Joss Whedon Unconvincingly Quits Batgirl Development

Joss Whedon quitting Batgirl seems more like taking cover until the #MeToo storm passes:

Industry sources add that even as Whedon faced story issues, in today's cultural entertainment environment, a male filmmaker may have faced greater public scrutiny if he were to have tackled a movie with such feminist importance such as Batgirl or Wonder Woman, much like a white filmmaker would have seen backlash taking on the Black Panther movie.

Once again, this recalls Whedon's Twitter sabbatical of three years ago (he's baaack). The Hollywood Reporter story recalls his success with Buffy The Vampire Slayer, so once again, we're left guessing at the real story: was it his treatment of the Black Widow character in Age of Ultron? Or his estranged wife's lengthy accusation of him as a serial philanderer? At some point, you have to wonder if there will be anyone left standing once every possible objection to a man directing a story with a woman in it. Because it certainly will not end there; there's a lot of intersectional nonsense to mine yet.

The Annie Wilkes Model Of Culture

I had read in various corners about Tim Burton's supposed racist comments in the context of his new film, Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children, contained in an interview in The Bustle, as to why his movies are so, so white:

“Nowadays, people are talking about it more […]things either call for things, or they don’t. I remember back when I was a child watching The Brady Bunch and they started to get all politically correct, like, OK, let’s have an Asian child and a black — I used to get more offended by that than just — I grew up watching blaxploitation movies, right? And I said, that’s great. I didn’t go like, OK, there should be more white people in these movies.”

This, of course, met with howls of protest from people for whom "diversity" is really code for "must make movies in exactly the way I want them made" — as for instance this:

To add insult to injury, you claim that “things” (movies and other shows?) either call for “things” (diversity), or they don’t. Ok, whatever, I’ll bite. If that’s so, then why did the role of a villain call for a black man? It sends kind of a questionable message. This is the first time you’ve had a person of color in a major role in any of your movies, and according to you, things either call for diversity or they don’t, so you felt the role of a particularly awful villain (we’ve both read the book, I’m sure. That guy is just the fucking worst.) called for a black actor. The only time your films have called for any significant diversity so far has been when you needed someone to be the worst kind of evil? That’s not a good look, buddy. It leaves a horrible taste in my mouth about you that watching “Sweeney Todd” and “Edward Scissorhands” on loop just won’t wash out.

So in other words, it's not enough to cast a black man in his films — no, blacks must be cast in the roles the author wants, have the qualities the author wants, etc. For his part, Samuel L. Jackson appeared to think the whole thing was a nothingburger:

With”Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” Samuel L. Jackson will be the first black actor to play a leading role in a Burton movie, according to Bustle.  “I don’t think it’s any fault of his or his method of storytelling, it’s just how it’s played out,” Jackson told Bustle. “Tim’s a really great guy.”

This represents yet another instance of the narcissistic view that creators must make stories for fans in exactly the way the fans want them, and with exactly the right political overtones. As Joss Whedon found out, even tiny diversions from orthodoxy are met with shrieking. We see the echoes of this with the Sad Puppies Hugo slate and the Ghostbusters reboot lynch mob: both involve orchestrated attempts by loud minorities to manipulate public opinion by shaming, and both face titanic uphill battles. The more vicious of these recall Annie Wilkes from Misery: they plan on bludgeoning creators until they get it right, for some value of "right".

"Fandom Is Broken" And Other Silly Ideas

About this:

1. GamerGate = "terrorist hate group"? Grow up. Your definition of "terrorist" is too broad.
2. Re: the Ghostbusters reboot, if you don't have enough funny moments to make a funny trailer, you lose. Also, it's a comedy, but neither the franchise's new masters nor its executrices have any visible skill at that art.
3. OH HAI LET'S PICK A SINGLE RANTING POST AS TYPICAL OF PEOPLE I HATE. Weak.
4. Death threats are always so much bluster. Read The Gift of Fear some time. (They do, however, have some commercial value.)
5. How dare people engage with and have an opinion about books, movies, TV shows, and videogames, and worse, have the temerity to inform their creators. I'm sure most creators would rather their output exist in a vacuum, Emily Dickinson style. Right?
6. I don't know the canon well enough, but Captain America's embrace of Hydra appears to have been a commercialized rape of the character, destroying it for no particular good reason other than sales. You do that, you will hear from the fans, and in some very unpleasant ways.
7. Funny how you failed to mention how it was the SJWs who chased Joss Whedon off Twitter. Why is that? Yes, I know, he claimed afterward that it was a new project whose time he did not wish to split with social media; fine. Nevertheless, it does not excuse the behavior of the People's Front Of Judea, nor does it absolve the author of this piece of pinning the worst excesses exclusively on people he apparently dislikes for other reasons.

Update 2016-06-02: Christopher Landauer elsewhere pointed out Devin Faraci's follow-on post that is so larded with self-contradiction it's hard to tell whether it amounts to self-parody:

Over the years I have written extensively - and with passion - about the need for more representation in our media. About the need for more actors of color in our films, about the need for more queer characters in our stories, about the need for more perspectives behind the scenes to better represent the great diversity of people who love the pop culture we all love. Nothing has changed for me. I still feel that way.

I believe that people should let the decision-makers know that they want more stories featuring underrepresented groups. I believe that the only way to get more representation is to let the suits and the bean counters know that there's an audience for this stuff, to loudly proclaim your willingness to buy tickets or comic books (and then follow up on it by actually buying tickets and comic books). Everyone should let the companies behind the stories we love know that they would like to be included in them.

But the line is crossed when you go from "Disney, I would really like to have a queer princess in one of your cartoons" to "I demand that the writers and directors of Frozen 2 make Elsa canonically queer." You can - and should! - let the higher ups know the kinds of stories you want told. You should not demand that storytellers tell their stories in the ways that you want. 

This strikes me as fundamentally an impossible demand, the idea that once a franchise is in place, it is up to the creators and the creators exclusively to set the story arcs and world. The second quoted graf above stands in stark opposition to the third.

"They Need You Now, But When They Don't, They'll Cast You Out Like A Leper."

Great quote pull by The Libertarian Republic on the subject of Joss Whedon's late Twitter exit:

“Don’t talk like one of them. You’re not. Even if you’d like to be. To them, you’re just a freak. Like me. They need you now, but when they don’t, they’ll cast you out like a leper. See, their morals, their code, it’s a bad joke to be dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be.”

I doubt Mytheos Holt has really any polling data to find whether he's right about the fungibility of Whedon's audience, but the early tally of receipts from the current Avengers point at a $700M walloping of, well, everything. Of course, that this was part of a dialogue between the Joker and Batman is probably not something Holt would advertise, but the "dropped at the first sign of trouble" certainly rings true.

Whedon Cites New Project As Reason He Quit Twitter

Sadly, we must revoke, or at least substantially amend, yesterday's story about the feministas chasing Avengers auteur Joss Whedon off Twitter. In a Buzzfeed interview today, he says he's doing so as a consequence of his next project:

“I saw a lot of people say, ‘Well, the social justice warriors destroyed one of their own!’ It’s like, Nope. That didn’t happen,” he continued. “I saw someone tweet it’s because Feminist Frequency pissed on Avengers 2, which for all I know they may have. But literally the second person to write me to ask if I was OK when I dropped out was [Feminist Frequency founder] Anita [Sarkeesian].”

What did happen, Whedon said, is that he chose to embrace his long-standing desire post–Age of Ultron to reclaim his personal life and creative spark — and that meant saying good-bye to Twitter. “I just thought, Wait a minute, if I’m going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place,” he said. “And this is the least quiet place I’ve ever been in my life. … It’s like taking the bar exam at Coachella. It’s like, Um, I really need to concentrate on this! Guys! Can you all just… I have to… It’s super important for my law!”

 I am not entirely convinced even he believes this, though:

“I’ve said before, when you declare yourself politically, you destroy yourself artistically,” he said. “Because suddenly that’s the litmus test for everything you do — for example, in my case, feminism. If you don’t live up to the litmus test of feminism in this one instance, then you’re a misogynist. It circles directly back upon you.”

Well, at least, that's how it works if you have camp followers who believe you must conform to their narrow (and frequently unknowable) ideals of how such a creature should behave, and think, and create.  I have read elsewhere — and cannot now put a finger to — a story claiming that Whedon has previously deleted his Twitter account, so there's reason to think he'll be back.

Update: Found the cite for Whedon's prior exit at Entertainment Weekly, exiting Twitter after concluding the campaign for his partly creepy but otherwise fun treatment of Much Ado About Nothing. Which brings up some other points:

1. If his main reason for being on Twitter was to publicize the recently completed Avengers sequel, mission accomplished. I really can see this being a significant reason for walking away from Twitter.
2. That said, couldn't it be both?
3. If the fact that (some portion of) his audience is scary was in fact partly a motivation for his exit, is there any way on Earth he could say this? He (and his employers) depend on them to keep delivering multi-million-dollar paydays; dissing them publicly would be bad form and counterproductive. This cognitive dissonance is exactly what made the old Saturday Night Live sketch about William Shatner insulting his Trekkie audience at a fan convention so very funny:
   
   

The Feminist Twitter Mob Scalps Joss Whedon

I keep looking at ways to pull the word "feminist" from the lede, and finding none, I helplessly giggle at the news that Joss Whedon has quit Twitter following a lynch mob out to tan him "for using Scarlett Johansson's international spy Black Widow in a typical 'damsel in distress' role in a few key scenes late in Age of Ultron." The nature of the pitchfork-wielders went unmentioned by the likes of The Mary Sue, a near inevitability, but it's surprising that we have yet to get reaction from Jezebel and some of the other watering holes of the feminist left. Jon Gabriel at Ricochet put up a post with links to a number of Whedon tweets in amber before his exit, though it missed my personal favorite, one I cannot now access thanks to his account's being down, a glowing, 140-characters review of Laurie Penny's latest book, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution:

"THIS. Funny, angry, clear & true. @PennyRed takes no prisoners - she'd rather free 'em. #weaponizeourshamelessness http://t.co/VLb9u3RDV7"

I find Whedon's assessment questionable to say the least (without that I haven't read it), given her prior work, which is largely hostile to the audiences and authors of those genres. If, as Whedon previously claimed, Anita Sarkeesian "is just truth telling", she also engages upon a political struggle whose long game is the social (if not legal) power to micromanage others' work. As Cathy Young wrote about a different matter, the retracted cover of Batgirl,

The worst message to send creators is that if your female character doesn’t get a Good Feminist seal of approval — if she shows too much weakness or too much sexuality, if she has too many stereotypical female qualities or too many “male” ones, if she suffers a failure or a harrowing ordeal, if she is shown in an overly disturbing situation — your work may be attacked as anti-woman. That’s a prescription for bland characters and dull stories.

You can't be orthodox for everyone, and eventually, something like this had to happen. Whedon proved that airing the right sentiments on Twitter is not proof against attack; surely, he cannot be the last victim, but he might be the biggest scalp collected to date, and for a long while.

Update: I forgot to mention this:

How soon until @scalzi and @wilw get Joss Whedon treatment? It's coming, you gutless cowards, and it will be glorious! #ComeBackJossWhedon

— Mike Cernovich (@PlayDangerously) May 5, 2015

Scalzi is certainly on my short list of SJW hacks for his arrogant, condescending whining about white male privilege, which is really a sort of intellectual prejudice pretending to be wisdom. Like a lot of the motte-and-bailey frauds, it says something uncontroversial (some people have it easier in life because of birth) while later asserting something both insulting and controversial (subsequent successes are largely a function of birth). It can't happen soon enough.