about diversity in other comic book movies.

Whedon, whatever his feminist failings, has never been part of that crowd. But he’s also become alienating and politically out-of-touch to progressives. “I’ve said before, when you declare yourself politically, you destroy yourself artistically,” he told BuzzFeed in 2015. “Because suddenly that’s the litmus test for everything you do – for example, in my case, feminism. If you don’t live up to the litmus test of feminism in this one instance, then you’re a misogynist. It circles directly back upon you.”

There is truth to Whedon’s claims, in that those who are vocal about any left-leaning political or social stance are generally held to a higher moral standard than those who stay entirely neutral. But it’s also odd to expect leniency when much of your fame, riches and admiration stems from a perceived value system that keeps becoming more and more blurry.

Today, Whedon is more often spoken of as the hack who ruined Zack Snyder, or the embodiment of untrustworthy self-proclaimed male feminists, than a creative visionary. His career has also become spotty. A proposed Batgirl movie went up in flames shortly after the Justice League debacle, Whedon claiming he “really didn’t have a story” to tell.

He is due to return to television with The Nevers, an HBO series about a gang of Victorian women with supernatural powers, but its journey to the screen has so far been quiet. It will reportedly launch in 2021, having filmed in London last summer. Viewers of all political leanings will have their pitchforks out.

It’s somewhat disappointing that Whedon has ended up here; his early work remains singular, masterful and important. But it also gives weight to the idea that sometimes it is better to exist in a vacuum, stuck in amber rather than pushing forward with increasingly problematic or lazy work, diluting your own legacy until it becomes unrecognisable. Whedon owned the Nineties.

He had a strong run in the early Noughties, too, if perhaps one that left him too comfortable and resistant to change. Transferring his skillset to 2020, however, exposes all of his failings and oddities, the ones we were too blissfully distracted to notice the first time around. Like Ginger Spice, Apu from The Simpsons or Roseanne Barr, he was brilliant 20 years ago. We loved him. He should also go away.