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beer_good_foamyGo, then. There are other worlds than these.
- Jake Chambers, Stephen King's The Gunslinger
So I wanted to post something for Buffy's 20th birthday, and why I still care so much about this little series, but I wasn't sure just what until I started a rewatch and got to this line in "The Harvest":
JOYCE: Everything's the end of the world when you're a 16-year-old girl.
Which got me to this:
She saved the world. A lot.
Which got me thinking about just what the hell (heh) the "world" and saving it means in terms of the Buffy- and Jossverses, and why that would matter.
I mean, we're talking about the guy whose most recent original work in Cabin In The Woods (spoilers ahead) ended with our heroes explicitly refusing to sacrifice anything to save the world and letting it end. What changed, Joss? Besides, Buffy doesn't seem to do a whole lot of saving outside the larger (and not very large at that) metropolitan area of Sunnydale, as much as they try to convince us that one ancient vampire taking over a small town in SoCal would somehow constitute the end of the world.
Funnily enough, right off the bat, season 1 of Buffy has lots of characters talking about "the world". And they're all defining it from a personal perspective.
GILES: Because you are the Slayer. Into each generation a Slayer is born, one girl in all the world, a Chosen One, one born with the strength and skill to hunt--
BUFFY: -- the vampires, to stop the spread of their evil blah, blah, blah... I've heard it, okay?
BUFFY: You, Xander, Willow, you guys... you guys know the score, you're careful. Two days in my world and Owen really would get himself killed.
DARLA: Do you know what the saddest thing in the world is?
BUFFY: Bad hair on top of that outfit?
DARLA: To love someone who used to love you.
SNYDER: My predecessor, Mr. Flutie, may have gone in for all that touchy-feely relating nonsense, but he was eaten. You're in my world now.
WILLOW: I'm trying to think how to say it... to explain it so you understand...
BUFFY: It doesn't matter as long as you're okay.
WILLOW: I'm not okay! I knew those guys. I go to that room every day. And when I walked in there, it... it wasn't our world anymore. They made it theirs. And they had fun. What are we gonna do?
Thing is, "the world" is a very malleable concept. "The Earth" is a lot more unambiguous, we're talking about a planet, but the world - that can mean a lot of different things. Especially in a series as wilfully post-modern as Buffy. Within the larger Buffyverse there are many different worlds; the two separate series Buffy and Angel (and, if that's your poison, their various comicbook, novel, board game and fanfic spinoffs), hell and heaven dimensions, alternate realities (usually referred to as verses* by fans) ... Sure. But the show also runs on what Terry Pratchett called narrativium, and keeps sneaking into both the characterization and plot that each person is narrating their own story. No two characters experience the events of Buffy the exact same way, they all live their own version of it. There is not ONE world; each person lives in, and constitutes, a world of their own.
BUFFY: What I want is to be left alone.
ANGEL: Do you really think that's an option anymore?
In these days of "alternate facts", filter bubbles and whatnot, that may sound a bit creepy. Surely, that means Ford's or Warren's or Richard Wilkins' or any crush-kill-destroy demon's worldviews (to borrow a word from the current politicsverse) are no less valid than Buffy's? Is Buffy just another PC-gone-mad SJW out to force her biased version of reality on people who just want the freedom to suck the blood of the living in peace? Well, no, because the thing is, those worlds are not mutually exclusive. Just because you have your own, you can't ignore those of others, because the Buffyverse makes them tangible and frequently gives them very sharp teeth.
MASTER: A dream is a wish your heart makes. This is real life.
Much has been made of how Buffy fights demons that are metaphors for her own situation. Less is made of how often she fights other people's demons as well; pretty much every episode of season 1 has her try to protect someone at school, whether they be weirdos or cheerleaders. Buffy is an inherently empathetic story. Even the monsters get their say; Vamp!Jesse gets to explain exactly how this is an improvement for him - while putting some fairly overtly rapey moves on Cordelia - but his story must still be put to an end once he's presented his world. We get to see the horror of Marcy Ross' situation even though it's clear that she's become, in Buffy's words, a thundering loony. The Master weeps over Darla. Buffy's Slayer role was always part-counselor, long before Robin Wood rolled into town; she doesn't just use violence, she lets both victims and perpetrators explain their worlds, even if it may just be a throwaway rationalisation from one of Giles' books. Buffy actively welds other stories to her own. Buffy actively welds other stories to its own. The genre roulette isn't just a fun way to add variety to a weekly TV show, it serves to validate the people in them. Record their pain. Save their worlds.
JONATHAN: Stop saying my name like we're friends! We're not friends! You all think I'm an idiot! A short idiot!
BUFFY: I don't. I don't think about you much at all. Nobody here really does. Bugs you, doesn't it. You have all this pain, and all these feelings and nobody's really paying attention.
JONATHAN: You think I just want attention?
BUFFY: No, I think you're up in the clock tower with a high-powered rifle because you wanna blend in. Believe it or not, Jonathan, I understand about the pain.
JONATHAN: Oh right. Cuz the burden of being beautiful and athletic, that's a crippler.
BUFFY: You know what? I was wrong. You are an idiot. My life happens to, on occasion, suck beyond the telling of it. Sometimes more than I can handle. And it's not just mine. Every single person down there is ignoring your pain because they're too busy with their own. The beautiful ones. The popular ones. The guys that pick on you. Everyone. If you could hear what they were feeling. The loneliness. The confusion. It looks quiet down there. It's not. It's deafening.
Buffy was never a perfect series. 20 years later, there are things about it that haven't aged well (especially in season 1) and the very fact that it tried to be on-message tends to call more attention to the ways it failed. But flaws and all, the show was still always based around that simple act of seeing others, of acknowledging them, of dealing with their situations because they are not separate from your own. Saying that we're all in this together. And, in that simple but brilliant twist at the end of the season, have Buffy thwart prophecy and be free of predestination from then on - still trapped in a hellish world, but with the right to fight for her life and others'.
XANDER: You're still weak.
BUFFY: No. No, I feel strong. I feel different.
Which brings us back to Cabin In The Woods, and our heroes' choice to not save the world. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's... complicated, but basically we learn that our heroes have been put through the standard horror-movie script and killed off one by one in order to appease the old gods who will rise and wipe out mankind if they don't get their sacrifices (hello to Buffy's HP Lovecraft-lite backstory, as explained by Giles in s1), and at the end the survivors are told to kill each other off to entertain the monsters or let humanity die. Despite the fact that at least one of them is already bleeding to death, they choose to get stoned and wait for the end of the world instead.
MARTY: Giant evil gods.
DANA: I wish I could have seen them.
MARTY: I know. That would have been a fun weekend.
Does this sound familiar? Because this is not a random monster of the week deciding to try and destroy the world. This is one world unambiguously ending. This is... well, this:
ANYANKA: You trusting fool! How do you know the other world is any better than this?
GILES: Because it has to be!
This world will not stand, Cabin In The Woods says - much like Buffy does in just about every episode. It matters how we treat each other, and realities in which it doesn't must be fought.
We live in a time when a lot of different people are pushing end-of-the-world scenarios, claiming to do it by "listening to the people" (who always seem to agree with them) and "saying what you think" (without ever specifying what that is). If we don't do X (kick out the immigrants, or build higher walls, or return to Traditional Family Values, or...) it'll be the end of the world as YOU know it, so keep your blinders on and trust us to get rid of those invisible monsters for you. Well, any eschatology worth its salt ends with a new world rising from the ashes of the one that ended. Buffy begins and ends with the notion that the world looks different for everyone, meaning that those new worlds were all there all along. Buffy isn't about the apocalypses, it's about the cases-of-the-week. Every time Buffy shows a victim or a monster, it creates a world. Every time Buffy saves a life, she saves a world. And by focusing on the ones left by the wayside of the traditional narratives, by refusing to accept that there's just ONE world, ONE narrative, she keeps doing so 20 years later. And I for one am very grateful for that.
So thank you, Joss, SMG, and all the rest of you who took part in it, actors, writers, producers, and fans. Here's to 20 more.
BUFFY: We saved the world. I say we party.
* Sidebar: Yuri Herrera's very highly recommended novel Signs Preceding The End Of The World uses the verb "to verse" (the equally neologous "jarchar" in Spanish) as a catch-all term to mean to leave, to enter, to pass, to cross, to transgress, as his heroine crosses the Mexican border into the US, moving from one world while giving birth to another. Metaphorically. Maybe. Great novel at any rate, read it.
- Jake Chambers, Stephen King's The Gunslinger
So I wanted to post something for Buffy's 20th birthday, and why I still care so much about this little series, but I wasn't sure just what until I started a rewatch and got to this line in "The Harvest":
JOYCE: Everything's the end of the world when you're a 16-year-old girl.
Which got me to this:
She saved the world. A lot.
Which got me thinking about just what the hell (heh) the "world" and saving it means in terms of the Buffy- and Jossverses, and why that would matter.
I mean, we're talking about the guy whose most recent original work in Cabin In The Woods (spoilers ahead) ended with our heroes explicitly refusing to sacrifice anything to save the world and letting it end. What changed, Joss? Besides, Buffy doesn't seem to do a whole lot of saving outside the larger (and not very large at that) metropolitan area of Sunnydale, as much as they try to convince us that one ancient vampire taking over a small town in SoCal would somehow constitute the end of the world.
Funnily enough, right off the bat, season 1 of Buffy has lots of characters talking about "the world". And they're all defining it from a personal perspective.
GILES: Because you are the Slayer. Into each generation a Slayer is born, one girl in all the world, a Chosen One, one born with the strength and skill to hunt--
BUFFY: -- the vampires, to stop the spread of their evil blah, blah, blah... I've heard it, okay?
BUFFY: You, Xander, Willow, you guys... you guys know the score, you're careful. Two days in my world and Owen really would get himself killed.
DARLA: Do you know what the saddest thing in the world is?
BUFFY: Bad hair on top of that outfit?
DARLA: To love someone who used to love you.
SNYDER: My predecessor, Mr. Flutie, may have gone in for all that touchy-feely relating nonsense, but he was eaten. You're in my world now.
WILLOW: I'm trying to think how to say it... to explain it so you understand...
BUFFY: It doesn't matter as long as you're okay.
WILLOW: I'm not okay! I knew those guys. I go to that room every day. And when I walked in there, it... it wasn't our world anymore. They made it theirs. And they had fun. What are we gonna do?
Thing is, "the world" is a very malleable concept. "The Earth" is a lot more unambiguous, we're talking about a planet, but the world - that can mean a lot of different things. Especially in a series as wilfully post-modern as Buffy. Within the larger Buffyverse there are many different worlds; the two separate series Buffy and Angel (and, if that's your poison, their various comicbook, novel, board game and fanfic spinoffs), hell and heaven dimensions, alternate realities (usually referred to as verses* by fans) ... Sure. But the show also runs on what Terry Pratchett called narrativium, and keeps sneaking into both the characterization and plot that each person is narrating their own story. No two characters experience the events of Buffy the exact same way, they all live their own version of it. There is not ONE world; each person lives in, and constitutes, a world of their own.
BUFFY: What I want is to be left alone.
ANGEL: Do you really think that's an option anymore?
In these days of "alternate facts", filter bubbles and whatnot, that may sound a bit creepy. Surely, that means Ford's or Warren's or Richard Wilkins' or any crush-kill-destroy demon's worldviews (to borrow a word from the current politicsverse) are no less valid than Buffy's? Is Buffy just another PC-gone-mad SJW out to force her biased version of reality on people who just want the freedom to suck the blood of the living in peace? Well, no, because the thing is, those worlds are not mutually exclusive. Just because you have your own, you can't ignore those of others, because the Buffyverse makes them tangible and frequently gives them very sharp teeth.
MASTER: A dream is a wish your heart makes. This is real life.
Much has been made of how Buffy fights demons that are metaphors for her own situation. Less is made of how often she fights other people's demons as well; pretty much every episode of season 1 has her try to protect someone at school, whether they be weirdos or cheerleaders. Buffy is an inherently empathetic story. Even the monsters get their say; Vamp!Jesse gets to explain exactly how this is an improvement for him - while putting some fairly overtly rapey moves on Cordelia - but his story must still be put to an end once he's presented his world. We get to see the horror of Marcy Ross' situation even though it's clear that she's become, in Buffy's words, a thundering loony. The Master weeps over Darla. Buffy's Slayer role was always part-counselor, long before Robin Wood rolled into town; she doesn't just use violence, she lets both victims and perpetrators explain their worlds, even if it may just be a throwaway rationalisation from one of Giles' books. Buffy actively welds other stories to her own. Buffy actively welds other stories to its own. The genre roulette isn't just a fun way to add variety to a weekly TV show, it serves to validate the people in them. Record their pain. Save their worlds.
JONATHAN: Stop saying my name like we're friends! We're not friends! You all think I'm an idiot! A short idiot!
BUFFY: I don't. I don't think about you much at all. Nobody here really does. Bugs you, doesn't it. You have all this pain, and all these feelings and nobody's really paying attention.
JONATHAN: You think I just want attention?
BUFFY: No, I think you're up in the clock tower with a high-powered rifle because you wanna blend in. Believe it or not, Jonathan, I understand about the pain.
JONATHAN: Oh right. Cuz the burden of being beautiful and athletic, that's a crippler.
BUFFY: You know what? I was wrong. You are an idiot. My life happens to, on occasion, suck beyond the telling of it. Sometimes more than I can handle. And it's not just mine. Every single person down there is ignoring your pain because they're too busy with their own. The beautiful ones. The popular ones. The guys that pick on you. Everyone. If you could hear what they were feeling. The loneliness. The confusion. It looks quiet down there. It's not. It's deafening.
Buffy was never a perfect series. 20 years later, there are things about it that haven't aged well (especially in season 1) and the very fact that it tried to be on-message tends to call more attention to the ways it failed. But flaws and all, the show was still always based around that simple act of seeing others, of acknowledging them, of dealing with their situations because they are not separate from your own. Saying that we're all in this together. And, in that simple but brilliant twist at the end of the season, have Buffy thwart prophecy and be free of predestination from then on - still trapped in a hellish world, but with the right to fight for her life and others'.
XANDER: You're still weak.
BUFFY: No. No, I feel strong. I feel different.
Which brings us back to Cabin In The Woods, and our heroes' choice to not save the world. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's... complicated, but basically we learn that our heroes have been put through the standard horror-movie script and killed off one by one in order to appease the old gods who will rise and wipe out mankind if they don't get their sacrifices (hello to Buffy's HP Lovecraft-lite backstory, as explained by Giles in s1), and at the end the survivors are told to kill each other off to entertain the monsters or let humanity die. Despite the fact that at least one of them is already bleeding to death, they choose to get stoned and wait for the end of the world instead.
MARTY: Giant evil gods.
DANA: I wish I could have seen them.
MARTY: I know. That would have been a fun weekend.
Does this sound familiar? Because this is not a random monster of the week deciding to try and destroy the world. This is one world unambiguously ending. This is... well, this:
ANYANKA: You trusting fool! How do you know the other world is any better than this?
GILES: Because it has to be!
This world will not stand, Cabin In The Woods says - much like Buffy does in just about every episode. It matters how we treat each other, and realities in which it doesn't must be fought.
We live in a time when a lot of different people are pushing end-of-the-world scenarios, claiming to do it by "listening to the people" (who always seem to agree with them) and "saying what you think" (without ever specifying what that is). If we don't do X (kick out the immigrants, or build higher walls, or return to Traditional Family Values, or...) it'll be the end of the world as YOU know it, so keep your blinders on and trust us to get rid of those invisible monsters for you. Well, any eschatology worth its salt ends with a new world rising from the ashes of the one that ended. Buffy begins and ends with the notion that the world looks different for everyone, meaning that those new worlds were all there all along. Buffy isn't about the apocalypses, it's about the cases-of-the-week. Every time Buffy shows a victim or a monster, it creates a world. Every time Buffy saves a life, she saves a world. And by focusing on the ones left by the wayside of the traditional narratives, by refusing to accept that there's just ONE world, ONE narrative, she keeps doing so 20 years later. And I for one am very grateful for that.
So thank you, Joss, SMG, and all the rest of you who took part in it, actors, writers, producers, and fans. Here's to 20 more.
BUFFY: We saved the world. I say we party.
* Sidebar: Yuri Herrera's very highly recommended novel Signs Preceding The End Of The World uses the verb "to verse" (the equally neologous "jarchar" in Spanish) as a catch-all term to mean to leave, to enter, to pass, to cross, to transgress, as his heroine crosses the Mexican border into the US, moving from one world while giving birth to another. Metaphorically. Maybe. Great novel at any rate, read it.
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no subject
Date: 2017-03-20 09:26 am (UTC)As infinitewhale points out further down, Cabin (or at least the first draft) may predate Dollhouse. All the same, it's the last original thing he's put out (and that was five years ago. Get off twitter and get to work, Joss!)
There's that very telling scene in Cabin where the heroes actually start working together, and the controllers immediately drug them to make them think it makes more sense to go it alone. That's a good metaphor.
I always felt the Existentialist perspective worked best.
Yeah, Joss has been pretty open about his fanboying of Camus and existentialism. To re-use a quote
"Season six [of Buffy] remains the highlight. You won't find a more skilled extended exploration of existential turmoil on the big or small screen. And I'm not talking "woe is me" teenage angst, but a genuine search for what it means to be human. It's Bergman for the masses."
Tim Porter, Paste Magazine
Slaughterhouse-Five is one of my favourite novels. Here's a pitch: Scalzi and Joss get together to adapt Vonnegut's novels (they're in a verse with each other, mostly) into a TV series. Who do I contact to make that happen? :)
no subject
Date: 2017-03-21 01:02 am (UTC)LOL! He has the same problem Scalzi and Stephen King do..Trumpitis (coined by a co-worker) or an inability to ignore the Doofus. I get it...I've had to yank myself away from FB due to falling into the same trap. Twitter is even worse.
Except I think Scalzi and Stephen King have actually created stuff recently. But they're novelists --- it's easier to get a novel published than a television series or movie.
I wonder if Whedon is ghost-writing?
Slaughterhouse-Five is one of my favourite novels. Here's a pitch: Scalzi and Joss get together to adapt Vonnegut's novels (they're in a verse with each other, mostly) into a TV series. Who do I contact to make that happen? :)
Vonnegut is ridiculously difficult to adapt to the big or small screen. I think for the same reasons that William S. Burroughs, Heinlein, and Joyce are...he has this sort of jagged stream of consciousness style...where he jumps around a lot.
I like it -- because my mind does that. And I have a mother who will do that in mid-sentence so I'm used to it. But I think it is hard for a lot of people.
If anyone could adapt him Whedon and Scalzi could. Both have similar ways of thinking.
I'm in the midst of Hitchhiker's Guide and appreciating Slaughter-House Five more and more as I go. Adams seems to borrow from it in places. No book did a better job of conveying how human beings dehumanize and objectify one another for their own ends...and how War is the end result of that. That book, Slaughter-House Five, kicked me in the gut, and it really resonated...with what is happening now, in a weird way. (Not sure it was the best pick for travel reading material though...but somehow, I found it comforting. The whole "so it goes" just was really comforting somehow.)
It's a weird book - you can't really describe the experience of reading it. Or why...it is weirdly uplifting...you sort of have to read it on your own to experience it. So, not sure how anyone could convey that to a small screen.
no subject
Date: 2017-03-21 01:12 am (UTC)Tim Porter, Paste Magazine
Hmmm...didn't see that. Was that part of the article which stated how S6 Tore the Show Down and Built Something Better?
I tend to agree. S6 is when I became obsessed with the series. I enjoyed it before then, but I wasn't quite a fan until S6. S6 blew me away. Because it took what they were attempting to do in a handful of episodes in S2-5 (Passion/Becoming, Hush/Restless/Who are You, Wish/Doppleganland/Earshot/Superstar, Fool for Love) and expanded on it. Like watching a hire wire act without a net.
And anyone who has seen Luis Bunel or some surrealistic films...saw the ambitious stuff they were attempting with a low-budget, and within a limited time frame. I mean if you consider for a moment that this was on UPN (which was the ugly step-sister to the WB), and that the writers were basically writing from the seat of their pants (no character bible, totally intuitive) -- it's amazingly well done. You can't compare it to stuff like Lost or BSG -- which had much bigger budgets and a lot more freedom and time. And in some respects, I actually think it was better than those shows. I certainly enjoyed it more and don't see myself rewatching or writing much about the other two.
no subject
Date: 2017-03-21 09:47 pm (UTC)I don't think Stephen King is physically capable of not writing at least two novels per year.
Vonnegut is ridiculously difficult to adapt to the big or small screen.
I thought both Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night worked pretty well as movies. But yeah, it's not really the same thing.
You can't compare it to stuff like Lost or BSG -- which had much bigger budgets and a lot more freedom and time. And in some respects, I actually think it was better than those shows.
If nothing else, as contested as it is, the Buffy series finale didn't screw up as monumentally as BSG (and, I'm told, Lost) did.
no subject
Date: 2017-03-22 02:31 am (UTC)I've only read Welcome to the Monkeyhouse, Cat's Cradle, Sirens of Titan and Slaughter-House Five. Three in the 1980s (which means I don't remember them that well) and Slaughter-House Five last week.
I don't think Stephen King is physically capable of not writing at least two novels per year.
Whether they are any good is a whole other issue...particularly since they stopped editing his work several years back, which is about around the time I stopped reading his work. I'm sorry, everyone needs a line editor, even if word is horrific about accepting line editing changes and you often don't know it hasn't...(okay rant on a separate topic). Anne Rice did the same thing (no editor, she doesn't think she needs one.).
If nothing else, as contested as it is, the Buffy series finale didn't screw up as monumentally as BSG (and, I'm told, Lost) did.
From what I've seen and heard? Whether people liked the BSG or LOST endings had a lot to do with their personal religious views. Both endings got a bit ....okay more than a bit...religious with a heavy Judeo/Christian motif.
They didn't work for me, but I can't decide if it was because I am admittedly not a big fan of Judeo/Christian heavy religious moral narratives...or if the plotting/structure was off? (Judeo/Christian mythos from my perspective has been overdone and not well. It can get sappy and sanctimonious. And Ron Moore does tend to go down that road a lot -- he did in Caprica, and in Deep Space Nine (which is why I had issues with DS9.) BSG -- it felt like the plotting was off somehow, and there were bits and pieces that just did not make any sense. (ex: Starbuck disappearing like a ghost as if she'd only come back to help Apollo, but had actually died, and the whole Earth that they landed on looking like a freshly mowed lawn, well manicured and taken care of...) To be fair? The first version of BattleStar Galatica got heavy handed with the Christian mythos...going so far as to introduce the devil and the angles of light in an episode. So...it's not surprising that they didn't feel the need to do it in version 2.0.
LOST? It made BSG look rather..subtle in comparison. I have a Lutheran friend, who is rather religious, who adored the ending of Lost. I found it heavy handed and obvious. (We discover the island is a sort of purgatory or limbo gateway between life and death...and at the very end everyone gets to relive their lives and solve all their problems then meets up together at the gates of heaven. ) BSG actually made more sense than LOST did. Because it didn't quite work that the Island was a way-station between heaven and hell, with God and the Devil making deals. Not when people could leave the island and live in the real world, then come back and die on it.
Nor did it make a lot of sense that at the end everyone lives out some alternate existence where they never arrive on the island, and solve all their issues so they can come to heaven.
But, I know people who loved it. (shrugs).
Buffy....I thought worked better. It was less heavy-handed. Of course Whedon isn't religious, so there's that. If anything he's anti-religious...and kept poking at it with a big stick. Yet, religious people had no problems with it -- so more subtle.
no subject
Date: 2017-03-22 04:41 pm (UTC)We discover the island is a sort of purgatory or limbo gateway between life and death...
It wasn't, though. The Island was a real, actual place and everything on it happened as depicted. Basically, it's a Hellmouth with electromagnetism instead of magic.
The ending is something different, but no less heavy-handed. That's why everyone is there, whether they died on the Island or not. I quite enjoyed the last season except for the sideways crap and the ending. It just seemed like fanservice. Everyone gets a happy ending, guys! Maybe I'm made of stone, but I rolled my eyes.