Joss Whedon is a beloved TV show and filmmaker, having created such TV shows as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Firefly” and the first two “Avengers” movies. He is also an infuriated man, made more so by the election of Donald Trump. Most recently, for some reason, he decided to tweet a rude suggestion about Speaker Paul Ryan.
“Violence solves nothing. I want a rhino to f--- @SpeakerRyan to death with its horn because it's FUNNY, not because he's a #GOPmurderbro”
It is very easy to deconstruct this tweet.
First, the message in Whedon’s TV shows and movies has consistently been that violence solves everything.
Whether its Buffy Summers staking the undead, Captain Mal Reynolds setting up a space battle between the Alliance and the Reivers, or the Incredible Hulk smashing Loki, the heroes in the Whedonverse solve their problems by removing them, along at times with a well-timed quip.
Second, how can violence solve nothing and at the same time a Rhino killing the Speaker of the House via an unnatural act be funny? How does that work?
Mind, Whedon’s tweet reveals a great many deep-seated, unsolved issues in the artist. One is equated the political with the personal. Republicans just do not affront him because he thinks they are wrong. They affront him because he thinks they are evil. Hence, it is funny to see them sodomized with a Rhino horn.
The tweet also suggests a strange mystery in Whedon’s psyche. One of the reasons that “Firefly” and the movie sequel “Serenity” were so popular was that it depicted a space ship full of entrepreneurs struggling to make a living despite the machinations of an all-powerful state, the Alliance, that claimed not to be an evil empire, yet turned an entire planet of colonists into either corpses or violence crazed Reivers in an experiment to make humans more docile that went very wrong.
Mal Reynolds, the captain of the ship, is one of the reddest neck, red state characters ever to come out of broadcast science fiction. The only reason Mal might not be a Trump supporter is that he has a healthy distrust of all politicians.
It goes almost without saying that no one wished the same fate to be visited upon Whedon that he would see afflicted on the inoffensive Speaker Paul Ryan.
But he really needs to go someplace quiet, without Internet or TV, and think about what he just tweeted and the state of his general mental health. He might also contemplate the possibility that tweets like that are part of the reason so many people voted from Trump in the first place.
