Tuesday, July 26 2011
Voluntary Amnesia in ‘Dollhouse’ and ‘Pygmalion’
Long before Dollhouse's Echo submitted herself to five years of memory loss, Eliza Doolitle of Pygmalion experimented with some personal tabula rasa.
Friday, April 15 2011
Whedon and Company: Worlds Await
The formal creation of Buffy Studies -- and therefore Whedon Studies -- was born with the creation of the online journal Slayage 10 years ago. Here the coeditor of Slayage, Rhonda V. Wilcox, offers some reflections on our obsessions with the output of a certain TV creator.
Wednesday, April 13 2011
Joss Whedon: Pioneer of the Body Count
Among Joss Whedon's greatest contributions to television has been the continual use of the Body Count, the willingness to kill off recurring characters in order to ratchet up the narrative tension and create a sense of danger.
Tuesday, April 12 2011
The Power of Fandom in the Whedonverse
While viewers watch television and film for entertainment, it's easy to forget that these media are industries. In this essay the changing relationships between creators, studios, distributors, and an increasingly active fandom are examined.
Monday, April 11 2011
The Dystopian Future in Joss Whedon’s Work
In contrast to the utopian vision of the future found in sci-fi series like Star Trek, Joss Whedon's creations show a different vision of the future. And it isn't pretty.
Friday, April 8 2011
The Big Bad Universe: Good and Evil According to Joss Whedon
Most of Joss Whedon's work has been characterized by Big Bads. But the lines separating Good and Evil are more complex than one might expect.
Thursday, April 7 2011
‘Buffy’ and ‘Dollhouse’: Visions of Female Empowerment and Disempowerment
While Buffy has been universally acclaimed as a great work of TV feminism, Dollhouse has been denounced as anti-feminist. But have the critics of Dollhouse been too quick to dismiss its feminist credentials?
Wednesday, April 6 2011
TV’s Grim Reaper: Why Joss Whedon Continually Kills the Characters We Love
Among Joss Whedon's greatest contributions to television has been the invention of the Body Count, the willingness to kill off recurring characters in order to ratchet up the narrative tension and create a sense of danger. This is the first of two essays examining Joss Whedon as a televisual mass murderer.
Tuesday, April 5 2011
Love Hurts, or, Why Buffy Couldn’t Find Love
Unlike most teen shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer wasn't constructed around romances. And while viewers followed her epic romances with vampires Angel and Spike, whether or not she would ever find true love was never really the point of the show.
Thursday, March 31 2011
Identity and Memory in ‘Dollhouse’
While all of Joss Whedon's shows examine the nature of personhood, none does so to the degree of Dollhouse. Here the role of memory in establishing identity is examined.
