BtVS: iconoclasm and community
I haven't posted anything about BtVS for a while, largely because I tend to think about its weekly installments less as self-contained episodes and more in terms of how they fit into the big picture of the show. And I haven't wanted to do that lately because, getting so near the end, I wanted to just wait for the end to start collecting my thoughts. So I experienced the last half-dozen eps in a cheerful, largely analysis-free haze of waiting to see the final ep's choices about what to tie up, what to reiterate, what to emphasize.
Consider this my tentative first foray into thinking about BtVS as a completed text.
It occurred to me this morning that "Chosen" is the logical sequel to "Graduation Day," and that the last four seasons have been, in many ways, the story of how that sequel has been delayed.
"Graduation Day, Part II" is such a viscerally satisfying episode partly because of its open rebellions against existing institutions and structures, particularly patriarchy and education. Buffy quits the Council and blows up the high school. What could be cooler?
But these rebellions are merely iconoclastic. Buffy attacks particular manifestations of the institutions in question without building anything in their place, and the institutions themselves are not destroyed. Buffy goes to college the next year; the high school is ultimately rebuilt; the Watchers' Council is still around. It's possible, then, to read the next several seasons as the story of Buffy's search to find something with which to replace those institutions in her own life.
In S4, Buffy finds the Initiative, which she initially wants to be a part of even though she doesn't always want to play by its rules. The Initiative, for a variety of reasons that I'll get into in another essay, rather spectacularly fails to work out.
At the beginning of S5, we see Buffy telling Giles, "I want you to be my Watcher again"; she's trying to use what she can from the Watchers' Council for her own purposes, on her own terms. The events of "Fool For Love" take place because Buffy's trying to find out about Slayer history, to find out about her own powers and weaknesses and, by extension, to find some sort of guidance outside the Council's system. The arrival of the Council's emissaries in "Checkpoint" is nervewracking for Buffy precisely because she hasn't yet found anything to replace them. The end of "Checkpoint" reestablishes Buffy's independence from the Council's interference (and, with the reinstatement of Giles' salary, even gets the system working for her to a limited extent) but the Council itself remains unchanged.
The end of S5, particularly Joyce's death and its fallout, completely derails Buffy's project. Her comment in "The Gift" that "I don't know how to live in this world if these are the choices-if everything just gets stripped away" is a testament to her need to be part of something larger than herself, to be connected to something that can't be "stripped away"; without that connection, self-sacrifice feels like her only option.
S4 and S5 both demonstrate that Buffy gets much of her strength from her connection with her friends; that connection is made explicit in "Primeval"/"Restless," in Spike's speech in "Fool For Love," in Buffy's declaration to the Council in "Checkpoint" that "I will continue my work with the help of my friends" (where "my friends" is in explicit contrast to "the Council"). I would argue that one of the things S6 shows us is that, just as the self is not always enough, sometimes friendship is not enough.
The Scooby friendships turn out to be pretty durable, surviving even the hazardous territory of S6; but their bonds are badly strained, and all of them suffer as a result. By showing us the limits of what friendship can do, even as the finale reiterates that friendship can sometimes save the world, S6 sets us up for the need for something beyond friendship, for a solidarity much bigger than a single group of friends, however loving and powerful those friends may be.
"Everything's connected," Willow says in "Lessons"; "Not so much connected," Buffy tells Holden in "Conversations With Dead People." And connection turns out to be one of the keys of S7: connection not just with the people we know and love, but with people we don't know, and yet with whom we have a choice, a commitment, in common. We're reminded, too, of the importance of making rather than merely rejecting; in "Get It Done," Buffy rejects the power offered by the First Watchers, but has no other source of power with which to replace it and thus worries that she made the wrong choice.
In "Chosen," Buffy & co. change the rules. They broke away from the Council long ago; now they go to the root of the problem, the system the proto-Council created, and make a new system instead. The choice to be strong is not merely a personal choice; it is, precisely, a choice not to be alone, to be connected, as the montage of girls suggests, to people we may not even know. Ultimately, the show takes us beyond mere resistance to patriarchal, authoritarian attitudes and structures, and offers a vision of what we might build in their place.
Glancing back over it, this post is really more like notes towards a longer and more in-depth essay rather than an essay itself, so please post your comments, quibbles, additional examples, etc; I'd love to take them into account as I continue working through these ideas.
Acknowledgements: many of the ideas I've articulated here are based in earlier dialogues with truepenny and renenet, and particularly in a separate paper that Truepenny and I are currently writing on Firefly.