Month: July 2015

In this episode, Buffy feels isolated from her friends and mother after her return to Sunnydale. Then zombies crash a party and that fixes everything.

Well, eventually. The zombies don’t really get mixed into Buffy’s storyline until the 3/4 mark of the episode, and until then we’re following her through some uninterrupted angst. The show initially has Buffy and her friends greet each other awkwardly but happily, but the relationships swiftly spiral into awkwardness: Joyce is full of smiles and tries too hard to be accommodating, but can’t help seeding every conversation with passive aggressive frustration; Willow is friendly and pleased to see her, but then avoids her while claiming not to be avoiding her; Xander is gleeful at her return, but also can’t help but voice his resentment. All this growing isolation is beautifully depicted, nicely underplayed with awkward silences and off-looks. The message Buffy takes from this is that returning home was a mistake: while she might be ready to return to Sunnydale, Sunnydale doesn’t really want her back. And so she gets ready to leave. Here, finally, the unspoken tensions come to a head as everybody discovers her attempt to leave, and it finally provokes everyone to say what’s on their mind. And then, zombies.

This is a solid metaphor monster episode. Metaphor monsters were initially meant to incarnate the horrors of high school life, but the zombies in this episode represent a much more general phenomenon. This is a sign of the show’s shift in focus, as it owns up to the fact that it was never about high school and teenagers at all, but rather about life in general. (After all, what is drama about teens but a metaphorical representation of proper drama about adults? Cough.)

The show hangs a lampshade on a metaphorical reading for the zombies:

Xander: You know, maybe you don’t want to hear it, Buffy, but taking off like you did was incredibly selfish and stupid.
Buffy: Okay! Okay. I screwed up. I know this. But you have no idea! You have, you have no idea what happened to me or what I was feeling!
Xander: Did you even try talking to anybody?
Buffy: There was nothing that anybody could do. Okay? I just had to deal with this on my own.
Xander: Yeah, and you see how well *that* one worked out. You can’t just bury stuff, Buffy. It’ll come right back up to get you.

Xander is calling out Buffy’s avoidant behaviour, fleeing Sunnydale without telling anyone, but the zombies also represent Joyce and the Scoobies giving Buffy fake smiles and denying that anything’s different or wrong. The conflict that drives this whole episode is about people not saying what they’re feeling, which is clearly presented as toxic: the weight of what is unspoken is far more dangerous than anything that could be said.

This is an amusingly self-serving message, as far as drama goes. On the one hand, fictional drama in general, and television drama in particular, sustains itself on matters unspoken. So many dramatic plots would be resolved swiftly and without much consequence if one character would just tell the other character something. Often the reasons why this talk is withheld are tenuous or absent entirely: they say nothing because the story demands it. (A notable subset: they never mentioned the secret because it hadn’t even been invented until the current episode is written.)

On the other hand, while fiction thrives on revelation and laying bare the resentments and secrets and concerns that sit between two characters, the real world does not always align with this. Real people often withhold their private thoughts. Their relationships may change or end as a result, but they also might continue pretty much as they did before. Telling people things doesn’t always solve problems, and can create many new ones. People aren’t stories, and popular fictions are poorly placed to moralize about secrecy and discretion. (See also: crappy 70s/80s therapy culture telling people to “be honest”.)

Buffy‘s plotting has always been happy to use dramatic contrivance – indeed, the final straw that has Buffy packing her bags is when she just happens to conveniently overhear when her mother finally confides her discomfort to a conveniently-introduced new friend. However, this show has always held itself to a higher standard than most pop culture in the dimension of emotions and emotional consequences, and this episode provides a solid showcase for this. The trouble among the friends is finally expressed with brutal honesty, which gets so unpleasant that Oz interposes himself to stop people really hurting each other emotionally; but the seeds are set for this conflict across the episode through many small awkward interactions, and the clear sense that everyone involved is only figuring out how they feel as they go along. Authentic emotional is even played for farce, setting up the old trope of a teenage party getting bigger than expected by having the core characters feel too awkward to face each other in a small group.

It’s notable that Buffy’s closest friends Willow and Xander carry most of the load here in making Buffy unhappy. Her relationship with her mother is obviously more powerful and more important, but it’s also somewhat expected that there would be issues between them. Willow’s and Xander’s anger at Buffy feels unfair and entirely human, and without the grounding of unconditional parental love the stakes even feel slightly higher. All of which points at the other central figure in Buffy’s life, Giles, who is a counterpoint to all of the above. He, alone, expresses nothing but satisfaction and relief in her return. His quiet relief, alone in his kitchen listening to Buffy and her friends, is enormously affecting. And as a bonus, because Giles doesn’t need to walk a path of forgiveness and acceptance, he is freed up to provide an absolutely hilarious performance in the zombie throughline that sits as a solid B-plot throughout the episode.

The action concludes with the shocking (and never-again-mentioned) death of Joyce’s best friend (shades of Ted, and a reminder that the emotional continuity so prized by this show is rarely applied to secondary characters like Joyce), and a runaround showdown where the gaze of the evil mask is crucial for no metaphorical reason worth discussing. The action itself is used to resolve the character conflict: basically, they all accept their interpersonal issues don’t count for much when zombies and vampires and demons are around and Buffy has a job to do smacking them down. The metaphor works – let the bad blood come out into the open, have the fight, then relax. Curiously, the metaphor positions the disputing friends on the same side, with the dissension between as the enemy that must be controlled – it’s a very interesting way to frame things, and it helps the resumption of friendship among the Scoobies feel both organic and earned even though none of the harsh words exchanged earlier have been addressed in the least.

Other thoughts:
* It’s a shame that when the show finally pulls a story out of Joyce’s gallery as a source of weird stuff, it’s with a Nigerian mask that she calls “primitive”. Perhaps it’s a blessing they mostly forget about the gallery.
* Is the zombie cat a deliberate reference to Pet Semetary?
* Snyder’s threat to keep Buffy out of school is obviously a false jeopardy – the TV show makes it inevitable she’ll be readmitted, so the dramatic question becomes, how (and under what terms) will Snyder be defeated? It is very satisfying to have Giles step in to put Snyder in his place, continuing the movement of his character into the badass role.
* Buffy finds in the basement a photo of Willow, her and Xander… but this framed photo is only a year old, right? What’s it doing in the basement?
* Another appearance of the Cyclops/Wolverine joke from X-Men: Cordelia: How do we know it’s really you and not zombie Giles? / Giles: Cordelia, do stop being tiresome. / Cordelia: It’s him.
* While I’m completely on board with the relationship depicted between Willow and Buffy this episode, the very final sequence, where they trade friendly insults? It just doesn’t feel right to me. Not entirely sure why.

Once there was a girl whose life went bad. Vampire romance turned into vampire horror, until it became just too much for her. So she ran away. She left her home and every friend she had and disappeared into the anonymous big city. She had had enough. She just wanted a simple life. She wanted out. And it worked, for a while. She wasn’t happy, but she was safe.

Then she met Buffy Summers again, and it all went horribly wrong.

The first episode of season three of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has crucial work to do. When we last saw Buffy, she had run away from Sunnydale and the show. Now it’s time to bring her back. But in order to do this, the episode delivers a truly unexpected return. Chantarelle from Lie to Me, a vampire groupie who narrowly escaped slaughter, reappears here. Even in a show that makes a point of treasuring its bit players and revels in comics-style continuity callbacks, this is an astonishing move. She was a minor element in a minor episode, notable only for her clueless optimism. Why on earth would the show build such a crucial plotline around her reappearance?

Like the first episode of season two, this episode is about recovering from the weight of the previous season. Once again, the title character has lost her way and is trying out a different identity, deliberately out of step with audience expectations. Both episodes launch 22-episode seasons in which Buffy must slay some vampires, so for the following 21 episodes to function, they have repair work to do. The Buffy of “When She Was Bad” was troubled and angry, but her recovery to normality was fairly easily achieved. This time the path is not so simple: Buffy had to kill the man she loved, the man who betrayed her and murdered her friend, and whose betrayal was precipitated by her own actions. This is a heavy burden, and true to its founding principles, the show does not stint on the weight. Season two began with Buffy’s return to Sunnydale, but this season she is resolutely away from her friends and family, trying to make a new life. She is alone.

How to bring Buffy back? There are of course countless ways this could be accomplished, but the obvious options are not as suitable as they might first appear. The show could simply contrive a reason to force her back – she forgot something crucial, or she has a message she must deliver,or she discovers a crucial threat to Sunnydale that she decides she can’t ignore. Yet none of these easy answers would address the substance of her departure. Buffy could be made to return and stay, but the emotional reality of her return would be lacking, and in this show, that hurts. Similarly, Buffy’s return could be facilitated by one of the core cast – Cordelia is an obvious candidate, still in her role as truthteller and dispeller of self-delusion, and with a built-in reason to be in Los Angeles as well. But no, even there, the move would be hard to sell. If Buffy comes back because she is persuaded, or because of something temporary, then her true discomfort would remain unaddressed. The troubles ahead would either drive her away again, or destroy the reality of her character.

The truth is, Buffy knows that if she returns to Sunnydale and to the title role of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, then there is more pain ahead of her, more heartbreak, more suffering. She has not passed through a nightmare and come out the other side, but simply glimpsed the horror that awaits her. To be in Sunnydale is to be part of the anguish and certain harm that will be delivered to her life and the lives of all those around her. And so she fled.

The reason she understands is that she senses the rules of the universe around her. She believes she is fated for pain because she is aware that she lives in a reality governed by higher laws. She is a character in fiction, and part of a narrative, and although she is not quite aware of that, she sees enough. The world she lives in is one of realistic pain and realistic threat, but little else stands up to scrutiny. The writers cannot help but make her sense this truth, her above all, because she was created with a self-awareness and insight that is crucial to her whole character, and to maintain the veil from here on would neuter her.

Call it the problem of Anne. Either Buffy’s reflective awareness is stunted, harming her character, or she lives in knowledge and desires only to flee the trap that is this show. How can the show thread the needle?

Buffy is in Los Angeles, living alone, working a thankless job in a diner. The music sting as she does not react to sexual harassment reveals everything we need to know about her: she is hiding from herself. If she stops being Buffy the Vampire Slayer, if she can just be Anne, then she might escape the narrative entirely. She might be forgotten. We, the audience, might let her be. But then Chantarelle, now Lily, appears in her diner with her friend Ricky. Buffy runs from this sign of her past but she meets Lily again later, outside. And then she sees an old man about to be run down, and she cannot help herself: she saves him. Soon after, Lily asks for help: Ricky is missing.

And so we see why Lily is here. Buffy needed a character from her past, one to remind her of the value of her old life, and also to show her that her fate would never leave her alone. It helps the storytelling more if character is tangential enough that Buffy would feel no obligation to them, and innocent enough that she would not be able to feel manipulated. Lily fits all these criteria.

There’s more. Whether Lily was chosen deliberately and strategically for this reason, or it is just creative coincidence, her earlier episode resonates heavily with this one. The great arc of Season 2 began in earnest in Halloween, and Lie to Me immediately followed, encapsulating the whole tragedy of season two in a single episode – someone Buffy loved and trusted turned on her, and his death shook her to the core. Life is hard and complicated, and people die, and it hurts like hell.

Lie to Me was also the episode where the show charted a course back from this kind of trauma: through the love and support of friends. Giles lied to Buffy that everything would be fine; she drew strength not from his lie, but from the fact he cared enough to tell it. The narrative principles of this show inevitably traumatise the characters, but they recover through love. Buffy is hiding from the trauma, but Lily’s appearance proves to her that the trauma will always find her. All that she has accomplished by fleeing is to cut her off from the only remedy to her pain: the love of her friends.

So Buffy makes her choice. She decides not to hide any more. She embraces her identity and her role. She goes to save Lily and avenge Rickie, and finds herself in a slave-ridden hell. She asserts her identity as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (note the invocation of the title of the show, the first time Buffy has ever said it), but then indicates that she is adopting a new strategy. Hiding hasn’t worked. She is going to grab her fate with both hands and take as much control of it as she can. The new direction is signalled in her very next line of dialogue: “Anyone who’s not having fun here, follow me.”

Fun has been conspicuously absent from this story. Buffy has been miserable, and has found only further misery. Enough of that. The show has always believed in true threat and true emotions, but also in joy and laughter. It has always been fun. It has to be fun. Fun is the point. And Buffy’s going to make things fun if it kills her.

Moments later, as Buffy takes control, becomes a leader, and dominates the bad guys, there is an incredible hero shot, the camera coming down on a crane past Buffy on a platform waiting for the bad guys to come at her… And then a huge run-and-punch fight scene that takes the show’s action choreography to a new level. Ending, of course, with the main bad guy finally getting a moment where it looks like he is back in control, holding Lily (of course) at knifepoint. He tells Buffy she has disobeyed, and Buffy’s response? “Yeah, but it was fun.” And then: the bad guy, ranting, grandstanding, steps forward while Lily drifts out of focus behind him.

So Lily uses this as an opportunity and pushes him off the platform to his defeat.

It’s rip-roaring punch-the-air great, and it’s also hilariously meta. It’s hard to read the moment as anything but the show itself intervening again, giving a minor character the chance to unseat a powerful villain via the simple power of blocking. It’s so dumb it’s delightful, and it feels like this is the show *wooing Buffy back*. Yes, there will be pain, you can’t hide from that. But there will also be moments like this.

This is the answer to the problem of Anne. The show is striking a deal with Buffy. She will go back and be herself again, the title character, and she will face the pain. In return, the show will let her be a hero – her kind of hero, the kind of hero who knows too many narrative rules to be safe. The kind of hero who would deliver a coup de grace on a trapped enemy – while comparing herself to Gandhi, no less. A different Buffy. A Buffy who we can believe will go back to Sunnydale, and stay. The show makes with her the same deal it makes with us, the audience: we need to laugh and cheer as well as cry.

The episode ends with Buffy and her mother reunited in a wordless embrace. We’re back. But there’s still some work to do…

Other notes:
* Lily also originated in an episode by Joss Whedon, who is writing this episode – when he cast his mind back for a character to use, she would have been right there.
* Buffy’s working at a place called “Helen’s Kitchen”. The Hel’s Kitchen joke must have been a bridge too far.
* The demon wearing a human mask saying “do you know how long it takes to glue on?” – well I lol’d.
* All of the above completely ignores the parallel storyline in Sunnydale where everyone’s coping with Buffy’s absence. It’s pretty good stuff – the Scoobies trying to slay vampires and not being much good, a subtle demonstration of how intensely Giles is feeling Buffy’s absence, the surprisingly frank discussion between Joyce and Giles about his role in her life, Willow being in charge and thriving at it, it’s all good stuff. But to call out two particular shining lights here:
* Seth Green in the credits! The beautiful moment where Oz throws a stake at a vampire and misses underlines his worth to this show.
* and Cordy just being perfect everywhere, still! There’s a lovely moment where Cordelia and Willow reunite after summer and instantly smile and chat as close friends, which is such an incredible and yet believable contrast to season one. But even better the weird relationship she has with the show’s misfit child of instinct, Xander, where they both talk themselves out of being honest with each other and need to bicker themselves into a life-threatening situation before they can get past their own issues. The problems with Xander continue to grow this season but right now it’s a lovely sequence.
* Now that the core cast have figured out that they’re not really in the real world, the world stops trying so hard to pretend, with amusing results, notably Larry (another recurring bit player) saying “If we can focus, keep discipline, and not have quite as many mysterious deaths, Sunnydale is gonna rule!”
* Although, this episode does feature the extremely rare sight of students in the school library…

In the 90s, reflexive post-modernism moved out of academia and found an unexpected home in popular entertainment, through the overlapping outlets of irony and self-awareness. Nirvana wanted to title their post-breakthrough album “Verse Chorus Verse”, Sprite advertised itself with the slogan “Image is nothing, thirst is everything”, Scream brought horror films back to the multiplex with victims who knew the rules of horror movies. And so on.

The affection for meta was never as dominant as trend pieces would have you believe – trends never are – but it was definitely a part of the zeitgeist, and fledgling network The WB had what the era demanded: wisecracking, weird-talking teens who parsed reality as if it was fictional. Two shows’ worth, in fact, and during 1998 the WB’s critical darling Buffy the Vampire Slayer was used as a platform for its similarly-meta counterpart, break-out teen smash Dawson’s Creek. It’s almost forgotten now, but for that year these two shows were all tangled up with each other.

The WB launched Dawson’s Creek on Tuesday, January 20, 1998, the same night as the heavily promoted Buffy episode in which Angel turned evil, Innocence. The two shows screened as a block, with Buffy as the sillier, goofier lead-in for the more adult Dawson, which courted huge controversy by having its young characters discuss masturbation in the pilot episode.

Dawson immediately became an enormous hit among the coveted teen audience, scorching past Buffy‘s numbers. But by the time Dawson’s short first season and Buffy’s second reached their final episodes (on the same night of course), there was no question that Buffy had become the more grown-up show. Dawson was delivering intense teenage feelings all right, but Buffy was working on another level entirely.

The reputation of Dawson’s Creek has not aged nearly as well as Buffy‘s. It is remembered with great fondness, but with minimal respect. There’s good reason for this: for most of its run, the show was a charming, head-smacking guilty pleasure. But don’t be too quick to write it off. As I’ve argued before, season one was great.

Despite the absence of giant monsters in Dawson and giant foreheads in Buffy, the two shows had much in common. They both featured attractive teenagers uttering highly-stylised dialogue, and used that to sucker-punch the viewer with startling emotional realism. They also both featured a deeply meta approach to their content.

It’s illuminating to compare the ways they played with this aesthetic, particularly how they delivered theme and meaning. Stories have to have meaning, of course, if they’re going to matter to anyone, and the meaning has to sit somewhere. It’s traditional to hide the meaning in subtext, making it implicit in what happens: you get a sense of it by seeing what the characters do, and how they are rewarded or punished, and how they feel about the whole thing.

However, subtext is the exact opposite of self-awareness, and this is the high watermark of an era of self-awareness. Hiding meaning in the subtext doesn’t work cleanly when your characters are constantly exposing and tearing up the subtext. So with all that going on, what happens to the meaning of your story? Where the hell do you put it?

The two shows solve the problem in different ways. Kevin Williamson uses in Dawson the same basic approach he used in Scream. There, the subtext of slasher horror as a contemporary morality play was explicitly called out by the characters; in fact, subverting it became part of the motivation for murder. In Dawson season one, Williamson and his writers have the characters explicitly reference the fact that they are living through a coming-of-age tale, justifying this trick with the device of Dawson’s obsession with films. In both cases, the characters talk about the general meaning of stories like the one they think they’re in, and so end up talking about their story’s actual meaning. In Dawson‘s case, the trick couldn’t sustain itself – the application of a film narrative to an ongoing TV series hints at why – and this structural game was dropped after season one. In fact, the only reason it could last that long was because the characters were never able to solve any of their problems by talking about them. Like figures in a classical tragedy, they were doomed to know their fates but unable to use that knowledge to escape them.

Contrast this with Buffy. The characters talk a lot – endlessly! – and they also seem to know some of the “rules” that govern their reality. But where Dawson and friends seemed to be aware of their position in a dramatic narrative, Buffy and co. have a narrower understanding, where they guess they are inside a story about monster-fighting and use that knowledge against the monsters. They get to be just as self-aware and reflexive as Dawson & company, but because their show is about much more than just fighting monsters, the meaning of the stories can still sit just out of their reach. The Buffy equivalent of Dawson‘s anxious speeches about “what is really going on” are the scenes when metaphor monsters try to tear the Scooby gang to pieces.

During season two, however, Buffy‘s boundaries were starting to fail. The last run of episodes pushed the characters towards a wider awareness, and gave Buffy in particular a clear sense that she wasn’t in a monster-fighting procedural, but in a different kind of narrative that has a larger, more punitive agenda.

Buffy’s insight is the inevitable fate of any show that breaches the boundaries of story and allows itself to be reflexively post-modern: the game is exposed, and the player is revealed. What happens to the show then becomes a reflection of its true nature and the values at its core. Dawson was a show that wanted to push its characters into drama, but never to truly harm them. It depended, ultimately, on keeping them always fundamentally safe so they could love each other. It had a commitment to real emotions, but there was no counterbalance at its core. Such a show can’t do anything but give in to its characters once they become aware of their own narrative position. Dawson’s Creek corrupted into a merry decadence swiftly, losing the rawness and honesty and sexual frankness and awkward edges that so defined its first season.

Buffy had no interest in protecting its characters. Its founding principles were to match real emotions with real threat. These principles created a story engine that wanted the opposite: to break the characters into pieces, slowly, carefully. Committing to real emotions and real threat made Buffy incorruptible despite handing self-awareness to its characters. Those who discovered the truth, like Buffy at the moment she killed Angel, could find no comfort in their status as focal characters in a story. The show’s cruel touch waited above them like a hammer ready to fall. They could only fear the heavens.

This, then, was the challenge facing Buffy the Vampire Slayer as it entered its third season. If the fundamental structure of your show drives the main character to run away from your story – how can you possibly keep the enterprise going and find some joy and laughter along the way? It’s the problem of Jesse again of course, but complicated by the third factor of Buffy‘s and Buffy’s self-awareness. Does it need it’s own name? Maybe. Let’s call it “the problem of Anne”, then. Because that’s where we’re headed next.

Other notes:
* There are, of course, other links between the two shows. Katie Holmes was considered for the role of Buffy Summers. Some sources say she was shortlisted, but I find that hard to credit – Holmes was a developing presence and she radiated awkwardness, like she was always just about to fall over. Even her weird-cute lopsided smile was the opposite of balance. It’s hard to see how her energy could work for the supremely grounded and balanced Buffy.