Buffy Anne Summers, aka

Posts Tagged ‘ideology’

(originally posted on June 10)

Okay, so that was kind of cheap trick, but in my defense the title of the last post did say it was the teaser. So with that out of the way, let’s get on with it! Oh no, I meant let’s segue into my next tangent.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, on the subject of relationships, obviously there is much to work with. One could easily write an entire book on Buffy Summers’ relationships alone. With the inclusion of other characters, with a little less ease, one could write several. To do the subject any justice though, I feel I first need to talk about the story universe in which these relationships operate, and so I will, but I am not going to attempt to cover everything, or any one thing from various perspectives, or even any one perspective in depth. No doubt more on the subject of relationships begs to be addressed, but for now I intend only to skim the surface, and from a height, and before I begin in earnest, let me get a little writerly-something out of the way (how was that for a segue?):

It is a truism among critics and literary types that creators of fiction often incorporate unconscious obsessions, agendas and intentions into their work and thereby not only enrich the fictional world(s) in which their characters move and evolve, but reveal more about themselves than they intend.

I have no real argument with that. So in beginning any analysis, even one as relatively simplistic as this, I would agree that it is not unreasonable to expect to increase one’s awareness of, and perhaps even reveal something very significant about, how such a creator perceives and assigns value to experience.

From there — that is, if the above is a reasonable expectation — then in an analysis that is to be strictly limited to the depiction of relationships, one might expect to reveal how a creator posits what character and relationship qualities are and are not worthwhile, and perhaps what responsibilities the genders and the members of the varying social strata, may have toward one another, and given the overriding importance of emotional and hierarchical relationships in all our lives — in fact, these relationships veritably define human existence — even some of the creator’s ideological biases.

Whoa, that was kind of a mouthful. And by the way, how about this tangent? Still with me?

If so, I now may surprise some of the critics and literary types and tell you all, I simply don’t care.

Frankly, I couldn’t give a — excuse me, what I mean to say is, when examining any collaborative creative effort (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer), any such expectation is a cognitive stretch. However much it may be argued to have been primarily the creation of Whedon, by definition BtVS was the combined effort of a team of creators, and that is what is being examined here, and further complicating matters, we are looking at a collaboration that took place in a corporate environment in which the utmost (or at least a primary) concern was commercial success.

And if all that were not enough to bring into question the validity of such reveals, in the specific case of Whedon, Petrie, Noxon, Greenwalt, Fury, Espenson, et al, we also are dealing with some very sophisticated creators who were often quite self-conscious — judging by how the show consistently played with language, metaphor, foreshadowing, etc. — about what they were doing.

So if someone comes up to me and says it is possible to determine, simply by watching BtVS, that Whedon or Noxon, or any of the other writers or creators, are Nazis, or communists, or right-wing or left-wing nuts of whatever persuasion, for the purposes of this analysis (at least), I simply don’t care — and I don’t believe it could be a reasonable determination in any case.

In this or any given analysis, though I may not always say so, I think it behooves us all to reflect on the difficulty of inferring what was of conscious intent, what was unconscious, what was true to any specific creator’s vision, or to the artists’ collective visions, and what was or was not due to commercial considerations.

Given human nature, this is true even when taking into account what the writers themselves may have to say on any given matter, i.e., since memory itself is unreliable and may fail or fill in where there are blanks — and since the writers themselves may not always correctly assess what their intentions were, i.e., as the series matured and plot developments seemed sometimes surprisingly foreshadowed, Joss himself purportedly asked his fellow writers on more than one occasion, "Were we planning this back then?"

If that isn’t evidence enough, even without referencing theories of the unconscious, that even the creators themselves may not always have fully understood their own intentions, I can’t imagine what is.

So now, with all that almost interminable preamble, or disclaimer (or tangent), out of the way, in the next post — by the end of this week or somewhere in the next — I will begin my ruminations, a bit more in earnest next time, on the characters’ relationships, skimming the surface from a height and giving you my take — with no claim whatsoever to certainty — on interpreting at least some of their thematic resonances.

I sincerely hope you will find it worth your while . . . [to be continued, soon]