We'll see about Spike. I would argue very hard for the proposition that Spike is essential to Buffy's story up through The Chosen, and that Joss knows this and approves of it. He couldn't have written things the way he did if he was insensible of just how central Spike is.
But I do agree that part of "everything's all different" could well be that Buffy's story is no longer really focused on the things represented by the Angel/Buffy/Spike movement. I still think Joss has to do something to move us from a world where Spike was genuinely emotionally intimate with Buffy to a world where Buffy's loneliness is an explicit theme. Is she there because she rejected Spike and that intimacy? Or because he died and it was forced on her? And as I've said, if he fails to offer some kind of bridge, then y'all are right about how bad season 8 is.
I look forward to some interesting conversations about AtF once it wraps up. I'd love to compare notes with you on it.
You know, I don't think Joss is exploring Buffy's darkness in the way you think. I don't mean that he expects us to endorse everything that Buffy's done, but I don't think he's aware quite how badly she's coming across. I would expect her friends to behave rather differently towards her than just to complacently accept everything she does if we were really supposed to disapprove of it so much.
I have always oscillated on this -- quite wildly. On good days, I think that Joss has ALWAYS challenged our conventional assumptions about heroes, and that the ambiguities of his two leads are totally intentional, and are meant as a critique of the genre and its typical audience. On bad days, I think it's an accident that these interesting ambiguities are there and/or that the writers are so bought into the notion that heroes are essentially good, and thus fail to notice how badly they're really behaving, and there is thus a huge tension between what I'm seeing and what they want me to see.
I have mostly sided with the former view, especially in the wake of the release of season 8. NFFY was huge for me because I think it's very clear that Buffy and Faith have inverted moral positions, and because the arc goes back to the season 3 stuff in a way that calls attention to just how murky it really was all along. At a minimum, the second arc of season 8 is very easily read as part of a show that has always meant us to think harder about good/evil dichotomies. Jane's comments on the latest issue say that this has always been intentional. The fact that ME explicitly chose to use Angel's hero music when he was locking the lawyers up with Darla and Dru suggests that they are quite intentional about contrasting the look and feel of the show with the actual moral content of what's going on. It opens up space for us to judge the characters independently of the cues of music or lighting or even of the reactions of characters within the show -- and those tensions really are interesting. I suppose at a minimum, I'm free to read the show that way even if the writers really don't know that Faith's original failure was an accident; or that Buffy was pretty darned abusive towards Spike in season 6; or that Angel ordering Lindsey's execution is seriously problematic. The show has stressed the distance between appearance and reality, and that frees up a lot of space for interesting engagement with the show, regardless of authorial intent.
Stray thought: OTOH, my negative reaction about AtF is almost entirely centered on the fact that I'm pretty darned sure that Brian is in the latter camp. He's done a lot of whitewashing, that suggests that he'd rather live in a world where heroes are 90% good, rather than the show I was watching where (in the case of Angel) the protagonist was always at serious risk of going the other way, and was always pretty mixed between good and bad. So I do have some sense that Buffy (all versions) and AtS really do have an intentional distance between the appearance of things and the truth of what's going on.
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Date: 2009-01-14 08:49 pm (UTC)But I do agree that part of "everything's all different" could well be that Buffy's story is no longer really focused on the things represented by the Angel/Buffy/Spike movement. I still think Joss has to do something to move us from a world where Spike was genuinely emotionally intimate with Buffy to a world where Buffy's loneliness is an explicit theme. Is she there because she rejected Spike and that intimacy? Or because he died and it was forced on her? And as I've said, if he fails to offer some kind of bridge, then y'all are right about how bad season 8 is.
I look forward to some interesting conversations about AtF once it wraps up. I'd love to compare notes with you on it.
You know, I don't think Joss is exploring Buffy's darkness in the way you think. I don't mean that he expects us to endorse everything that Buffy's done, but I don't think he's aware quite how badly she's coming across. I would expect her friends to behave rather differently towards her than just to complacently accept everything she does if we were really supposed to disapprove of it so much.
I have always oscillated on this -- quite wildly. On good days, I think that Joss has ALWAYS challenged our conventional assumptions about heroes, and that the ambiguities of his two leads are totally intentional, and are meant as a critique of the genre and its typical audience. On bad days, I think it's an accident that these interesting ambiguities are there and/or that the writers are so bought into the notion that heroes are essentially good, and thus fail to notice how badly they're really behaving, and there is thus a huge tension between what I'm seeing and what they want me to see.
I have mostly sided with the former view, especially in the wake of the release of season 8. NFFY was huge for me because I think it's very clear that Buffy and Faith have inverted moral positions, and because the arc goes back to the season 3 stuff in a way that calls attention to just how murky it really was all along. At a minimum, the second arc of season 8 is very easily read as part of a show that has always meant us to think harder about good/evil dichotomies. Jane's comments on the latest issue say that this has always been intentional. The fact that ME explicitly chose to use Angel's hero music when he was locking the lawyers up with Darla and Dru suggests that they are quite intentional about contrasting the look and feel of the show with the actual moral content of what's going on. It opens up space for us to judge the characters independently of the cues of music or lighting or even of the reactions of characters within the show -- and those tensions really are interesting. I suppose at a minimum, I'm free to read the show that way even if the writers really don't know that Faith's original failure was an accident; or that Buffy was pretty darned abusive towards Spike in season 6; or that Angel ordering Lindsey's execution is seriously problematic. The show has stressed the distance between appearance and reality, and that frees up a lot of space for interesting engagement with the show, regardless of authorial intent.
Stray thought: OTOH, my negative reaction about AtF is almost entirely centered on the fact that I'm pretty darned sure that Brian is in the latter camp. He's done a lot of whitewashing, that suggests that he'd rather live in a world where heroes are 90% good, rather than the show I was watching where (in the case of Angel) the protagonist was always at serious risk of going the other way, and was always pretty mixed between good and bad. So I do have some sense that Buffy (all versions) and AtS really do have an intentional distance between the appearance of things and the truth of what's going on.