Whedon and Shakespeare
This is the essay I was docked five marks on, because it was submitted nine minutes late. Ah well. The mark was 68, a high merit, so it's now 63, still in the same range. (Three grades - pass, merit, distinction.)
I thought you guys might enjoy reading it. A big shout-out to beer_good_foamy, who allowed me to cite a piece of his.
We Band of Buggered: Joss Whedon’s Engagement With Shakespeare
Joss Whedon has been called a ‘Geek God’ for his work in film and television over the last twenty years. Perhaps still most noted for the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he has also written, directed or acted as showrunner in several other TV series, written and directed films, including two ‘blockbuster’ films in the Marvel franchise and, most salient for this essay, adapted and directed Much Ado About Nothing as a black and white, low-budget film made in two weeks in and around his own home. Whedon comes from a family with a very long tradition of writing for the screen , such that respect for language was deeply inculcated into him. To him Shakespeare feels ‘very welcoming’ - he claims he cannot recall his first experiences of the plays. He talks about Shakespeare readings orchestrated by his mother:
I grew up around people doing it and watching it and reading it, even before I could understand it, just because I was trying to look cool to my parents, and it sort of seeped in.
During three years at Winchester College in England he studied Shakespeare in depth for A Level but, perhaps more importantly, saw professional Shakespeare on stage for the first time , something which left a lasting impression. During a key creative period, when he was in charge of his most iconic TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel the Series and Firefly, he relaxed by inviting cast members to his house to participate in group readings of Shakespeare plays - from this derived ultimately his selection and core casting of Much Ado About Nothing. Thus Shakespeare could be considered an essential part of Whedon’s cultural capital, that is to say, the habits of life and thought which could be said, not least by him, to define him. His cultural context - highly-educated, somewhat intellectual, wealthy, with a bias towards European literature - is something he effectively takes for granted . He has a keen awareness of popular culture, demonstrated repeatedly in his writing, but admits little differentiation between this and Shakespeare. David Lavery makes it clear:
In Why Buffy Matters (2005), Rhonda Wilcox makes frequent, revealing comparisons between Whedon’s foundational creation and the work of William Shakespeare […] eight years later he would actually write and direct the Bard’s work for the big screen, thereby demonstrating conclusively that the subject of this book is never more Shakespearean than when he’s doing Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is, however, also a symbol of a type of culture many might see as the antithesis of his work. There is a certain tension in his appropriation of the Shakespearean corpus in his own writing, and particularly in the selection and timing of his micro-budget independent film of Much Ado About Nothing. It surely cannot be accidental that it was made during a break between filming and editing of Marvel’s Avengers Assemble. In order to make the latter, almost military levels of organisation were required. Not only was it hugely complex and expensive in terms of locations, CGI and highly-paid cast-members, it was also overseen by Kevin Feige , representing the very considerable power and wealth of the Disney Corporation; as screenwriter and director Whedon had to argue for many elements of his story, such as the inclusion of the female superhero, Black Widow, and few creative decisions could be made by him alone. It was, moreover, a filmed version of a comic book story: Whedon himself has written for this genre and defends it vociferously, but is also very much aware of its low cultural status: ‘I grew up reading ‘The Avengers’ when I wasn’t trying to impress my parents with what I was reading.’ It is therefore possible to perceive this film as the antithesis of the Marvel’s Avengers Assemble and in some part a rebellion against it. As Douglas Lanier says, ‘It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Whedon’s Shakespeare film was a means to strike a strategic distance from mass-market Hollywood’s artistic imperatives.’ While Lanier sees this as laying a claim to ‘artisanal,’ indie form of filmmaking, , putting Art before profit, it must also be recognised that, insofar as Shakespeare represents ‘high culture’, this is Whedon’s bid to be considered as participating in it. There is no evidence that Stephen Greenblatt, for example, would have reviewed Marvel’s Avengers Assemble, as he did Much Ado About Nothing, and the slightly condescending tone of that review implies a certain level of surprise that the ‘Geek God’ would aspire to the Bard. It is still commonplace, some twenty years after its debut, for Buffy the Vampire Slayer to be dismissed as trivial and ‘camp’; it is impossible, and has been for some centuries, to do the same with the plays of Shakespeare. The initial press release on the website set up for the film expresses this clearly: ‘The film should be completed by early spring and headed for the festival circuit, because it is fancy.’ - a typical piece of Whedonic humour at his own expense, as with ‘the joy of working on a passion project surrounded by dear friends, admired colleagues and an atmosphere of unabashed rapture far outweighs their hilariously miniature paychecks.’ Similarly, he signed a comment on Whedonesque.com, a website dedicated to tracking the activities of Whedon, his cast and collaborators, with: ‘Joss ‘Shut up, it's art if it's in black and white’ Whedon.’ He has given several practical explanations for his use of monochrome film - the cost, the ease of matching and editing scenes shot at different times of day - but also uses it as an explicit link to film noir.
Joss Whedon is extremely well-versed in film genres as well as the practical techniques of film making; as he mentioned on a PBS interview , he acted as a teaching assistant for film studies professors while at Wesleyan University. In key interviews such as this one, he has suggested that the play is a ‘RomCom’ - arguably the first - and that he sees his version as akin to ‘noir comedies’ such as The Apartment, in which pain is as important as laughter, and a bleak view of human nature predominates. It is easy to detect other elements of the film noir genre, from the use of noir techniques - framing, lighting, unusual camera angles, and narrative tropes to the emphasis on flaws in the hero/anti-hero. Costumes were drawn from cast members’ own wardrobes, but there’s a distinct 40s/50s feel to the styles, including formal suits, full-skirted dresses, echoing the dominant period of the original genre. The style of the house adds to this - traditional materials and design features suggest it is older than it is, and the only really ostensibly modern feature is the ‘control room’ buried away from the guests. The ‘screwball’ comedies of the period are also relevant - also shot in monochrome at a time when colour technology was easily available, such films as The Philadelphia Story, (1940) share the focus on a single wealthy household, and a tangled story, misunderstandings, characters who believe themselves to know more than they do and to be manipulating others when they are being manipulated.
By using his own house as the location for virtually all the filming Whedon in some sense acknowledges a link between himself, not merely the owner of the property, but the person for whom and with whom the house was designed, and the dominant male figures of the play in his adaptation - wealthy, powerful individuals who expect their world to revolve around them. As Douglas Lanier notes, ‘Whedon’s house is a crucial component in his Much Ado, an upper middle-class social space that enables ‘unconstrained hospitality’; in it, class differences are minimized and a casual ethos reigns’ . It is, however, a casual ethos which accepts routine invasion of female spaces - the partygoer who insists on attempting to fondle Beatrice, for example, or Borachio’s exploitation of Margaret’s access to Hero’s bedroom. Moreover, the superficial air of licence, emphasised by the ubiquity of alcoholic drinks is underpinned by evidence of multiple layers of professional (if not always competent) surveillance. Lanier, inter alia, has commented on the use of the ever-present figure of the photographer who can move from taking publicity shots to acting as a paparazza as events unfold, and whose camera is often pointed directly at the film camera, thus threatening the audience with exposure as much as the characters. The Prince and Leonato take for granted that their lives will be documented constantly - their first on-camera meeting involves a ‘handshake’ for the photographer, which carries public rather than private meaning. Lanier points out the moment before this, when, on leaving the car, the Prince has his brother’s handcuffs removed, as an example of hyper-consciousness of being watched ‘As a space of compromised privacy, the house works to intensify the fear of social stigma,’ he says - yet it is possible to take this further. Don Pedro is not only accustomed to being ‘noted’, he also expects all his acquaintance to accept it as routine. Verges, played by Tom Lenk, is part of his entourage, and the Watch as a whole are presented as a private security firm with access to CCTV, installed in a room in the basement of the house. These powerful men assume the right not only to surveillance within their own space, but to complete control of this, with their own armed guards - Dogberry and Verges wear shoulder-holsters - who apparently have the right of public arrest, as shown by their last appearance in the film, when on an iPhone we see an overhead shot of them arresting Don John, an angle which surely implies access to CCTV cameras even away from the house. Personal surveillance and recording is normalised in the world of this Messina, yet in most of Whedon’s other work where it occurs (as in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ‘Entropy’) it is presented as sinister, even malignant. Shakespeare’s Don John is both a political and a military figure, but the latter is very much downplayed in Whedon’s film. No uniforms are shown, even on the security officers, and no other characters carry guns overtly, so that the assumption of surveillance and policing powers seems much more arbitrary than it might in other contexts. A reference for Whedon fans alone, perhaps, is that the bedroom shared by Claudio and Benedick has ‘an enormous doll-house’ . Whedon’s most recent television series was Dollhouse (2009 - 2010) , in which Denisov and Krantz both featured, and which deals amongst other major themes, with invasion of privacy, appropriation of individual rights and surveillance. This location is also used for the moment when the Prince asks, ‘What secret hath held you here?’
In a play in which witty language predominates, it is noteworthy that Whedon chooses to start and end the film with moments of pure silence. In the first it is a defeated, total silence as Benedick leaves Beatrice alone after an apparent sexual encounter, neither capable of communication at that moment, presumably the ‘won it from me with false dice’ of Beatrice’s later reference. “Pain is where I hang my hat,”, Lavery quotes him as saying , and the painful undercurrents of the play are brought to the front in Whedon’s version.
In the generally tipsy party-world of the film failed communication is a motif, using not only the frequent miscommunications and misunderstandings of Shakespeare’s play but others inserted by Whedon - Claudio’s casual remark about ‘an Ethiope’ while passing an African-American woman, for example. In season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Whedon, who had been much praised for his witty dialogue, wrote and directed Hush , in which over half the episode has no dialogue at all, when invading, and terrifying, monsters ‘the Gentlemen’ steal the voices of the entire town. Consequently all the characters are forced to concentrate on accurate communication of precise meanings, with hilarious effect on occasion, and using a variety of techniques. Only at the end, when the monsters are defeated and speech is once more possible, do we see the protagonist and her boyfriend agreeing to talk and then facing each other silently, unable to find the words. An expert in wordless communication, then, Whedon uses it to notable effect in the closing scenes of his film, when we see Hero protectively holding Margaret as her father accuses the latter of criminal complicity in Borachio’s plot. Finally, however, and most significantly, we see Beatrice and Benedick silent, wholly focussed on each other while a loud party proceeds in the background. The painful silence of the start of the film is transformed into the eloquent silence of the end.
Lanier notes the fact that the film has a double audience, of Whedon fans as well as Shakespeare fans, and that ‘the film’s various paratexts - the tales of the film’s genesis, the candid pictures, the Vine videos of the bus ride to SWSX, the raucous cast commentary track on the DVD’ all serve to create a sense of intimacy with the actors and director, not simply the characters, something which reinforces the sense of personal familiarity apparently felt by many long-term Whedon fans; the explosions of comments on Whedonesque.com when the fact of the film was revealed and again when it was released all suggest a sense of shared ownership of the people as well as of the work of art. The director and many of his cast members are referred to by their first names with an implied personal relationship; Whedon seems to encourage this with his own posts, as quoted here, and his habit of sharing trivia, thus, as Michael Dobson says of amateur productions, ‘the special power […] lay in the close comparison and synergy that it enabled between the personal identities of the players and those of the characters they represented’ Neither the film, nor the earlier Shakespeare readings at Whedon’s home were ‘non-professional’ in terms of the performers, but that strong sense of community Dobson notes as a key feature of amateur Shakespeare is very much present. ‘There are many things to do by way of interpreting, understanding and sharing a Shakespeare play that are completely beside the point compared to actually living in it for a while.’ The language, which Whedon describes as the greatest attraction of the playwright, was clearly not a problem for those who had read his works as a leisure activity. This was not true of the entire cast of Much Ado About Nothing, however. Nathan Fillion famously tweeted ‘Reciting Shakespeare seems like Yoda-speak, if he was educated,’ and attempted to back out of the project, yet ultimately, as Dogberry, gave one of the performances most admired and commented on by reviewers.
The domestic Sunday readings at Whedon’s home originated when a cast member of Buffy the Vampire Slayer commented that a particular episode (S5E7, Fool for Love) was like ‘being in rep’ and continued for some years. Not only were they relaxation, they were a de facto method of bonding together groups of individuals; the impromptu singing sessions with which they frequently ended are credited by Whedon for the genesis of Once More With Feeling, the famous ‘musical’ episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Season 6. Amongst his ‘regulars’ were Anthony Head, James Marsters and Alexis Denisov, all of whom had a classical stage training and felt equally comfortable with Shakespeare. It is interesting that, of these three, Head actually is British and the other two played British characters; Shakespeare fits in with a general anglophilia observable in much of Whedon’s work as well as his life experience. While the ‘British’ characters are not alone in Whedon’s work in making explicit references to Shakespeare, they often do so with a greater sense of awareness of their source and of irony. Thus Drusilla, the British vampire and former nun misquotes Othello deliberately in Crush, when she asserts that vampires can love, ‘quite well. If not wisely.’ - a reference to a play in which an ostensibly mismatched pair is destroyed by love in a scene in which a vampire, Spike, is asserting his love for a human, who rejects it as impossible. Later in that season, in The Gift, Spike and Giles share a moment of Englishness by appropriating Henry V:
BUFFY: […] Remember, the ritual starts, we all die. And I'll kill anyone who comes near Dawn. (she exits)
SPIKE: Well, not exactly the St. Crispin's Day speech, was it?
GILES: ‘We few...we happy few...’
SPIKE: ‘We band of buggered...’
Here the shared consciousness of the play and a speech particularly well-known in the educational environment both experienced, albeit a century apart is used to suggest a number of complex ideas - amusement at Buffy’s refusal to give a stirring oration, awareness of a shared purpose and the very small numbers of individuals on their side in the crisis about to be enacted, wry acceptance of probable failure and the unlikely bond forged by their circumstances. Any of Whedon’s audience unfamiliar with the source would notice little, and in some cases not fully understand the colloquialism,’buggered’, but to those who do the exchange enriches understanding not only of the situation but of the characters.
References and uses of Shakespeare abound in Whedon’s work. The naming patterns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer are very distinctive, from Angel, the idealised first love and Spike, the abrasive, sexualised vampire and later partner of Buffy to Willow, earth-goddess witch and Jenny Callendar, who brings the modern, ‘techno-pagan’ day into the archaic world of Buffy’s Watcher, Giles. In that context it is worth noting the naming of Cordelia, an important secondary character who metamorphosed into one of the core team in Angel the Series, the series’ spinoff. This unusual name is very firmly linked to the character in King Lear; viewers conscious of the uncommon association are likely initially to be shocked by the apparent contrast in character between the two versions. However, more careful consideration reminds one that Lear’s Cordelia speaks truth at whatever cost and hides considerable strength beneath a superficially stereotyped female personality, just as Whedon’s character does. Cordelia Chase does not have a voice ‘ever soft, gentle and low’, far from it, but she is relentless in her truthtelling, even when it does not suit the current circumstances. As she herself says, ‘Tact is just not saying true stuff.’ As Beer_Good notes in an extended article on the subject, ‘it's remarkable how often Whedon's Shakespeare references turn out differently than they do in Shakespeare.’ In other words, Whedon expects his viewers to recognise allusions and thus to understand and appreciate the unexpected uses made of lines, names and plots. While both Cordelias fit beer_good_foamy’s description: ‘her father's favourite […] loses her inheritance and has to leave her home and go into exile down south, where she joins up with a powerful man, fights bravely but dies off-screen in the last act.’ much more separates than links them. It is clear, however, that an extra layer of meaning and understanding of the character is available to those who grasp the reference, which in the early seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer may ameliorate or complicate our reactions to the figure and help us to admire her significant development as she, with two other characters, transitions to the spinoff series, Angel. Similarly, near the end of the last season of Angel, a beloved character, Fred, dies and is transformed into Illyria, a powerful but displaced god-figure. Viola, in Twelfth Night, is cast ashore in Illyria ; both figures are out of place, have lost all contact with their previous lives and have to undergo major metamorphosis in order to survive at all in an alien and threatening environment.
Another significant use of Shakespearean naming occurs in the short-lived series Firefly and the film, Serenity, with the same setting and the same cast. A major theme explored throughout both is the nature of civilisation and what makes a person behave decently or otherwise once away from societal norms and pressures. In that context The Tempest is used: one episode is set on a ‘civilised’ planet called Ariel, on which the protagonists intrude in the hope of doing good, but more significantly, the ultimate focus of the film Serenity is a planet called Miranda, a ‘brave new world’ experiment gone horribly wrong, even more of a dystopia than Huxley’s society in his novel of that name. Whedonic concerns of free will, of social and government control and of individual responsibility for group action centre here on a place where human beings were expected by themselves and their masters to form an ideal society, much as Gonzalo dreams of in The Tempest, but who encounter only death from inertia or brutal destruction. Ironically, this understanding is available only to the audience - Firefly is set in a distant future in which Earth-that-was has almost been forgotten. In a world without Shakespeare we alone are forewarned, if we are able to hear that warning.
It is undoubted hyperbole to claim, as some fans do, that Whedon is the Shakespeare of our times. Rhonda Wilcox asserts that ‘Whedon’s interest in Shakespeare helps clarify the fact that he is part of a long stream of dramatic literature and a writer aware of his inheritance...’ and it is easy to demonstrate superficial similarities such as the mixing of genres, which Lavery calls genre hybridity, so that the comedy of the fight scene in Romeo and Juliet or the mimed exposition scene in Hush can turn almost instantly into horror and tragedy. The collaborative tradition of the Hollywood Writers’ Room may not be so very different to the necessary and repeated collaborations of writers in Shakespeare’s day. Indeed, Jane Espenson’s description of the distribution of writing tasks in her commentary on Conversations With Dead People is oddly reminiscent of the processes described by Stanley Wells. In writing and performing each relied ultimately on the trust inspired by working with a known group of individuals, whose strengths could be exploited without dismissing the possibilities offered by bringing in newcomers.
Both Shakespeare and Whedon are storytellers, engaging their audiences with characters who create an illusion of depth. Both explore romantic, sexual, fraternal and family relationships as part of their stories. Both rely on a number of narrative tropes - the sudden revelation to a character that he or she is in love, for example, the so-called expert unaware of ineptitude, or the superficially downtrodden in a position of power, as Dogberry and Verges are. All of these offer the opportunity for comic treatment but also can and sometimes do make the foundation of tragedy. Shakespeare offers Whedon a shorthand for some of these elements - young love leads to death, apparently mismatched individuals can have more in common than they realise - and is adept at using references and names to emphasise this.
Ironically Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans frequently refer to what is and is not ‘canon’, a term itself appropriated from high culture. Arguably, cultural capital goes both ways; there is anecdotal evidence from Whedonesque,com, for example, that Whedon fans who had hitherto avoided Shakespeare watched the film of Much Ado About Nothing. Issues of canon pervade the high-culture world of academic literary study too, where the gatekeepers are scholars in high-status university departments. For other critics Whedon’s production of Marvel’s Avengers Assemble was evidence of high status, of having ‘arrived’, with an enormous-budget popular film which took record-breaking amounts of money. The making of Much Ado About Nothing, however, suggests that ‘success’ means something rather different to him, as he wrote in a post on Whedonesque.com as Marvel’s Avengers Assemble opened, ‘I have people, in my life, on this site, in places I've yet to discover, that always made me feel the truth of success: an artist and an audience communicating. Communicating to the point of collaborating.’
Extra thoughts:
Re-reading this to edit for posting made me realise that the so-called expert unaware of ineptitude is a particularly accurate description of Wesley - in Sunnydale his mistakes have almost wholly comic effect, but in LA there are darker and darker consequences to his misjudgements, and his character becomes correspondingly darker too. His character moves, one might argue, from the vain and foolish Dogberry figure to the casual, accidental cruelty of Claudio, who really does get off lightly. In the end he is wholly himself, and wholly tragic, suffering deeply in part because of terrible mistakes he made without knowing how terrible they were, and even of loving too well, but not wisely. His fatal flaws, the hamartia which can be composed of virtues as well as vices lead to the point where death, in the arms of what he knows to be a lie, is a welcome release.
I thought you guys might enjoy reading it. A big shout-out to beer_good_foamy, who allowed me to cite a piece of his.
We Band of Buggered: Joss Whedon’s Engagement With Shakespeare
Joss Whedon has been called a ‘Geek God’ for his work in film and television over the last twenty years. Perhaps still most noted for the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he has also written, directed or acted as showrunner in several other TV series, written and directed films, including two ‘blockbuster’ films in the Marvel franchise and, most salient for this essay, adapted and directed Much Ado About Nothing as a black and white, low-budget film made in two weeks in and around his own home. Whedon comes from a family with a very long tradition of writing for the screen , such that respect for language was deeply inculcated into him. To him Shakespeare feels ‘very welcoming’ - he claims he cannot recall his first experiences of the plays. He talks about Shakespeare readings orchestrated by his mother:
I grew up around people doing it and watching it and reading it, even before I could understand it, just because I was trying to look cool to my parents, and it sort of seeped in.
During three years at Winchester College in England he studied Shakespeare in depth for A Level but, perhaps more importantly, saw professional Shakespeare on stage for the first time , something which left a lasting impression. During a key creative period, when he was in charge of his most iconic TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel the Series and Firefly, he relaxed by inviting cast members to his house to participate in group readings of Shakespeare plays - from this derived ultimately his selection and core casting of Much Ado About Nothing. Thus Shakespeare could be considered an essential part of Whedon’s cultural capital, that is to say, the habits of life and thought which could be said, not least by him, to define him. His cultural context - highly-educated, somewhat intellectual, wealthy, with a bias towards European literature - is something he effectively takes for granted . He has a keen awareness of popular culture, demonstrated repeatedly in his writing, but admits little differentiation between this and Shakespeare. David Lavery makes it clear:
In Why Buffy Matters (2005), Rhonda Wilcox makes frequent, revealing comparisons between Whedon’s foundational creation and the work of William Shakespeare […] eight years later he would actually write and direct the Bard’s work for the big screen, thereby demonstrating conclusively that the subject of this book is never more Shakespearean than when he’s doing Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is, however, also a symbol of a type of culture many might see as the antithesis of his work. There is a certain tension in his appropriation of the Shakespearean corpus in his own writing, and particularly in the selection and timing of his micro-budget independent film of Much Ado About Nothing. It surely cannot be accidental that it was made during a break between filming and editing of Marvel’s Avengers Assemble. In order to make the latter, almost military levels of organisation were required. Not only was it hugely complex and expensive in terms of locations, CGI and highly-paid cast-members, it was also overseen by Kevin Feige , representing the very considerable power and wealth of the Disney Corporation; as screenwriter and director Whedon had to argue for many elements of his story, such as the inclusion of the female superhero, Black Widow, and few creative decisions could be made by him alone. It was, moreover, a filmed version of a comic book story: Whedon himself has written for this genre and defends it vociferously, but is also very much aware of its low cultural status: ‘I grew up reading ‘The Avengers’ when I wasn’t trying to impress my parents with what I was reading.’ It is therefore possible to perceive this film as the antithesis of the Marvel’s Avengers Assemble and in some part a rebellion against it. As Douglas Lanier says, ‘It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Whedon’s Shakespeare film was a means to strike a strategic distance from mass-market Hollywood’s artistic imperatives.’ While Lanier sees this as laying a claim to ‘artisanal,’ indie form of filmmaking, , putting Art before profit, it must also be recognised that, insofar as Shakespeare represents ‘high culture’, this is Whedon’s bid to be considered as participating in it. There is no evidence that Stephen Greenblatt, for example, would have reviewed Marvel’s Avengers Assemble, as he did Much Ado About Nothing, and the slightly condescending tone of that review implies a certain level of surprise that the ‘Geek God’ would aspire to the Bard. It is still commonplace, some twenty years after its debut, for Buffy the Vampire Slayer to be dismissed as trivial and ‘camp’; it is impossible, and has been for some centuries, to do the same with the plays of Shakespeare. The initial press release on the website set up for the film expresses this clearly: ‘The film should be completed by early spring and headed for the festival circuit, because it is fancy.’ - a typical piece of Whedonic humour at his own expense, as with ‘the joy of working on a passion project surrounded by dear friends, admired colleagues and an atmosphere of unabashed rapture far outweighs their hilariously miniature paychecks.’ Similarly, he signed a comment on Whedonesque.com, a website dedicated to tracking the activities of Whedon, his cast and collaborators, with: ‘Joss ‘Shut up, it's art if it's in black and white’ Whedon.’ He has given several practical explanations for his use of monochrome film - the cost, the ease of matching and editing scenes shot at different times of day - but also uses it as an explicit link to film noir.
Joss Whedon is extremely well-versed in film genres as well as the practical techniques of film making; as he mentioned on a PBS interview , he acted as a teaching assistant for film studies professors while at Wesleyan University. In key interviews such as this one, he has suggested that the play is a ‘RomCom’ - arguably the first - and that he sees his version as akin to ‘noir comedies’ such as The Apartment, in which pain is as important as laughter, and a bleak view of human nature predominates. It is easy to detect other elements of the film noir genre, from the use of noir techniques - framing, lighting, unusual camera angles, and narrative tropes to the emphasis on flaws in the hero/anti-hero. Costumes were drawn from cast members’ own wardrobes, but there’s a distinct 40s/50s feel to the styles, including formal suits, full-skirted dresses, echoing the dominant period of the original genre. The style of the house adds to this - traditional materials and design features suggest it is older than it is, and the only really ostensibly modern feature is the ‘control room’ buried away from the guests. The ‘screwball’ comedies of the period are also relevant - also shot in monochrome at a time when colour technology was easily available, such films as The Philadelphia Story, (1940) share the focus on a single wealthy household, and a tangled story, misunderstandings, characters who believe themselves to know more than they do and to be manipulating others when they are being manipulated.
By using his own house as the location for virtually all the filming Whedon in some sense acknowledges a link between himself, not merely the owner of the property, but the person for whom and with whom the house was designed, and the dominant male figures of the play in his adaptation - wealthy, powerful individuals who expect their world to revolve around them. As Douglas Lanier notes, ‘Whedon’s house is a crucial component in his Much Ado, an upper middle-class social space that enables ‘unconstrained hospitality’; in it, class differences are minimized and a casual ethos reigns’ . It is, however, a casual ethos which accepts routine invasion of female spaces - the partygoer who insists on attempting to fondle Beatrice, for example, or Borachio’s exploitation of Margaret’s access to Hero’s bedroom. Moreover, the superficial air of licence, emphasised by the ubiquity of alcoholic drinks is underpinned by evidence of multiple layers of professional (if not always competent) surveillance. Lanier, inter alia, has commented on the use of the ever-present figure of the photographer who can move from taking publicity shots to acting as a paparazza as events unfold, and whose camera is often pointed directly at the film camera, thus threatening the audience with exposure as much as the characters. The Prince and Leonato take for granted that their lives will be documented constantly - their first on-camera meeting involves a ‘handshake’ for the photographer, which carries public rather than private meaning. Lanier points out the moment before this, when, on leaving the car, the Prince has his brother’s handcuffs removed, as an example of hyper-consciousness of being watched ‘As a space of compromised privacy, the house works to intensify the fear of social stigma,’ he says - yet it is possible to take this further. Don Pedro is not only accustomed to being ‘noted’, he also expects all his acquaintance to accept it as routine. Verges, played by Tom Lenk, is part of his entourage, and the Watch as a whole are presented as a private security firm with access to CCTV, installed in a room in the basement of the house. These powerful men assume the right not only to surveillance within their own space, but to complete control of this, with their own armed guards - Dogberry and Verges wear shoulder-holsters - who apparently have the right of public arrest, as shown by their last appearance in the film, when on an iPhone we see an overhead shot of them arresting Don John, an angle which surely implies access to CCTV cameras even away from the house. Personal surveillance and recording is normalised in the world of this Messina, yet in most of Whedon’s other work where it occurs (as in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ‘Entropy’) it is presented as sinister, even malignant. Shakespeare’s Don John is both a political and a military figure, but the latter is very much downplayed in Whedon’s film. No uniforms are shown, even on the security officers, and no other characters carry guns overtly, so that the assumption of surveillance and policing powers seems much more arbitrary than it might in other contexts. A reference for Whedon fans alone, perhaps, is that the bedroom shared by Claudio and Benedick has ‘an enormous doll-house’ . Whedon’s most recent television series was Dollhouse (2009 - 2010) , in which Denisov and Krantz both featured, and which deals amongst other major themes, with invasion of privacy, appropriation of individual rights and surveillance. This location is also used for the moment when the Prince asks, ‘What secret hath held you here?’
In a play in which witty language predominates, it is noteworthy that Whedon chooses to start and end the film with moments of pure silence. In the first it is a defeated, total silence as Benedick leaves Beatrice alone after an apparent sexual encounter, neither capable of communication at that moment, presumably the ‘won it from me with false dice’ of Beatrice’s later reference. “Pain is where I hang my hat,”, Lavery quotes him as saying , and the painful undercurrents of the play are brought to the front in Whedon’s version.
In the generally tipsy party-world of the film failed communication is a motif, using not only the frequent miscommunications and misunderstandings of Shakespeare’s play but others inserted by Whedon - Claudio’s casual remark about ‘an Ethiope’ while passing an African-American woman, for example. In season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Whedon, who had been much praised for his witty dialogue, wrote and directed Hush , in which over half the episode has no dialogue at all, when invading, and terrifying, monsters ‘the Gentlemen’ steal the voices of the entire town. Consequently all the characters are forced to concentrate on accurate communication of precise meanings, with hilarious effect on occasion, and using a variety of techniques. Only at the end, when the monsters are defeated and speech is once more possible, do we see the protagonist and her boyfriend agreeing to talk and then facing each other silently, unable to find the words. An expert in wordless communication, then, Whedon uses it to notable effect in the closing scenes of his film, when we see Hero protectively holding Margaret as her father accuses the latter of criminal complicity in Borachio’s plot. Finally, however, and most significantly, we see Beatrice and Benedick silent, wholly focussed on each other while a loud party proceeds in the background. The painful silence of the start of the film is transformed into the eloquent silence of the end.
Lanier notes the fact that the film has a double audience, of Whedon fans as well as Shakespeare fans, and that ‘the film’s various paratexts - the tales of the film’s genesis, the candid pictures, the Vine videos of the bus ride to SWSX, the raucous cast commentary track on the DVD’ all serve to create a sense of intimacy with the actors and director, not simply the characters, something which reinforces the sense of personal familiarity apparently felt by many long-term Whedon fans; the explosions of comments on Whedonesque.com when the fact of the film was revealed and again when it was released all suggest a sense of shared ownership of the people as well as of the work of art. The director and many of his cast members are referred to by their first names with an implied personal relationship; Whedon seems to encourage this with his own posts, as quoted here, and his habit of sharing trivia, thus, as Michael Dobson says of amateur productions, ‘the special power […] lay in the close comparison and synergy that it enabled between the personal identities of the players and those of the characters they represented’ Neither the film, nor the earlier Shakespeare readings at Whedon’s home were ‘non-professional’ in terms of the performers, but that strong sense of community Dobson notes as a key feature of amateur Shakespeare is very much present. ‘There are many things to do by way of interpreting, understanding and sharing a Shakespeare play that are completely beside the point compared to actually living in it for a while.’ The language, which Whedon describes as the greatest attraction of the playwright, was clearly not a problem for those who had read his works as a leisure activity. This was not true of the entire cast of Much Ado About Nothing, however. Nathan Fillion famously tweeted ‘Reciting Shakespeare seems like Yoda-speak, if he was educated,’ and attempted to back out of the project, yet ultimately, as Dogberry, gave one of the performances most admired and commented on by reviewers.
The domestic Sunday readings at Whedon’s home originated when a cast member of Buffy the Vampire Slayer commented that a particular episode (S5E7, Fool for Love) was like ‘being in rep’ and continued for some years. Not only were they relaxation, they were a de facto method of bonding together groups of individuals; the impromptu singing sessions with which they frequently ended are credited by Whedon for the genesis of Once More With Feeling, the famous ‘musical’ episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Season 6. Amongst his ‘regulars’ were Anthony Head, James Marsters and Alexis Denisov, all of whom had a classical stage training and felt equally comfortable with Shakespeare. It is interesting that, of these three, Head actually is British and the other two played British characters; Shakespeare fits in with a general anglophilia observable in much of Whedon’s work as well as his life experience. While the ‘British’ characters are not alone in Whedon’s work in making explicit references to Shakespeare, they often do so with a greater sense of awareness of their source and of irony. Thus Drusilla, the British vampire and former nun misquotes Othello deliberately in Crush, when she asserts that vampires can love, ‘quite well. If not wisely.’ - a reference to a play in which an ostensibly mismatched pair is destroyed by love in a scene in which a vampire, Spike, is asserting his love for a human, who rejects it as impossible. Later in that season, in The Gift, Spike and Giles share a moment of Englishness by appropriating Henry V:
BUFFY: […] Remember, the ritual starts, we all die. And I'll kill anyone who comes near Dawn. (she exits)
SPIKE: Well, not exactly the St. Crispin's Day speech, was it?
GILES: ‘We few...we happy few...’
SPIKE: ‘We band of buggered...’
Here the shared consciousness of the play and a speech particularly well-known in the educational environment both experienced, albeit a century apart is used to suggest a number of complex ideas - amusement at Buffy’s refusal to give a stirring oration, awareness of a shared purpose and the very small numbers of individuals on their side in the crisis about to be enacted, wry acceptance of probable failure and the unlikely bond forged by their circumstances. Any of Whedon’s audience unfamiliar with the source would notice little, and in some cases not fully understand the colloquialism,’buggered’, but to those who do the exchange enriches understanding not only of the situation but of the characters.
References and uses of Shakespeare abound in Whedon’s work. The naming patterns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer are very distinctive, from Angel, the idealised first love and Spike, the abrasive, sexualised vampire and later partner of Buffy to Willow, earth-goddess witch and Jenny Callendar, who brings the modern, ‘techno-pagan’ day into the archaic world of Buffy’s Watcher, Giles. In that context it is worth noting the naming of Cordelia, an important secondary character who metamorphosed into one of the core team in Angel the Series, the series’ spinoff. This unusual name is very firmly linked to the character in King Lear; viewers conscious of the uncommon association are likely initially to be shocked by the apparent contrast in character between the two versions. However, more careful consideration reminds one that Lear’s Cordelia speaks truth at whatever cost and hides considerable strength beneath a superficially stereotyped female personality, just as Whedon’s character does. Cordelia Chase does not have a voice ‘ever soft, gentle and low’, far from it, but she is relentless in her truthtelling, even when it does not suit the current circumstances. As she herself says, ‘Tact is just not saying true stuff.’ As Beer_Good notes in an extended article on the subject, ‘it's remarkable how often Whedon's Shakespeare references turn out differently than they do in Shakespeare.’ In other words, Whedon expects his viewers to recognise allusions and thus to understand and appreciate the unexpected uses made of lines, names and plots. While both Cordelias fit beer_good_foamy’s description: ‘her father's favourite […] loses her inheritance and has to leave her home and go into exile down south, where she joins up with a powerful man, fights bravely but dies off-screen in the last act.’ much more separates than links them. It is clear, however, that an extra layer of meaning and understanding of the character is available to those who grasp the reference, which in the early seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer may ameliorate or complicate our reactions to the figure and help us to admire her significant development as she, with two other characters, transitions to the spinoff series, Angel. Similarly, near the end of the last season of Angel, a beloved character, Fred, dies and is transformed into Illyria, a powerful but displaced god-figure. Viola, in Twelfth Night, is cast ashore in Illyria ; both figures are out of place, have lost all contact with their previous lives and have to undergo major metamorphosis in order to survive at all in an alien and threatening environment.
Another significant use of Shakespearean naming occurs in the short-lived series Firefly and the film, Serenity, with the same setting and the same cast. A major theme explored throughout both is the nature of civilisation and what makes a person behave decently or otherwise once away from societal norms and pressures. In that context The Tempest is used: one episode is set on a ‘civilised’ planet called Ariel, on which the protagonists intrude in the hope of doing good, but more significantly, the ultimate focus of the film Serenity is a planet called Miranda, a ‘brave new world’ experiment gone horribly wrong, even more of a dystopia than Huxley’s society in his novel of that name. Whedonic concerns of free will, of social and government control and of individual responsibility for group action centre here on a place where human beings were expected by themselves and their masters to form an ideal society, much as Gonzalo dreams of in The Tempest, but who encounter only death from inertia or brutal destruction. Ironically, this understanding is available only to the audience - Firefly is set in a distant future in which Earth-that-was has almost been forgotten. In a world without Shakespeare we alone are forewarned, if we are able to hear that warning.
It is undoubted hyperbole to claim, as some fans do, that Whedon is the Shakespeare of our times. Rhonda Wilcox asserts that ‘Whedon’s interest in Shakespeare helps clarify the fact that he is part of a long stream of dramatic literature and a writer aware of his inheritance...’ and it is easy to demonstrate superficial similarities such as the mixing of genres, which Lavery calls genre hybridity, so that the comedy of the fight scene in Romeo and Juliet or the mimed exposition scene in Hush can turn almost instantly into horror and tragedy. The collaborative tradition of the Hollywood Writers’ Room may not be so very different to the necessary and repeated collaborations of writers in Shakespeare’s day. Indeed, Jane Espenson’s description of the distribution of writing tasks in her commentary on Conversations With Dead People is oddly reminiscent of the processes described by Stanley Wells. In writing and performing each relied ultimately on the trust inspired by working with a known group of individuals, whose strengths could be exploited without dismissing the possibilities offered by bringing in newcomers.
Both Shakespeare and Whedon are storytellers, engaging their audiences with characters who create an illusion of depth. Both explore romantic, sexual, fraternal and family relationships as part of their stories. Both rely on a number of narrative tropes - the sudden revelation to a character that he or she is in love, for example, the so-called expert unaware of ineptitude, or the superficially downtrodden in a position of power, as Dogberry and Verges are. All of these offer the opportunity for comic treatment but also can and sometimes do make the foundation of tragedy. Shakespeare offers Whedon a shorthand for some of these elements - young love leads to death, apparently mismatched individuals can have more in common than they realise - and is adept at using references and names to emphasise this.
Ironically Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans frequently refer to what is and is not ‘canon’, a term itself appropriated from high culture. Arguably, cultural capital goes both ways; there is anecdotal evidence from Whedonesque,com, for example, that Whedon fans who had hitherto avoided Shakespeare watched the film of Much Ado About Nothing. Issues of canon pervade the high-culture world of academic literary study too, where the gatekeepers are scholars in high-status university departments. For other critics Whedon’s production of Marvel’s Avengers Assemble was evidence of high status, of having ‘arrived’, with an enormous-budget popular film which took record-breaking amounts of money. The making of Much Ado About Nothing, however, suggests that ‘success’ means something rather different to him, as he wrote in a post on Whedonesque.com as Marvel’s Avengers Assemble opened, ‘I have people, in my life, on this site, in places I've yet to discover, that always made me feel the truth of success: an artist and an audience communicating. Communicating to the point of collaborating.’
Extra thoughts:
Re-reading this to edit for posting made me realise that the so-called expert unaware of ineptitude is a particularly accurate description of Wesley - in Sunnydale his mistakes have almost wholly comic effect, but in LA there are darker and darker consequences to his misjudgements, and his character becomes correspondingly darker too. His character moves, one might argue, from the vain and foolish Dogberry figure to the casual, accidental cruelty of Claudio, who really does get off lightly. In the end he is wholly himself, and wholly tragic, suffering deeply in part because of terrible mistakes he made without knowing how terrible they were, and even of loving too well, but not wisely. His fatal flaws, the hamartia which can be composed of virtues as well as vices lead to the point where death, in the arms of what he knows to be a lie, is a welcome release.