Okay,
I admit it, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is pretty cool – uneven, but
some of the episodes are among the best in television (Hush, Once
More, with Feeling stand out, IMO) and I liked Angel even better
overall (Smile Time is among the funniest things ever put on
television, and I'm counting the Thanksgiving episode of
WKRP in Cincinnati and the Futurama's Roswell That
Ends Well). But sometime around Firefly, well, it was clear there
was a cult of personality going on. I don't particularly like
Firefly and when people ask me why, I go, “The sexism.” Then,
with near 100% reliability, Firefly fans say, “There's no sexism!
Kaylee! River!” And I go, “Mal publicly and frequently sexually
humiliates Inari by calling her a whore . . . and this causes her to
fall in love with him. That's sexism. That isn't near the line.
It's so far over the line that it can't see the line from orbit.”
While this (with almost 100% reliability) gets them to concede the
point, it seems to do little to dent their uncritical praise for Whedon's
work. And I won't even get into Dollhouse and the whole
prostitute-assassin-rape thing. Or even how embarrassingly stupid
The Avengers is (though it most certainly is very stupid). I'm not
saying Whedon is a talentless hack, I'm just saying he doesn't walk
on water and I think much of his career is currently being sustained
by the goodwill generated by Buffy that has transformed into a cult of
personality. I'm sure that if almost anyone else had written a movie
as bad as the Avengers, someone would have noticed.
Right
here is a convenient place to show both Whedon's strengths and
weaknesses as a writer. I'm not considering his acting, which is
wooden, because that's not my point (and isn't the problem with the
piece, anyway). The problem is that this joke is about a minute too
long. Whedon spends about a minute belaboring the ways in which
Romney's policies will bring about a zombie apocalypse. Except for
Romney's unrestrained embrace of corporations, it was unnecessary and
didn't build comedic tension but drained it due to the transparency
of the humor. He essentially repeated things that are known about Romney, that are repeated by Obama's campaign ad nauseum.
The basic
premise is good. The zombie apocalypse bit is
quite funny. But at two and a quarter minutes?
Man, a joke has to be as good as The Aristocrats to be that long. (I'm sure there are many versions of it on YouTube, if I recall, Bob
Saget's is particularly good, but his, Gottfried's and Silverman's
are all worth listening watching – or just watch all of Penn and
Teller's The Aristocrats, great flick).
Because
of it's unnecessary length, furthermore, it fails as political
satire. For political satire to work, it's gotta hurt. With a
premise as absurd as a zombie apocalypse, you've got to strike fast
or you'll lose the audience you're trying to satirize. A Romney
supporter, watching this video, will be taken aback by the zombie
apocalypse thing and right then, right there, in that moment of
shock, is when you've got to hurt them. Whedon should
have employed his best weapon, the corporate line, immediately.
Otherwise, you're allowing them to recover and go, “This is just a
guy repeating the same ol' Democratic line.” Which he is. By the time he gets
to Romney's worship of corporations, they've fully recovered. He
went for a grind instead of a finish and lost on points.
This is the basic pattern of much of Whedon's work – it has moments of sharp wit but it's in between all this other stuff which
is not so good. Which isn't a problem for Whedon, in the sense that
no writer lands the knock-out punch every swing. Even brilliant
writers, like Mark Twain, have good and bad days. Whedon did give us
Buffy, he did give us Angel, he certainly owes no one anything,
artistically speaking. I'm just annoyed that people praise his works
while seeming to willfully ignore his flaws.
No comments:
Post a Comment