buffy at pylduck.com

(Spoilers inevitable in posts. Be warned.)

[2:52:52 PM]

Hello to the all of no one who might still stumble onto this lame-ass page. [Tinmanic] has been faithfully reviewing each episode this season, though. From his review of the [penultimate episode]:

These last few episodes haven't been all I've hoped for. Things seem cobbled together with cardboard and duct tape.

Exactly how I've felt about the last few episodes. I mean, my god, do they have any clue what they're doing to wrap up storylines? Maybe the problem is they're trying to resolve things too much, when it might be best just to leave things in the air, providing only the most cursory of resolutions to the Buffy line. Eh.

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[9:57:55 AM]

[10 Questions for Joss Whedon]

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[2:16:43 PM]

Who else cheered when Dawn woke up out of her chloroformed stupor and STUN GUNNED Xander?

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[2:55:48 PM]

Grr. Argh. Please please please let Buffy and Joss et al be mounting a critique against Bush-like autocratic rule and militarism (with Buffy in the role of Bush).

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[11:50:12 PM]

From PopPolitics's roundtable discussion of Buffy:

On where we are headed: Did anyone else find this dream dialogue (in “Bring on the Night”) intriguing?
 
Buffy: Something evil is coming.
 
Joyce: Buffy, evil isn't coming, it's already here. Evil is always here. Don't you know? It's everywhere.
 
Buffy: And I have to stop it.
 
Joyce: How are you gonna do that?
 
Buffy: I -- I don't know yet, but?
 
Joyce: Buffy, no matter what your friends expect of you, evil is a part of us. All of us. It's natural. And no one can stop that. No one can stop nature, not even?
 
Now we don’t know yet (unless I missed something) whether the Joyce apparition is a manifestation of The First or not, but if she is not, I think she is pointing Buffy (and the show) in an all important direction here: The First will be defeated not by thinking of its as an other but recognizing (in true Jungian fashion) that it lies within, that it is natural. The Buffyverse is not Manichean.

Amen to that. I really hope the show follows through with this moment. I mean, not simply to say, "Evil is within us all," but really to use that realization to understand everything that has happened in the show.

Watching Angel tonight -- against my will, I assure you, but Faith has returned there -- I noticed again something my roommate in New York pointed out: there is sure is a lot of bondage and torture in this show. But it's also particularly evident that the logic of the show condones beating up and torturing demons (not just ridding the earth of them, perhaps "euthanizing" them for the sake of humanity). There is a lot of beating demons because they are evil. Now really, isn't one of the major realizations that Buffy and Co. missing repeatedly that the distinction between good and evil is just not a fixed, sure thing? Demons can be good. Humans can be bad. Your friends can be bad. In some ways, it's about a shift from thinking about the inherent goodness and badness of people and demons to acts. Angel, of course, is the paradigm for this idea. His acts of goodness lead him to the path of redemption. (Though of course, there are always complications, and god knows what's been going on in his show.)

Oh, and yay! Willow will be on Angel next week to kick some ass as a witch. I'm glad they're letting her get back into the witchcraft.

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[5:00:18 PM]

Buffy? Buffy? What is the deal with Joss's obsession with Chinese as a marker for radical/humorous difference? I'm trying hard not to respond with a sense of "good representation" vs. "bad representation" of Asians, but sometimes I gotta wonder. Why do the writers need to bring in an Asian face as the site of miscommunication, farce, and the failure of something central to the connectedness of the Slayer group? Hmmmm.

And I'm thinking, wasn't the second of the two Slayers that Spike killed a Chinese Slayer during the Boxer rebellion? So apparently, China is a site of vampiric activity and Slayer training. What does that do for the show? What does China as a far away, not-understandable space mean?

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[9:12:52 AM]

Yay [Buffy]!

This show rocks. Totally totally. Willow becomes Warren. Totally totally. The fairy tale rescue. Kissing. Yay!

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[12:24:08 AM]

Ha ha!

From my cousin
I really like what one of my friends said: "Buffy's a repeat because The First needed the night off to make some kind of big speech" - posted on legalmoose on the night of the State of the Union address

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[12:34:31 AM]

From: byronwors

Haven't watched Buffy yet, can you believe that? Did you see the NY Times article about Spike on Sunday? I just skimmed it. Made it kinda sound like maybe Buffy isn't over - even if Sarah Michelle Geller doesn't renew her contract. You know what I think will happen though, one of those slayer-to-be's, the more "mature" dark-haired one will have to kill Buffy to restore the order/balance whatever since it's b/c of Buffy's not-so-alive-ness that's destabilized the world and making it possible for pure evil to happen. Can't wait for that to happen. That will be pretty cool.

[A Vampire With Soul, and Cheekbones]: I totally missed this article when it came out earlier this week. Luckily, people tell me about these things.

As Marsters notes, Buffy is a very moral universe. I hadn't thought about how that would mean the "balance" must be restored between Slayer-good and First Evil. I guess I've been overly-optimistic about Buffy as a vehicle for the critique of the good-evil dichtomoy. Sigh. Can I help write the last few episodes of Buffy? Well, aside from the fact that they're probably written and filmed by now.

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[9:29:59 AM]

[Kennedy] rocks. I will be so unhappy if they kill her, though given the history of Buffy, she will probably die in an act of ultimate sacrifice. She should become the next slayer, though. Buffy is so not living through this season.

And I can't believe I didn't know that the third season dvd set was out already. Eek! I should've asked for that for my birthday. :)

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[1:51:59 PM]

To: byronwors
Subject: Re: Geez Louise

Yup, the only thing that makes a little more pessimistic is the sentimental turn that Spike has taken. I mean, the whole, "She's the one who believes in me," stuff makes me think the show is becoming this trite story of love as redemption. I mean, I guess that wouldn't be so bad in itself, but there are so many ways for such a theme to go wrong. Like _The Fifth Element_. Gargh.

P

At 12:33 PM Saturday 12/21/02, you wrote:
Oh goody, I'm so relieved to hear your theories about Buffy. It totally
makes sense. I guess that evil has always been undermined in some way or
another - usually in everyone around her, but never Buffy. I guess the theme
has come up a lot over the years. That would be a really good way to end
Buffy, actually.

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[10:39:24 PM]

Ok, I've totally neglected writing about Buffy all season so far. I've had things to say, but the semester kind of ran away with me. Now it's over, though. Here are some quick thoughts about the latest episode I sent byronwors in response to his e-mail:

To: byronwors
Subject: Re: Geez Louise

Yup and yup and yup. Saw Buffy, definitely can't believe Buffy's speech, but I think it's all going to build up to a realization about the whole good-evil thing, and I think Giles is the First, too. The Buffy speech was totally like W and I think intentionally this final season is going to be a critique of the whole us-vs.-them, we're goody-goody and we fight the baddies kind of thing. At least I hope. Remember the parts where the mom said things like evil is everywhere and in all of us? And it's supposed to be ominous? Well I think this season's revelation is that she's right, not in a scary way, but in the way that brings an end to the Buffy universe. And then there's Willow who was like, the evil is still in me don't make me kill anyone! So I think the show is definitely going to end on that note of dismantling the whole human-good, demon-bad, moral universe thing. Maybe they'll also take up the insane asylum thing again. That Buffy has been crazy this whole time. I dunno.

Oh, and with Giles, I definitely think he's the First or some other aspect of the First because they haven't explained how he escaped the ax. He could also be some other primal force (the First good?), but I think it's going to be that he's also the First, and it's about the conflicts of these kinds of forces within themselves (the First isn't really pure evil?). Remember how in the first episode of the season the First, in the form of Buffy (notice how the First takes the form of Buffy, she's died before?), said it's all about "power"?

Do you think I'm being too optimistic? But it is Joss Whedon after all...

I've missed Firefly the last couple of weeks. :( I just woke up today after a five-hour nap this afternoon.

P

At 12:51 PM Friday 12/20/02, you wrote:

So! What did you think of Buffy this week? I saw it on tivo Wednesday. I
can't believe Buffy's speech at the end - straight from Dubya about
declaring war and bringing it onto the evil itself.... I think that I'm
losing my patience for Buffy. She's yucky. Maybe she'll finally die this
season. I still like Drusilla and Spike though. I like Willow too. Oh yeah,
B thinks that Giles is the First - since that last time, they showed him
about to be killed...

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[10:47:21 PM]

Oh, and anyone interested in writing papers on Buffy for a conference should check out this Call For Papers I just got: [Blood, Text and Fears: Reading around Buffy the Vampire Slayer].

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[10:40:30 PM]

Ok, that ending (before the Spike part) was disappointing. Why is Joss Whedon so obsessed with Xander? I guess he really meant it when he said that of all the characters, he was probably most like Xander. The episodes were good until the point when Xander says that he's not the hero of the story (which inevitably translated into his being the hero of the story). Sure, love can save us all, blah blah blah, but did it have to be done so heavy-handedly and with Xander?

When Giles came in, I whooped for joy. Yay librarian kicking ass! I like how Willow totally read everyone (like Spike does), especially Buffy as the goody-two-shoes Slayer. Always a warrior, she must always come to the rescue. She's such a flat character, even though the writers tried to fill her with angst and confusion this past season. In the beginning, before she was so self-assuredly the SLAYER, she was much more interesting as a character. She didn't brandish her goodness in front of everyone like she is somehow the paragon of excellence.

I loved how active Anya was in the finale. Teleporting rocks. Plus, chanting the spell that put a damper on Willow was very cool. She kept getting beat down, though. She should get some powers beyond the ability to grant any vengeance wish.

Is there any doubt that Spike will be a major player next season? Muhahahaha.... But what a twist -- did I hear correctly that the demon restored Spike's soul. Oooo....

Yeah, so Willow was really cool and evil in the episode. Zot zot. She did the dark force electricity zapping thing.

So let me get this straight: true magic comes from the goodness of humanity. But somehow Willow taps into this awesome magic of grief and anger. Is this false magic? You know, I think all fantasy stories boil down to this core spark of humanity, often undefinable, but just as often defined as love. And I'm sorry, but that's just not enough for me. While I can appreciate that the love Willow feels from and for Xander might be strong, it needs to be evoked more viscerally than through Xander's paltry recallings of young Willow things (the yellow crayon). I mean please. If that's all that it takes to stop an anger-driven Willow, why couldn't any of her other friends come close to slowing her down? Don't tell me that next season Willow and Xander are going to get (back) together or something.

Rob was saying that it would be a much more interesting ending if Willow had killed Xander at the Satanic temple, and then that event was the trigger to her suppressed humanity. Sure, she would've killed her closest friend and all that, but it would've made a much more convincing moment of realization than Xander making the jokes.

Even though the ending was kinda eh, this viewing experience of Buffy was one of the best ever because of Rob. :)

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[10:49:46 AM]

Woo! Willow kicks ass!

I hate how my friend tells me what's going to happen in Buffy a year ahead of time. I knew about Tara and Willow sometime last year, or at least knew of the rumors, which amounts to the same thing.

But that scene where Willow soaks up the books on the Dark Arts? YAY! I loved how the words, like tattoos, raced up her arms and into her hair. How cool is that? The darkness of the text becomes the darkness of her dyed hair representing the assumption of the dark side. Oooo....

Is it just me, or does Buffy's insistent proclamations of goodness ring less and less true, less and less believable, as each season passes? Whereas before her virtues and suffering seemed genuine, now they seem more and more like a performance of her self, of her Slayer-ness. Interesting shift... And who is she to talk, as Rob pointed out, about not killing humans when she tried to kill Faith a few years ago? Deskinning Warren was really creepy. "Bored now." Whoosh!

I also find it incredibly fascinating how the show has been so insistent on the divide between the mystical and the ordinary, between magic and science. It's definitely one reason why I like the show so much. As much as it is a fantastical world with demons and magic and all, it has such a particular (practical?) relationship to our everyday world. One could easily map the mystical to a psychological space of a "normal" human being (hence the incredible genius of suggesting the whole series and world is the delusion of a mentally unstable Buffy in L.A.). But this is also where ideas of magic become particularly interesting. Magic, especially through spells, works through the ability to make things happen simply by thinking them or saying them. Repeated incantations will bring about things. Calling out to demons will make them come. It's a fascinating literalization of performative utterances, an Austin-ian understanding taken to the n-th degree, the realm where science studies would go if it could (words = reality?).

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[12:13:05 PM]

Xander sucks to high heaven. I can't believe they shot Tara, though of course it makes sense in the Buffy-verse of pain and suffering and the impossibility of continual fulfillment in love. And of course, what better way to push Willow over the edge than through her heart? Previews for next week make me squirm with excitement. Willow kicks ass!

The whole Spike rape thing was very upsetting. Of course it was upsetting to see Buffy getting almost-raped. But it was also upsetting to see Spike force himself on her. If anyone's looking for social commentary in Buffy, this is a prime moment for thinking about date rape and rape within relationships.

The show seems to be delving very much into a "male" psyche these days, with the focus on Xander's thoughts and reactions to his desertion of Anya (he deserves all his pain) and Spike's confusion with Buffy (damn her, poor Spikey).

It's obvious I have certain biases in evaluating characters.

I'm glad the show finally has returned to thinking about Spike's chip as soul-like (or not). It's so interesting how souls and sex work in the show. Joss Whedon clearly has issues with sexuality, love, romance, and all that. Sex is destructive, soul-wrenching (and removing, in a very literal way at times). But the soul also seems to function more like a conscience, like the ego (or is it the superego?) controlling the id of the body. I think it's fascinating how the show has revealed Spike to be an extremely altruistic being as well, someone who though incredibly self-involved, narcissistic, and caught up in passionate Romantic ideals of love that demand fullness of SELF still can think of another so fiercely.

Why don't the evil people on the show just shoot Buffy? The demons and whatnot always try to beat her up with sticks and axes and other things that require them to get within striking distance of her. But she's not invincible. Bullets can hurt her very easily. Weird how someone as smart as Warren would try all these outlandish schemes to deal with Buffy, but only finally resorting to a gun which seems the most effective at throwing her world out of whack (though unintentionally killing Tara).

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[7:27:37 PM]

I love Buffy. But I also am troubled by the insistent pulls toward normative definitions of gender, sexual relationships, and such. What's great is that given the context of the show, the world populated by demons (long understood as metaphors for what normative society tries to cast out as undesirable) provides many examples of non-normative or queer lives.

Spike is my favorite now because he simultaneously evokes a sappy, romantic view of love and a sexuality disarticulated from necessary attachments to "one love." This last episode, "Entropy," seems so conventional in plot. The broken-up couples (Xander/Anya and Buffy/Spike) explode when the pairing of Anya and Spike in shared despair triggers Xander's homicidal (literally in the ax-murderer sense) attack on Spike. I hated how he described Spike as a thing, something unlovable, undeserving of any person's care and attention. It is a logic premised on exclusion -- that which is not alive, that which is not deserving, that which is not of his world (the Scoobies, etc.). And Buffy with her inability to pronounce her relations with Spike, her insistence (rationalization?) that she is simply using Spike, that there is nothing "there" between them. But clearly there is some connection between them, some spark or other, whether or not it is love or romance.

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[7:16:57 PM]

[Shyaku] makes an interesting comment about Xander attempting to use a macho identity to cover a more essential shy identity. Seeing some of the reruns of the first season on FX, though, I think that Xander has always been a jerk. He's always had an overblown sense of his macho-ness, covering his failures as a "man" with his comic facade. So, I guess in some ways I would say that Xander used to act shy and stuff as a cover for his more innate jerkiness. I just don't like him. Nyah. ;)

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[10:44:09 PM]

W
O
W
!!!

I haven't written about the last couple of episodes because I've not been really inspired by them. In fact, I've not been very inspired by this whole season so far. But WOW! This week's episode, "Normal Life," really pulled together things, spun them, and shook things up. Finally we have the reassertion of Buffy's intense engagement with suffering and pain. (And lots of great analysis from Spike.)

I'm fascinated by mental illness as a trope in film/literature as well as mental illness as a medical discourse. I planned on writing my senior thesis in college on madness, but freaked out when I saw how much literature there was out there on madness in fiction (especially on madwomen). I'm thinking just about what I've read this semester -- things like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" -- stories that exist in this strange polarized space of madness/extreme clarity. Like the Buffy episode, these stories cast main characters in the role of heroine/crazy woman. And in the end, we're left with outright uncertainty about which standards of "reality" to believe.

I'm interested in how discourses of madness often rely on saying things, on performative utterances of truth, as the first step to mental health. In the episode, the doctors and others in the institution kept encouraging Buffy just to say that she realizes she is delusional. The simple act of stating a reality makes it real.

I am so so happy with this episode.

It is kind of gimmicky and twilight-zone-y. But it works for me. It would be very interesting if the show had gone into the world of the mental institution. What if Buffy became the story of a madwoman who believed herself to be the Slayer? I'm not sure if that would've been a particularly interesting move -- to have the past five-and-a-half seasons cast into a delusion. But I could see it working. Of course, the problem then is that the complex engagement of the supernatural as metaphors and rearticulations of social problems then becomes epiphenomena of a schizoid delusion. Still, that doesn't mean their force as analytical tools is any less incisive.

(Xander is stupid, by the way. I can't believe he ran away from Anya. What a wimp. As if being afraid that he'll hurt her is really an adequate excuse for leaving her at the altar. The best way to protect against hurting her is to be a good man, a good husband. Not to run away.)

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[6:46:25 PM]

My thoughts about "Dead Things": there some great moments in the episode, but overall it dragged. The triumverate of geeky evil still isn't really working for me, but the final turn of "getting away with murder" might complicate things in an interesting way. Warren is so enigmatic. Why is he so amoral? Why is he so in need of a lover to please his every (sexual) need? I hope he does reveal more of his motivations, more of what drives him.

Buffy's emotions and pain in this episode didn't work for me. I had high hopes for a strong parallel with Faith's situation, Faith's turning point. When Faith killed a human, that was when something in her snapped, her fragile sense of "right" and "wrong" somehow fell by the wayside. (I really want her to come back, for the show to explore that path of contrition....) But Buffy seemed so flat, so all-too-good. She wanted to turn herself in to the police. And yet she was able (and willing) to beat down Spike who stood in her way. The way she treats him is so fascinating.

The best moment was the ending, of course, when Buffy is talking to Tara (yay Tara!). And she finally admits that she doesn't want to be forgiven for her actions. She is afraid of what it means when everything she does is "good" or "excusable" because of the great weight of the world upon her.

Slight digression: This is very fascinating in light of the discussion I had in my class about Kate Chopin's The Awakening (a short novel everyone should read!!) and the main character's ultimate turn to the infinite nothingness of death in preference to a life of endless fulfillment. Is desire really possible only when the cherished object is unreachable? Must desire as a moving force in life, as that which propels us to act, always be a marker of the unattainable? Must it always signal absence (I desire food because I am hungry / I lack food)?

So what does it mean for Buffy to question her being and her worth because somehow everyone always forgives her? She wants to be "wrong." She can't be ok and normal. There must be something "wrong" about her, something that people can point to as a lacking in her. Is she too complete? Is she otherwise too alright?

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