Buffy Season 6
Feb. 28th, 2005 10:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelkWhat follows is a distillation of some thoughts I’ve been having for a while about the character arcs, especially Willow’s, in S6 of BtVS. I’ve been rather struck by the way all the characters seem to hit rock bottom at points that reveal their underlying issues to be based on real-life rather than mystical problems and wondering how this might fit into the framework of the series as a whole.
The Age of Disillusionment
Season 5 of BtVS has been described by no less an insider than Marti Noxon as ‘epic’. Thematically it’s easy to see why. Much of Buffy’s arc is occupied by an examination of what it means to be a ‘warrior’ and the complex relationship between the slayer and her mortality. Willow’s experiments with magic suggest yet another classic fantasy storyline, the one in which the talented ingénue becomes corrupted/seduced to the dark side by the power he/she seeks. Meanwhile, Spike’s pining after the unobtainable Slayer begins to resemble a modern retelling of medieval romance conventions. It feels almost inevitable that things should end, as in so many tales of the great battle between good and evil, with the hero’s sacrificial and noble death.
If the proper end to an epic story is death, Season 6, by the very act of existing, repudiates the epic. This will be the season of “au revoir m’sieur metaphor”, in which real life will prove scarier than monsters and evil will come, not from an irresistible godly force, but from three little boys (and one girl) who just don’t know when to stop. In fact the process of undermining the mythic begins even before Buffy’s magical resurrection, in the final words of “The Gift”. After all, if the hardest thing in this world is to live in it, shouldn’t the hero be up to that challenge too?
And challenge it proves to be, “Everything is hard and bright and violent,” says Buffy, “Everything I feel, everything I touch”. Initially our erstwhile hero withdraws into herself. When she finds she can’t even protect her friends from the knowledge of what they’ve done, she lets herself believe she’s come back a monster and vents her consequent self-loathing on Spike. But she’s not a monster, only behaving like one. Finally, the events of ‘Normal Again’, offer her a poison-induced return to heavenly bliss, but the heaven she now envisages is no Valhalla and the valiant hero is just a sick girl in a lunatic asylum. In the climatic scenes of the episode Buffy at last rediscovers the strength to reject the illusion and begin the journey back to life in earnest.
While Buffy actively chooses disillusionment, Willow and Spike seem more deeply committed to the epic interpretations of their lives/unlives and have to be forcibly shocked out of their fantasies.
In the early episodes of season 6, the idea of becoming the next Anakin Skywalker seems to exert the same pull on Willow as Supervillany does on the three nerds. She gains the power to remake the world to her own liking, but is that really what she wants? This is the girl who balked at even being called the Big Gun following her first experience of real power in the final episodes of Season 5. Raising Buffy from the dead feels amazing but also absolves Willow of having to stay “boss of us” and that may be the point. Like most of us, I suspect, Willow wants to feel like Super!Willow without the attendant responsibility of being her. She wants power, yes, but largely as means to avoid having to experience unpleasantness, and if achieving that disrupts other people’s lives then so be it. It takes a trip to Rack’s for her to finally see through what she’s been doing and she crashes to the ground, neither Dark!Phoenix nor fallen angel, but just another junkie seeking a fix for her emotional inadequacies.
Spike’s arc begins by apparently continuing to follow the Courtly Love paradigm of the previous season. However, this breaks down in OMWF, which forces him to admit to his distinctly unknightly feelings of frustration and anger in song. When he and Buffy finally have it out and bring down the house, his romantic illusions revert to the gothic model. “Great love is wild and passionate and dangerous. It burns and consumes.” And disintegrates into narcissistic delusion, with all that effulgence coming down in the end to no more than a brutal scuffle on the bathroom floor.
Much (but by no means all) fan criticism of season 6 seems to revolve around the writers’ perceived failure to deliver the “promised” Willow and Spike arcs of corruption and redemption, respectively. I would argue that deconstructing fantasy/romance conventions was, in many ways, the point of a season that looked beyond the hero’s death, to the metaphorical equivalent of that stage of life when you finally abandon childhood dreams of playing for England or winning the Nobel prize for medicine.
The Age of Disillusionment
Season 5 of BtVS has been described by no less an insider than Marti Noxon as ‘epic’. Thematically it’s easy to see why. Much of Buffy’s arc is occupied by an examination of what it means to be a ‘warrior’ and the complex relationship between the slayer and her mortality. Willow’s experiments with magic suggest yet another classic fantasy storyline, the one in which the talented ingénue becomes corrupted/seduced to the dark side by the power he/she seeks. Meanwhile, Spike’s pining after the unobtainable Slayer begins to resemble a modern retelling of medieval romance conventions. It feels almost inevitable that things should end, as in so many tales of the great battle between good and evil, with the hero’s sacrificial and noble death.
If the proper end to an epic story is death, Season 6, by the very act of existing, repudiates the epic. This will be the season of “au revoir m’sieur metaphor”, in which real life will prove scarier than monsters and evil will come, not from an irresistible godly force, but from three little boys (and one girl) who just don’t know when to stop. In fact the process of undermining the mythic begins even before Buffy’s magical resurrection, in the final words of “The Gift”. After all, if the hardest thing in this world is to live in it, shouldn’t the hero be up to that challenge too?
And challenge it proves to be, “Everything is hard and bright and violent,” says Buffy, “Everything I feel, everything I touch”. Initially our erstwhile hero withdraws into herself. When she finds she can’t even protect her friends from the knowledge of what they’ve done, she lets herself believe she’s come back a monster and vents her consequent self-loathing on Spike. But she’s not a monster, only behaving like one. Finally, the events of ‘Normal Again’, offer her a poison-induced return to heavenly bliss, but the heaven she now envisages is no Valhalla and the valiant hero is just a sick girl in a lunatic asylum. In the climatic scenes of the episode Buffy at last rediscovers the strength to reject the illusion and begin the journey back to life in earnest.
While Buffy actively chooses disillusionment, Willow and Spike seem more deeply committed to the epic interpretations of their lives/unlives and have to be forcibly shocked out of their fantasies.
In the early episodes of season 6, the idea of becoming the next Anakin Skywalker seems to exert the same pull on Willow as Supervillany does on the three nerds. She gains the power to remake the world to her own liking, but is that really what she wants? This is the girl who balked at even being called the Big Gun following her first experience of real power in the final episodes of Season 5. Raising Buffy from the dead feels amazing but also absolves Willow of having to stay “boss of us” and that may be the point. Like most of us, I suspect, Willow wants to feel like Super!Willow without the attendant responsibility of being her. She wants power, yes, but largely as means to avoid having to experience unpleasantness, and if achieving that disrupts other people’s lives then so be it. It takes a trip to Rack’s for her to finally see through what she’s been doing and she crashes to the ground, neither Dark!Phoenix nor fallen angel, but just another junkie seeking a fix for her emotional inadequacies.
Spike’s arc begins by apparently continuing to follow the Courtly Love paradigm of the previous season. However, this breaks down in OMWF, which forces him to admit to his distinctly unknightly feelings of frustration and anger in song. When he and Buffy finally have it out and bring down the house, his romantic illusions revert to the gothic model. “Great love is wild and passionate and dangerous. It burns and consumes.” And disintegrates into narcissistic delusion, with all that effulgence coming down in the end to no more than a brutal scuffle on the bathroom floor.
Much (but by no means all) fan criticism of season 6 seems to revolve around the writers’ perceived failure to deliver the “promised” Willow and Spike arcs of corruption and redemption, respectively. I would argue that deconstructing fantasy/romance conventions was, in many ways, the point of a season that looked beyond the hero’s death, to the metaphorical equivalent of that stage of life when you finally abandon childhood dreams of playing for England or winning the Nobel prize for medicine.
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no subject
Date: 2005-03-09 01:51 pm (UTC)I once wrote a post comparing the tower jump and the S6 aftermath to any really big accomplishment in life: you think, "If only I could finish my dissertation/graduate/win an Olympic medal/become president of the company/whatever, I would have this great shining moment, and everything would be perfect!" Except, even once you've attained your ultimate goal, and gone out in a blaze of glory, life goes on. You still have to take out the trash, pay the bills, watch over your bratty kleptomaniac younger sister, get a crappy job, and still go out every night saving the world. The big shining moment is just that--a moment. It's a punctuation mark in the narrative of your life, not the sum total of it.
So that's why I love where S6 went, in Buffy's case, and you do a great job of explaining why it was important for the others, too. I think the same reasoning as above works for Spike's return in AtS S5: he still needed to learn to make an unlife for himself after his ultimate sacrifice. Otherwise, it would be an easy out.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-09 05:19 pm (UTC)Is there a link to your shining moment post, I’d love to read it. Our education systems do seem set up to push that model of life with the emphasis on finals/thesis completion. But whether it would be possible or even desirable to avoid it completely? I don’t know.
And Spike, I think, spent S7 learning to love like a person rather than a Byronic hero but was still very much a work in progress on other fronts by the end. So although giving the hero’s sacrifice to him was a good end to Buffy’s story, I agree it would have been too much of an easy out for his.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-09 05:32 pm (UTC)Er, lord knows when it was. It was not a big fancy essay, pretty much what I wrote above.
Our education systems do seem set up to push that model of life with the emphasis on finals/thesis completion. But whether it would be possible or even desirable to avoid it completely? I don’t know.
I really think the "big achievement" model is an intrinsic part of Western society, American in particular. Always pushing toward some huge goal, thinking that will make one's life have a purpose. I'm hardly an expert on Eastern philosophies, but it seems there are other cultures that place more emphasis on the value of the small, everyday gesture.
Or maybe it's just a "grass is always greener" thing. ;)
So although giving the hero’s sacrifice to him was a good end to Buffy’s story, I agree it would have been too much of an easy out for his.
Yeah, there was a lot more for him to do. Even after S5, alas, although we'll just have to make it up ourselves at this point.