The Spike, the Wolf, the Ram and the Hart

Random late-night thought: Spike being bound to Wolfram & Hart, and furthermore to LA as it goes to Hell. Angel's team all agreed, for various reasons sufficient to each of them, to join the new staff of Wolfram & Hart. However, as has been revealed in the comics, WR&H were playing a very long game, and they now have the whole team right where they want them. But they wanted Spike, too, and he never would have agreed to join them of his own free will. They knew, though, that he would insist on wearing an amulet designated to be worn by 'a champion, souled but stronger than human', especially to save Buffy. Passing it from Lilah to Angel to Buffy to Spike ensured both that Spike would insist, and that there would be no way for him to understand where/who it came from. Any one of a dozen spells would ensure that the amulet returned to the LA office, and once conjured there, Spike would be bound to the offices, and whether or not he recorporialized, he would then have ties that would keep him in town for a year, which is all they needed. They played him just as much as the rest of the team, just at one more remove.

Buffy Quibble

OK, it's minor, but this one keeps bugging me: At the beginning of Season 1, Buffy was 15 when she started Sophomore year. At the beginning of Season 7, it is implied that Dawn is starting Freshman year, but she is 16. What gives? Sloppy writing? Was she actually taking high school classes before, but in a random building? In fact, for those three years, where were all the teenagers going to school? They could have spent two lines explaining all this, but instead these questions are left to haunt me. *sigh*

The Choices and the Chosen

Warning: this post is entirely spoilers for Buffy Season 7.

One of the wonderful things about Buffy is her awareness of power dynamics. This is most explicit in Checkpoint (5.17), when she discovers that both the Watcher’s Council and Glory, the Hell-Goddess, are behaving as if she is powerless in an attempt to undermine her power. She reclaims her power, and in the process completely redefines the playing field. However, it is most resonant in Choices (7.22). The name of the episode itself conveys so much: for seven years, we (and Buffy) have been told that she is “the Chosen One”, the one girl in all the world to fight the demons and the forces of darkness. Only a few episodes earlier we had discovered that the power was forced into the First Slayer by the first Watchers, in an act some have likened to metaphysical rape, and that the only help those Watchers could provide was to give Buffy another dose of that essentially-demonic power. Instead, Buffy redefines not only the field, but the entire game. She gives the girls themselves, all the Potential Slayers she has gathered, the choice to take up the power and “be strong”. She takes them from passive creatures to active agents, from “We the Watchers have chosen you to be the Slayer” to “I chose to be a Slayer.”

This is beautifully foreshadowed an episode earlier in the season, Same Time, Same Place (7.3). Willow had spent the summer learning to harness and control her magic use, something which before had been closer to an addiction (the handling of that arc is something I will leave for another posting), and finds herself afraid of her friends’ reaction to seeing her for the first time since she tried to kill them. She magically puts herself out of phase with them, leading eventually to her being attacked by the Monster of the Week and having large chunks of skin eaten. In the ‘tag’ at the end of the episode, she is meditating to heal herself, and then she and Buffy talk. Willow tries to go back to meditation with the line “it hurts too much not to, but it takes so much strength…”. Buffy offers to share her own strength with Willow, saying she’s got so much she’s giving it away. Sure enough, by the end of the season, she has given away her strength, her power, and found herself with more than she started with.

Buffy has long made the conscious choice to be The Slayer. She first actively chooses it at the end of the first season, when she knows of her prophesied death and goes to do her duty anyway. At least once a season after that, she has to reaffirm her decision to put her life on the line for the greater good. In the end, she offers the ultimate Choice to the Potentials, and by proxy all women, and thereby empowers herself and all of them/us. No longer is there a Chosen One, and Buffy is free to make her own choices in life.

Beware the shift in technology

In reading Landow’s talk of digitizing print books, I think immediately of a Buffy episode which articulates the turn-of-the-millennium conflict between print and digital media. Landow asks why we would do it, why retype a book or scan it onto a computer, and Buffy and her friends provide some, if not all, of the answers why, and one reason why not, though that might not apply in the real world.
Mr. Giles has a job as the school librarian, but that is just so he can be close to Buffy all day, since he is her mentor, trainer, and information source, known as a Watcher to her Slayer. (Also so he can be near the Hellmouth, which is located directly below the library, but that’s another issue) He has an enormous collection of rare and ancient books, codices, and manuscripts, dealing mostly with demons, spells, and other magical subjects, of which he is justifiably proud. The Slayer and her friends are not nearly as careful with these tomes as a scholar would like, and so he decides to scan them into the computer for searchability. If Giles had been less secrecy-conscious, or Willow more independent-minded, they could have made a website and database from this information, and helped other demon hunters around the world, possibly even other Watchers and their Potential Slayers. Giles himself has said that many of his volumes are unique or the only surviving copy, and certainly his girlfriend, computer teacher and self-professed “techno-pagan” Ms Calendar, has done online research to help them with cases. However, I understand that such things were left out to streamline story, so I can't really object.
The problem must come, of course, and in this case it is that one of the texts is a powerful summoning spell, and the process of scanning it acts like reading it, and the demon materializes within the school network. It is unclear whether or not it can get to the rest of the Web from there, but he concentrates on Willow anyway, so it seems to be a moot point. He woos her and nearly kills her before Buffy rescues her and banishes him. The overt lesson is that people you meet on the Internet are generally not what they appear, especially if they won’t send you a picture or talk to you on the phone, but there is another lesson. Knowledge is power, and the Internet makes it very easy to share both, so you have to pay attention to what you put on the computer, because it can take on a life of its own very easily.

Culture, not just pop culture

If you ask a Literature professor what separates an airport pulp novel from a Classic, generally the answer involves some or all of the following: layers of meaning, allegory and metaphor; truth about the human condition; characters we can identify with, that we root for and suffer and struggle with; and story that holds up over multiple engagements (readings, or, in our case, viewings), even years apart. I contend that the same holds true for audio-visual media like TV and movies. In Buffy, for example, the characters certainly learn. Their whole lives are a process of learning more about the world and themselves, and in watching them, we learn about the world too, often without even realizing it. Through them we remember (or anticipate) the pangs of young love, the thrill of graduation, the trepidation of college, moving out, one’s first job… In short, the characters stand in for us. They are fully-fleshed, complex- even one-note jokes like Larry the football jerk turn out to have unexpected depth. Larry is using his jerkishness to cover his fear of coming out of the closet, and after he admits to someone that he is gay, he becomes a much nicer person, a transformation a friend of mine went through in high school too.
Babylon 5 likewise has something to say about humans and how they interact with each other and the larger world (or universe). There is deep poignancy in the choices the characters must make- there is never an easy, black-or-white choice, but rather a range of shades of grey and even a rainbow of colors. Some characters make what seem like the best choices, for the best reasons, only to have terrible consequences result, and be aware of their own culpability. Others make choices recklessly, with no concern for their own or others’ safety, and find that they have made a positive difference. Most commonly, however, on the show as in life, there are only the bad choices and the worse choices, and the characters have to find a way to make it work out decently well. Friends die or leave, and the survivors have to get on with their lives, but there is life and hope and good times as well. Love can blossom in the most unlikely of situations (and pairings), and acquaintances or even enemies become dear and trusted friends. Misunderstandings occur, but eventually grievances are aired and everyone basically likes everyone else again.
In some ways, TV shows are actually a better way to tell a complex, nuanced story. Aside from the elements actors bring- a face and voice to go with a personality- we can get to know the characters better over twenty-two 45-minute episodes than over 350 pages. There can be stories of greater depth, and larger scope, stories that take time to build and flesh out and foreshadow.

Background on Buffy

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is about a lot of things. There is the first and most blatant metaphor, which is that high school is a hellish place, full of personal demons and the monsters other people become. However, there are more subtle elements, about the pitfalls of growing up, and the trouble we get into as we age, and our hormones change, and we begin to pull away from parents and grade-school friends. For instance, Buffy herself loses her virginity on her 17th birthday, to the only vampire to have a soul (forbidden love), but his afterglow causes him to lose his soul. In the show, a soul is a metaphor for a conscience, a sense of morality, and without it, he is literally a different person, cruel and violent, which echoes a common complaint of hundreds and thousands of young women- "He was a completely different person after we slept together". Buffy's best friend, Willow, is dating a boy who becomes a werewolf, another metaphor for the wild teen years.
After the high school years, the issues become a little more blatant, but still handled slightly obliquely. When Willow's boyfriend decides he can no longer control his wild instincts (a female werewolf is a trigger in this- potential infidelity as a breakup cause), she begins to explore a wider world. In the process she joins a different religion than her parents' (she was raised Jewish but embraces Wicca, the same path I followed) and falls in love with a woman. Willow cautiously and nervously comes out of the closet to Buffy, and Buffy's first reaction is shock- she calls Willow "Will", as if that will make it easier to think of her as in love with a woman. However, once she recovers she is very happy for her friend, and soon there are on-screen kisses and cuddles, and even a scene in which Willow and her girlfriend perform a spell which is clearly a metaphor for sexual contact, with heavy breathing and arched backs, though only the palms of their hands touch.
Buffy's main focus is the vampires and demons she fights, but she also has to deal with real-world issues. Some of these issues are layered with metaphor, like the Mayor, whose motivation is to become a Demon and devour the town. This is the literalizing of the idea of the corrupt politician, who just wants more power and doesn't care who he hurts on the way. Some are stark and harsh, like Buffy's mother's illness. She is diagnosed with a brain tumor, is operated on, and comes home with a clean bill of health. She is just beginning to recover and resume her normal life when she has an aneurysm and dies. Buffy is the one who finds her at the beginning of the episode, and the rest of the episode focuses on the terrible practicalities of autopsy, funeral arrangements, and survivor's guilt. It is an episode without music of any sort, so we are focused on the words people say, and, more importantly, the silences. There are many awkward silences, and moments of uncomfortability. There are also awkward conversations. One such involves a character who was a demon and has recently become human. Her mission as a demon was to inflict pain and death on humans, but she rarely stayed, and never thought of them as people. However, she has become friends with Buffy's mother, and, like a small child, she wants to know why it has to happen, why this vital, loving woman has to cease. She is struggling with something we all have to wrestle with at some point, the loss of innocence, the understanding of death as part of life in this world. Willow's girlfriend, on the other hand, lost her own mother during high school, and so she has wise words, and can comfort Buffy to some extent, reassure her that her expressions of grief may well take odd turns, and that's ok.
All of this is a guide for us the viewers. We come to know and love these characters, to cheer for their struggles and mourn their losses, to grow and explore the world with them. We relive the awkwardness of first love, or, for younger viewers, get some idea of what to expect and what to avoid. We empathize with the drive to move out from under our parents' roof, the stress of finding a job that can support you, the wonderful-scary feeling of finding the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. The show is a fun-house mirror, our own worries and hopes distorted, writ large, but still recognizable as human impulses. This is the strength of Buffy, and why it is truly literature, and not just pop culture.