Joss Whedon: The Biography (6 page)

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.