Writer's Intent: a bit of a rant

[maggie2]

gabrielleabellehas an interesting post up talking about the writers' intent to portray Xanders' speech to Buffy in Into the Woods as being The Take on Buffy's relationship with Riley.  Most people think that the writers want the audience to think it was good that Buffy ran after Riley and tragic that she didn't get there on time.  And if I recall from the script, there are cues in the Buffy/Xander scene (most notably "he's getting through to her") which sure sound like Xander has an important truth that Buffy needs to hear.

The subject of writers' intent comes up a lot in the context of critiques of the show.  I very often here the complaint that the writers tell us they were writing something different from the way it came across -- especially when people are complaining about season 6.  We were supposed to see Spike as just the bad boyfriend dragging Buffy down, but that's at odds with the far more complex relationship that ended up on the screen.

We could debate all day and all night about what the writers intended.   But I keep finding myself puzzled at why.  Joss is an existentialist.  That means there is no meaning "out there".  We are the ones who make meaning.  Insofar as Joss is the creator of the Buffyverse, he gets to tell  us what happened and what the rules are.  But he doesn't get to tell us what it means.  If he really is an existentialist, he shouldn't want to tell us what it means.  The writers can show us Xander making a speech to Buffy about why she should run after Riley.  That's in the text.  What's not in the text is any evaluation about whether he's right.  That's a judgment call that WE get to make. 

Well, does it matter that they comment on Xanders' speech by giving us the big Hollywood running after the helicopter scene with the big music and the dramatic editting?  Is that a way of telling us that it is just TRUE that Buffy should have run after Riley?  I don't think so.  Stuff like that is meant to reflect the characters' POV.  Buffy's tragic inability to catch up to Riley is how BUFFY is constructing that event.  There's no doubt that Buffy ends up concluding that Xander was right.  She constructs the end of B/R as being due to her failure. But that's how Buffy constructs the end of *all* her relationships.  Back in season one we were told that Buffy's deepest fear is that Hank left because of her.  She's going to see every other leaving through that lens.  And that's what the writers are showing us.  In Buffy's mind she just played out a tragic, dramatic scene to end her relationship wth Riley.  That's all the writers get to tell us.

The evaluation?  That's up to the audience.  I think Xander was full of crap, mostly talking about his own issues.  I think it's a bit sad that Buffy's emotional make-up is such that she was going to buy Xander's crap.  I can't work up a hatred of ITW on the grounds that the writers want me to feel something that I don't feel, because I don't think the writers get to tell me how to feel, and I don't think these writers want to dictate to me how I should feel.  Marty Noxon might think it's sad that Buffy let Riley get away, but all she gets to write is *that* Riley got away and how Buffy felt about it.   I quite like the episode.  It gives us a good portrait of the hows and whys of the B/R break-up.  It gives us some interesting insight into Riley's character.  Spike's role in the episode reminds us just how far Spike is from understanding what love is about, while also suggesting something about his character that grounds the subsequent growth in Spike's understanding of what love is. Best of all, ITW gets Riley gone.  And happily the writers don't drag it out in subsequent episodes.  Riley doesn't get moped over nearly as much as Parker got moped over, let alone the major epic endless mopage over Angel.  That's a portrait of where Buffy is emotionally.  We get to make of it what we will.

Comments

[gabrielleabelle.livejournal.com]

Agreed to a point. Typically, I'm not too attached to intent, because I love S6 and I think a lot of the brilliance was unintentional.

I think what peeves most fans (including myself) about Xander's speech is that it does act as the final word on the subject. Riley returns in AYW and we get no commentary on ITW at all.

And when the final word is that Buffy is deficient and wrong, it's very annoying. It's especially annoying because Buffy does take it to heart for the rest of the series. And it's extra annoying because it's unquestioned and unchallenged by anybody else.

Certainly, the writers are just laying it out there, and we all come to our own conclusions. But in this case, they're not putting out any alternative viewpoints on the matter, and when Xander's speech in ITW is set up as some ultimate truth reveal, that's what viewers are gonna take it as.

[deird1]

You clever clever person!

I never realised this before, but I think you might be right.

[ms-scarletibis.livejournal.com]

I haven't had a chance to read Gabs post yet, but--

I will say that I always viewed Xander's speech as his point of view of the information he had, and in that respect, he wasn't wrong. However, what always confused the hell out of me is that Buffy, with both sides of the story, bought into Xander's unintentionally slanted assessment. I am not sure what it is the writer's wanted me to feel, since I the viewer saw it from all angles, but I am very confused as to what it was the writer's had Buffy feel and why. It was very...assbackwards and just plain odd (to me).

However...you make an interesting point that she hardly blinks in comparison to her break up/ending with Angel and Parker. We get some histrionic/"oh puhleeze" crying in "Triangle" and...that's pretty much it. Granted, things get all helter skelter a few weeks after Riley's departure, but still--she doesn't seem that affected by it.

My evaluation is that Buffy had a total brain fart after Xander's speech, but shortly recovered.

[rebcake.livejournal.com]

I'm still confused by all these posts insisting that the writers intend for us to feel that Riley is some paragon and that Buffy is somehow to blame from him leaving, when nobody posting or commenting actually feels that way. Every single poster has agreed to a greater or lesser degree that Riley was out of line, Xander was out of line, and that Buffy was lucky to be rid of the big doofus. So, why do people have so much trouble trusting their own take on this episode, in particular?

It's just odd. To me.

[shapinglight]

I haven't had the chance to read all the posts, Maggie. But I agree with your interpretation. I do agree with Gabs, though, that like many Jossverse things, you're always left with the nagging feeling in the back of your mind that large swathes of the audience are not 'getting it' and think Riley/Xander are in the right. That's unavoidable, of course. We all bring our prejudices to the table, and as Joss says, it's a drama, not didacticism.

Erm - I'm ineptly trying to agree with you both here.

ETA: came back to change my icon, because this one seems so very appropriate.

[quinara]

Insofar as Joss is the creator of the Buffyverse, he gets to tell us what happened and what the rules are. But he doesn't get to tell us what it means.

I don't know - I think there's a halfway house between those two options. Events happen, yes, and it doesn't matter what the writer was thinking when they wrote them, but they are always framed in certain ways and that context gives them meaning and makes certain readings more natural than others. We can turn around and actively resist that reading, but I don't think that's the default way that we interact with texts.

AYW comes at a pointed moment in S6 and Riley returning then does mean something different than him returning maybe after OMWF or Smashed or any other episode. OaFA has Buffy actually relatively happy in her house, but then Riley's perspective allows the show to highlight again Buffy's situation - her bad-paying, mindless job; the idea that, for better or worse, she doesn't know everything about Spike. He's given to us as a fantasy that's flawed (because, whoops, he has a wife), but he's a fantasy that casts a certain light on things (even if we take Spike and the eggs most simply as just something Buffy didn't know about).

Whereas I think Riley is so utterly, utterly wrong that he has no place in S6 whatsoever, not to mention in that role. That's a reaction I can have, of course it is, but it's a reaction, not an interaction (I can't really go anywhere with that, because it happened), and to me that's actually a sign of the show being flawed in that particular instance. That sort of blanket rejection of the episode is not what Joss or I wanted when I sat down to watch it.

(And I think I went off into my own little world there, hopefully it makes sense.)

[slaymesoftly.livejournal.com]

Good points, all. :)

[stormwreath.livejournal.com]

I've just re-read the shooting script of 'Into The Woods' (since S5 is not one I've re-watched all that often).

You know, I do think Xander is meant to be giving us an Important Truth. But it's a truth about Buffy, not about Buffy and Riley. Buffy does close herself off emotionally - it's central to her character in the later seasons. And I do agree with Xander that Buffy was doing that with Riley, and that's partly why he left. I'm not sure Buffy realised that before, and that was part of her epiphany. Of course, after Riley had gone anyway it only reinforced her tendency to seal herself away.

Should she have run after him? That's up to her. Xander was telling her it's something she needs to decide for herself: and while it's obvious that he, personally, wants her to say "Yes", the important thing I took from it was that it was still her choice. She wanted to pass the blame onto Riley; to tell herself that he'd made the decision, done the deed, so she was absolved of all responsibility and could happily blame him for betraying her. Xander reminded her that as long as she still has power to move and speak, she can make her own choices. It would be her own pride, not anything Riley did, that could stop her going after him; and it was up to her to choose which was most important to her.

I'm not saying that sacrificing her pride is something that Buffy should, well, be proud of. But in its own way it's kind of heroic, too.



If he really is an existentialist, he shouldn't want to tell us what it means.

I'm not sure that follows exactly. There may be no inherent meaning in an object, but that doesn't mean we can't attempt to persuade other people that the meaning we give to it is the one they ought to give to it too. I'd say it's human nature to want to do that: it's a fundamental part of our character to tell stories about things, and to try to give them meaning.

I think Joss likes to deliberately subvert that sometimes - for example, by providing dramatic musical cues and sweeping camera work for something that actually doesn't warrant them. It's part of his work's quirky appeal, and it's there to warn us that in the end, we can only find our own meanings in things. But even Joss often falls back into the more conventional forms of story-telling; and, of course, the other writers on his shows don't necessarily subscribe to his own philosophy. I'm not sure that Marti Noxon or Doug Petrie are also Existentialists...

[mulder200.livejournal.com]

What a very interesting debate here. I like it.

As for the speech, I don't think Xander was full of crap but simply offering Buffy his advice on the subject based on the evidence he had. It was Buffy herself who knowing all sides of it who chose to run after Riley.

[green-maia.livejournal.com]

Joss Whedon said that one reason he wanted to create Buffy was that he had seen so many horror movies where a blond girl goes into an alley and gets killed by a monster, and he wanted to create a story where the blond girl goes into the alley and kicks the monster's ass.

But: "a blond girl goes into an alley and kicks a monster's ass" is not a fact, it's a narrative. And to narrate is to interpret.

Reality is too complex for the human mind to grasp, and narrative is how we make meaning out of it. The stories we tell ARE our interpretation of reality.

No human story is unbiased; telling a story means choosing what to include, what to focus on, what words or images to use, how to frame it. Every choice excludes another choice.

Good stories are nuanced. Good stories can be interpreted in many different ways. Good stories are complex. Good stories are ambiguous. Good stories are layered.

But nuance and complexity and ambiguity and layers don't mean that the meaning is entirely in the eye of the beholder, because all that nuance and complexity and ambiguity and layers are not Reality but
reality-as-narrated-by-a-limited-human-mind.

The meaning is in the eye of the beholder AND in the eye of the storyteller - and neither eye can see it all.

No story lacks inherent meaning, because a human made it, and human beings can't make anything without putting meaning into it.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

You reminded me of something Whedon said during that recent Cultural Humanist Q&A - when asked about intent and the contradictions in his stories. The person asking the question - wanted to know how an athesist and existentialist reconciled the "magic snow" scene in Amends with say "Objects in Space" or the scene in
Epithany - Angel S2. Whedon responded that he is telling a story and there are multiple voices and perspectives in his head. What you see on the screen are all those voices arguing with each other. I don't
often know. And as a story teller, if I picked just one, it would become didatic not story.

I agree with your take on ITW. I think people forget that it is told through Buffy's pov mainly, then Xanders and finally Riley's. We are getting multiple perspectives.

What I have always found amusing about posts on ITW and Xander/Anya, is the irony that everyone appears to be missing. Xander's speech to Buffy is a huge projection. Every word he says could be applied to his relationship with Anya. And Buffy calls him on it.
Which motivates him to tell Anya she is amazing and further his relationship with her. He even proposes. Yet, look what happens in Hell's Bells - he basically does to Anya what he is accusing Buffy of doing to Riley. He's never honest with her or himself. He doesn't see their relationship clearly until Hell's Bells. Xander has also to a degree romanticized Riley and Buffy. He hasn't heard her side, so much as Riley's and he doesn't know everything regarding Riley.
He thinks he is being a good friend, but he isn't.
His speech is selfishly motivated. As the writer shows later in both AYW and in Hell's Bells. It's great - because what it shows us is that even though our friends may be well-meaning, their advice is not always in our best interest. We have to make our own choices.

[ladyofthelog.livejournal.com]

As ever, I like your commentary on this.

I wonder, too, how much disagreements on how to read the show have to do with how one originally saw it. I saw it on DVD - am I remembering correctly that you did, too? - in its entirety, and watched almost all of the series before reading anything about it. There was no incentive to approach this text in any other way than I would normally approach any text.

[candleanfeather.livejournal.com]

Hi Maggie. I've been wanting to comment on this post for a while now but had to delay it because work is claiming for his due. Kicks work!

It's a difficult subject you tackle here and it opens many questions: on one hand intent is necessary for an author to construct his work, without intent no direction, no form, no meaning and I do think that in academic analysis especially, taking into account the author's intent is important to understand a work. But and the problem (or the richness) is there, we all know that there's isn't such a thing as a total mastery of one's work, hence the possibility of multiple readings. Now as for the particular scene you evoke I don't know how people came to the conclusion that Xander's speech was the voice of the author dictating how to understand the B-R relationship, I believe though that Xander's speech revealed one layer of their relationship (Buffy closing off), it gave meaning to little facts interspersed in the text of the show. But it was only one layer. What always struck me in Btvs, is how the show generally avoided to impose one meaning by carefully constructing the POV of the protagonists, one of the best examples being in season 7 the Buffy-Giles confrontation about Spike. Both have good reasons supporting their respective positions, none of them is evidently wrong.