Joss Whedon: The Biography (7 page)

The student himself couldn’t provide much of an explanation; Joss tried to chalk it up to an “identity crisis.” But by this time he was confident that his future was in the performing arts—and that this path didn’t require a dogged pursuit of academics. His housemaster and teachers, naturally, disagreed. Massen expressed concern for Joss, still “Joe” at the time: “We would say here that this attitude is unfortunate, because the performing arts are an inconsistent mistress, and Joe a volatile human being. A liaison could be short-lived and abortive, leaving him with little but the memory of his ambitions. Somehow, we think, [someone] should persuade him that a good academic foundation is a very useful thing for him to have.” Still, he ended his final house report on Joss with a prophetic statement: “This boy could go far as an actor, writer, cartoonist. This talent has no passing illusion.”

Despite his poor grades, Joss still graduated from Winchester in 1982. He ended his tenure with a standout performance as four different characters in
Better Days
, a musical revue honored by being selected as the inaugural performance at the school’s Queen Elizabeth II Theatre. Queen Elizabeth herself was in attendance for the performance, which was part of Winchester’s six hundredth anniversary that July.

Joss returned to America to pursue higher education. He scouted several schools, undecided whether he was going to focus on theater or film. Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, caught his attention. Friends of his parents had taught there, and he had liked the town during his regular visits in his youth. Out of all the colleges he visited, Wesleyan was the one that felt right. Although it was among the most selective schools in the country, he took a leap of faith and went all in, applying to no other schools.

It was a risky choice, coming from Winchester with “no grades … [and] a lot of reports that said, ‘He seems to be intelligent, but I wouldn’t say he applies himself terribly much.’ It’s not like anybody was begging for me,” he explained. “I was clearly a ne’er-do-well.” Something must have stood out, however, as Joss was accepted into the class of 1987.

At Wesleyan, Joss developed a social life that he was finally happy with. He found himself an actual, real-life girlfriend, he made friends, and he played Dungeons & Dragons like any proper geek in the early 1980s. He was accepted into the coed Eclectic Society, the school’s oldest fraternity, which is known for its “artsy” members and weekend parties featuring an impressive roster of indie bands. (Eclectic was the inspiration for the Pit, the raucous party house at the suffocatingly politically correct Port Chester University in the 1994 film
PCU
. Wesleyan class of 1990 students Adam Leff and Zak Penn based their script on their experiences at the university.) At last, Joss felt that he was accepted and valued for his creativity. He made an emotional break from the life he’d led earlier by choosing a new name. No longer “Joe Whedon,” he christened himself “Joss.”

Joss had not thought much about the struggle for women’s equality while surrounded by hundreds of boys at a traditional British boarding school, but at Wesleyan he was suddenly confronted with the fact that the fight was far from over. “It was only when I got to college that I realized that the rest of the world didn’t run the way my world was run,” Joss said.

Until then, his mother had shaped his worldview tremendously. “She was an extraordinary inspiration—a radical feminist, a history teacher and just one hell of a woman. What she did was provide a role model of someone who is completely in control of her life.” By this point she had even produced, almost single-handedly, a full-day feminism symposium
at her school that featured guest speeches and workshops with prominent feminists such as Gloria Steinem, Cynthia Enloe, and Katha Pollitt. Lee’s symposium had led to the establishment of Riverdale’s Gender Issues Committee, which met frequently to keep on top of ongoing problems in the relations between the sexes. Through watching his mother, Joss had assumed that the equality issue had been “solved.”

Now he was shocked and offended to see that what he had expected, especially at a private liberal arts college like Wesleyan, was not what he was faced with. He wanted to help change the political landscape for women, but he was concerned about how he could engage with gender issues without coming across as self-serving. “I was very aware that my interest in gender studies and my feminist bent went hand in hand with the sort of greasy Eurotrash ‘I
looooove wee-men!
’ [attitude],” he says. He was working through the duality of “an almost unseemly fascination with these women and at the same time a desire to empower and protect them so they could in return empower and protect me.”

This meshed with the development of Joss’s voice as a writer, which he describes as that of a “literary transvestite.” He was no longer just interested in female characters; he actually needed to use them as his avatars. His excitement at a young age at seeing a girl character “let into the club” had grown into a desire to tell her story himself, because it was the story he himself wanted to live: “Somebody who appears to be or is weak becoming stronger. But in almost every case, that person is female.”

Joss couldn’t deny his connection to the other side of the gender divide either. He took classes in feminism at Wesleyan, and in their discussions, he felt that he had an advantage over most of the girls in discussing male-female relationships because “I have seen the enemy,” Joss declares, “and he’s in my brain!” As a male, he explains, “I understand the murderous gaze, and I understand objectification.”

Joss would come to understand that this position—respecting, admiring, and identifying with women while acknowledging the objectifying influence of the male gaze—helped him create female characters that worked and connected with an audience. “You can’t write from a political agenda and make stories that are in any way emotional or iconic. You have to write it from a place that’s a little dark, that has to do with passion and lust and things you don’t want to talk about.”

When he entered his sophomore year, Joss was at a crucial point in his academic career—did he want to follow a path like his father, grandfather, and mother and pursue theater performance and directing, or would he find greater happiness in the school’s film studies department? He’d added film directing to his storytelling skillset, making short films on his own, cast with his family. Joss wrote and directed a film with his little brother Jed as the star that premiered at Jed’s eighth birthday party. “It was the year that
Superman [III]
came out, so he did a film called
Stupidman
,” Tom recalled.

Joss set up a meeting with Professor Jeanine Basinger, the head of the film department. A leader in the field, Basinger was a trustee of the American Film Institute and would later be named to the board of directors of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. Under her guidance, Wesleyan’s program had become one of the most respected in the country—a status that allowed Basinger and the school to set guidelines for potential film studies students that are still in force today. Students must meet with her in person before being allowed to register for her class. During these meetings, Basinger and the potential enrollee discuss movies, books, and their lives. She asks questions, trying to work out how the student thinks and what he or she likes. Students’ answers about film preferences usually give Basinger a good baseline for who they are.

Right away, Basinger saw in Joss a curiosity, a liveliness of the mind. She found him to be a flexible, creative, and deep thinker. “Sometimes people are flexible but not deep; sometimes they are creative but not flexible. There’s a different level of things that you discover,” Basinger explains. “I saw the hard worker he was and how seriously he took it.”

The respect was mutual. “I’ve had two great teachers in my life,” Joss has declared: his mother and Basinger. “The way everyone in the film department talks about her—she’s like a god,” says Kai Cole, Joss’s wife. “And she is. You meet her and you really regret not going to film school [at Wesleyan].”

Basinger approved Joss’s enrollment, and he chose her program instead of a theatrical track. Unlike at Winchester, in his film classes he drank in everything there was to learn. “[There were] people who understand theory in terms of filmmaking and film storytelling, and film mythos and film genre, better than anybody else does,” he explained. “Lectures that were so complete, so complex, so dense and so simple that I almost had trouble following them, and by the end would
realize they were dealing with things that were already in me. They were already incorporated in the way I thought about story, because they are the American mythos.” In Basinger’s film lectures, in particular, he was super attentive, very involved, very imaginative, and creative about his work.

Joss embraced Wesleyan’s approach to film studies, which focused on theory rather than production. He wrote a paper on Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Birds
in which he identified four thematic elements: the Watcher, the Watched, Isolation, and the Role of the Viewer. He said of Tippi Hedren’s character, Melanie Daniels, “She has to give up her superficial life to survive,” and framed the horror she faces in existential terms: “Stop thinking of why the birds are attacking … they just are, that’s all that matters.” Basinger loved reading his work. “His papers seemed so natural, like they were improvisational,” she says. “And yet they were crafted to perfection, because the ideas that he had were delineated at a very precise level.”

However, his need to absorb film history couldn’t be quenched only by his time in the classroom, or even by Basinger’s extra screenings, which most Wesleyan film students attended. When spring came and his classmates would take advantage of the break from the long winter, Joss would be alone in the basement watching a double feature—and then he’d go home at 2
AM
and watch whatever was on TV. He felt it was essential to watch films over and over again, taking time to dissect and truly understand what the filmmakers were trying to do. Anyone can learn where to point a camera, he said. But no one could truly be taught
how
. Before he could shoot, Joss felt it was more important to study the meaning of each move in a film—“where the simplicity is, where the complexity is.”

The film students ran and selected films for the campus movie theater. Joss’s choices were the westerns
The Bad and the Beautiful
(1952) and
The Furies
(1950); the film noir
Laura
(1944); and
The Scarlet Empress
(1934), which starred Marlene Dietrich as the German princess Sophia, who became the empress Catherine the Great. Basinger explained that her students felt so strongly about their film preferences that they’d sometimes come to blows, and that “while Joss is a very effective screenwriter, he is weak in the punching department.”