Whedon Sits on a Hornet’s Nest

I’m kind of disappointed to see what’s happening with Joss Whedon.

To those who have never heard of him, Whedon is the man who wrote the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie. He was also in charge of the series, and he now has a big TV/movie empire. He’s a big player in the Avengers movies, and he is also behind Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. Whedon is what film critics call an auteur. He’s like Kevin Smith, only not long-winded, not as aggressively filthy, and much better at writing action scenes.

Whedon created Firefly, my favorite sci-fi series. The network destroyed it by rolling episodes out in sort of a random order. Too bad.

If you haven’t seen Firefly, it works like this: the Democrats take over the solar system. They interfere in people’s lives, pretty much the way they do in real life. The aim is to produce a lovely classless society in which everyone loves whales, never secretes testosterone, and never puts recyclables in the trash bin. The Democrats, known as the Alliance, mean well, but like our own Democrats, they don’t understand that totalitarianism is bad.

The Firefly solar system is full of tiny asteroids which have been converted into earth clones. Miraculously, and to the extreme indignation of Sir Isaac Newton, these little worlds have exactly the same gravity as earth, and they are able to hold onto gaseous atmospheres.

Not everyone loves the Alliance. Future space Republicans form a confederation and fight back, and they lose. After that, most assimilate, but certain hard core right-wing individuals continue resisting. They live on fringe worlds and make money doing various illegal things.

The show takes place on a ship (a “firefly”) captained by Malcolm Reynolds, who was a sergeant in the rebellion. Malcolm is clearly conservative. He hates the government. He wears a six gun. He grew up on a farm. He’s ex-military. He is aware that he’s male, and he’s in love with a woman. Who was born a woman.

Reynolds is supposed to be a hero, but Whedon himself admitted he and Reynolds probably would not have much in common politically. You know what that makes Whedon. A conservative in denial. He’s like Chris Rock or the pre-conservative Dennis Miller. I don’t think he’ll ever come out of the closet, because the force of denial is strong in this one.

Incidentally, Reynolds is not really a hero. The premise of the show had a lot of problems, and one of them is this: there was never any reason why Reynolds couldn’t go home and go back to farming. In the show and the movie based on it, he killed people and risked lives to keep his ridiculous ship in the air. Okay, space. He never had the slightest justification, until the movie came up with a Democrat plot to conceal a utopia experiment that turned genocidal.

Reynolds would have hated giving up, but it would have been better than stealing and killing for a living. Whedon never confronted that. Liberals are good at cognitive dissonance. It makes their existence possible, just like the atmospheres on little asteroids.

Anyway, Whedon has been going nuts on Twitter. He accused Trump of raping a 13-year-old, which came as news to me. On the night of the election, he put up a snarky meme, pre-celebrating Hillary’s non-forthcoming victory. We all know what he saw the next day, when he turned on NPR or visited The Daily Kos. That must have hurt.

His latest misadventure, over which the Twits are tearing him apart: posting a “humorous” meme with cancer patients in it. Paul Ryan, who, according to most experts, is not Donald Trump, met with some ladies who beat cancer, and Whedon said this: “Tonight on White House Wife Hunt, Donny makes host P. Ryan give 2 more contestants the ‘Not a 10′ card.”

There are a number of problems with this, beyond the strange Ryan/Trump conflation. Whedon is saying Trump would not marry any of the cancer patients because they are not “10’s.” That’s not all that funny, and it wouldn’t be funny even if people didn’t see it as cruel. Whedon is very talented, so it’s not clear why he would post a lifeless, unclever joke. On top of its overall weakness, the joke only works if you accept the premise that the women are not good looking.

You can see how this worked. Whedon, who is a suspiciously, deliberately conspicuously ardent fan of powerful women, is so angry at Trump, he lost sight of the fact that his unfunny meme was an oblique shot at the appearance of several very vulnerable women. Feminists are never supposed to mention womens’ appearance, except to say that all women are extremely, extremely beautiful, even if they’re clearly not. Whedon disparaged the looks of several women, and not only did they qualify as protected individuals by virtue of their exalted gender; they were cancer patients who, presumably, need all the help and reinforcement they can get.

Whedon exposed himself as an insincere feminist, or at least a feminist with troubling undercurrents running around in his skull. Maybe that meme was really a Rorschach test.

That being said, I think the reaction is a little overblown. I don’t think he sat down at the computer with the intention of being cruel to sick people. He was simply addled by Trump Derangement Syndrome, which is what Bush Derangement Syndrome turned into at some point during 2016 (much to the delight of George Bush). He was blinded by his strange hatred of conservatives.

He probably still thinks he didn’t do anything wrong.

People are talking about boycotting Marvel. Yeah, okay. I’ll get right on that. I think the last two movies I saw in theaters were Iron Man and Logan, and they were around eight years apart, so I believe I can commit to a boycott lasting around…eight years. I also promise not to watch Marvel movies on cable, unless nothing else good is on, and while I do record the SHIELD show, I will try to feel really bad when I watch. I always zip past the commercials, so in a way, I’m boycotting the show WHILE watching it.

I promise to stop buying comic books, ASAP. And I won’t go to cosplay conventions. These aren’t things I actually do, so abstinence should be a cinch.

What Whedon needs isn’t a boycott. He needs to sit down in a cool, dark room and ask himself why he created Malcolm Reynolds. His characters are all about guns, military weapons, martial arts, killing, and blowing stuff up in the name of America. One of the big things that drives Reynolds is his hatred of God and Christianity, and Whedon gave him a preacher father figure to help him work that out. Whedon is not Lena Dunham. Somewhere inside him, there is the stunted seed of a Ted Nugent. He just won’t admit it and come to terms with it.

He can say his movies are just fantasy. Isn’t that what pre-arrest pedophiles say about their picture collections and chat rooms? If conservatism isn’t in you, why is it coming out in your screenplays?

If you’re really a conservative at heart, who knows? You might even have a thirst for God. That wouldn’t be cool, and it wouldn’t help your career, but a relationship with God is better than the phony love of West Coast sycophants who will happily eat your gutted corpse the first time you stumble badly enough.

It has to be hard to listen to reason when Hollywood is paying you trillions and telling you you’re a genius. Camel, needle, et cetera.

I have to wonder if Whedon’s involvement with occult shows and movies opened him up to demonic influence. Toward the end of the Buffy shows, he seemed to turn into a demon rights activist. A lot of his energy was devoted to lambasting human characters who were against demons. In the Whedon scheme, demons are a race, and being against demons is bigotry.

Demonic influence would certainly explain Whedon’s irrationality. When things don’t make sense, I look for a supernatural cause.

What interesting days we live in. Thank God I don’t have a Twitter account, myself. I’m glad I’m not involved in this mess.