Buffy Anne Summers, aka

Posts Tagged ‘Joss’

Joss Whedon’s comments as he received on April 10, 2009, the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism at Harvard University’s Memorial Church.

Technorati Tags: Humanism, Joss, whedon

A few interesting comments from Joss Whedon about Dollhouse — something about what he’s trying to accomplish, a little bit about how he feels about the characters’ mixed motivations, and so forth. I guess, what occurred to me was, What are our more private dreams really made of?, and Who and what are we willing to compromise to fulfill them?

Technorati Tags: dollhouse, dushku, eliza, Joss, media, pop-culture, scifi, series, television, whedon

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

At this point, I really have no idea if some out there are getting impatient for my next installment on relationships in Buffy, or if no one cares. It’s a bit difficult to know given the stats, but I don’t suppose it matters much. These few posts have been as much an exploration of some of my own thoughts and feelings about the show, and hopefully for my own benefit as a writer, as they have been for any other particular purpose, e.g., your entertainment, or edification, or otherwise.

So, I might as well continue.

As I’ve said all along, I believe, conscious on the part of the creators or not, some of the characteristics of the show — such as the relative lack of hierarchies, the emphasized dualism between the forces of life and death (or light and darkness, or however we choose to think about it) — have some to do with the show’s appeal and may say a little something about the spirit of our times.

It will be with that thought in mind, that I will begin to draw some of my conclusions.

However, I’m juggling various other projects and responsibilities, including being a caretaker, and it’s considerably easier and less time-consuming (and seems to drive more traffic to the site) to simply post videos and the like than to wax philosophic about BtVS. And a bit like one of my other favorite TV characters, Dr. Gregory House, I have more than my fair share of pain on a daily basis, and it’s been getting me down some lately. So there will be yet another delay before I go much further with my discussion, or analysis, or whatever I should call it. Hopefully, I’ll feel better and get something out next week.

So while I’m resting and recovering, as I’m often inclined to say, how about let’s all go watch Buffy?

Technorati Tags: buffy, Joss, media, pop-culture, television, whedon, writing

A quick interview with Nicholas Brendon (Xander) from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This interview was taken at FX2008

Duration : 0:2:10

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Technorati Tags: Brendon, buffy, Harris, Joss, Nicholas, slayer, vampire, whedon, Xander