I do really and well and truly get the problem on this. As a latecomer on DVD, I didn't have to live through the parade of writers saying mule, mule, mule about what is obviously an ox, but I know that they've said crap like that. I honestly and truly don't know what to make of it -- especially in season 6 when they apparently all sounded so earnest about it. It's just... that the readings in the opposite direction so often look so carefully done.
Am deleting an excessively long reply on this. I assume you're talking about (season 6 is about having sex with a bad boy and we know that never turns out well; and Spike must be evil since he has no soul and we'll prove it to you in SR). It's weird and I get that they all looked real earnest in their claims about what they thought they were doing. But the stuff that would make season 6 look much more ox-like to me isn't in there by accident. You don't accidentally show a shockingly brutal scene of your heroine doing something to her lover that could not possibly have been filmed if the hero had been doing it to his lover. Or if you do, and you still expect your audience to think that this is a story about bad evil boyfriends, you are just intensely stupid. But if you're intensely stupid how did you cough up a series that gets lots of serious people to spend a lot of time thinking about it seriously? I don't really want to go out on a limb and say that someone in charge is lying about intention, but this show and makes it cross my mind as a possibility.
Season 6 might be the one place where they really meant it, bizarre though that is. But this reading against text and against the surface is built in from the start. This is a show where one of the main themes is that things are not always what they seem. It's there from the start, not just creeping in later when things get wobbly. The idea of the show, Joss tells us, is what if the small blonde girl in the opening scene doesn't get eaten by the monster, but instead kicks its ass. That's reverse expectation for sure. That's what he told us. But the opening scene of the show isn't of Buffy not getting eaten by the monster. It's of Darla. So the small blonde girl isn't the munchee, as the horror genre conventions would dictate; nor is she the vampire slayer that the show's title and Joss's mission statement would lead you to expect. She's the monster herself. And more, she's the monster who is the former lover of the lover that the vampire slayer is going to take. So Joss tells us that he wants to cut against our expectations; and then he cuts against the expectations we would have formed based on his claim that he's going to cut against our expectations. I dunno. I tend to take that as official license to find meaning in the text on our own -- you know, to grow up as Joss keeps telling us and stop looking to authority figures (or storytellers) to tell us what to think of things. The guys an existentialist. I find it hard to believe that's not exactly what he's been up to since the beginning.
(And it's so not normal for me to think wacky things like this. This is the only show that has pulled this kind of reaction out of me.) So you know what? If it's just an accident and the folks at ME are just majorly incompetent at laying down the straight-forward message of the week that we're supposed to take home it's a lovely accident. And I kind of would rather attend to that than to the yahoos who happened to be around when that bizarre accident spilled onto our screens.
And that got long again. I think what you think about 30% of the time. 30% of the time I think what I just said. And 40% of the time I decide it's too complicated to figure it out and I curse the friend who insisted that I watch the show in the first place.
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Date: 2009-02-13 07:33 am (UTC)I do really and well and truly get the problem on this. As a latecomer on DVD, I didn't have to live through the parade of writers saying mule, mule, mule about what is obviously an ox, but I know that they've said crap like that. I honestly and truly don't know what to make of it -- especially in season 6 when they apparently all sounded so earnest about it. It's just... that the readings in the opposite direction so often look so carefully done.
Am deleting an excessively long reply on this. I assume you're talking about (season 6 is about having sex with a bad boy and we know that never turns out well; and Spike must be evil since he has no soul and we'll prove it to you in SR). It's weird and I get that they all looked real earnest in their claims about what they thought they were doing. But the stuff that would make season 6 look much more ox-like to me isn't in there by accident. You don't accidentally show a shockingly brutal scene of your heroine doing something to her lover that could not possibly have been filmed if the hero had been doing it to his lover. Or if you do, and you still expect your audience to think that this is a story about bad evil boyfriends, you are just intensely stupid. But if you're intensely stupid how did you cough up a series that gets lots of serious people to spend a lot of time thinking about it seriously? I don't really want to go out on a limb and say that someone in charge is lying about intention, but this show and makes it cross my mind as a possibility.
Season 6 might be the one place where they really meant it, bizarre though that is. But this reading against text and against the surface is built in from the start. This is a show where one of the main themes is that things are not always what they seem. It's there from the start, not just creeping in later when things get wobbly. The idea of the show, Joss tells us, is what if the small blonde girl in the opening scene doesn't get eaten by the monster, but instead kicks its ass. That's reverse expectation for sure. That's what he told us. But the opening scene of the show isn't of Buffy not getting eaten by the monster. It's of Darla. So the small blonde girl isn't the munchee, as the horror genre conventions would dictate; nor is she the vampire slayer that the show's title and Joss's mission statement would lead you to expect. She's the monster herself. And more, she's the monster who is the former lover of the lover that the vampire slayer is going to take. So Joss tells us that he wants to cut against our expectations; and then he cuts against the expectations we would have formed based on his claim that he's going to cut against our expectations. I dunno. I tend to take that as official license to find meaning in the text on our own -- you know, to grow up as Joss keeps telling us and stop looking to authority figures (or storytellers) to tell us what to think of things. The guys an existentialist. I find it hard to believe that's not exactly what he's been up to since the beginning.
(And it's so not normal for me to think wacky things like this. This is the only show that has pulled this kind of reaction out of me.) So you know what? If it's just an accident and the folks at ME are just majorly incompetent at laying down the straight-forward message of the week that we're supposed to take home it's a lovely accident. And I kind of would rather attend to that than to the yahoos who happened to be around when that bizarre accident spilled onto our screens.
And that got long again. I think what you think about 30% of the time. 30% of the time I think what I just said. And 40% of the time I decide it's too complicated to figure it out and I curse the friend who insisted that I watch the show in the first place.