Rules of Engagement: Violence and Hyperreality in the Buffyverse
rebcake recently posted a poll regarding the onset of Buffy and Spike's sexual relationship in the BtVS episode "Smashed." I answered "neither" and began to post a comment to explain, but it started to get long-ish, so I thought I'd just do a long-ish blog post instead. What I wrote turned out to be somewhat off-topic in terms of her poll, and more
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Whether Buffy is duking it out with nameless mooks, sparring with college boyfriends, or having a knockdown, drag-out brawl with a B.F.F. who has crossed over to the dark side, it's almost as if their acrobatic slugfests are analogs to our world's less direct conflicts, more akin to bickering, arguing and debating than to literal punching and kicking.
This is so true. I hadn't ever really thought to articulate it like this, but you're dead on. I feel like post-Angel, all of the ~real~ violence is stripped down in a way that makes it utterly shocking (even in a show as violent as BtVS)--most notably Seeing Red--Tara's death and Spike's assault of Buffy. But also Andrew's murder of Jonathan. Those moments are intimate and real in a way that is truly rattling. They make it impossible to ignore the violent act that just occurred. By comparison the run-of-the-mill violence on BtVS is... pedestrian and unoffensive. And, I'm sorry, but Smashed fits in that category. That scene is in no way pedestrian--but the violence in it is. Because the violence isn't the point.
To be fully human she needs to be able to feel both (collectively, the "fire"), because invincible people are too hard on the inside to experience love. What's thematically important about Spike's discovery in this episode is that he learns that he can hurt her, thereby breaking down a very important wall between them.
Dude. Yes. I'm not sure I've ever seen this put so simply and clearly. Buffy's fear of becoming hard--and Spike showing her that she's not too hard because he can still hurt her. She can still feel that.
This is because the physical violence on display in this scene is a metaphor for how they can hurt each others feelings, not a dialectic about the evils of stalking.
Again, beautifully put.
Frankly, I think comparing something like the battle of "Smashed" to the kinds of physical and psychological abuse we see in reality does a HUGE disservice to victims of the latter.
YES. And I think the show demonstrates with Seeing Red (and Dead Things) that it's perfectly capable of delivering a product that really gives some sense of what that sort of victimization looks like. It's capable of stripping down an act and calling a spade "a spade." Smashed? Is not a spade. Smashed is absolutely without a doubt supposed to be interpreted as metaphor.
Also, though I'm not fully familiar with the current fandom kerfuffle, it seems like it completely ignores the fact that the violence is supposed to be there--that Buffy is acting as the abuser to Spike to subvert certain ideas surrounding male/female relationships and to explore the inherent qualities of masculinity and femininity. Meh. I don't know. It just seems like a very shallow reading to me.
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it seems like it completely ignores the fact that the violence is supposed to be there--that Buffy is acting as the abuser to Spike to subvert certain ideas surrounding male/female relationships
That is hardly a fact. That's an interpretation, one that the writers discounted on a few occasions. If that's the argument, then the uproar is perfectly justified by fandom. It's not really fair to pick and choose which is just a metaphor and which is the social commentary.
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Good spot there.
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I've never understood it, to be honest. The writers specifically gave Spike the ability to hurt her and fight back. Her and her only. It doesn't jive with setting it up as some kind of role reversal. I mean, Whedon himself called the relationship mutually abusive and ultimately misogynist. So...I don't see how to read it that way.
The story sets them up as equals.
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Thanks, BF. (Jeez, you know, every time I see your alias, I think of the Pixies. Extremely OT, sorry.)
By comparison the run-of-the-mill violence on BtVS is... pedestrian and unoffensive. And, I'm sorry, but Smashed fits in that category. That scene is in no way pedestrian--but the violence in it is. Because the violence isn't the point.
Yeah, it's reminiscent of kung-fu theater, pirate movies and schlock - Spike even swings from a chandelier, at one point. I'm sure there are people out there whose sensibilities offended by even this sort of violence, which is fine; everyone has different tastes and tolerance levels. The problem I see is the selective outrage that sometimes surfaces, often masquerading as serious, "objective" analysis.
It's not just the Buffyverse, either. In my opinion, a significant chunk of art criticism (and in particular , cinema criticism) that has gone awry. I think the emerging pattern is similar to this:
1) The art is first experienced on a visceral level, activating the same subconscious circuitry of un-examined premises, sense memories, cultural context, unspoken aspirations, unspeakable fears and involuntary emotional responses that we use when we dream. But unlike in our dreams, the analytic engine doesn't shut down. We know what we are watching isn't real and we acknowledge the separation between it and us, but the distinction is a lot blurrier than it is when we're just living our normal, waking lives (i.e. work, shopping, social navigation, etc.).
2) What results is a bit of information overload, but this can actually be a pleasant feeling as long as the art stirs our emotions. We feel little pings of pleasure from the intersection of all the elements exterior to the story -- a face we like looking at, music we enjoy hearing, a voice want to listen to, words we'd like to hear, a tense bit of composition or staging, etc. -- which we can't verbally describe in the moment but will later recall. Conversely, if those intersections include a bunch of elements we can't make an emotional connection with, the analytic engine takes over a proportional amount of the work. Suddenly we're scrutinizing details that wouldn't have otherwise bugged us -- gaps in the story's logic or continuity, scenes that are seemingly meaningless and boring, actions that clash with our ideological or moral systems, etc. It's not that we can't appreciate the art when we are bored by it or angry at it, but our understanding of it is colored by the fact that we weren't in a great mood while collecting our information. When the balance of emotion-to-analysis tips enough towards the latter, we wind up not just hating an element of the art, we just think the whole thing "sucks." Short of that, we just learn to hate those elements themselves, and in future viewings we'll quietly segregate them from the story and its themes.
3) With repeat viewings, we eventually craft our own story-within-the-story, in which all those elements our hearts enjoyed zoom to the forefront, and everything else fades into the background. Every element we don't connect with emotionally feels more and more like a mistake; something inorganic and external to the narrative, and so we begin constructing reasons why this might be true. When we have discussions with other people about the art, it bothers us that they were watching a "different" story, without realizing that we are blowing the importance of certain elements out of proportion, or diminishing the importance of any intellectual themes which heavily feature the elements that left our hearts cold.
I'm no postmodernist, so I actually think there's a right(er) way to do this. Since I'm as susceptible to falling into the above pattern as anyone else, what I try to do when thinking about art is to constantly put my own premises under the microscope, and try my best to give every element equal footing when I start writing/thinking about it. I also try to assume that all my initial reactions were wrong (or, at least, deeply biased and flawed), which helps me to scutinize the elements I feel surest about more skeptically, whether it's a character arc, an episode, a line of dialogue, a metaphor, or what have you.
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That's where it's from! I used it as my username on Jezebel back in the day when I used to participate over there, and it just came over here with me. Anyway, Pixies FTW. I finally got to see them just last year.
The problem I see is the selective outrage that sometimes surfaces, often masquerading as serious, "objective" analysis.
Indeed.
Yeah, I think your step-by-step analysis of the watching-cum-analyzing process is pretty accurate. But in addition to all that, I think these incidents--where audience members are completely willing to play along with the violence as campy entertainment 99% of the time and then suddenly take issue with it--these incidents likely have something to do with a dissonance in the audience member's own perceptions. The combination (even conflation) of violence in sex in that scene in Smashed is not own startling--it's moving, erotic, disturbing.
If you aren't okay with being disturbed in that way for whatever reason, it seems to me that there's an attempt to make sense out of the chaos--to start segmenting off the emotions as the ~appropriate~ emotions (ie offense, disturbance--because it is appropriate to be disturbed by the idea of a man punching a woman--we all can agree on that) and eschewing the ~inappropriate~ emotions (ie arousal, a sense of emotional connection to either or both of the characters as this is occurring--because you would never find violence to be an appropriate means of inter-human connection). And then, like you said, the conflicted audience member picks apart the scene.
Maybe it's unfair of me to suppose that everyone has some sort of emotion evoked by that scene--maybe some people really just can't relate to it and find it offensive. But... I don't know. I feel like the entire scene is set up with tons of emotional cues--the music (which I've written about before), the lighting, the eye contact and facial expressions of the actors--it's all designed to signal to the audience that something emotional is going on here. Even the fact that there's absolutely no skin shown. It's not about the physicality of either the fighting or the sex. It's about all those other cues.
I think if a person doesn't pick up on that stuff... I don't know. It seems strange to me. It doesn't mean that they have to ~like the plot development of Buffy and Spike having sex or of them having sex in that fashion. But I do think you have to make an effort to not see that what's going on in that scene is more internal than it is external.
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Yeah, I agree with this. I just wonder how much of this dissonance is triggered behind the scenes of the conscious mind while someone is actually experiencing a narrative for the first time. Those first impressions are so powerful.
It's really, really interesting what you say about being "okay with being disturbed in that way." That's something I've thought often about, when trying to form a mental picture of Buffy fandom. We are a very motley crew, I think, not just demographically and ideologically, but in terms of our media consumption habits. Buffy's creative DNA includes on a multitude of different genres, everything from horror to sci-fi/fantasy to western to romance, and even disregarding events in someone's personal history that might cause an overpoweringly negative reaction to something on the screen, there are probably plenty of fans who just aren't used to being disturbed in that way.
Like I mentioned to Barb below, I think that the "Big Bad" of season six is actually "the real world", which begins to invade upon the characters hyperreality almost as though it were a tangible entity. That's what I meant when I was saying that the bathroom scene (as well as several others) were infinitely more disturbing than the "Smashed" fight. But if scenes like that are what it took to horrify me, I can hardly imagine how... well, not just disturbed, but how horrified a viewer who found "Smashed" unbearable would be by the events of "Dead Things" or "Seeing Red."
I feel like the entire scene is set up with tons of emotional cues--the music (which I've written about before), the lighting, the eye contact and facial expressions of the actors--it's all designed to signal to the audience that something emotional is going on here.
Yes, there is an avalanche of nonverbal cues going on there for sure . But if someone is repulsed by one of the characters for reasons external to that scene, I think the cues could very easily all be ignored, or traded for ones that fit the meta-narrative someone is writing in their heads ("Look how filthy that house is." "Look how Buffy scowls at him when he touches her." etc.)
I think there was someone earlier in this comments thread who I mentioned the "swell in the music" to. Their response was basically one of sneering derision, as though it was obvious music isn't an important part of the art's meaning. I find it's hard to carry on a useful conversation with someone who thinks like that, because, to them, discussing art is not about compiling evidence in order to explore its meaning and, in the process, learn more about yourself. Instead, it's about having a powerful, visceral response to the art, and then seeking out only the evidence which best seems to validate that response. It doesn't really matter if the response was positive or negative, either -- I'm sure there are people who adore the "Smashed" fight who treat the attempted rape scene as something alien or unimportant.
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