I really don't think any character's voice gets privileged as the one that speaks the "truth"... especially not when it's essentially a take on the very-well established central character. Buffy is very complex. There are many ways of seeing her. Xanders' way has some truth and some distortion. I just don't see anybody at ME as being about having one character be the oracle who gives the final verdict on how we should see a character or judge her actions.
The thing about Joss as an existentialist is that he's the God in his universe. He creates these characters and sets the rules for how things works and so on. If Joss-as-creator starts stuffing meaning into his world he's supporting a view (worlds have meanings encoded in them) that he actively resists.
On the final paragraph. Once Joss starts subverting the cues then all of the cues are available to be read as subversions. Even if Noxon et.al. thought it was a heaving tragedy that Buffy didn't catch up to Riley, I'm free to see it as a subversion of the notion that Buffy should be seen as the heroine in a romance movie. And if I can find other details in the text that amplify that reading (Triangle as commentary on B/R, for example) then I think I have a reading that is actually doing some work in terms of giving me interesting ways of looking at the text which don't seem to do violence to what's actually presented on screen.
On your last line: Joss is the executive producer and the writers have always said it was his baby. Once he's shaped the series as a whole to have this existentialist/subversive stance, it doesn't matter if the staff writers think they are doing something else. Their more conventional story telling is available to be read subversively because the subversion is part of the show. Indeed, one suspects that the details which do all the undermining might well have been dropped in by Joss without having it register on the other writers that their take on the story just got subverted.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-29 08:50 pm (UTC)The thing about Joss as an existentialist is that he's the God in his universe. He creates these characters and sets the rules for how things works and so on. If Joss-as-creator starts stuffing meaning into his world he's supporting a view (worlds have meanings encoded in them) that he actively resists.
On the final paragraph. Once Joss starts subverting the cues then all of the cues are available to be read as subversions. Even if Noxon et.al. thought it was a heaving tragedy that Buffy didn't catch up to Riley, I'm free to see it as a subversion of the notion that Buffy should be seen as the heroine in a romance movie. And if I can find other details in the text that amplify that reading (Triangle as commentary on B/R, for example) then I think I have a reading that is actually doing some work in terms of giving me interesting ways of looking at the text which don't seem to do violence to what's actually presented on screen.
On your last line: Joss is the executive producer and the writers have always said it was his baby. Once he's shaped the series as a whole to have this existentialist/subversive stance, it doesn't matter if the staff writers think they are doing something else. Their more conventional story telling is available to be read subversively because the subversion is part of the show. Indeed, one suspects that the details which do all the undermining might well have been dropped in by Joss without having it register on the other writers that their take on the story just got subverted.