Buffy Anne Summers, aka

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I am frequently appalled by what manages to become a movie. After having given it the occasional thought, I’ve begun to conclude that it is at least partly due to the fact that too many in the business of making movies have never studied how the best stories usually work.

Now that the studio system is as dead as the ancient pharaohs and most actors are captains of their own careers, I suspect there really ought to be more emphasis on teaching actors more about the art of storytelling. If Marsters had a better sense of that, he likely would have never agreed to this script. Either that, or whatever he originally found compelling about the script never made it into the actual movie, and contractual obligations, or some sense of loyalty, compelled him to speak no evil of it despite.

High Plains Invaders had no significant character arcs, no moral dilemmas, no self-revelations, no inspired dialog, and was composed entirely of nearly dispassionate and seemingly burned-out characters, most of whom had very little (except for the most obvious) at stake.

If, as he said in the video clip posted elsewhere on the site, Marsters really believed this movie was better than even the worst of Buffy, he has an utter lack of appreciation for what Joss Whedon and his crew actually accomplished on Buffy, and he is in serious need of having his head examined.

(But since I wasted two hours of my time watching it — even if one of my motivations for enduring it was to be able to comment on it for this blog — I probably need my head examined as well.)

No, it wasn’t any worse than a lot of other made-for-SyFy-channel movies, but it wasn’t any better either — and given James Marsters’ acting ability and his impeccable sense of delivery, High Plains Invaders was a monumental waste.

If you missed it, count yourself fortunate. If it is rebroadcast and you somehow manage to miss it a second time, count yourself among the truly blessed.

Technorati Tags: film, flick, invaders, James, Marsters, movie, pop-culture, scifi, SyFy, television, western

I came across this today — and now wish I hadn’t. This is very hard guys, very sad, but as you are about to hear, James talks about the upcoming movie, High Plains Invaders, and right at the end of this clip, he commits the most unforgivable blasphemy!!

Oh James, how very far you have sunk!

(Of course, I haven’t seen the movie, but how could it possibly be better than Buffy? It just makes no sense. It does not compute. He must mean in some alternate universe or something, right? — Or has he been drinking? Taking drugs? Anyone know? I mean, work with me here, guys. I’m trying to find some reason to forgive him.)

Duration : 0:0:30

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Technorati Tags: aliens, bugs, High, High Plains Invaders, invaders, James, Marsters, movie, Plains, pop-culture, SyFy, video, western

 

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

Here’s a short video of Eliza Dushku strutting her stuff. Now that’s entertainment, right guys?, right?, er, not that this sort of thing is appropriate on a site dedicated to Buffy and semi-dedicated to female empowerment, but, er, (did I say semi-dedicated?), er, y’know, a little variety here and there can’t hurt. Right?

Technorati Tags: dollhouse, dushku, eliza, media, pop-culture, television

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