BtVS S8.12 Wolves at the Gate

[hazelk]

Happy Birthday shadowkat67!


Comedy is hard. Hard to pin down, to dissect, to explain. Hard to do but all too easy to know when it’s done right. March is screwball season at the NFT, The Lady Eve, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday. It’s almost impossible to think about those movies without slipping into "why they can’t make them like that these days.”

Except when they can. Goddard and Jeanty do screwball, matching verbal pyrotechnics with speechless French farce. It’s all in the timing. Comedy is like sex, comedy is about sex, sex death and pain. Interestingly one of the reasons often given for the unscrewiness of modern romance is that without a Hayes code to mother comic invention the screwing part is all too easy. Media and fandom responses to Buffy/Satsu make it all too clear that we’re really nothing like as enlightened as we like to think. There’s the blatant homophobia (in a few cases) but more widely the rush to judgement of any sexual interaction that doesn’t categorise neatly into true love or exploitative lust. Classic screwball relationships were never that simple. In The Lady Eve a conwoman seduces a mark, falls for him confesses, gets rejected, takes revenge and picks up all over again. In Bringing Up Baby a naïve paleontologist is lured away from his innocent fiancé by a self-styled force of nature and I’m not even going to try dissecting the layers of relationship dysfunctionality in His Girl Friday. But who roots for the fiancé or the Ralph Bellamy character when watching either film? Bellamy maybe in retrospect but only then. Comedy makes its audience complicit with all manner of dubious behaviour because it’s funny but also because it’s true. It is more complicated.

So we begin with Renee and Xander finally getting to the point of her asking him to put the question in sweetly traditional fashion. These Sergeant Furys may talk the Nick and Nora, it’s a flirtation founded on assassination and celts with clubs, but both are sober throughout. Then with no more prep than a simple “who’d want to be alone on a night like this” there’s Buffy with Satsu. Naked in bed and I didn’t see that coming (operative word) although with hindsight Buffy mentioning Satsu’s scentfulness in the previous issue should have been a giveaway. Sex smells good in the works of Whedon. So set up and we knew Satsu loved her and we knew Buffy knew and Satsu knew she knew and knew she didn’t and yet they still went there. It happens. More interesting is the other set up, not just that Buffy is lonely and Buffy is horny (and sex is connection, slot A in slot A) but that Buffy really cares about Satsu (enough to go back and heal with her). These girls aren’t mortal enemies but friends and close colleagues, if it’s Buffy/Spike re-visited it’s once more with affection. Love aside (and romantic love is both a self-sacrificing and a uniquely selfish emotion) there’s a whole Old Pretender/Young Pretender, Margot Channing/Eve Harrington aspect to the affair, which makes who has the power here fascinatingly fluid. Satsu hero-worships Buffy but from Buffy’s point of view it’s only a matter of time before her protégé surpasses her.

Enter Dracula and is the Sunset Boulevard connection a Twilight thing? Dracula was the vampire movie star back in season five now he’s reduced to tottering around the mansion like Norma Desmond on cabbage leaves and rubbing alcohol. Pictures got smaller until Xander returned heart (grossly) in hand. The Buffy parallels have got to be intentional, after all Goddard had an earlier story that made the comparison explicitly (you almost wonder if there’s something of how he sees Joss in there). If true it also links the new Goth gang to Simone and her gun totting acolytes and that’s another development that just begs for follow up.

Comments

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

I really like this interpretation. As a bisexual, I tend to resist rigid sexual categorizations, but I admit it pings me as wrong to see Buffy having sex with a woman -- she has always read so profoundly heterosexual to me, a true Kinsey zero. I even wound up removing the sex from a slash story I wrote (Buffy/Tara/Willow) because Buffy seemed so straight to me that it didn't feel *true*.

I wonder if it's easier to do this in comics because you don't have the het-ness of SMG's performance front and center.

I think the choice is perfect for BTVS from a narrative and a political point of view, so I've no argument with it on those grounds. And you're right to note the way it was foreshadowed and that it's a good and reasonable thing for a lonely, horny person to do with a willing friend she cares for. And I don't necessarily feel that the experience means Buffy is "gay now" -- people aren't that simple. But I'm still having a hard time believing she'd do it.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

I'm with you in that I think I still can't believe she'd do it but I can believe she's done it if that makes any sense. I do think it's the best way to tell the story, if they'd tried a long UST-ridden lead in it would have read as a coming out story whatever the intention and doing it this way brings Satsu centre stage that much more quickly, which is good in all kind of ways.

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

Agreed on both counts. (: If they were going to do it, this is definitely the best way.

And now for something completely different

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

I've been productive over Easter and finally have a complete version of a Slayers vid to Sinead O'Connor's "Scarlet Ribbons" I've been working on since Christmas. But after all this time have zero perspective on whether it makes sense to anyone not me. Would you be interested (have time) to do a beta on it? I'd be very grateful.

~H

Re: And now for something completely different

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, I would love to! But I don't think I have the time right now. I have a friend coming in for a visit this week, and I'm under the gun on deadlines for the vidding documentaries I'm editing -- that's where all my fannish free time is going.

Damn, I miss beta-ing. I've turned down so many requests this year. ):

Try elynross?

Re: And now for something completely different

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Doh! I should have thought. I will try elynross - thank you for the suggestion :-)

[elisi]

But I'm still having a hard time believing she'd do it.
I don't think show!Buffy would. Comic!Buffy did. Different things. :)

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

But see, if I want to consider the comic canon (and I do!), I have to think of them as the same thing rather than different things.

[elisi]

But see, if I want to consider the comic canon (and I do!)
Why on earth would you want to do that? (Sorry, I just can't do it. It's nothing to do with thinking that s8 is entertaining crack - I *adore* 'After the Fall', but still don't consider it canon. It's just like extra shiny fic.)

But, in the interests of trying to get the two Buffies to overlap, these two posts might help. :)

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

I guess I want to because I will always want more Buffy. (:

Thanks for the links! I'll check 'em out.

[stormwreath.livejournal.com]

Fascinating analysis, especially the comparison to pre-21st century depictions of relationships. Although I don't think the metaphor 'slot A in slot A' works as well as the original version... :-)

I didn’t see that coming (operative word) although with hindsight Buffy mentioning Satsu’s scentfulness in the previous issue should have been a giveaway.
It's an unusually intimate thing to say about someone, isn't it? Not to mention her stumbling over the compliments in "someone, you know, someone really cool" in her next speech.

Personally I'm miffed because after 'A Beautiful Sunset' I actually wrote 1700 words of an unfinished story where Buffy discusses her feelings for Satsu with Willow - the punchline was going to be her confession that they'd already slept together - and now that's been thoroughly Jossed before I had time to finish it. :-( [:-)]

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Intimate and with a history from Angel smelling the blonde on Wesley's hair to what Anya said to Spike before Entropy took over. Maybe ypu could re-write the whole thing in the subjunctive, some kind of therapy role play with I statements - this is how I would have told you if that Goth bitca hadn't dropped ypu in there already?

[tigerpetals.livejournal.com]

I'd still read it, if you decide to finish it. :)

[moscow-watcher.livejournal.com]

Interesting parallels.

But the crucial difference between classic screwball comedies and BtVS is that the scale of events is global on the latter. I rather see parallels to Barbarella, Modesty Blaise, Austin Powers and other comedies with international (or interstellar) setting.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Neither All About Eve nor Sunset Boulevard are screwballs and I wasn’t trying to say Season Eight was, just that I could see similarities in the style (and quality) of the humour and the way it allows the complexities of sex and human relationships to be addressed. And could I be any more po-faced? If there’s a common thread to all the movies I mentioned it would be that they could all be categorized as women’s movies, packed with vibrant, vital women and interested in how they relate to one another as well as to men and that’s a definite point of comparison both with Buffy in general and with Season Eight in particular.

Other than setting I’m really not seeing the similarities with Austen Powers or Barbarella or even between those two movies. Although they share a setting one is a parody and the other the kind of soft-core sixties romp it set out to parody. They’re almost a classic example of why setting, far from being crucial, is an extremely unreliable basis on which to draw parallels between movies/comics/shows.