Viewer Participation and the Works of Joss Whedon Erin Hollis In
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PREVIOUSLY ON “It’s the Perfect Story, So They Say”:Viewer Participation and the Works of Joss Whedon Erin Hollis In an letter written to his fans just prior to the momentous release of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog on the Internet in the summer of 2008, Joss Whedon (2008) presents a call to action, urging his fans to “spread the word” about the production he had paid for entirely on his own, had produced during the 2007-2008 Writer’s Strike in Hollywood, and was about to post for free on the Internet: Spread the word. Rock some banners, widgets, diggs… let people know who wouldn’t ordinarily know. It wouldn’t hurt if this really was an event. Good for the business, good for the community – communitIES: Hollywood, internet, artists around the world, comic-book fans, musical fans (and even the rather vocal community of people who hate both but will still dig on this). Proving we can turn Dr. Horrible into a viable economic proposition as well as an awesome goof will only inspire more people to lay themselves out in the same way. It’s time for the dissemination of the artistic process. Create more for less. You are the ones that can make that happen. Whedon, demonstrating knowledge of his fan base as well as an idealistic belief in the power of ordinary people, set out to create a different model for how such productions are produced and distributed. Television networks, especially, have long exhibited a fear of the internet, worrying that if they make their shows available on the Internet, they would follow in the footsteps of the music industry, which might result in the steady loss of revenues. What Whedon’s production proved is that the networks lacked a creative approach to the changing face of media, especially in terms of the Internet. Whedon pushed back against the conservative nature of the networks and his experiment was an immediate success: “[d]emand for the first [act] was sufficient to crash the whole Hulu site as well as Whedonesque and the homepages for Dr. Horrible and The Guild” (Walters, 2009: 67). And when the show was made available on iTunes and later on DVD, “[w]hat began as a lark turned into something far bigger: the first series in history to find an audience and make money entirely online—outselling every TV show on iTunes in the weeks after its release” (Kushner 2009: 38). Of course, this Cinderella story is not without its caveats— Whedon was an already successful television and movie writer, director and producer who had the necessary money and friends needed to make the show as well as a firmly established fan base from his earlier fan-favorite shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly. However, it was Whedon’s ability to understand, respect, and sympathize with his fans as well as his trust in those fans’ intelligence and his willingness to challenge such intelligence that led to the success of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. In this essay, I will look at the trajectory of Whedon’s television career, examining how each of his television shows released prior to Dr. Horrible—Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly—created a fan culture that was primed for such an event as Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Understanding how Whedon employed popular conventions of fan culture in his own work will help to demonstrate not only why Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog became such a success, but will also serve to highlight how Whedon shaped his own fan base by encouraging fans towards critical inquiry of their own fan practices. 291 PREVIOUSLY ON Approaches to Fan Culture: A Brief Overview Of course, Whedon’s creations are not the only television shows that have engendered a dedicated fan following. The most obvious comparison is with the long running multiple series Star Trek franchise, which has its fair share of fans and is perhaps one of the first franchises to attract such a loyal following. Other shows have provoked such a response as well, including Xena: The Warrior Princess, Dr. Who, The Simpsons and Family Guy. Yet, I would argue that Whedon’s shows move viewers beyond typical fan engagement that often seeks to rewrite the series to the fan’s expectations to a more nuanced and reciprocal relationship between Joss Whedon, the creator and author of these series, and the fans who seek to engage with the Whedonverse. As David Kociemba (2006: par. 32) argues, “Whedon guides the audience . to an investigation of their accustomed ways of thinking about identity and being, authenticity and duty, caring and vengeance.” A brief exploration of two studies of fan cultures will help to illuminate both how Whedon’s fans are responding differently to his work and how Whedon and his team of writers, actors, and producers used the conventions of fan culture to create shows that played off common fan practices. In his influential and often-quoted book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Henry Jenkins objects to the commonly negative stereotypical depiction of fans, examining the culture of fan practices in order to demonstrate how a variety of fans interact with television programs. Jenkins, writing in 1992, saw the prevalently negative view of fan culture at the time as narrow and limiting, failing to recognize the complexity of such cultures, and urged ethnographers of fan culture to question their own academic pretentions in relation to their depictions of fan culture. Eighteen years later, such depictions of fans still exist, although perhaps more acceptance has been given to many fan culture practices with the advent of the Internet and with the numerous academic studies that have sought to re-define fan cultures. Jenkins further argues that fans develop intelligent reading practices that allow for a participatory culture, using Michel De Certeau’s concept of “poaching” about which De Certeau argues that “[f]ar from being writers . readers are travelers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves” (in Jenkins, 1992: 24). Jenkins chronicles how fans write fan fiction, filk music (music inspired by the show of which they are fans), create their own movies using clips from the shows (commonly called “vids”), and sometimes attempt to live the ideals of their chosen show in their own lives. The extensive discussion Jenkins provides of these common genres in fan culture highlights how fans seek to make television shows into their own text as they nomadically move from show to show, appropriating storylines and characters for their own purposes. By becoming active respondents to the shows that they love, fans can become “readers who appropriate popular texts and reread them in a fashion that serves different interests, as spectators who transform the experience of watching television into a rich and complex participatory culture” (Jenkins, 1992: 23). Such participation allows viewers to become creators as well as they create their own stories for the show. 292 PREVIOUSLY ON Matt Hills (2002: 137) extends and revises Jenkins’s discussion of participatory culture in his book Fan Cultures, arguing that cult television shows owe their success to “endlessly deferred narrative” that encourages “multiple fan productions, speculations and recreations.” Because such television shows never provide their fans with closure, fans, in turn, are encouraged to create their own closure and finish writing the story, becoming authors as well as viewers of the show. The viewer, then, gets to make the choice about how to deal with such “aporia” in the text; they can become frustrated and turn away from the show, write their own answers to the dilemmas that such shows provide, or allow the dilemma to remain in their minds, encouraging a more nuanced and critical reading of the show. Hills (2002: 137) further argues that in addition to the deferred narrative that sustains viewer attention and engagement, many cult shows use “hyperdiegesis,” which is “the creation of a vast and detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered within the text, but which nevertheless appears to operate according to principles of internal logic and extensions.” Hills (2002: 137) continues, “the hyperdiegetic world may, as Jenkins notes, reward re-reading due to its richness and depth, but its role is, [Hills] would suggest also one of stimulating creative speculation and providing a trusted environment for affective play.” So, in addition to Jenkins’s argument that the detailed worlds of these cult television shows allows for viewer participation as they imagine parts of the world that do not appear on that show, Hills argues that such a world creates trust in the viewer as he or she learns the rules and can in turn play with that world in their own reactions to the show. The participation that Jenkins outlines and Hills complicates is not without its problems. Throughout his book, Jenkins seeks to describe how fans interact with shows in an attempt to rewrite the commonly negative representation of fans in popular culture; however, the examples he provides often serve to reinforce such depictions. Often, the fan practices that he recounts have a major emphasis on fans rejecting the storylines and characterizations provided by the series they are devoted to. Whether it is in slash fan fiction, where fans usually imagine explicitly sexual relationships between male characters, or the fan videos, in which fans splice together scenes from the series, choosing music to help define the new scenes they create, fans are not so much responding to the series itself as creating something new out of the series.