touchtheowl:

prokopetz:

If we’re going to update the pantheon of regrettable artists, can we add “white male writer who was legitimately progressive twenty years ago, but hasn’t learned or grown as an artist in any way whatsoever since then, and now exists in a state of grumpy bewilderment at the fact that he’s being critcised for doing exactly the same stuff that used to win him praise”?

That’s a long winded way of saying Joss Whedon

When we say “regrettable artist,” do we mean that his entire existence is regrettable? That we’re not allowed to still like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, or The Cabin in the Woods? Should we wish those things had never existed? Must we now condemn everything he writes as worthless in order to prove our social justice bona fides? I’m strongly suspecting the answer is “yes,” since I see a lot of very flimsy criticism of his characterization in recent films: because his feminism is imperfect, his writing must also be terrible in every way. No one who has any moral failings can have any virtues, even non-moral ones. The most ironic example of this I’ve seen lately is a juxtaposition of a gif from The Avengers of Captain America saying “Son of a gun” – claimed to be an example of Whedon’s inept characterization of Brooklyn-born army vet Steve Rogers as a euphemism-using prude – with a gif of Cap saying “Son of a bitch,” which is said to be more authentic. The irony, of course, is that the second gif is from Avengers: Age of Ultron, also written by Joss Whedon. In their haste to condemn every aspect of his writing, Tumblrites happily misattribute quotes.

I’m willing to concede that Whedon has not followed the zeitgeist on representation of women in action films. His approach is still to show the way women are sexualized, victimized, and underestimated on account of their gender (which, I can attest, is still accurate to the experience of women in male-dominated fields), while the favored strategy in progressive circles is now to depict a situation in which women are accepted and respected without question and gender is a non-issue. (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. does pretty well on that, as well as on racial diversity among women as well as men, but Joss Whedon’s involvement may be minimal at this point.)

But I still think that Whedon is a better writer of dialogue and, yes, character than most of the other staff hacks writing in the MCU. People also have a tendency to reduce his style to pop culture jokes, and yes, there are a lot of those. But there’s also “I remember a shadow”; “It’s a terrible privilege”; “Big man in a suit of armor. Take that off, what are you?” / “Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist” / [Natasha shrugs]; “I’ve got red in my ledger, I’d like to wipe it out”; “Loki, he’s a full-tilt diva”; “Seeing as it’s a stupid-ass decision, I’ve elected to ignore it”; “Satisfaction’s not in my nature” / “Surrender’s not in mine” (yes, he wrote the Dark World bro-boat scene); “Actually, he’s the boss, I just pay for everything”; “That up there, that’s the endgame”; “If you step out that door, you’re an Avenger.” Those aren’t just punchy quotable quotes; they’re moments that tell you a lot about a character. Our conceptions of characters in the MCU are profoundly shaped by some of those moments, and people are happy to gif them and quote them in tribute to the characters, giving no credit to the person who wrote them, then turn around and unconditionally demonize the writer. And I’m really tired of it.

I wasn’t in Tumblr fandom in the mythical days I hear of when criticizing Joss Whedon was an unpardonable sin; all I’ve seen is the excessive backlash. I ask for nuance; I ask for credit where it’s due. And I’d really like people to stop implying that I’m a bad feminist (which, to the rigorist Tumblr Left, makes me an irredeemably wicked contributor to Oppression) for continuing to like Joss Whedon’s writing (or George R. R. Martin’s, for that matter). As a historian of philosophy, I’m used to dealing with people like Kant and Nietzsche whose attitudes were often Problematic, sometimes even regressive relative to their day. I’ve also learned how not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.