Special Topics in
Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
Jon Favreau,
2008
Special Topics in Film Studies:
Joss Whedon
Louis Letterier,
2008
Special Topics in Film Studies:
Joss Whedon
Jon Favreau,
2010
Special Topics in Film Studies:
Joss Whedon
Joe Johnston,
2011
Special Topics in Film Studies:
Joss Whedon
Kenneth
Branagh, 2011
Special Topics in Film Studies:
Joss Whedon
Shane Black,
2013
Special Topics in Film Studies:
Joss Whedon
Alan Taylor,
2013
Special Topics in Film Studies:
Joss Whedon
Anthony and Joe
Russo, 2014
Special Topics in Film Studies:
Joss Whedon
Joss Whedon,
2012
Special Topics in
Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
Special Topics in
Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
Special Topics in
Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
Special Topics in
Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
Special Topics in
Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
Special Topics in
Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
Special Topics in
Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
13—Marvel’s The Avengers
In which Whedon finally has the opportunity to make a blockbuster,
smashes box office records, and becomes a major filmmaker.
The fact that creative work is difficult and therefore spread out
over months and years has consequences for the organization
of purpose. In order to make grand goals attainable, the creator
must invent and pursue subgoals. Delays, tangents, and false
starts are almost inevitable. The creative person must therefore
have some approach to managing the work so that these
inconclusive moves become fruitful and enriching, and at the
same time so that a sense of direction is maintained. Without
such a sense of direction, the would-be creator may produce a
number of fine strokes, but they will not accumulate toward a
great work.
—Howard Gruber, “Inching” (265)
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
So I’m writing, I’m editing, I’m shooting. I can’t
sleep. I’m like, great, it’s just like running a TV
show.
—Joss Whedon on filming The Avengers (quoted
by Rogers 198)
Readers of this book to this point are unlikely to
disagree with Adam Rogers’ observation (in Wired)
that, at the beginning of the second decade of the
21st Century, “It began to seem as though
Whedon’s intellectual aspirations—the result of a
film-major/unofficial-gender-studies-minor
education at Wesleyan in the paradigm-subverting
days of the postmodern mid-’80s—were getting in
the way of success” (194). But then Whedon’s The
Avengers became the frakking third highestgrossing film of all time! How?
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
“New organs of perception come into being as a result of
necessity,” the mystical Sufi poet Jalaal al‐Din Rumi (1207-1273)
once observed enigmatically. “Therefore, increase your necessity so
that you may increase your perception.”
In an interview for the second volume of the official Watcher’s Guide
(2000), Joss Whedon, then a relative newcomer to showrunning
(Buffy had just completed its fourth season) and yet to direct his first
movie (Serenity was still five years away), would comment on the
educational value of making television and then wonder aloud about
what it might be like to make movies instead of TV:
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
I think everybody who makes movies should be forced to do
television. . . . Because you have to finish. You have to get it
done. . . . [Y]ou've got to do it right and do it fast. . . . So TV is a
good thing. . . . Ultimately, you want to move on from that. You
just want to say, “Okay, now I want to do something where I
have the time to create everything that's in the frame.
Everything.” And that's sort of where I'm starting to be. I'm
getting to the point now where I'm like, “Okay, I've told a lot of
stories. I've churned it out.” I just feel like I want to step back and
do something where I can't use the excuse of “I only had a
week." (Holder, Mariotte, and Hart 323)
With Marvel’s The Avengers, Whedon would have the opportunity—
and the budget ($220,000,000, almost six times larger than
Serenity’s $38,000,000)—“to do something where I have the time to
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
create everything that's in the frame.” * And, of course, he had much
more than a week, but, as we shall see, Marvel’s The Avengers’
magnificent success—an exemplary case of the cumulative “great
work” Gruber spoke of (see the epigraph above)—still owed much to
the “necessity” under which it was created.
Writing in Wired before The Avengers had been released, Rogers
would reveal the limitations Whedon had agreed to before taking on
the assignment in March 2010.
* The official coffee table book, The Art of
Marvel’s Avengers offers a detailed and
exquisite insider’s look at how Whedon
and his team created the film’s mise-enscène, aka “everything that's in the
frame.”
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
Marvel went for his angle—with some restrictions. Whedon
would have just 92 days to shoot, and the postproduction
schedule was going to be brutally tight. The company told him
the villain had to be the evil god Loki, from Thor. Execs said the
movie had to have a big fight among the Avengers. They wanted
a set piece in the middle that tore the team apart somehow. And
there had to be an epic final battle.
Whedon, still at heart a “company man,” readily acquiesced. “I was
like, great, you just gave me your three acts,” Whedon would tell
Rogers. “Now all I have to do is justify getting to those places and
beyond them” (196, 198). Jettisoning the existing Avengers
screenplay (Zak Penn still gets a writers credit), Whedon quickly
__________
*According to Rogers, in March 2010 Whedon sat down with Marvel
executive Kevin Feige “intending simply to give his take on the script. What
Whedon heard himself saying about it surprised even him. ‘I don’t think you
have anything,’ he said. ‘You need to pretend this draft never happened’”
(196).
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
overcame, thanks to the necessities he was bound by, the
sort of writers block that had precluded writing a Wonder
Woman script.
Whedon remained undeterred even as Marvel nixed early
drafts of the script. According to Rogers, Whedon fought for
retaining Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) as a central
character when the studio recommended she be eliminated,
insisting that “without her the Helicarrier was going to feel like
a gay cruise” (198).
Prior to and during shooting, virtually every journalistic piece
on the highly anticipated movie asked the same question:
how could Marvel Studios take such a huge risk, putting a
tentpole film—the culmination of Iron Man and Iron Man II
(Jon Favreau, 2008, 2010), The Incredible Hulk (Louis
Letterier, 2008), Thor (Kenneth Branagh, 2011), and Captain
America (Joe Johnston, 2011) and predecessor to Iron Man
III (Shane Black, 2013), Thor: The Dark World (Alan Taylor,
2013), and Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Anthony
and Joe Russo, 2014)—in the hands of an unproven
director?
Special Topics in
Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
It would not be the first time, of course, as Rogers would
note, that a superhero movie was put in the hands of a
relative unknown: Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins,
The Dark Knight, The Dark Night Rises; Bryan Singer (XMen [2000], X-2 [2003]); and Sam Raimi (Spider-Man 1
[2002], 2 [2004], and 3 [2007] were “art-house,” “quirky,”
and “small-scale” before taking on their “comic book
epics” (196). (Branagh and Favreau likewise come to
mind.*) Besides, Whedon brought other credentials to the
director’s chair, as this book has endeavored to show: his
unimpeachable prowess as a cult auteur—Jeff Bercovici
would observe with delicious irony that “Whedon has the
kind of credibility that only comes from repeated failure”
(“Avengers Director Joss Whedon”); his card-carrying
status as a Marvel Geek and comic book author (of
Astonishing X-Men); his extensive experience as a
television creator.
______________________
*An ulterior motive also comes to mind, as Rogers notes (196):
Marvel has a reputation for frugality and tends to hire lowerpriced directing talent.
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
As pre-eminent television critic Maureen Ryan, who had learned
how to watch Whedon on the small screen, conclusively
demonstrates, what made Marvel’s The Avengers a titanic success
had its origin in Whedon’s work in TV: “the film itself is a celebration
of everything we ever loved about Whedon's small-screen work. The
things that he did really well in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel,
Dollhouse, Firefly and Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog are the
things he did very well in The Avengers.” Whedon’s long-term
followers, Ryan reminds,
know that he excels at creating mismatched groups that haltingly
form ad-hoc families—fractured families with lots of internal
tensions, of course. Most shows (and movies) have enough
trouble creating just one or two compelling characters, but in
Whedon's work, there are usually a half dozen characters, each
with his or her own baggage and agenda. The ways in which each
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
person works out their personal issues and comes into
conflict with, or assists in, the mission of the group as a
whole—well, those kinds of rich, knotty dynamics drove
the best episodes and arcs in the Whedon canon.
Amazingly, given the drastically truncated story time
available to a filmmaker, Whedon found a way to distill his
proven narrative schema for exhibition at the multiplex.
Enhanced, for those who saw them, by the expectations
established for each of the superheroes by the movie’s
backstory predecessors, not to mention the “assembly
instructions” layed down through the recurring roles of
S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Coulson, Nick Fury, and Tony Stark,
especially in those mini-episode-closing credit sequences,
Marvel’s The Avengers had an advantage not available to,
say, John Carter (Andrew Stanton, 2012) or Battleship
(Peter Berg, 2012), and Whedon himself had a hand in
establishing multi-film continuity (including an uncredited
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
revision of the Captain America script*), but what Whedon
as both writer and director accomplished in Marvel’s The
Avengers was unprecedented in still another way:
The Avengers, for all its exultant clobbering time, actually
deepened most of the characters in important and
exciting ways. That's where Whedon's other area of
expertise came into play: He makes us relate to the
specially chosen and the superpowered because he
shows them experiencing self-doubt, self-loathing and
fear.
______________
*As Whedon told O’Hehir (“Interview”), unlike his earlier challenge
as a writer and director, Serenity, a film that presented a supreme
challenge because of the requirement to “target [a relatively small]
fan base” while necessarily establishing the characters for a larger
audience, his Marvel movie came with a preexisting boost: “with
Avengers,” “particularly Iron Man right now, because of the movies,
Captain America, too, and the Hulk because of the TV show,
everyone’s got their own juice.”
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
Yes, these men and women are exalted and special, but they're
vulnerable too. That's what makes us love them, and Whedon
has always understood that. (Ryan)
As Whedon himself would tell Andrew O’Hehir, The Avengers is
“kind of an old-fashioned movie. It’s not a cavalcade of sensation.
There’s a ton of stuff in it and we really put them through the wringer,
but at the end of the day, it’s a human story that I feel people can
relate to on a lot of levels.”
Though not as impressive as the “REALLY fine [meal], with truffles
and shit—enabling box office receipts, the response of the critics to
Marvel’s The Avengers was for the most part positive. On NPR’s
Fresh Air, for example, high-brow critic David Edelstein, while
admitting he sometimes “find[s] a lot of Whedon's banter selfconsciously smart-alecky,” vouches his “love” for “how he can spoof
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
his subjects without robbing them of stature” and identifies, with all
the brilliance of a true Whedon aficionado, that “the heart of The
Avengers clearly isn't the predictable, whiz-bang computergenerated battles between good and evil, but scenes in which our
superheroes hang out, spar with words as well as weapons, and
weigh the merits of individualism vs. teamwork. It's not unlike
Howard Hawks' iconic gunfighters taking one another's measure in
Rio Bravo.” “Prepare yourself, earthlings, Edelstein warned
(correctly): “For the next few weeks, we'll all be living in the
Whedonverse.”
Of course, not everyone loved Marvel’s The Avengers. The snarky
Walter Chaw, writing for the Film Freak Central website, and Rene
Rodriguez, the Miami Herald’s film critic, for example, both savaged
the film, and their caustic takes are revealing about Whedon’s place
in contemporary culture.
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
For Chaw, The Avengers is both “completely inoffensive” and
“agreeably stupid” and Whedon’s “definitive artistic statement”:
It's a giant, loud, sloppy kiss planted right on the forehead of a
fanboy contingent that will somehow find jealous dork solidarity
in the largest product excreted this year by a Hollywood
machinery that's the playground now of Whedons and Apatows
and Farrellys, where it used to be the domain of John Fords and
Sam Peckinpahs and Von Sternbergs. Not a full-grown man
among them, they're drunk on power and nerd cred, making
references to their references and amazed that someone like
Scarlett Johansson returns their calls . . . .
This is, of course, more ad hominem insult than critical discernment,
and Chaw does not let up, insisting, all-knowingly, that the film
“finally, has no inner life—there's nothing to explore here, except
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
maybe the ways that men express their insecurities in the avatars
they create . . . ,” and privy, in a way the author of these pages
would envy if it had any basis in reality, to Whedon’s mental state:
[W]henever [The Avengers] threatens to be about something—
like when Bryan Singer or Chris Nolan direct a superhero
movie—Whedon reveals he lacks the confidence to be much
more than the operator of the world's most expensive
amusement park ride. (italics mine)
Predictably Chaw would praise the ambitiousness of Nolan’s The
Dark Knight Rises two months after The Avengers.
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
Like Chaw, Rodriguez claims special access to The Avengers’
director’s creative process, able to discern that “Whedon, who
seems to have gotten in over his head, struggles to keep this
unwieldy movie spinning. He is so preoccupied with the sheer
physicality of the thing that he doesn't have time to step back and
consider the larger picture. He drowns in the details” (my italics).
The Avengers, Rodriguez concludes doesn’t “add up to anything.
This is a long, talky, clunky movie. . . . From Whedon, you expected
more than spectacle. . . .”
It difficult to understand how Rodriguez, one of Michael Bay’s most
caustic detractors, missed The Avengers “extras.” Take note that the
educated-by-television Maureen Ryan was not so oblivious, nor
were Charlie Jane Anders ("Several Reasons Why Avengers Kicks
Ass [That You Haven’t Already Heard]" for i09) and others who
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
catalogued the many pleasures Marvel’s The Avengers offers. I will
limit myself here to identifying only a few signature moments that
contribute to Whedon’s creative portrait.
In the Whedon Spring of 2012, just before the release of both The
Cabin in the Woods and Marvel’s The Avengers, the t-shirt above
(Figure 11) went on sale on the internet. Just after Avengers hit the
theatres, Blastr posted a slide show: “Tara, Wesley and 13 other
Joss Whedon deaths that broke our hearts.” Included on their late
lamented list, of course was the most recently deceased,
S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Phil Coulson, Captain America trading card
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
collector, who stood up to a god, accusing him of lacking conviction,
whose death at the hands of Joss Whedon Loki brought the
Avengers together, giving them (with an assist from Nick Fury)
something to avenge.
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
On the Helicarrier, just after Loki has been
captured and imprisoned (and Tony Stark takes
note that one of the crew is playing Galaga on his
computer), the assembled Avengers speculate
about the significance of their enemy’s magical
staff. When Captain America observes that it
bears a certain resemblance to a Hydra weapon,
Nick Fury responds that, whatever its origin, it was
capable of transforming both Hawkeye and Dr.
Selvig into Loki’s “personal flying monkeys." The
reference is lost on the often-too-literal and
unearthly Thor, but Captain America is quite
delighted that he “gets” the allusion to The Wizard
of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), a motion picture he
evidently saw back before America entered the
war (back when he was still just Steve Rogers).
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
It has been part of the argument of this book that Whedon is a “film
studies auteur,” drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of film
history and genre to both write and direct. Marvel’s The Avengers is
a prime example. We know from a variety of interviews that a
rewatch of Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott, 2001) had made him
want to do a war film and Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967)
had provided a kind of template for The Avengers.* As was
establisihed earlier, Whedon’s mentor Jeanine Basinger has written
a definitive “anatomy of the genre”: The World War II Combat Film
(1986).
_____________
*Ensley Guffey’s discerning piece on The Avengers in the forthcoming The
Joss Whedon Reader offers a valuable reading of the film as a war movie.
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
Marvel’s The Avengers likewise offers numerous
examples of what might be called the “popular
culture sublime” (PCS), moments so selfconsciously redolent with iconic characters,
character traits, symbols, technology, weaponry
that the response of the knowing viewer/fan
becomes a kind of imaginal transcendence. Could
any filmmaker other than Whedon have given us
the sublimity of the entire sequence in which Thor
abducts Loki from the S.H.I.E.L.D. jet and then
does battle on the ground, first with Iron Man (who
gets a power boost from the Norse god’s lightning)
and then Captain America. It is impossible to
conceive a more PCS moment than Thor’s
hammer slamming down, icon to icon, on the
Captain’s shield.
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
Writing for the CHUD website, Joshua Miller would confess to
another PCS moment.
My adult-ness was powerless to
Hulk in The Avengers. When he
was on screen my decades
stripped away and I was left a 10year-old boy, drooling with pure,
guiltless, innocent joy. It was
almost a religious experience.
When Cap takes charge of the
Avengers during the final battle,
barking orders to our other heroes,
then turns to a seething Hulk and
says, “Hulk . . . smash” I literally
teared up—from happiness!*
_____________
*On my deathbed,” Miller would go on to say, “I very well may look back on my life’s
brightest moments and have to decide if the birth of my first child should be above or
below watching Hulk go completely apeshit in The Avengers.”
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
Even the film’s harshest critics agreed that The Avengers’ Incredible
Hulk far surpassed all previous TV/movie incarnations of the “other
guy”—as Bruce Banner deems him in the film. Mixing action and
humor has long been a Whedonian signature, and the Hulk brings
both the PCS and the funny in equal measure. His below-decks
chase of Black Widow, his thunderous smackdown with Thor, his
punch-out of a Leviathan, his skyscraper-scraping save of Iron Man
after his free fall from the vortex are unforgettable; but so too are his
comic moments: being told (as Banner) after plummeting from the
sky that, in the opinion of a security guard (played by cult actor Harry
Dean Stanton), he has “a condition”; his just-for-the-hell-of-it decking
of Thor; his hilarious, cartoonish pummeling of the-full-of-hubris Loki
(“Puny god!”)—a scene that at a screening I attended received the
longest sustained laughter I have ever experienced in a movie
theatre.
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
If all the above stand as quintessentially Whedonesque, it still must
be said that The Avengers’ “increased perception” is the result of
Whedon’s restraint, his acceptance of necessity. “In over his head”?:
nothing could be farther from the truth. Whedon knew precisely what
he was doing. When the first edit of the movie came in at over three
hours, what ended up on the cutting room floor was core
Whedonstuff (as Rogers reported):
The darker aspects of the dysfunctional team dynamic: out. A
quiet scene with Captain America trying to absorb the craziness
of modern-day New York: out. And so on. . . . “You don’t have to
say what you’re trying to say. You can just do it, and then people
will feel it,” Whedon says. “The more I hone this and just focus
on the Avengers as they relate to one another, the better it
works. That’s painful, but it’s a reality. (199; italics mine)
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
Painful . . . “”Pain is where I hang my hat,” Whedon had told Jim
Kozak with Marvel’s X-Men in mind (JWC 102), but in making
Marvel’s The Avengers he had internalized the pain—and the
necessity—and spun them into gold.
It should not surprise us that Whedon was slow to sign on for the
inevitable Avengers sequel. “You know, I’m very torn,” Whedon
would tell the Los Angeles Times just before the Avengers’ debut.
“It’s an enormous amount of work telling what is ultimately
somebody else’s story, even though I feel like I did get to put myself
into it. But at the same time, I have a bunch of ideas, and they all
seem really cool” (“Avengers: Joss Whedon talks sequel”). As he
spoke, shooting for Much Ado about Nothing was already complete.
At ComicCon in July 2012, Whedon would remain undecided. Less
than a month later, however, came the news that Whedon had
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon
agreed to not only helm
Avengers 2, with its alreadyestablished-in-the-closingcredits-of-the-first-film Big Bad
Thanos, but also develop Marvel
properties for television (Kit),
including the now in-development
S.H.I.E.L.D. series featuring
(somehow) the late Phil Coulson.
Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss
Whedon