Joss Whedon, “Strong Female Characters” and the Hopeful End of the Jerk Director Trope

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

Honestly, most of us have known for a while that Joss Whedon is a jerk. I’m a Buffy fan, I adore Buffy and it partially inspires my own work.

But Whedon is a jerk.

I even liked Dollhouse despite it’s problematic nature. (It was clearly meant to deal with cyberpunk themes of identity, agency, and control, but did have a tendency to wallow in it).

But Whedon is a jerk.

And recent allegations indicate that it may go beyond that.

Directors Being Jerks

Look, I’ll say it. There’s a trope that directors are jerks. Joss Whedon is far from the only director to have been accused of abusing actors, especially women.

A 2014 article from IndieWire features four directors who, in their opinion, went too far. These include Lars von Trier cutting an actresses hair, Darren Aronofsky using explosives rather too close to his cast, Stanley Kubrick screaming at actors and the famous Alfred Hitchcock throwing live birds at Tippi Hedren. But this article also sums up the problem. The last line of it is “when in the end the actress gives the greatest performance of her life — as many of these actors have admitted after the fact — maybe torture has its…