Tag Archives: Joss Whedon

Voting as a Heroic Act

So Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and director of the Avengers movies, created his own PAC to encouraging voting this year.

I love this comment about the ethos of what he’s doing:

“There is this heroic act called voting. And the world is scary, and things are overwhelming, and there’s a lot at stake. But this voting thing is actually beautiful. Not just necessary—it’s a wonderful thing and it makes you powerful.” -Joss Whedon

Pairs nicely with the Ms. Marvel “to the polls” image:

Ms. Marvel & Joss Whedon on voting

(And yes, that’s a direct visual reference to the 1830 painting “Liberty Leading the People.”)

It’s easy to become frustrated or disillusioned, especially this year, but I think there is something incredible about voting.

This year my family went together, lining up with a hundred neighbors waiting for the polls to open. I wore my Captain America hoodie—an older woman remarked about its appropriateness.

My son watched as I voted. I pointed out that I’d just voted for a woman for president for the first time in my life. I voted for what could be only the fourth woman to represent Minnesota in the U.S. House and our first gay member of Congress. I voted for what could be West St. Paul’s first female mayor. I pointed to the school district levy, that I was voting for his school to keep getting money. (And I voted for at least a dozen judges running opposed, which felt kind of silly.)

The candidates have had their many, many months. But now it’s our turn.

However you vote, this is our moment. So vote.

Lessons from a Reader: Make ’em Expendable

I love gripping stories. I love reading a book I can’t put down, where I have to know what happens. A good tense story is often better than most movies. That’s something I talk about in 137 Books in One Year—the value of knowing what you love and pursing it as a reader.

So as a writer, one of the things that heightens the tension in a story and makes it so gripping is when you’re willing to make characters expendable.

Yes, killing off characters makes for better stories.

As you can imagine, this post is going to be full of spoilers. So get used to it.

I experience this recently in the zombie thriller Feed by Mira Grant. She created a post-zombie uprising world that hasn’t descended into the post-apocalyptic. Instead, people find ways to live with zombies, which mostly involves fear, lots of blood tests and guns. More than a story about zombies, Feed is the story of a trio of bloggers following a presidential campaign and uncovering a massive conspiracy.

Sidebar: In the post-zombie world bloggers come in a few stripes: Newsies who are your typical factual reporters, Fictionals who create fictional stories, and Irwins who pursue first-hand encounters with zombies. The Steve-O award is bestowed on deserving Irwins. Took me three-fourths of the way through Feed before I realized what Irwins was referring to. Get it? Brilliant.

Feed Spoilers
As the tension rises in Feed, people start dying. That’s pretty typical for a zombie story. But when one of the three primary bloggers in the story is killed, you know the stakes are high. At this point in the story, killing Buffy was pretty intense. It shook up the world for our two remaining bloggers, siblings Georgia and Shaun. But we still had those two. The story really gets intense when one of them dies. Killing two of your three main characters? Whoa. That puts the tension through the roof.

What’s perhaps more interesting is that writer Mira Grant chose to kill of Georgia, who had served as the story’s narrator. Not only did she kill off a main character with 75-some pages to go, but she killed off the freakin’ narrator.

That might seem like taking things too far. In Feed, it worked. Grant also turned the story into a trilogy that continues without two of her three main characters, or the primary narrator for the first book. That’s bold. I’ll let you know if it works.

Other Spoiler-Filled Examples
This strategy of killing off characters is put to work beautifully by Joss Whedon. In his Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series he employed it to a minor degree [BUFFY SPOILER ALERT] by readily killing off supporting characters (Jenny Calendar, Joyce Summers, Tara, Anya) or moving characters off the show (Angel, Cordelia, Oz, Riley, Giles). While he never completely kills one of his three primary characters, Buffy does die twice, Willow becomes evil and Xander loses an eye.

Whedon takes it up a notch in Serenity, the theatrical finale to his canceled Firefly TV series [here come the SERENITY/FIREFLY SPOILERS]. As the movie approaches the climax he kills off Shepherd Book, one of the nine original crew. That’s big, but Book also wasn’t on the ship at the beginning of the movie. You know the stakes are high, but the core crew of the movie still seems safe, right? Wrong. When pilot Wash is killed moments after a successful crash landing, suddenly all bets are off. As the climax reaches its crescendo and our heroes are fighting for their lives, nobody is safe. Injuries pile up, characters are shot and we have no sense that anybody is going to make it.

Serenity is possibly the best example ever of killing your characters to heighten the tension.

Unlike the original Star Trek series where the main characters were never in any real danger (the “redshirt” phenomena, lampooned brilliantly by John Scalzi), this approach makes danger real and the outcome unknown. Tension heightened.

If you want your readers to be on edge, prove how high the stakes are.

Lessons from a Reader: Resolve Relational Tension

What I’m going to call ‘relational tension’ is at the center of just about every story. It’s the conflict between two characters where you can’t tell if they’re going to be friends or enemies, lovers or acquaintances. It’s usually romantic tension, but not always.

If you’re using that kind of tension in a story, you need to resolve it by the end. You can’t just leave us hanging.

This isn’t a TV series where that tension is the heart of the show and you can let it stretch on forever. And in most cases, when that tension is resolved the show loses it’s heart and flounders for something new (see: Buffy and Angel, Lorelia and Luke, Jim and Pam, Castle and Beckett [they haven’t resolved it yet, but you can tell that’s their struggle], Mal and Inara, Angel and Cordelia [Joss Whedon is good at relational tension]).

If it’s a love story they get together at the end. If it’s a tragedy they split at the end. If it’s horror one of them gets killed. That’s simplistic, but the point is something happens by the end.

I was reading Enclave by Ann Aguirre and [SPOILER ALERT], they never resolved this tension. Now it wasn’t central to the story. But two characters were forced together. They were navigating a post-apocalyptic world and facing death side by side. Their relationship was developing, but it was undefined. Then a third character was introduced and suddenly this relational tension developed. The dreaded triangle.

But the story ended before it was resolved. The girl didn’t pick one guy over the other. She didn’t choose to be alone. She didn’t even decide not to choose. It just ended with her clearly attracted to both guys, having developed connections with both of them, but nothing happening.

It was a good story. Unique and compelling with interesting twists and turns. The writer was even brave enough to abandon one world and introduce a new one halfway through, which is no easy feat. But the unresolved tension left a bad taste in my mouth. The central question of survival for any post-apocalyptic story was answered, but the remaining tension didn’t make for a satisfying ending.

Give us a satisfying ending. I don’t care if we cry or cheer, but give us closure.

The Problem of Canceled TV Shows

So Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse is canceled. At least Fox will let the season end, airing the remaining episodes and giving the show a proper, if early, finale. Another sci-fi show wasn’t so lucky. ABC canceled Defying Gravity just as it was getting good, though the remaining episodes in the season were allowed to air in Canada. U.S. fans will have to either find the pirated versions online or wait for a DVD release to see how season one played out. Thankfully Defying Gravity creator James Parriott shared online how the show would have progressed beyond that first season.

Those are just two quick examples of current network cancellations, though the airwaves are littered with shows cut down before they could tell their stories.

In this DVR, DVD, on-demand age I wonder if networks are only hurting themselves. Many viewers are getting to a point where they won’t commit to these long story-arc shows until they know it’s going to last. Why get wrapped up in a story line if it could potentially be canceled? Some people are opting to wait for a show to run its course before checking it out on DVD. It would help if networks could pick a show and stick with it. But maybe fans need to start demanding it. Maybe we should refuse to watch a show unless it has a two-season commitment. It’s not how Hollywood works, but maybe show creators should refuse to do a show unless they can get a multi-season commitment.

It’s unheard of, but it sure beats unrealized story arcs and half-revealed plots.

Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse Debuts Tonight

Joss Whedon, the creative mind behind such compelling TV as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog has a new show debuting tonight. It’s called Dollhouse and is about these secret agent types who sign up to have their memory wiped and reinstalled with whatever scenario a client pays for. Or something like that. It all sounds kind of sinister and creepy.

Which sounds just like Joss Whedon (who told NPR, “I believe the best way to examine anything is to go to a dark place.”).

I’m eager to see the new show, but I’m keeping my expectations low. Primarily because it shares more than a few similarities with another Whedon show that got canceled after half a season. Firefly also aired on Friday nights, also on Fox, and also had the pilot episode mucked with. But I’m also keeping expectations low because this is TV and good TV often takes a little time to find its footing. The first season of Buffy (yet another half season) is pretty rocky. The Firefly pilot had wonderful moments, but also feels like its entire two-hour run time. Pilot episodes are rarely perfect.

But I’m more than willing to be pleasantly surprised.

Update: My 140-character or less Twitter review: “Dollhouse was good. Intense & a little creepy (Joss trademarks), but not much funny. Not much of a pilot ep either, felt like a normal ep.”

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is Here

Josh Whedon (of Buffy and Firefly/Serenity fame) has finally released his online superhero musical spoof, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day. It comes in three installments that will be released today, Thursday and Saturday. Then on Sunday night it will be taken down and you’ll need to wait until the DVD comes out (how diabolical!).

For now you can watch it at the Dr. Horrible site or buy it on iTunes.

This little musical bit of entertainment was conceived during the writer’s strike and put together on the cheap. And it’s pretty funny. It’s also receiving a lot of attention for something that amounts to 42-minutes of entertainment: TV Guide, Wired, MTV, Entertainment Weekly, Gawker. But we’ll take it.

Serenity is the New Star Wars

Yesterday morning I read this quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon about his movie directing debut, Serenity:

“I worked for a long time to come up with something epic enough to be a Universal movie and not just a glorified episode of Firefly. I wanted to make a movie that made me feel or made people feel the way I felt the first time I saw the first Star Wars.”

Yesterday evening I went to a pre-screening of Serenity, and I’ll just say that as dangerous as it may be to compare a movie to the original Star Wars, in this case it’s not a bad idea.

Go. See. Serenity.

It opens Friday.

(For those really geeking out, I’d also recommend the Time interview with Whedon and the Amazon Whedon sale [Oops, guess it was yesterday only]. Just for kicks, yesterday and today Firefly was among the top 10 selling DVDs on Amazon.)

Update: I’m feeling like I should really qualify and explain the comparison to Star Wars, but I don’t want to spoil anything. Let’s just say the greatest similarity is in the movie-going experience. Once more people have seen Serenity we can get into the details.