"...here at the ending of all things..."

7.22: Chosen & excerpt from The Romantic Manifesto by Ayn Rand

Not only was Ayn Rand's writing and approach astonishingly clear, it has also proved helpful in identifying the elements within literature with which I am already familiar. Her calling into question of very specific stylistic devices and drawing constrasts between others addressed suspicions I have long held concerning some works of literature I have come across. I loved the part where she cites an imaginery situation in which a writer describes a hero as "'virtuous,' 'benevolent,' 'sensitive,' 'heroic,'" but he "does nothing except that he loves the heroine, smiles at the neighbors, contemplates the sunset and votes for the Democratic Party" (pg. 67)—it took me back to being a 13-year-old, frustrated all over again after reading The Scarlet Pimpernel because, while the hero is praised for his bravery and brilliant disguises, the reader is not privy to any of the facts, so it would appear that he doesn't really DO anything in the whole novel. Then, on top of that, I saw through his "brilliant disguise" at the end, and I know I personally hate when I guess the ending. I realize this was a very popular style at the time Baroness Orczy was writing, but nevertheless, COME ON! I appreciated having that, and other problematic issues in literature, addressed so clearly in Ayn Rand's book.

Looking at "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer," I can now more easily see the solidity of each of these ingredients, and their unlikely but wonderful compatibility. The show's identity stems naturally from the culture surrounding it (the words diverse and eclectic come to mind), and this aura should be embraced rather than dismissed. Because of its point of origin (aka, America, even California, in the 20th century, extending over the brink of the 21st) I really find the theme, plot, characterizations AND style of BtVS to be well-mixed, exceptionally clever and undeniably cool.

Now, according to AGB:

The theme of BtVS: everyone must take a stand in the neverending, universal battle between good and evil.

The plot-theme of BtVS: the fate of the world lies in the extraordinarily capable hands of a beautiful, fashionable Californian girl.

I watched most of the television-spot feature, "Television With a Bite," and in one of the first cuts from an interview with Joss Whedon, he mentioned that he wanted to create a show with an explicitly feminist mission. After viewing almost the entire show, I am quite clear on the fact that HIS brand of "feminism" is not hand-in-hand with that of the "femi-Nazi" (i.e. Buffy's own wardrobe and emphatically NOT anti-male outlook), and in general, the result is a type of feminism of which most women should approve. Very basically, despite the historical patriarchal view of women, women are strong and should stand alongside men, not behind them—not that I would exactly call Buffy herself an updated suffragette with kung-fu skills.

In "Chosen," when Willow is able to call up the magic of the scythe to empower all the potential Slayers all around the world and we see the inspirational montage of all the girls all over the world who suddenly share in the power of the Slayer, it's as though Whedon had put everything—everything he wanted to say with "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer"—into that one concept and scene. I personally did find it to be quite emotional.

While looking at the facts and not at the actual show itself, the "recently gay" Willow could be viewed as a slight upset to the balance. I saw evidence of Whedon's excellent planning and writing skills there for sure: viewers were eased with the utmost care into her initial relationship with Tara. Whedon mentioned that when they actually came out and said that "Willow is in love with Tara," they started getting hate emails and such—but I didn't view the situation as such an upset. For one thing, we HAD already seen evidence (especially with the vampire Willow in "Doppelgangland"), and for another, I can't help but admire his sense for tact and stopping just immediately before taking something farther than necessary. I am, personally, certainly not interested in seeing two girls making out (in fact, I can't stress how incredibly dull I find it), but the slow buildup of the whole issue and relationship was the perfect approach. Even the initial rather awkward humor about their relationship (aka, Joyce after an unsuccessful date asking Willow and Tara if they ever just thought about "giving up on men" altogether, after which they exchange looks, or Dawn at the beginning of Season 5 writing about the spells Willow and Tara do together) was handled well. I think that Whedon's influence on such a touchy subject was very necessary to the show and was quite obvious.

The second scene, the rewritten one, struck me as weak and sophomoric. (I mean, I could have written it.) There is such a weighty subtext, filled with unspoken words and ambivalent but strong emotions, in the actual book version. We are humans; we must express ourselves through creativity. We write, paint, draw, sculpt; we make movies or TV shows, we act, we make up stories. Rand had written the scene as a dialogue between these two men, and if these characters were as important as they seem to the structure of the novel, they never would have spoken in such basic terms. People with emotional baggage don't usually express themselves with the childlike clarity found in the second version; they say much with their silences, they skirt around the facts. Rand called the the rewritten one "humanization" of a character. That comes into play, I think, on two separate levels. Here, Rourk is so much more straightforward and apparently innocuous, while before, his boredom with Keating's struggles, so palpable is comes across several times as contempt, appeared as a multi-layered threat. He is a completely different person here, and so made the scene a completely different scene. On the other hand I find that to pare a work of art down to its bones, to its merest necessities, is to rob it of its inherent humanity. The beauty of creativity may not be found in excess, but it certainly is not found in scantiness. Although sometimes it is true that "Less is more," I hold more often hold to the phrase that "It is better to have too much than too little."

That phrase is only true, however, if there is something actually there, as Rand goes on to point out. Of these two New York scenes, Spillane's, which was one of nothing but visual and action-based evidence and Wolfe's, which was one of which was atmospheric description, I found them both to be just examples of incredibly different writing styles. I never would have thought of "comparing" them, quality-wise, which is almost what she seemed to do; I presume that she hasn't got the highest opinion of Thomas Wolfe's writing style. However, the different styles just come across in different moods. I would have to read the whole novel in both cases to give an actual opinion. I liked Wolfe's vocabulary, because of my own natural inclination toward longish strings of adjectives and adverbs, but the action and pace of Spillane's was like a breath of fresh air. I understand her argument that Wolfe "has said nothing," but I think reading somebody like Marcel Proust every once in a while is nice for the needed moments of un-focused-ness in life.

"It's All About Soul"

7.19: Empty Places
7.20: Touched
7.21: End of Days


Though overall the title "Touched" infers the sexual pairings that go on in this episode (Robin/Faith, Xander/Anya, and Willow/Kennedy), it's Spike and Buffy's calm, restful night together that is clearly the crucial one. Now devoid of the violence and bestiality of their encounters throughout Season 6 (which, as Roz Kaveney points out, did originate in a battle), the painful vacuum that has been their relationship since Spike was ensouled has at last been filled with something truly remarkable: trust. In spite of his repeated inadvertent activities worthy of any regular vampire at the top of his evil game, Buffy responded every time by repeatedly making every attempt to help him. In the episodes surrounding "Never Leave Me," she spent every effort on trying to determine and remove the source of his lapses into demonic behavior, which, when he was "himself," he appreciated far more than he could express.



Again, as when Angel had killed Jenny Calendar and others then mystically returned to life as a vampire with a soul in Season 3, Giles displayed no faith in either the ensouled vampire or Buffy's judgment. Claiming that her emotions were clouding her ability to make decisions, then with Angel and now with Spike, he deliberately goes headlong against his reasons for ever leaving Sunnydale in the first place. If he was ever really proud of Buffy's ability to "put her heart before everything" near the end of Season 5 and then was confident that he should get out of her way and return to England in Season 6, he clearly foreswore himself and failed her by conspiring with Wood to eliminate Spike.


As for the issue of the soul, it's actually the teenager Dawn who hit the crux of the matter; at the very beginning of the episode "Him," she discusses it with Buffy: "I'm just trying to understand. I mean, none of it makes sense. . . But to get a soul? Like that would make him a better man? Xander had a soul when he stood Anya up at the altar." Here we have, really, the "gray areas," the moral ambiguity that Kaveney spends a lot of time on in the introduction to "Reading the Vampire Slayer." Whether or not someone has a soul does not determine their actions, although it has a voice in the form of a conscience. Every character has, in some way or another, gone against his or her conscience in a big way since the beginning of the show. There is also a huge if subtle constant battle being waged between "wants" and "needs." As vampires, Angel and Spike need to drink blood, the easiest way of doing so to attack the weak humans. However, their wants become redetermined with the unstable re-installation of a soul. Even with the chip and not the soul, Spike's promise to Buffy to protect Dawn overcame his intrinsic desires as a vampire to join the raging demon mob in "Barganing, Pt. 2."


To re-state something that is frequently on the lips of strong figures in literature, it is not one's WISHES but one's CHOICES that define their character. This is a fairly obvious fact distilled from life. Though it may ever be Angel's inclination to bite Buffy's neck instead of kiss her lips—or both, which is perhaps more likely—he does not. Sometimes these choices constitute as a form of sacrifice, sometimes they don't. It is a natural reflection of the way people relate to one another and to their environment. While Buffy toys with sharing in Faith's autonomous behavior in "Bad Girls" from Season 3, Buffy can see that Faith is a living example of what would happen if she were to embrace it completely, and chooses not to—even though she is certainly equally capable. Buffy, Xander, Anya, and ultimately Giles see what has happened to Willow at the end of Season 6: like Glory, she abandoned the approach of the "choice" with the attitude that her power was above them (displaying quite a different personality than the timid high schooler dipping into magick who was spooked by the Anya, the new girl's, spell).

Faithless women (well, not anymore...)

7.12: Potential
7.17: Lies My Parents Told Me
7.18: Dirty Girls

"Lies My Parents Told Me" should actually have been named "Lies My Mother Told Me." And boy, some of this stuff was pretty disturbing, particularly Spike—then, William—and HIS lovely mother after he had turned her into a vampire. I'm no psychologist, but I know about Freudian slips and such ("When you say one thing and mean your mother—whoops, what I meant was 'another'!"); Spike's vampire mom was right up there with the disturbia. The situation with Wood's mom was more of the "what a real Slayer is" idea. She always told him that the mission was the most important thing, although he still may not fully understand all the implications of that statement, although both Spike and Buffy explained it, more or less.


"The big picture" (a phrase that's been quite often repeated of late) is simply too big—too big for personal feelings, preferences, wants, and even some needs. The Slayer's duty, the Slayer's destiny, is to mark the fate of the entire world as top priority. Not simply one, two, sixty or six hundred people, but everyone. Though the phrase "the end justifies the means" is not one that Buffy has always supported in the past, but lately there seems to be a marked change in some of her rules of conduct. Having glimpsed what lies beneath the Seal of Danzalthar, she has come to the conclusion that all the power in her corner (aka, herself, the unpredictable effectiveness of the old Scooby Gang, and a handful of half-baked potential Slayers) will not be sufficient to make even a dent on the gazillions of Turok-Hans below. Buffy has felt powerless before, but this is not the same. She seems to have been overcome by a very specific attitude of "we, the side fighting the evil, WILL survive this, even if I don't personally." In one of the episodes we did NOT watch for class, when speaking of Spike's government chip, she said something that I found really interesting: "You can't fight evil with evil." Although the series has never fully answered the question "What IS good, exactly?", it's the type of solid statement that the Slayer SHOULD utter.


Can I just say that, although I do love Nathan Fillion, I HATE Caleb? "Can I say something stronger than hate—can I reVILE Caleb?" His twisted religiosity and topsy-turvy Bible-like phrasiology is disgusting. Then, far worse than Warren with the sick misogynism; at least HE wasn't ALWAYS so blatantly violent. He needs to die a horrible death very soon. We need to get rid of him as soon as possible. I don't know if I can stand him, and he's only just appeared. Maybe . . . with a little REAL Faith . . .

... with a vengeance

7.5: Selfless
7.6: Him
7.11: Showtime

I know this is a bit out of order, but I wrote about the wrong episodes in my previous blog . . . Oops, my apologies again.

It was really interesting how all the different usages of the word "selfless" from the title of the episode came across in the show. It signified a complete change of heart for Anya herself: the "first" time we see her in old Norway, or wherever she's supposed to be living with Olaf, she takes her revenge on him by turning him into a troll. The act of vengeance in and of itself is notorious for its general self-centered-ness. "Vengeance" is viewed as something undesirable, an actually bad thing, in most circles, really unless you're a Vengeance Demon. Buffy and her circle of friends basically agree on that point. Dictionary.net defines "vengeance" as "Punishment inflicted in return for an injury or an offense; retribution; often, in a bad sense, passionate or unrestrained revenge," as I've pointed out. Anyanka, Halfrick, and D'Hoffryn's forms of vengeance are always of the second type: revenge without consideration for other simultaneous consequences, it's always vengeance WITH a vengeance, if you will.

Since Anya became human again, she had the chance to learn something of many human attributes, such as compassion (or at least to take the edge off of her literal-ness) and the ability to recognize some sort of delineation between right and wrong. Finally, being human changed her most importantly into someone who can give of herself; in spite of all her protestations and even her rehearsed awkward, amusing semi-feminist wedding vows in "Hell's Bells," she has fallen in love, with all its emotional and spiritual intricacies. She is now able to look beyond the absolute present and her own wishes and desires and consider those of other people. Most pointedly, those of her victims. She "turned her back to please the crowd." It is, I think, yet another credit to Xander, in a lot of ways: Anya is over a thousand years old. She has come across many people and tortured and killed many men, but it's chiefly because of Xander and their love (only briefly happy, but ever honest) that this absolute change came about. Now, she is so much less self-centered she is a different person, even if she fears that she is "self-less" in the sense of not having a "self."

I enjoyed the episode "Him" in a lot of ways; like "Restless," it's a sort of outside force that happens to several of the main characters. Each one is affected in different ways, and reacts to the problem with their own specific style. In Dawn's case, she is the classic besotted teenager: "It's NOT . . . a crush. This is true love!!" When she realizes that she will never get him, she lies down on the railroad track. There's a very angsty teen reaction for you: "If I DIE then everyone will be sorry. That'll teach them." Buffy takes charge of the situation by obviously steering their "relationship," then planning to kill the principal to show RJ how much she "loves" him. Willow almost turns him into a girl; Anya reverts to breaking the law to impress him. These are all pretty selfish motivations, I must say; typical of any infatuation that isn't real and solid, unlike Anya and Xander's relationship, which I discussed earlier.

"Showtime" is distinctly awesome. Buffy, Willow, and Xander's plan to lure the uber-vamp to a better battleground was classic, and the fight was terrific. It certainly does seem that we're coming full circle in so many ways, especially in this episode. I know we discussed the repetition of the phrase, "Here endeth the first lesson," and "Welcome to the Hellmouth," but there are other parallels between the first season and seventh here as well.

Although the potentials are not yet Slayers and Buffy WAS the Slayer, she was neither comfortable in nor knowledgeable of her role, which can certainly be said for each of the girls currently lodging at the Summers home (a sort of replacement for the old Sunnydale High Library of yester-season). She had a guide: Giles, her Watcher. For several seasons now, however, Giles has been out of the picture, or at least he has stepped out of his particular previous role in the life of the Slayer and the Scooby Gang. Instead of Giles, the new potentials have Buffy. Her friends, too, but mostly Buffy. She is guiding them, training them, teaching them the history as well as the generic and even harsh facts about BEING the Slayer. She is probably going to be, in many ways, a much better teacher than Giles was, simply because she HAS "been there, done that." Adding this to her new job as the guidance counselor, it's very clear that we see Buffy's clear coming UP the outside of the cycle, emerging as a true crone in all the positive ways; aka, she's still "quite youthful, AND peppy."

I just realized I wrote about the wrong episodes. It should have been "Beneath You," "Help," and "Selfless." Um. I think. Whoops. I'll get it right next time. :-P

I need somebody

7.2: "Beneath You"

7.4: "Help"

7.7: "Conversations with Dead People"

The title of the episode "Beneath You" certainly has many meanings.

Of course, for those of us who have not yet seen the remainder of the season we're still wondering what all that means (and although there WAS the earth-tunneling worm demon thing in "Beneath You," Anya's vengeance spell was clearly not worthy or permanent enough to be a lasting answer). Not only the phrase that is getting repeated throughout the season, "From beneath you, it devours," but it also brings to mind the line that Buffy said to Spike, like a re-echo of his past in "Fool for Love" from Season 5: "You're beneath me." This theme recurs faintly at the end of the episode, where Buffy finally realizes the nature of Spike's apparent transformation. (May I just say that the writers of Spike's lines in that scene are BRILLIANT. Of course, I'm a big fan of Spike's practically no matter what he does, pretty obviously I'm sure, but here, the perfect amount of everything that's barely being concealed under the surface comes across vividly with so few words, like a Tom Stoppard or Terence Rattigan play.)

Now we've even seen in "Conversations with Dead People," from Buffy's heart-to-heart with a former classmate turned vampire, that Buffy has both an "inferiority" AND a "superiority complex," so there again is a use of the phrase "beneath you."

The parts of the episode "Conversations with Dead People" about Dawn and her mom, Joyce, reminded me very strongly of the film Poltergeist (which I just got to see in Janterm—hooray for Film Music class!). But, of course, one big difference is instead of the mother trying to find the daughter and save her from the other spirits in the other dimension, Dawn is trying to save her mother from the evil demon (or whatever it was). Also, Joyce is definitely dead, unlike the little blonde girl. So, anyway, the action in those scenes just struck me as very reminiscent of Poltergeist.

The episode "Help" was, again, a revisitation of the lines between real and the unreal, usual and unusual. "I think you might be seeing PARAnormal where there's just normal," Willow tells Buffy, and this seems to be one of Buffy's many difficult challenges: how do you face that which is natural and inevitable, like her mother's death? When Joyce was experiencing her unexplained headaches and fainting spells in Season 5, Buffy was so convinced that someone was attacking her through her mother she put herself into a magical trance to trace the mysticism. However, when her mother finally died, it was something Buffy had no way of helping, no way of stopping. For an around-the-clock go-getter like a vampire slayer and a naturally compassionate person like Buffy, that particular fact of life will always be very difficult to accept.

Dawn states, "I guess sometimes you can't help," and Buffy asks, "So what then? What do you do when you know that? When you know that maybe . . . you can't help?" This is something that showed particularly strongly throughout Season 5, when not only Joyce died but the battle against Glory seemed to be inevitably one-sided. Buffy stood up for her sister despite all the complex issues surrounding her creation, despite the seeming invulnerability of her enemy and pointlessness of her efforts. The final scene of "Help," in which Buffy calmly returns to her desk at Sunnydale High to await other students, is how people—not only vampire slayers—really ought to respond to this question: you just keep trying. It's like picking back up after a loved one dies: life goes on, as against it as you as the bereaved may be. Buffy was made to care for and protect people, and in spite of all the horror that will doubtless be going down before the end of the season, she will keep going. That is her calling, her destiny.

[She shall be . . . the Energizer-Bunny Slayer! (My apologies to Anya . . .)]

Here we go again

6.21: Two To Go
6.22: Grave
7.1: Lessons

. . . and we're back with Sunnydale High! Unfortunately, the glorious absence of the high school just couldn't last, for several reasons. 1) There was too much of the earlier seasons invested in the "life in high school is hell" motif for it NOT to recur, 2) Dawn had to go to high school SOMEwhere, and 3) as this is the final season as we know it, it is already imparting a certain kind of closure to the series—depressingly, because I am NOT prepared for this show to be over yet [long live Buffy! (To be honest, I never dreamed I would be saying that—but then again, that was back when I was yet in total ignorance of the Buffyverse.)]—but it also makes it very neat, like some kind of diabolical "bookends."


I really like Willow telling Giles he "went all Dumbledore"—THAT was cute. Even in this, the "real" world of demons and magicks, it's the character who has been closest to REAL power who finally makes a reference to the Harry Potter series. ["And now for something comPLETEly different"—minor rabbit trail here: the Buffyverse reminds me of the world of Harry Potter in a lot of ways: not only is the writing strong and witty, complete with steady and quirky characters, but the series as a whole deals with deep concepts such as self-sacrifice (though still not what I would deem the Ayn Rand version, but more like the garden variety type) and the transforming power of love—even of love that lasts beyond death.]


However, going back to the season 6 finale—yes, it was great, and it was moving, and I wept ever so slightly, as I am wont to do—and the first time I watched the episode, I sort of missed the point of Giles's allowing Willow to take his borrowed powers. He tells Anya that the magick Willow had been using before—that which she had stolen from Rack—"came from a place of rage and power" and that the magick the Coven in Devon lent to him, being magick in its truest form, would appeal to the "spark of humanity that she had left." It enabled her to connect with the rest of the world (as she later discovers the value of in "Lessons") and to sense everyone's emotions.


Giles says that it "allowed her to feel again." Anya said in "Two To Go" that she could no longer sense Willow's presence since whatever Willow was feeling must have gone far beyond mere vengeance—but the simultaneous question seems to be: do enormous feelings somehow double back and negate themselves? True, there is a deadening of the everyday wants and even needs when a loved one dies—often the bereaved go through the day, listless, unable to focus on anything, trying not to focus on the one thing that is the source of their misery. Buffy experienced this after her mother's death: she had to keep doing little things so that she could keep the pain at bay. "I see," Giles tells Willow. "You lose someone you love and the other people in your life—the ones who care about you—become meaningless. I wonder . . . What would Tara say about that?" She immediately veers away from the subject, responding coldly, "You can ask her yourself" and rallies for another attack.


In Willow's case, by this point she has gone so far beyond her initial emotions concerning Tara's death that her responses stopped being RE-actions and turn into just actions. Throughout these ending episodes, everything she does and says takes on a separate entity from her first responses to the event from which they sprang. While, as Giles says, her powerful forces has been "fueled by grief," the foolishness about her use magick that was clear in Willow's character earlier in the season (especially in "Wrecked") have taken charge of her. Her mishandling of the magick changed her, even before: changed her into someone who considers herself impervious and superior. The "scary, veiny Willow" is incredibly condescending and patronizing to everyone—two things just a few seasons ago she would never have considered being. When Buffy first greeted her in Season 1, Willow answered timorously, "Why? I mean—what? Do you want me to move?" She has, as Xander says, "come a long way."


"You've come a long way—ending the world not a terrific notion—but the thing is, yeah. I love you." Not only is destroying the world "not a terrific notion," it is another angle on the idea of suicide. We discussed in class whether or not Buffy's self-sacrifice at the end of Season 5 was just, after all, an escape—a suicide. While I personally do not believe this to be the case (i.e., she did NOT actually commit "suicide," and furthermore if she had allowed Dawn to give HER life it would have bypassed every single person's efforts to protect her throughout the entire season), Willow's plan to channel all life in the world through the satanic effigy smacks of escapism. Like every character, from the high school age Jonathon in "Earshot" to the newly-resurrected Buffy, people have to recognize that, as Spike sings in "Once More, With Feeling,"

"Life's not a song;

Life isn't bliss;

Life is just this: its living.

You'll get along.

The pain that you feel

You only can heal

By living;

You have to go on living.

So one of us is living . . ."