gwyn | A thin line between hate and hate

I’ve put off writing about the season 6 discs for many reasons. One is that I still haven’t managed to listen to the commentary tracks for all eps, and it seems wrong to go forward without that background info. Two is that I know I have only a few positive things to say (primarily about the first part of the season), and it makes me feel like a churlish, cranky fangirl, especially when others have written wonderful opuses (opi?) about just why it’s better than anyone gave it credit for being. And third, it just makes me mad — in both senses of the word, and then it gets hard to control my train of thought and wrassle it into something resembling linear, coherent thought.

So maybe I’ll start out with the physical stuff, rather than the spiritual. The extras here are pretty meager, as is to be expected; I liked the thought of including the Buffy panel more than the actual reality of it, especially because the person running the panel did such an execrably poor job that it devolved into Life Lessons from Mutant Enemy. Everything else is charming enough, but not particularly substantive. It’s always struck me as strange that the Buffy discs did not include commentary from any of the actors except the lone Seth Green appearance, along with Marti Noxon and Joss, on S4. Actor commentaries are no more risky, really, than the crew commentaries — some of them will sing, some will tank (is there anyone more stultifying than David Fury? I think not, and the Grave comment track was the only one I listened to yet), so it’s curious that they haven’t relied on their vivacious performers more. This was the first set in a while of the BtVS or Angel discs that I didn’t have to return because of problems, though the packaging was a mess when I got it. Once again, I take Fox to task for their exceptionally poor execution — I’d much prefer spending a few more dollars for packaging that’s not so shoddy.

In some respects, I wish the extras had been better, because it might have taken the sting away from what was, for me, the definition of a show gone wrong. S6 starts out so wonderfully, but watching it devolve — made more intensely disappointing by the compactness of seeing it over the course of days — into something squalid and loathsome is a really difficult experience. And the Buffy panel brings home something that I’ve been feeling for a long time — clearly there was a misunderstanding of what they were doing, but everyone feels compelled to jump on the company bandwagon and support the missteps, and no one is deviating from the party line, no sir. Listening to that panel, especially as James Marsters and Michelle Trachtenberg try to expound upon the virtues of a dark storyline that tells the truth about growing up, when they so clearly have their own misgivings about their own roles, is embarrassing. The backpedaling and excuse-making is terrible, as over and over everyone emphasizes how many bad decisions young adults make, how difficult it is growing up, etc., yet no one seems to recognize that their own personal beliefs and experiences are not the audience’s. There’s a palpable sense of disenchantment when the actors talk about the less savory aspects of S6, and I get the sense once again that Joss is trying to keep up that “Marti did okay” front, only it doesn’t quite work when you can see the faces and the body language of the rest of the crew.

It’s particularly bad when Alyson Hannigan can only find one positive thing to say about her addiction storyline, and that’s more about Dark Willow than anything else. The ME group defend the addiction storyline and the bad sex storyline because we all do these things growing up, but they lose sight of the fact that, gosh, not everyone abused drugs/had addictions, not everyone had hate sex, not everyone had horrific poverty or abandonment experiences... and so on. It’s as if they desperately need to believe that this was a resonant storyline in everyone’s lives; the problem of course is that it isn’t, and that crew, without Joss’s guidance, couldn’t make it so no matter how didactically they approached it. One of Joss’s many gifts is his ability to translate his kid experiences to the show; unfortunately, the others aren’t so capable, and it came across as a mendacious bible study lesson, as though we could all relate if you just told us hard enough. They don’t understand the “show, don’t tell” rule here at all, and the second half suffers badly because of that.

It’s especially sad given how perfectly this begins. We get a wonderful picture of a group of survivors — not happy survivors, but still managing to get by — right away in the teaser scene of Bargaining. And for those of us who’ve watched Willow’s journey from meek, shy, nearly invisible girl to confident witch, it’s not a surprise to see her getting perilously close to the power tripping that comes with the ability to resurrect someone. Some of the early episodes will always rank among my favorites — the tentative steps of friendship and caring between Buffy and Spike that start in After Life and carry on, especially in Life Serial; the growth of Dawn as she starts understanding her own abilities as a person; the give-and-take between Anya and Xander as they move down a path that really does resonate with a lot of people at that stage of life; the subtle undercurrent of worry from Tara of what Willow may or may not be capable of that we started to see in Tough Love. There wasn’t much to do about the loss of Giles, unfortunately, and in his final departure after Tabula Rasa, the core starts to fall away and the dissolution starts. Not, though, before we get two sublime episodes — Once More With Feeling, and Tabula Rasa.

Watching these now so closely after the first eps in the season, it’s amazing what they were able to accomplish, veering from heart-wrenching sadness to laugh out loud humor, the hallmarks of this show cubed. Knowing what the cast and crew went through to get OMWF made is even more astonishing; where many feared this would be the jump the shark episode, seeing how it was made instead shows everyone at their finest, and makes us realize just how far above anything else this series was. And the comic timing, coupled with the tragic ending and that gorgeous set of crosscuts on all the major characters to Michelle Branch’s song (which at the time was sublime, and I wish UPN hadn’t beaten it into the ground as S7 wound to a close), was a perfect companion piece to OMWF, which would have been a terribly hard act to follow, and makes TR all the more extraordinary.

And then, somehow, it all starts to fall apart, and tumble into a cesspool of ugliness and character rape. Where the abiding concern of Tara’s — Willow overusing magic, Willow not understanding her abuse of her power over others — is reduced to addiction and I can stop anytime. Where Buffy’s growing friendship and feelings for Spike are reduced to bad, user sex as shorthand for her lack of feeling and affection and her own self hate (because really, why else have sex with Evil Spike unless you hate yourself?). Where Xander is turned into a craven, lying coward at the one moment where he would normally shine, and Anya is reduced to a shell of herself in order to affect her redemonization. Where Dawn’s worst characteristics are overemphasized to the point that anyone would want to see her killed off just to stop the whining and the screaming. Where Spike is deus ex machinaed back to just loathsome evil soulless Spike in a clumsy attempt the stop the growing fan base for the “romance.” The trouble with watching these discs so closely together (the second half of season 6 is something I’ve barely been able to watch again on FX in repeats, so many of these eps feel fresh and new) is that you begin to see the seams in the episodes, the scattershot writing and phoned-in acting, and start to realize how brutishly the messages they want us to accept are being pounded into our heads.

Over and over in the Buffy panel feature, they make the excuse that people were upset by the darkness of the latter half. And that’s all it sounds like — a flimsy excuse, because darkness has always been an attractive part of Buffy. They refuse to recognize that it wasn’t darkness that appalled people, but an ongoing destruction of character and squalid, lecturey storylines. I may never put in the fourth disc again as long as I live; in fact, if I weren’t a vidder and it didn’t have Spike on the front, I’d probably throw it in the trash, but I may need clips from it. What a repulsive collection of the worst of Buffy, in both senses. The worst of everyone. At the time, I thought nothing could be worse than Doublemeat Palace, with the humping in the alley and the stupid storyline and the destruction of our Hero character in the most humiliating way possible, but then they managed to make it worse with Dead Things and As You Were. I know there are a lot of folks who like Dead Things, but for me, this was about as far down as they wallowed in the filth for Buffy’s character, and it shows in every frame of the episode. By following it so blithely with Older and Far Away (which, even though Noxon admits it was a bad timing error, still sits there in our sets, an unfixable mistake), we get a picture of Buffy that was nearly unrecoverable for many people. (I had a friend I’d finally turned on to the show with OMWF, and by the time Dead Things came around, she told me she never planned to watch it again — she thought it was one of the most detestable things she’d ever seen.)

There honestly is no excuse for As You Were — just ignoring the whole trying to re-create Riley as the perfect man (how better to contrast yucky Spike?) and bringing in Mary Sue wife, what’s really astounding to me is that they thought he’d still look heroic even while evincing no concern whatsoever for Buffy, her death (which she mentions, and he says nothing), her mother’s death, her miserable life, or her situation and where Giles is. He lies to her, puts her in a humiliating position, and yet she is filled with adoring tenderness for him, because he’s human and has a soul and goddammit we are supposed to love Gary and Mary Sue Finn. Gah.

That’s the kind of preachiness I can live without. Unfortunately, it just gets worse, with the inexcusably dishonest Normal Again (yes! It’s all a lie... or maybe not, we can’t decide, but it’s geeky cool to pretend to fuck with your head), cascading down into the cesspool with Seeing Red and Villains and then our big finale of Grave, where Buffy’s epiphany that She Wants to Live! is supposed to move us, but mostly made everyone sneer. Two eps stand out here, not because they are the sum of their parts, but because they have acting gorgeousness: Hell’s Bells and Entropy. In both of these, the overall storyline still sucks and the writing is haphazard, but in Hell’s Bells, Anya becomes everyone’s favorite girl with her adorable pre-vow monologues and her squeal of “I get to marry my best friend”; plus the exquisite scene between Buffy and Spike, recapturing the magic chemistry they always had and that disappeared after Smashed. In Entropy, the scenes between Anya and Spike are an amazing example of two actors who have impeccable dramatic and comedic timing, and even though I never bought the concept of them having grief sex, they sold it to me right through the tube.

But it’s hard to grab those magic moments in between the rest of the garbage. No amount of yellow crayons could make me warm to Xander again after his despicable, craven, selfish desertion of Anya and it took nearly a whole season before I could care for him again. While I deeply understand Buffy’s tendency toward violence, I still could not quite grasp her vicious beating of Spike and the subsequent ignoring of it. Dawn’s increasingly shrill, wretched behavior may have been explained away on the show, but never once made any kind of sense to me as a viewer. And their insistence on both admitting why Willow wanted to abuse magic (she confesses to feeling worthless without it) yet immediately reducing it to a physical addiction and having her shake like a junkie trivialized her complexities. Saying that all kids go through these things on their way to being an adult? Doesn’t cut it. The worst part is how it comes through in the performances. I’ve seen some very well-written dissections of why SMG’s performance as the disaffected Buffy is so incredible when contrasted to earlier seasons, but it never felt this way to me — her unease and distaste for the stories oozes off her in waves. Knowing what she said later about how much she hated those stories isn’t even necessary, because her loathing comes through almost every scene. And now that we know how James Marsters felt about his nude scenes and their frequency, I find it even harder to watch eps were once pruriently enjoyable.

Worse is the discomfort of the other actors, as they pretend they weren’t uncomfortable, in the Buffy panel. None of the cast have much to say about enjoying their work on those eps, except some public relations toadying from JM and MT. AH is clearly uncomfortable, and this makes sense, given that she radiates ennui all over the place in the addiction story. Watching her performance on the discs, she seems nearly catatonic at some points, her attention wandering, and it’s only when Amber Benson comes back in proximity as Tara that she brightens up. And it’s interesting that JM and MT feel the need to explain things; I thought they lost out significantly that year when the Spike and Dawn friendship disappeared. (Their indelible scene in Seeing Red is still the saving grace of that ep, for me, where Dawn visits and tries to understand what’s happening, and Spike reacts to her with such tenderness and regret. And all, unbelievably, without even looking at each other.)

I’d wager most Buffy fans have a taste for the darker things when the characters are people they understand, and where we know that good trumps evil, heroes exist, etc. What people don’t like is watching characters turn despicable and detestable or get ground down and humiliated, seeing their own miserable lives and failures mirrored by people they want to succeed where they cannot, and then feeling misery come off the actors in waves. The pretense that everyone was behind this left turn in the show is a sort of contumely at the audience, and I think people reacted to it as they react to most insults and fabrications — they left, muttering darkly as they went.

Much of what happened in the second half bears the lecturing, hectoring, Afterschool Special type of storytelling stamp, dumped into a putrid concoction of squalid sex and violence, abuse of the actors, calumny of the characters, and haphazard, continuity-free writing. (As example, I think one of the worst lines ever on the show has to be Buffy telling Spike she won’t have him in her house because “I won’t let Dawn down by letting you in,” ignoring the longstanding but largely absent Spike and Dawn friendship, and using it as an excuse for Buffy to have sex on the lawn with Spike in full view of anyone coming by. It doesn’t get more nonsensical and bizarre than that.)

All of this flies in the face of Joss’s compositional gifts — darkness and horror and drama leavened with droll wit and gorgeous dialog and achingly real characters we all know and love, because they are us. His knack for turning youthful experiences into drama is unequaled; unfortunately, he believed that his ME peers could equal that, and left them to create this sordid mess of a second half. And it was very, very hard to get that back in S7, which to his credit, I believe he mostly did. As a completist and vidder, I have to have these discs. But there are only a few I will ever willingly watch again — I feel this deep need to protect the characters I love so much, and watching them be mutilated and degraded and cheapened by someone’s personal agenda makes me feel helpless about how they were mishandled.

Current Music: My Morning Jacket

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

paratti.livejournal.com

Word.
For me, they never did fix Buffy and Xander - and that means I can't watch re-runs or get my Xmas present S6 12-22 tapes out of the plastic despite all the time that's gone past. And I know SMG's shite 'acting' means I'll never watch her in anything again, as I'm positive it was to try and redress the balance of sympathy for her that they trashed my show.

From:

lube & ire

A thin line between hate and hate

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