I hated Religulous. I'm as atheist as they come (athe, athier, athiest?), and there are a lot of things about organised religion that scare the shit out of me, but Maher's approach to everything was just... I mean, that scene where he basically berates a muslim woman for NOT being oppressed, and demands that she behave more in line with his view of fundamentalist Islam? How does he not see the irony?
I suppose it has something to do with Joss' atheism on one level - that "fairy tales" can be read as "religion", as the belief in the unseen, the magical, the irrational?
I'm not sure about that, in Buffy, fairy tales and myths always hold a lot of power, often by virtue of being magical and irrational. You might even argue that's the entire point of the Initiative storyline - oversimplified, the rational, logical, blinkered "male" narrative that forces things into boxes ("A lot of filing, giving things names"), vs the intuitive, instinctive, storytelling "female" narrative that creates meaning. That's Joss' existentialism, of course. The trick is to not let the myth have power over you, but to have power over it.
Here's a thought: Buffy The Existenialist's power comes from demons (as openly said by Adam in "Restless") since they are two sides to the same coin - on the one hand, superstition and fairy tales, the Unreal, the escapist fantasy; on the other, the knowledge that stories have power whether they're objectively "real" or not, that there's more than one way to derive meaning and understanding of the world. All contrasted against the Rileys and the Quentins of the world, who already Know how the world works and thinks it's really just that simple, and since it's always worked that well for them (the Watchers are the ones writing history, after all, they think they can control which bits are remembered and which are forgotten) they're happy to try to make everyone else play by their rules.
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Date: 2012-12-18 02:43 pm (UTC)I suppose it has something to do with Joss' atheism on one level - that "fairy tales" can be read as "religion", as the belief in the unseen, the magical, the irrational?
I'm not sure about that, in Buffy, fairy tales and myths always hold a lot of power, often by virtue of being magical and irrational. You might even argue that's the entire point of the Initiative storyline - oversimplified, the rational, logical, blinkered "male" narrative that forces things into boxes ("A lot of filing, giving things names"), vs the intuitive, instinctive, storytelling "female" narrative that creates meaning. That's Joss' existentialism, of course. The trick is to not let the myth have power over you, but to have power over it.
Here's a thought: Buffy The Existenialist's power comes from demons (as openly said by Adam in "Restless") since they are two sides to the same coin - on the one hand, superstition and fairy tales, the Unreal, the escapist fantasy; on the other, the knowledge that stories have power whether they're objectively "real" or not, that there's more than one way to derive meaning and understanding of the world. All contrasted against the Rileys and the Quentins of the world, who already Know how the world works and thinks it's really just that simple, and since it's always worked that well for them (the Watchers are the ones writing history, after all, they think they can control which bits are remembered and which are forgotten) they're happy to try to make everyone else play by their rules.