So I finally got around to watching Dr. Horrible and overall I was quite impressed. We already knew that Joss could do an entertaining musical (hands up if even despite being a Buffy fan you half expected a trainwreck before actually seeing the musical episode), but it was delightful to see him expanding his chops even further into the genre. The songs were great, the cast was perfect, and Whedon’s favorite theme of blurring the boundaries between heroes and villains was, of course, front and center. It’s also a bit of a pop culture anomaly in that it’s exactly as long as it needs to be. Free from the restraints of television windows and commercial breaks, Whedon uses the online distribution route to craft a story that moves at a pace defined solely by the story itself.
But alas, this isn’t about the exciting possibilities of circumventing the Hollywood production machine, it’s about continuing patterns in Whedon’s bag of tricks. Now I’m as much a Whedon fanboy as any other, but not the kind that believes he can’t be criticized (and believe me, those kind do exist). And for all his feminist-tendencies, Joss just can’t seem to stop killing women. To be fair, he kills a lot of characters and, yes, sometimes they are male. However, Joss is increasingly crossing over into Women in Refrigerators territory.
For those not in the know, WIR is a reference from the comic book medium where female characters are historically given pretty short thrift. Specifically, WIR is a term coined by Gail Simone in direct reference to an issue of the Green Lantern when our hero comes home to find his girlfriend murdered and stuffed in a fridge. Again, people die in comics all the time. But WIR has come to mean a specific circumstance of death, where a female character is murdered solely to further the character development of the male (a related phenomenon is "Dead Man Defrosting," where male characters are often depowered but allowed to return to their former glory while female characters are usually doomed to their fates). It happens a lot (there’s a running list), and it’s the disproportionate usage of this trope between males and females that makes it really disturbing trend.
And this is basically what happens in Dr. Horrible just as it’s happened in many Whedon projects before. Perhaps it’s more jarring in Dr. Horrible since we don’t get to know Penny for very long. And I can predict the criticism. Like– well, of course the death of a lover is going to affect character growth for a hero. Or– Whedon killed Tara to further Willow’s character too. Or even the whole this is much adieu about nothing argument. No matter how you see it, this isn’t a simple matter of black and white. It’s not even a simple matter of just Whedon’s body of work. It’s a matter of a cultural pattern and it’s the pattern that gives any individual instance its weight.
