Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  “Winchester is timelessly beautiful, famously academic and a bastion of blithe cruelty,” Joss said. “Everyone else was used to this; I was the only new kid. Older boys relentlessly bullied younger, and teachers (called ‘dons’) bullied everyone, often physically.” Joss felt out of sync with his wealthy classmates there, far more than he ever had at Riverdale. “All the students, even boys younger than I, knew each other and came from the same social strata,” he recalled. “On top of it all, I was of course that most dread creation, an American. It was clear to me from the start that I must take an active role in my survival.”

  Joss decided to establish himself as the weird kid, even pushing boundaries of what he himself considered weird before “anyone had time to get their mock on.” He posted a nonsensical notice outside his assigned cubicle that made it clear that ridiculing him would “not only be weak and redundant, but might actually please me in some unseemly way.” His classmates read his declaration and walked away either laughing or puzzled, and he felt a little safer, comforted by his ability to defuse potential taunting with his own wit.

  In H. Bramston’s boarding house—more commonly known as Trant’s—he studied his housemates, trying to crack the code to popularity. He spent some days at Winchester wondering if anyone knew he existed. “I was lonely,” he said. “I wish that I could have made some moves on a girl at some point in my high school career…. Intellectually, it was a staggering gift to be able to be around that much intelligence.” But “socially, every boy that comes out of Winchester was completely pathetic.”

  His ungainliness is on blatant display in the 1980 Trant’s house photo. Joss stands in the back row, eyes pointed downward and almost lost behind the mop of curly red hair that mushrooms from his head. The awkward fifteen-year-old makes no attempt to interact with the rest of the boys, nor to connect with the camera capturing them.

  Years earlier, Joss had been able to earn accolades and get the attention he felt was due from established comedy writers. But surrounded by boys of his own age, he couldn’t make any headway. He would later say that he felt many at Winchester were bothered by everything he wore or said, and that they tried to quash his creativity and his personality. These feelings would eventually inspire a number of Buffy’s early plotlines, including the episode “Out of Mind, Out of Sight,” in which a high schooler is so completely ignored by everyone around her that she literally turns invisible.

  Joss, however, took a different route, further embracing the role of the outsider. “I was very dark and miserable, this hideous little homunculus, who managed to annoy everyone,” he said. “I mean everyone—because I made a list.” He went “extracurricular” with his ideas, writing stories and drawing comic books and sending them back home to Chris Boal, who added more to the tales and returned them. The comics were mostly about characters nobody took seriously, who knew something nobody else did. They were Joss’s way of declaring, “I’m alone out here, but there’s something in me that people don’t see…. I have a secret that nobody else has, and therefore I’m exalted, and the fact that nobody pays attention to me or thinks I’m cool or will dance with me makes me better.”

  Originally, the plan was for Joss to enroll in Winchester for half a year, as long as Lee’s sabbatical. The school asked him to stay on, however, so he decided to continue his enrollment and graduate. His feelings of loneliness hadn’t completely dissipated, but he appreciated the opportunity he had to study classic literature and great drama. And despite feeling mocked for being American, he had made unexpected inroads with his housemates.

  One night after the boys had settled into the beds of their “ice-cold room,” they all started reciting a piece from a Monty Python episode. While he may not have understood all of Winchester’s customs, Monty Python was something that Joss knew well. “When there was a lull, I unthinkingly chimed in with the next line. I was answered with unfiltered silence, and then one of the older boys called out from the corner, ‘OK. He’s in.’ He literally said that. Like a cheesy movie: ‘He’s in,’” Joss said. “And I, in whatever limited capacity I have to be, was. Speaking their language startled them as much as making up my own had.”

  The importance of language was nothing new to Joss. In a home filled with storytellers, he had learned early how empowering it was to make someone laugh. But earlier audiences had been family and friends, people who were predisposed to be open to him. Now he was suddenly accepted by a far more hostile audience. He learned that he could connect with them, too, and get his ideas across just by finding the right way to talk to them.

  No longer the shunned outcast he would still often consider himself to be, Joss found friends for all sorts of endeavors. One time, he and his friends were caught sneaking out at night to stage an impromptu reading of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

  Joss also spent weekends in town at the cinema. Unsurprisingly, he had several epiphanies while in the theater seats. While watching Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, he was moved not so much by the story as by the craft of the scene in which young Danny Torrance rides his Big Wheel through the hallways of the Overlook Hotel. A single Steadicam shot follows Danny for just over thirty seconds, and it was in that moment that Joss realized “somebody makes these [films], somebody directed that,” he explained. “It just opened up everything—that was a big moment for me.”

  During another solo trip to London, he experienced the kind of epiphany that generally comes in the early acts of his beloved superhero tales, the kind that resets long-held beliefs and sends the hero down a new path. Of course, as this is Joss’s tale, it’s only fitting that this big moment also came courtesy of a movie.

  In fall 1980, he was on a one-week break from school and renting a small room in the city by himself. One day, he went to see a specialedition rerelease of Steven Spielberg’s 1977 classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He was instantly moved by the story of an ordinary man who sees an extraterrestrial being, and by the idea that in the end, the man would board an alien ship for a journey through outer space, even though everyone he knew would be dead by the time he returned. The movie brought Joss to a realization about the “reality of being human”—and the accompanying limitations.

  “[I] came out of the theater with an understanding of the concept of existence and time and life and humanity that I could not contain. I couldn’t stop moving,” he said. The sixteen-year-old went back to his room, still overwhelmed mentally and physically. “I was just going back and forth going, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.’”

  For the rest of the week, he kept going back to see the film, even watching it three times in a single sitting until the ushers kicked him out. He was doing more than just rewatching a movie that he loved; he was developing a comforting ritual to deal with what he called the “extraordinary epiphany of the nature and reality and magnitude and ecstasy of pure, meaningless existence.” His return trips “became sort of a way to codify my joy and my terror and my misery at this extraordinary change that my brain had undergone, this sort of becoming of a grown-up,” he said.

  When he returned to Winchester, Joss tried to explain his experience to a friend, who gave him a copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. The 1938 novel follows the journal entries of Antoine Roquentin, who searches for meaning in all the things that fill his life as he attempts to finish a research project. Ultimately, Roquentin realizes that life and freedom are meaningless unless a person makes commitments to give them meaning.

  The book struck a chord. “Oh! Other people have gone through this!” he realized. The boy who often felt emotionally apart from those around him now had a movement that he could connect with. “Basically, [Close Encounters] had made me an existentialist.” Since that intense week, he hasn’t been able to revisit the film. “It’s just too important an experience in my life.”

  Arguably, however, the film’s impact loomed over the remainder of his time at Winchester. By 1981, Joss had
become a “full-tilt” Deadhead, making the hour-long trek into London several times to see the Grateful Dead perform. He never followed the band from place to place as many committed fans would, but by his count he would ultimately see the group at least fifteen times. “I saw them in the front row twice in London—you got in the front row by running,” Joss says. “When I started going by myself, everyone would be, like, trying to sneak to the front. I was like, ‘Well I’ve done that,’ so I’d go to the back of the theater so that I could just sit and just basically concentrate on hearing every instrument separately at the same time. Which is not easy to do.”

  Not an easy task, indeed, but it was made easier by the standard Deadhead accompaniments of marijuana and LSD. Joss regularly indulged in the drugs for what he calls “mind-expanding partying.” “I’m a big fan of anything that forces you to see things differently. Most people go through their lives without ever even trying,” Joss explains. “It’s the idea of being taken out of your own narrative, of your own expectations, and it’s the only truly pure thing that we can experience—becoming something less than the axis of the universe. That’s beautiful, that’s important. And that’s part of how that all works.”

  Joss’s heady pursuits seem to have affected his schoolwork as well. His housemaster, Dick Massen, wrote in his report at the end of Joss’s stay that at first, things went well: Joss worked hard and played a full part in the busy life of the school. But perhaps due to his change in outlook, Joss became “difficult to teach” and reluctant to do any work.

  Outside the classroom, Joss was still finding success. He was a member of the Winchester fencing team and wielded his saber to help the school defeat its “old enemy” Eton College, earning accolades from the school newspaper in December 1981 for the “American, and sometimes rather dubious, tactics” he used to clinch the win. He took part in several of Trant’s house’s student revues, and for one, he penned a sketch that retold the biblical story of Joseph and Mary—one of the first examples of him balancing his personal atheism with a respect for the tenets of a religion that others hold dear. As reimagined by Joss, Joseph is quite concerned about his intended—and virgin—wife’s pregnancy. So concerned, in fact, that he hires an American detective (Joss) to learn more about Mary and what she’s been up to. Understandably, housemaster Massen was worried about the sketch’s potential to offend—especially given its ending, in which Joss stood up and declared, “And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.”

  “It could have been absolutely ghastly,” Massen’s wife, Jane, says. “But it was done with such good taste, it was absolutely spellbinding and wonderful.”

  Even Joss’s schoolwork had one bright spot. His love of Shakespeare blossomed at Winchester, and he poured himself into studies for his A-level exam in English, devoting months to studying Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello. While his score on the A-levels would have little bearing on his academic career in the United States, he relished the idea of studying a text so deeply and being tested on a “grown-up understanding” of what he’d learned.

  “We’d have class for an hour and twenty minutes … and then there’d be three more hours until dinner, and we’d just … stay and keep talking,” he said. “Some of [the students] were doing it because they were desperate to get good grades, they wanted to get into Oxford or Cambridge. One of them mentioned to me, ‘You know, Joss, you’re not taking the A levels, you don’t have to stay.’ ‘Dude, where else would I be?’ It was amazing. Four hours at a stretch, great scholars and a great teacher completely prying open the text of Hamlet. I mean, what more fun can there be? … Spoken like a man who never had sex in high school.”

  (Not that he didn’t want to have sex. Joss channeled some of his desires into his first-ever screenplay. There were no superhero adventures in his romantic comedy, which he remembered as a thinly veiled wishfulfillment tale about a “clearly surrogate [Joss] as a grown-up and Goldie Hawn.” He remembers that “I always had such a big crush on her—it was insane,” adding that he’d returned to the cinema repeatedly to watch her in 1978’s Foul Play.)

  Except for his English studies, though, Joss had little interest in any of his classes. His teachers were very disappointed and frustrated with his downhill trajectory, noting Joss’s talents but worrying over his newfound sloth. One felt that at such a young age, the boy was “a person of a great deal of originality”; another said that anyone with his abilities should have “romped home” (meaning he should have found much success at Winchester, with fun and ease). In his final house report, housemaster Massen wrote that the lapse in Joss’s working ability was a mystery, and then went on to wonder if Joss was struggling simply because he was a puzzled adolescent.

  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 tremendous
ly. “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.”