Buffy Anne Summers, aka

Posts Tagged ‘culture’

 

To begin this ending, I’ve recently come across a quote that leads me to believe it was Carl Jung, rather than Friedrich Nietzsche, who said the bit about the artists giving back to their age what it is most lacking.

And so here we go again, and before I forget, let’s briefly skim over what I’ve said elsewhere about the values of friendship, fighting for, and not giving up on, one’s friends — even when they are misbehaving, and let me add to that, Angel’s comment to Buffy about not fighting to win but because some things are worth fighting for. Those are all values and they are certainly part of what Buffy the Vampire Slayer is about.

But if you’re anything like me, you watch Buffy primarily for the fun of it, and rarely, if ever, give much thought to what it all means, or could mean, or how Buffy the Vampire Slayer may fit into your value system. Moreover, I doubt very many of us give a lot of thought to how the show may or may not fit into the Western storytelling tradition. Well I don’t blame you, but I’m gonna, that is, I’m about to, and there’s a lot to say, and I don’t know for sure how to say it all, and I’ll probably be jumping and swerving around considerably, so buckle down for a ride or get gone now, and either way, don’t say you weren’t warned.

So, still here? Ready?

Okay.

At least since the early Middle Ages, if not going all the way back to Socrates, Western literature has been fraught with metaphor, and often interpreted as allegory, whether that was the author’s original intent or not. So it is not too surprising that BtVS, with its rich use of language, subtext and symbolism, has inspired more than its share of interpreters, academic and otherwise.

But before I try to add anything to the growing archives of Buffyology, let’s review just a bit.

We are, as I said at the outset, examining the work of a community of creators, and it is impossible to say with any certainty what the creators’ control or conscious intentions were, but that doesn’t mean that something that resembles a work of art as much as, in my opinion, BtVS does cannot say much that is significant about its times.

And even if it is not the work of artists as I claim, the show’s wide appeal surely says something, again, about our times.

Additionally, as I’ve already mentioned the moral ambiguity sometimes evident in the show and suggested it could be argued that it is Nietzsche-ian in some sense, those familiar with Nietzsche have probably already concluded, or at least suspected, that there was, after all, a reason I chose for this series of posts the title "Buffy Summers & Beyond Good and Evil" — and I believe that that too — the moral ambiguity, along with the intensity with which the good-versus-evil dualism is punctuated — may have contributed to the show’s appeal over the last several years.

So with that brief recap in mind, let’s proceed as to the how and the why.

What does it all mean? What are the values being communicated? Why — beyond the visceral action, wit, and the beauty of the cast — the show’s popular appeal?

While I mentioned that various hierarchies are frequently ignored or quickly dismissed in the world of Buffy Summers, I assume everyone familiar with the series has noticed that it is not nearly as true in the world of Demonic Forces. In truth, it is pointedly not the case at all. The Master has his disciples (nearly worshipers) in season one. Spike and Drusilla have their minions in season two. Mayor Wilkins has his political subordinates as well as his tributes to higher demons in the next season. Maggie Walsh and her creation, Adam, have their obedient ’soldiers’ — human and otherwise. Glorificus, her lackeys, or, again, worshipers; Warren, his feckless sidekicks; and the First, the abject devotion of its Bringers and Caleb.

Not only does respect for some given hierarchy often play a key role in the world of Demonic Forces, the primary hierarchy in effect is frequently religious, or quasi-religious, in nature. Abject devotion, unquestioning obedience, an unwitting and all consuming desire to please, or simply a fear of the consequences of disobedience are all prevalent and characteristic of the relationships between the show’s primary villains and their followers, or servants, or (if I haven’t said it too often already) worshipers.

(And of course the storyline with Caleb in season seven in particular reads like a devastating treatise against the fundamentalist, patriarchal and woman-blaming/hating tendencies of at least some Western religious tradition.)

In addition to the frequently in-your-face religiosity that seems to infuse the world of Demonic Forces, it is also emphasized in various episodes throughout the entirety of the series — all seasons — that the feeling that being on the side of evil grants (after becoming a vampire for example), is the feeling of having become "one with everything," or at least one with some great purpose or power.

What does that remind us of if not religion?

Being one with everything, being one with God, having an overriding sense of purpose, sacrificing the ego or one’s individuality for some greater whole — all of these are notions common in many (or perhaps all?) of the world’s religions. And maybe I’m being influenced here by the knowledge of Joss’s atheism, but I believe part of what is being communicated, consciously or not, is that that kind of experience, that kind of feeling of, for lack of a better term, oneness, is dangerous, dangerous in the sense of being, if not evil, then at least potentially evil.

Evil? Whatever are you getting at, Elijah? In what sense?

Well, you may recall Buffy’s comment in The Initiative to Professor Walsh, when after the professor’s callousness toward Willow’s misery (after Oz has left her and Sunnydale behind), Buffy says, "You’re right. A human being in pain is not part of your job."

What is Buffy really saying there? Isn’t it that Professor Walsh is letting her sense of her professional priorities and obligations overwhelm her humanity? Isn’t this the danger the late mythologist Joseph Campbell was talking about when he discussed the danger of "becoming the uniform?" As I recall, Campbell suggested that most, or at least much, of the evil in the world has been in the name of duty, or in the name of simply following orders or the rules, of becoming the uniform. Or, another way of saying that is being a mindless automaton (and "one with" a greater whole) rather than being an individual with an individual conscience.

That is, after all, one of the great complaints of the skeptic — that religion, which claims to establish a basis for morality, often leads to a mindless authoritarian, follow-the-leader sort of mentality that sometimes (some would say ‘often’) leads to some of the most immoral acts imaginable.

So if that is being communicated, i.e., that being or becoming somewhat less than an individual moral agent is innately evil in some sense, how does the story universe of Buffy, with its emphasis on duality and moral ambiguity, relate to the spirit of our times? — or, I suppose I might say, accurately or not, to the Zeitgeist?

One way to think about it is that it may mirror a psychological tension in the viewer that is nearly absent from much of modern storytelling. I’m not sure about this, but I am thinking that, if some of the world’s predominate religions (which tend in various respects to be story-based) are any indication, most human beings like to have things kept as simple as possible, e.g., folks like us are the good guys, so folks who are too unlike us must necessarily be the bad guys.

And of course such evaluations generally lead to some generalizations as to who is deserving of what.

I seem to recall that some have argued that there may even be some survival or evolutionary advantage to keeping such matters simple. Or another way of putting it might be to say that a simplistic world view makes for a simpler people who are more simply motivated, led, or (dare I say it?) manipulated.

But of course throughout our histories there have always been some who recognized that matters are never so simple, and in modern times especially, many more of us have been confronted by that understanding, i.e., a cognitive dissonance between much of traditional Western religious mythology and our modern experience due to there being so much contact between cultures and individuals that it is no longer reasonable for many of us to view the world in simple black and white (i.e., we’re good, they’re bad) terms.

So the Buffyverse (through its contrast between the emphasized dual nature of its story reality and the sense of moral ambiguity evident in some characters and situations) plays with the psychological tension between the dualism many of us are taught as kids and may still believe in on an emotional level — and still experience, or are frequently asked to experience, in our storytelling traditions — and the more complicated modern reality we now find ourselves in as adults.

Did Joss and his fellow creators intend this? I have no idea. But the recognition of our own dilemma, conscious or not, implicit in the Buffyverse may very well contribute to the show’s popularity. These are situations and moral judgments — as far removed from our reality as they may seem on the surface — that we all, or nearly all, understand from our own experience.

So you see it’s not fantasy after all, is it? It’s metaphor, it’s allegory, it’s myth.

Or is it?

So, just maybe that’s what Buffy the Vampire Slayer has to say about us, and about our times, but now swerving suddenly on, how does Buffy fit into Western literature, or into the Western storytelling tradition? And is it metaphor, or allegory, or myth? Or?

Well, Joss, et al, are in a sense creating a kind of mythic history, a kind of world myth where there was nothing before, a far less patriarchal — and far more feminist — myth of origin than what we in the West have grown accustomed to. Others have done something similar. It is arguable that Homer may have done it in the Odyssey for the Greeks (you knew there was some reason I brought up that sailing metaphor a while back, didn’t you? — even if I did not do a very decent job of extending it); and Virgil certainly did it in the Aeneid for the Romans; and Goethe took a stab at it for the Germans. Even Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings can be seen as an attempt to mythically bridge the gap between established English literature and England’s lost, prehistoric past.

And in all previous cases we are speaking of a mythic history, a history based on psychology, the psychological need to define a new paradigm of identity, rather than, or in addition to, actual events — and I would argue may be even more true of what Joss Whedon has done.

So that begs the question. Is Joss attempting to establish a national identity, or a new way of thinking about the American empire? No. Nothing so simple as that. BtVS is not an attempt at a nationalistic myth, nor an attempt to fulfill the desire an empire may have to justify its dominance, but rather, it is an attempt to create a world myth, a new kind of world myth that is simultaneously Western and non-Western in its sensibility.

But is BtVS truly a world myth? Did Joss, et al, succeed?

I would say no, at least not without more work, for Joss and his co-creators have not yet addressed all aspects of female empowerment, i.e., all aspects of what it means to be a woman.

Buffy is not complete as a world myth because it does not empower women in all aspects of womanhood. If it did, there would be more than one Slayer known to have had children, and many of those children would have been raised to successful adulthood. In fact, Robin Wood’s battle with his emotions over the loss of his mother is a (probably) unintended argument against Slayerhood, i.e., against the warrior woman, as the implication is, it can so easily lead to either no children, or ever more dysfunctional, and abandoned, children.

Nevertheless, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is most definitely in the Western storytelling, myth-making, identity-defining tradition, and however the continuing story, in comic book form or otherwise, may yet develop, at the end of the TV series, like in much of Western myth, our hero comes home again, not literally of course, but psychically home.

Whereas Odysseus traveled broadly to come home again to his wife, Buffy stayed home, or nearly home, throughout, and perhaps the notion of our hero staying home is just another reflection of some of what our society may be missing, as discussed previously, or perhaps it could be argued that the concept of home may be even more characteristic of the feminine journey. But as paradoxical as it may seem on the surface, being home — even after everything she could ever call home has been utterly destroyed — doesn’t prevent Buffy from longing to return home, just as Odysseus did. But it is a psychological home Buffy pines for, an emotional perspective that she finally comes back to, full circle, and that is to not feel so alone or be so special in the world, but simply to be an ordinary girl — or perhaps more accurately, an ordinary person.

While this next statement probably qualifies me as a little bit spacey, personally, I suspect part of the appeal of Buffy the Vampire Slayer — mostly unconscious and aside from all the obvious — is a kind of cosmic longing on the part of Western civilization to go home to the feminine, even while, perhaps, recognizing — albeit sometimes reluctantly — the necessity of the masculine.

There are other, far more sophisticated ways of saying it, but that seems like a kind of conclusion, so I will leave it at that — at least for now.

And so our sailing vessel docks at last! I hope you enjoyed the ride.

Technorati Tags: buffy, culture, patriarchy, pop-culture, series, television, western lit

James Marsters sang a new song back in May about his upcoming movie High Plains Invaders at the 100 club in London, UK. I would’ve posted it sooner if I had known. Just can’t keep up with everything, now can I?

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Technorati Tags: culture, James, Marsters, movie, music, pop-culture, scifi, television, western

I know it has been quite a wait for this post, and to the handful of my readers who really have been anxious, I apologize. Just so much to do, so much to learn, and so much pain (sometimes) from which to recover. I know none of that makes for a particularly good excuse, but it’s all I’ve got!

And with that said, I will get on with it:

So after all the discussion that has gone before, the natural questions may be, so what?, why are you making so much of it?, what does it all mean, or what do you, Elijah, believe it all means?

Well, fair enough. I’m most definitely getting to that, beginning with this post (the first part of what I expect to be a two part conclusion) but first, let me get one last semi-observation out of the way:

Although the show’s relative absence of hierarchies has already been discussed in previous posts, it recently has occurred to me that there is usually no tyranny of time either in BtVS, i.e., it is fairly rare that anyone punches a clock. Plot grows organically. It is (usually) driven by characters and events rather than by time constraints. This is not always and completely true, of course. Particular episodes and several of the overall season arcs are subject to some very explicit time pressures, i.e., options running out due to some looming deadline or another, but I believe, on balance, that the characterization is valid.

I bring this up because when characters are subject to the rule of time, it too, can be seen as establishing a type of tyranny, though entirely mechanistic. In fact, in modern life — actually, pretty much beginning with the dawn of the industrial age, the modern constraints of time and time management increasingly have proven to be one of the most impersonal and most demanding tyrannies of all. A lack of respect for another’s time, especially if that other is deemed to have a higher rank, has become the equivalent to many in our culture of showing disrespect for the the entire pantheon of modern hierarchies.

But enough of that, and back on the main topic of my conclusions — what do all my foregoing observations mean? To begin, I’d suggest the confluence of the lack, or essential insignificance, of hierarchies between, and imposed upon, the primary characters, along with the punctuated good-versus-evil duality, places a tremendous importance on the emotional, personal and intimate nature of those relationships.

This emphasis may even explain, at least partially (aside from the youth and physical attractiveness of many of the cast members, of course), why so much of fan fiction has been of an erotic nature.

The advantages to this emphasis on, for lack of a better term, ‘emotionality,’ for Joss and his fellow writers in terms of drama and immediacy, I hope, is rather obvious. For the very talented actors, mostly, who made up the primary cast of BtVS, I suspect there were also advantages (and challenges). But the main thrust of my conclusions is not what was advantageous to the creators of BtVS, but the how and the why — strictly in terms of the foregoing discussion — of the show’s appeal and what that appeal may have to say about our times. (No doubt, you recall my having broached those subjects in a previous post.)

I can no longer be sure where I first heard it, and I won’t take the time to research it just now, but I believe it was Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (and I will correct this at some point if I find out I’m wrong) who once concluded, more or less, that the purpose or merit of an artist can be evaluated by the extent to which he (or she) portrays or is able to give back to his (or her) age what it is most lacking.

Whoever might have said it, and whether or not the above is a fair spin on what Nietzsche actually said, I believe there may be some truth there, and so it naturally occurs to me that the lack of hierarchies and the emotional and intimate connections between the primary characters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer very well may be some of what our mainstream society and culture are missing. And perhaps the argument could be extended by suggesting that the relative lack of time constraints in the show’s plotting, as well as the frequently discussed moral ambiguity in the show (also Nietzsche-ian in some sense), may also reflect, respectively, an experience and a perspective that have often been in short supply in recent years in our prevailing culture.

Let’s think about it. How many hierarchies do we find ourselves caught up in on a daily basis? How many of our relationships are essentially superficial? How many people in our daily lives do we feel truly intimate with? Don’t we sometimes feel as if we are emotionally closer to the characters in BtVS than we are with some of our own family members, and co-workers, and friends?

Perhaps I’m the only who has felt this way, but I rather doubt it. Not more than 75 years ago, the overwhelming majority of the peoples of the world, including in the US, lived in extended multi-generational families and among friends and neighbors they would know for decades at least, if not for their entire lifetimes. Needless to say, the opportunities for intimate connections were, essentially, limitless. In recent decades, however, three or more generations living together in the same household is rare (or at least certainly so in the US and most western cultures), and so-called friends complain of having difficulty staying in touch, and those who do manage it stay in touch through artifice, e.g., via letters, phone calls, emails, or social media and so forth — all of which are far less intimate than yesteryear due to the lack of an actual physical presence.

It seems many of us are constantly moving from one place to another, breaking ties and estranging friends and lovers, losing contact even with those with whom we hope to stay in touch due, perhaps, to the pace of our lives and the difficulty of actually taking the time for long-distance "intimacy" — and sometimes it seems, even growing impatient and annoyed by the time it takes to maintain intimacies in the here and now of our lives.

The notion of staying in the same geographical location and being surrounded by the same people for your entire life seems quaint to many of us by today’s reckoning. Even in the statistically unlikely event that you have never found yourself relocating due to a career move, or otherwise, it is overwhelmingly likely some of your friends and family members already have done so, or soon will. Further, given the divorce rate in the US and some other western nations, it is evident not even our marriage bonds hold quite the same sense of permanence they once did.

So how often can truly intimate relationships propagate and flourish in our lives when, while still inchoate, much of the proximal basis for that intimacy is so frequently ripped away from us? Of course it’s just a theory, but maybe, just maybe, part of the appeal of BtVS is that very lack of respect for rank, and for hierarchies, that most of us can seldom get by with anymore, and the resultant and explicit intimacy between the primary characters that is so often scant in our own relationships.

By extension, the lack of time constraints is also an escape from much of our experience, no? (How many of us don’t feel any pressures to get to work, or church, or to business and doctor’s appointments, on time?) And any sense of moral ambiguity, well, that requires recognition of how complex the reality of our world really is — a level of sophistication we haven’t seen all that much of lately in our political leadership, our mainstream media, and perhaps especially, in our popular storytelling.

But before I belabor all these matters to the point of being boring or depressing (if I haven’t already), I’ll move on.

When I set out, my intention was to limit my discussion to the relationships of the primary characters in the world of Buffy Summers, but along the way, I have mentioned a few other matters (the extreme good-vs-evil dualism and the moral ambiguity often evident in the show coming immediately to mind), and have had some other unmentioned thoughts, some related, some not, about what some of the values are that are being communicated in the show, i.e., what Joss and his fellow creators were really up to, consciously or not, and I want to touch on some of that before I conclude.

And I will do so, but  — as this has already run on so long — in part two of this conclusion. Coming soon. I hope.

Technorati Tags: buffy, culture, Joss, media, patriarchy, pop-culture, scifi, series, slayer, television, vampire, western lit, whedon, writing

Michelle Trachtenberg (Dawn in BtVS) will star in an original Lifetime movie, The Dive From Clausen’s Pier, due to air daytime, August 2nd.

Okay, so what’s it about? A young woman (Carrie) in love suffers a terrible tragedy — er, her fiancé suffers a terrible tragedy — er, well, they both do I suppose. Basically, Carrie has to choose whether to stay with her quadriplegic boyfriend or go on to build a new life for herself. Quite the dilemma.

It’s Michelle Trachtenberg, so how bad can it be? – and it also stars Firefly’s Sean Maher, and, well, being somewhat familiar with the book the movie’s based on, I’m not going to say much more.  It is Michelle Trachtenberg after all, but let’s all hope she doesn’t whine as much as the character, Carrie, seemed to do in the book. Didn’t we all see enough of that particular Trachtenberg talent already in Buffy?

I predict it won’t be to everyone’s taste, and if the movie treats the subject and characters very much like the book did, probably not to mine — but I’m sure for many, it will prove worth watching. 

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Technorati Tags: clausen's, culture, dive, film, firefly, Michelle, movie, television, Trachtenberg

I understand the temptation of racism. I understand how petty we human beings can be, and I understand that many of us are just plain ol’ fearful of what is different than ourselves, especially the differences we don’t understand or with which we are unfamiliar.

I can even sympathize with — though I won’t excuse — those who develop racist attitudes because they feel they have been victimized by racists.

But being about as white as the driven snow, I do not understand modern white racism in America. When was the last time a law-abiding white Harvard college professor was arrested in his own home? When was the last time an unarmed white man was riddled with bullets by law enforcement while merely reaching for his wallet? And who are these white people who are so certain their rights are being infringed upon? Here? Now? In the USofA? Who are these white people who take a few rare anecdotes and attempt to construct a massive cathedral of an argument that they are being unfairly discriminated against because of their race?

Well, I guess it goes without saying that some of them are, and have long been, greedy, sleazy, opportunistic politicians and radio personalities, and it seems a lot of them have lately been leaping eagerly upon every opportunity to fan the flames of white racists, and being white, I’m getting far more than just sick of it. I am ashamed.

I am ashamed I have not always made a big enough issue of it. I am ashamed that, in the interests of keeping the peace, I have occasionally let racist comments pass more or less unchallenged.

But to hell with keeping the peace.

You white supremacists really want a race war? Well, you’re going to be fighting a lot of recently seasoned warriors with a lot lighter shade of skin than you’ve got. Do you hear me, Rush? Do you hear me, Pat? Because most of us real white folks understand that race is one of the most superficial aspects of a person. Race says nothing about one’s values, ethics, religion, family, courage, behavior, intelligence, talent, education, sense of humor, career, professionalism, and today, not even about one’s nationality or patriotism.

So the next time someone says something racist to me, I will speak up, speak out, and throw metaphorical dirt in their eyes — especially the politicians, and especially the white politicians. I will do everything within my power to publicly humiliate and embarrass them — and someday I’ll strap myself into a fully armed Block III Apache (in formation with my African, Asian and Latino brothers and sisters) and help take them out of this world if I have to — because there is no other country in the world that I can think of than the USofA where it is more important that the races of humanity learn to live with one another, and because this is the 21st century, damn it, and because this crap has got to stop.

Speak up, speak out, throw dirt. White or not, I hope you’ll join me.

Technorati Tags: culture, politics, race, racism