Understanding the Televisual Auteur
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Wesleyan University The Honors College I’ve Got a Theory, It Could Be Whedon: Understanding the Televisual Auteur by Allison Louise Cronan Class of 2017 A thesis submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors from the College of Film and the Moving Image Middletown, Connecticut April, 2017 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you first to my advisor, Scott Higgins. Your help on everything from specific ideas to organizational strategies was invaluable. Thank you for reading even my roughest pages and helping me find the good in them. And thank you for always helping me locate the joy in all the hard work. Thank you to Jeanine Basinger, for your incredible support. You gave me the tools to dig deep into Whedon’s work, and an instrumental idea of the baseline from which he approached various techniques and genres. Thank also to Marc Longenecker and Betsy Traube for teaching me how to critically analyze television. And thank you to the entire Wesleyan Film faculty for shaping the way I think about the moving image. I am also indebted to Lea Carlson, whose patience and overall help made the process of completing this work feel manageable. Thank you to my family—Mom, Dad, Megan, and Ryan. Thank you for always supporting me in everything, even when you found out I had to watch over 200 hours of television to work on this. Thank you to Sofi, Will, Kiley, and Alexa, who were a source of encouragement and a sounding board for ideas. As my roommates, you’ve seen me at my best and worst and been phenomenal friends through it all. Thank you to Nicole, who taught me that questions of authorship have long since been churned over in fine art. And thank you to Emily, who brought me all the Buffy DVDs from home when Netflix removed the series from its instant library. Finally, a huge thank you to my fellow History/Theory thesis students: Ben, Lucy, and Adam. I’m so grateful we were able to go through this process together. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1: WHEDON’S CONCENTRATED AUTHORSHIP IN BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER ............................................................................................................... 13 “ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING”: A CASE STUDY ................................................................. 21 “HUSH” AND “THE BODY”: THE ROUNDING OUT OF AN OEUVRE ...................................... 37 CONCLUSION: EPISODIC AUTHORSHIP ................................................................................ 51 CHAPTER 2: TELEVISUAL AUTHORSHIP ACROSS SEASONS ............................... 53 GENRES IN TENSION, WORLD IN TENSION .......................................................................... 55 WELCOME TO THE GROUP ................................................................................................... 74 TELLING STORIES LONG-TERM ........................................................................................... 82 CONCLUSION: SERIES AUTHORSHIP .................................................................................... 97 CHAPTER 3: PROVING AND DEFINING AUTHORSHIP AS A CONCEPT ............. 99 CHAPTER 4: EXTENDING WHEDON’S AUTHORSHIP ........................................... 124 WORLD IN TENSION, GENRES IN TENSION ........................................................................ 129 NOW WELCOME TO THIS GROUP ....................................................................................... 145 POTENTIALLY LONG-TERM STORYTELLING CUT SHORT .................................................. 154 SERENITY ........................................................................................................................... 170 CONCLUSION: EVOLVING AUTHORSHIP ............................................................................ 185 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................... 186 APPENDIX ........................................................................................................................... 205 FILMOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................. 210 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................ 215 1 Introduction “Remember to always be yourself. Unless you suck.” -Joss Whedon1 In March 2017, the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon, 1997-2003) turned twenty years old, and the Internet celebrated. Entertainment Weekly brought together most of the series’ major actors for a twentieth anniversary photo shoot.2 Included among the pictures is a large group photo. On a set dressed to look like a foggy graveyard, the twelve former Buffy stars form a line. Sitting in front of them—most prominent in the photo, except for maybe Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy herself)—is Joss Whedon. Whedon’s face never appeared on screen in Buffy. He played a minor character in one episode of Buffy’s spin-off, Angel (Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt, 1999-2004)3, but in such an outrageous costume it is difficult to even identify the actor as him. No, we do not recognize Joss Whedon for his compelling portrayal of one character. We associate him with the existence of all of them. But is this association simply a nice shorthand for discussing the series, a face to blame when we like or do not like what we see on screen? Or can we meaningfully refer to Whedon as the series’ “author”? If so, what does that mean? Can we consider him a “televisual auteur”? Is there even any difference between a film auteur (which 1 “Joss Whedon: Biography,” IMDB, accessed April 2, 2016, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0923736/bio?ref_=nm_dyk_trv_sm#quotes. 2 EW Staff, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer Reunion: Exclusive Photos,” Entertainment Weekly, March 29, 2017, accessed March 31, 2017, http://ew.com/tv/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-exclusive-portraits/buffy- the-vampire-cast-reunion/. 3 The episode referenced is “Through the Looking Glass” (221). 2 we know very well how to study) and a televisual one? In this project, I will bring together both a specific authorship study and a larger discussion of televisual authorship in general, in order to answer these questions. Yet, before we can tackle these issues, we need a better sense of the direction from which we are approaching both. To this end, academic literature and critical writing on television will be an essential starting point, as it will help us outline both an existing body of work around and a historical context for the questions addressed in this project. Across the academic and critical writing on the subject, numerous trends emerge. The first involves whether or not these sources consider “authorship” a valid method of evaluating television at all. Some writers flat out reject this practice. Robert J. Thompson and Gary Burns, for example, begin their book on authorship in television with the phrase, “The Author is dead…”4 Craig Fehrman similarly refers to ideas of discussing “television’s own auteur” as “The Showrunner Fallacy.”5 However, most writers on the subject seem to operate under the assumption that the idea of authorship in television is meaningful, albeit more nuanced than the dictionary definition of “author” implies. For example, immediately after Fehrman’s article was published, June Thomas wrote an article for Slate titled: “It's Not a Fallacy to Focus on Showrunners."6 4 Robert J. Thompson and Gary Burns, introduction to Making Television: Authorship and the Production Process, ed. Robert J. Thompson and Gary Burns (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1990), ix. Notably, they continue by explaining: “we do think it is worthwhile to study the human agents who work in the production of television as part of a complex system of communication.” 5 Craig Fehrman, "The Showrunner Fallacy," New Republic, June 13, 2013, accessed October 20, 2016, https://newrepublic.com/article/113374/why-tv-critics-should-stop-focusing-showrunners. 6 June Thomas, "It's Not a Fallacy to Focus on Showrunners," Slate, June 13, 2013, accessed October 20, 2016, 3 Although not completely new, it is also clear that the discussion of televisual authorship is one that has intensified relatively recently. For example, James Poniewozik claimed in a 2015 Time article that “the idea of the author-driven series has been growing in TV for decades, with network creators like Steven Bochco or David E. Kelley making series that--while they employed a lot of creative talent-- spoke with a certain, distinctive voice.”7 He clarifies that it “grew in the late 1990s and 2000s, as writers like The Sopranos’ David Chase and Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner became celebrated as artists, organizing their shows around a single vision and intention.”8 Notably, since Buffy premiered in 1997, Joss Whedon fits into this timeline as one of the writers at the forefront of this change. A large amount of the literature on authorship in television approaches it from a cultural perspective, rather than an aesthetic one. One such work, Jason Mittell’s book Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, is still incredibly valuable in this discussion of televisual authorship, as it not only lays out multiple versions of the idea, it provides a comprehensive vocabulary with which to discuss authorship. Mittell