The Real Problem With Marti Noxon
The true issue with Marti Noxon is not as some people have offered that she tries to use shows to discuss things like rape and violence against women. No--the true issue is that the shows she uses to do this are typically comedic dramas which are known for their light and airy themes, as well as their liberal take on reality. She has worked on shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Private Practice and within a year of taking over the helm of each of these, the thin blonde she clearly identified with most personally was sexually assaulted.
Now, I'm a feminist, and I believe the topic of rape is not discussed nearly enough on television along with ever other place in this society. HOWEVER, I am also aware that there is a time and a place for such discussions. Shows which make a point of being harsh and gritty such as the CSI and Law and Order franchises would be the perfect places to hold such discussions of rape and the aftermath of such trauma. Shows like Buffy, however, which essentially create their own worlds and realities to begin with, are not the place for such things.
Buffy functioned for a solid four years using primarily very light, humorous storylines with liberal use of demons of all kinds and vampires. Buffy was not known for its realism, but for its cool prosthetics and fish-demons. The more realistic, hard-hitting storylines which did occur--including an abusive boyfriend, friend Willow's transition to lesbianism, dealing with one's extreme anger [or becoming a wolf] and cheating amongst high school relationships were dealt with primarily via magical metaphorical allegories. Buffy's boyfriend was a vampire with a soul, which he lost after their First time together. The otherwise sweet boy with the anger problem became a werewolf three days out of every month. Friend Willow took up magic, and her first lesbian relationship was with fellow witch Tara--witchcraft here being the substitute for female power and for feminism as an extension. The cheating spouses thing still happened in real life, but was helped along plot-wise by a vampiric kidnapping and included [anti]love potions and other accoutrements of magical fantastic JossWhedonreality!. Even sometimes evil vampire Spike with his anti-biting chip can be seen as equivalent to a severely schizophrenic or bipolar kid on severe medication. The rape sequence or metaphor that truly WORKS is the parallel drawn between the First Slayer's experience of being forced into her powers via magic wielded by the first set of Watchers, a group of much-older men. That works well, and fits with the show as it has been previously presented to us. On the other hand, Buffy's attempted rape by former and recurring beau Spike works not at all.
This is the decision Marti Noxon has been most criticized for, and I would like to add my voice to the choir. However, in doing so I hope to change the tenor of what the choir itself is saying. I spent much of my time as a teen investing in the Buffy/Spike relationship, and I felt it was entirely out of character and a betrayal to my own emotions to believe he could ever try to rape Buffy. As I let go my stranglehold on the concept of BuffySpikewuv I began to realize he never would have raped her because their relationship was characterized by his submissive behavior to her dominant, roles never released during the entirety of their courting and affair. It was simply out of character for him to rape her, not because he loved her but because it did not fit HIM. Spike as we all knew and loved him had been characterized as "love's bitch" for a solid four years by that point, with Buffy the latest in a long string of women who used him for compliments and entertainment and then dumped him when someone more interesting or higher-stationed came along. Spike may have talked big talk about wanting to hurt her to make himself stop loving her, or bag himself a slayer, or whatever, but it turned out every time before to be just as harmless as a man claiming his "purely sexual" relationship with a friend of his could stay that way and that he had no feelings for her. The perfect scene to characterize this involved Spike going to Buffy's house with a weapon, intending to murder her--and then comforting her instead, unable to hurt the vulnerable woman he found crying on her porch. Spike as a man was a wimp, and we had been led to believe that in spite of his punk rock attitude and casual violence since becoming a vamp he was still that at heart. He fell in love too fast and with the wrong women, let them crush his heart into dust again and again and rarely complained because to him that's what love was. He couldn't have hurt her.
Marti Noxon was not considering this actual character when she made her decision to insert this plot point. Story-wise, it served no purpose, as the impetus it provided for Spike to go out and get a soul of his own could easily have been found in a shouting match with Buffy or some other confrontation instead. Indeed, a shouting match would have been vastly preferable, as Spike had been allowing himself to be treated poorly for months if not years by the Scooby gang and Buffy in particular and he deserved a chance to yell about it for once.
Instead, we had an irritatingly out-of-place scene which folks complained about for MONTHS, and with good reason. This scene felt almost like a fanwank fanfiction written by an irate survivor of recent sexual trauma--it made no sense for the story, but seemed as though it might possibly provide some catharsis for the writer. Indeed, that seemed its only conceivable purpose--it certainly was not there to help 'Buffy.'
This was the beginning of the end for Buffy in so many ways, the minute so many viewers stopped caring what happened on 'Buffy' except as more evidence as to why Marti Noxon left a lot to be desired as a human being. Season six was unquestionably the darkest season of Buffy, a fact which writers and directors alike referred to with what can only be described as "glee."
However, in doing so they missed the point. A show about vampires and demons does not NEED any more material to make it seem dark or heavy or hard-hitting, what it needs is writing light enough so we do not collapse under all that darkness. The writers of shows like these must walk a fine line between storylines heavy enough to keep things interesting and us coming back for more, but light enough so that we want to invest our time and energy into the show when most of us have more than enough darkness in our lives already.
Marti Noxon failed at walking that line.
Now on 'Private Practice', she seems to have done the same thing. Private Practice is a show with consistently upbeat music, ridiculously gorgeous actresses and actors who look like underwear models. The characters are interesting and two-dimensional but not terribly complicated, people whose little tics and weirdnesses are made all the more humorous by their seemingly "together" lives. It is a show about people trying to put their lives together in a world whose basic, casual cruelties threaten to rip their proverbial hearts out of their chests on a regular basis. From parents trying desperately to have children to young women debating whether to adopt out their children to disturbed OCD patients calling therapist Violet out of the office in the middle of the day to Sam and Naomi loving each other but staying divorced because they've come too far to turn back now whether or not their divorce has been a mistake to a man married to two women stupid enough to recommend both to the same doctors, the world these doctors operate in is not so much violent as it is mean. People do mean things or dumb things and wreck their own and others' lives without meaning to, and that is where the true tragedy lies. However, people also go way out on limbs to help one another, and love and live in spite of it all and that is also miraculous. That is where the true heart of the show lies, and its watchability, is in the characters' ability to pick up after every mini personal tragedy and move on from it.
Way back in season two of 'Private Practice', it seemed the show would depart from similar doctor shows. No one would die or get shot or wind up in the hospital themselves, there would be no bloodshed or extreme violent exerted for no reason other than to underline a point.
This show seemed far subtler than that, seemed willing to do with humor what other shows chose to do with violence.
Then something changed.
That something was Marti Noxon.
Now former best friends Naomi and Addison are at one another's throats because they believe they are in love with the same man, Violet has lost all of her quirkiness in pursuit of being a good, if heavily made-up, mother, and wanderer Pete seems to have settled down with her. Rather than finding a way to wander with Pete the way she seemed so eager to do earlier in the series, Addison also seems to have settled down, with Sam, who up until recently was her best male friend and hangout buddy without a trace of sexual tension to them. Cooper seems actually invested emotionally in his relationship with fiancee Charlotte, rather than simply biding his time until Violet realizes she's in love with him and he can take the next step with her. Naomi and Sam's daughter Maya is married at fifteen and has a child, and Dell is dead. Oh, and Addison's ex-husband's formerly drug-addicted sister is on the show to liven up the mood with some self-deprecating humor regarding her own sluttiness, to the benefit of all I'm sure. In other words, these people have all settled, whether in the quality of the doctors they accept at their Practice or in their choices of mates or in their decision to buck tradition and avoid the heavy makeup that has a tendency to make shows feel so claustrophobic. The mix-n-match nature of the love games played within the Practice does not help at all either.
Oh, and Cooper's fiancee, Charlotte, esteemed surgeon in her own right and head of her own practice has been attacked by a former patient. Why? I'm sure I would know if I was still watching the show, but sadly [though not so much for me] I am no longer watching the show. Charlotte is yet one more cute, blonde, hardass of a woman who's been attacked pretty much for no reason at all by somebody she trusted. Marti Noxon is herself blonde, so hmm, I am sensing a theme. Oh, and also, Charlotte is like Buffy in being the kind of woman that no man would ever want to mess with if he knew what was good for him. Charlotte would have to be raped at gunpoint after being fed a drug cocktail and even then she would have to have some pretty heavy-duty tape over her mouth for a rape to occur. Even then, she would probably track the guy down and tear off his balls. Instead, we have proud, haughty Charlotte who sacrifices nothing for no man and demands the kind of kinky sex from her fiancee that would make the rest of us blush just to contemplate has become a victim. Overnight she has become the kind of woman who calls a doctor from a rival medical facility who up until that moment she seemed to have had very little but contempt for to come sit by her bedside and hold her hand. She demands said woman keep the rape secret and does not even tell her boyfriend. I am fairly certain she does not press charges, though again, I have not watched the show, only read what I have online.
Look. Like I said, I am all for people writing about rape. It just seems that if you're going to broach such a difficult and emotionally-charged topic, you might wanna do it right. For a solid example, check out Oliva Benson's almost-rape on 'Law and Order: SVU.' That woman was in a female prison precisely to smoke out whatever guard had been raping prisoners there. She was out of her element and in strange physical territory, had been eating crap food and was deprived of sleep from sharing a cell with strangers. She still fought back with everything she had, and was eventually "rescued" by a fellow SVU detective. She later used her experience to put the perp behind bars.
This is the kind of experience that any woman with Charlotte's or Buffy's past herstory of kicking ass and taking names if not outright prisoners and kicking the **** out of any guy who came too close that she didn't like would have to go through to be anywhere near a sexual assault. Season two Buffy dropped a guy--hard--in high school gym class for the simple crime of touching her ass uninvited to do so. She killed her own ex-boyfriend and declared "soulmate" Angel in order to save the world. She punched the same supernaturally strong ex-boyfriend when she believed him to be wrong in harboring a fugitive, which I can admire even if I dont personally believe she was in the right. She saved herself from seemingly disastrous situations time and time again. Yet the one time she is being assaulted in her own bathroom, on her own territory the best she can come up with is to scream in a very ineffective and girlish voice? Yes, she was injured at the time, but for heaven's sake she could have said that and probably stopped the whole thing right there. All she had to do was tell Spike she would talk to him later but had been injured in the fight, and he would have left...but no. Ineffectual screaming and pounding the air with her fists was the best she could come up with. Meanwhile Spike comes out of this situation looking as though he was deliberately trying to take advantage of Buffy in a weak moment, which of course was incorrect because he could not have known what had happened to her.
Why? Say it with me now: she did not tell him.
Meanwhile I have seen nothing in Charlotte's character to indicate she would refuse to call the police, file a report or even request an armed escort if she felt that she was at all in danger from a patient. Her situation, too, could have been avoided by simply asking Cooper to walk her to her car...but no. Charlotte may have an independent streak, as her apparent lack of friends would attest to, but there is no evidence she would cling to that autonomy at the risk of her physical safety or her life. She may have an active and imaginative sex life, but that's about fantasy. She does not go in for extreme sports or otherwise seriously dangerous activities. She has shown no signs of being a thrill-seeker.
She thus has no motive for endangering her own life in this way. Women tend to know when we are in danger, and unless we have been conditioned into repressing that intuition--which so far as we know Charlotte has not been as her childhood seems to have been nearly ideal--she would have no reason not to listen to that sixth sense of hers. This storyline is dramatic, but it is fundamentally stupid.
Learn from your mistakes, Marti Noxon, before you do this all over again.
It's a very privileged thing to invade others' spaces, whether intellectual or literal, and start to mold that area according to what you personally wish it to be. It is also deeply cruel, another form of colonization, and the opposite of what is necessary for healing anything at all.
Interestingly, the set-up of this all is quite similar to Angel--Marti Noxon takes over the space once occupied of Shonda Rimes here much in the way she once did for Joss Whedon. Like Joss was with "Firefly", Shonda's attention here has been taken up by a new show ["Off the Map"]. Marti Noxon is again using that space to her advantage. Stop insinuating your way into others' worlds, Marti.
Please stop writing until you can see your characters as separate from yourself, instead of the means with which to work out your personal issues.
Signed,
A Concerned Viewer [who would like to have my shows back now, please]
Now, I'm a feminist, and I believe the topic of rape is not discussed nearly enough on television along with ever other place in this society. HOWEVER, I am also aware that there is a time and a place for such discussions. Shows which make a point of being harsh and gritty such as the CSI and Law and Order franchises would be the perfect places to hold such discussions of rape and the aftermath of such trauma. Shows like Buffy, however, which essentially create their own worlds and realities to begin with, are not the place for such things.
Buffy functioned for a solid four years using primarily very light, humorous storylines with liberal use of demons of all kinds and vampires. Buffy was not known for its realism, but for its cool prosthetics and fish-demons. The more realistic, hard-hitting storylines which did occur--including an abusive boyfriend, friend Willow's transition to lesbianism, dealing with one's extreme anger [or becoming a wolf] and cheating amongst high school relationships were dealt with primarily via magical metaphorical allegories. Buffy's boyfriend was a vampire with a soul, which he lost after their First time together. The otherwise sweet boy with the anger problem became a werewolf three days out of every month. Friend Willow took up magic, and her first lesbian relationship was with fellow witch Tara--witchcraft here being the substitute for female power and for feminism as an extension. The cheating spouses thing still happened in real life, but was helped along plot-wise by a vampiric kidnapping and included [anti]love potions and other accoutrements of magical fantastic JossWhedonreality!. Even sometimes evil vampire Spike with his anti-biting chip can be seen as equivalent to a severely schizophrenic or bipolar kid on severe medication. The rape sequence or metaphor that truly WORKS is the parallel drawn between the First Slayer's experience of being forced into her powers via magic wielded by the first set of Watchers, a group of much-older men. That works well, and fits with the show as it has been previously presented to us. On the other hand, Buffy's attempted rape by former and recurring beau Spike works not at all.
This is the decision Marti Noxon has been most criticized for, and I would like to add my voice to the choir. However, in doing so I hope to change the tenor of what the choir itself is saying. I spent much of my time as a teen investing in the Buffy/Spike relationship, and I felt it was entirely out of character and a betrayal to my own emotions to believe he could ever try to rape Buffy. As I let go my stranglehold on the concept of BuffySpikewuv I began to realize he never would have raped her because their relationship was characterized by his submissive behavior to her dominant, roles never released during the entirety of their courting and affair. It was simply out of character for him to rape her, not because he loved her but because it did not fit HIM. Spike as we all knew and loved him had been characterized as "love's bitch" for a solid four years by that point, with Buffy the latest in a long string of women who used him for compliments and entertainment and then dumped him when someone more interesting or higher-stationed came along. Spike may have talked big talk about wanting to hurt her to make himself stop loving her, or bag himself a slayer, or whatever, but it turned out every time before to be just as harmless as a man claiming his "purely sexual" relationship with a friend of his could stay that way and that he had no feelings for her. The perfect scene to characterize this involved Spike going to Buffy's house with a weapon, intending to murder her--and then comforting her instead, unable to hurt the vulnerable woman he found crying on her porch. Spike as a man was a wimp, and we had been led to believe that in spite of his punk rock attitude and casual violence since becoming a vamp he was still that at heart. He fell in love too fast and with the wrong women, let them crush his heart into dust again and again and rarely complained because to him that's what love was. He couldn't have hurt her.
Marti Noxon was not considering this actual character when she made her decision to insert this plot point. Story-wise, it served no purpose, as the impetus it provided for Spike to go out and get a soul of his own could easily have been found in a shouting match with Buffy or some other confrontation instead. Indeed, a shouting match would have been vastly preferable, as Spike had been allowing himself to be treated poorly for months if not years by the Scooby gang and Buffy in particular and he deserved a chance to yell about it for once.
Instead, we had an irritatingly out-of-place scene which folks complained about for MONTHS, and with good reason. This scene felt almost like a fanwank fanfiction written by an irate survivor of recent sexual trauma--it made no sense for the story, but seemed as though it might possibly provide some catharsis for the writer. Indeed, that seemed its only conceivable purpose--it certainly was not there to help 'Buffy.'
This was the beginning of the end for Buffy in so many ways, the minute so many viewers stopped caring what happened on 'Buffy' except as more evidence as to why Marti Noxon left a lot to be desired as a human being. Season six was unquestionably the darkest season of Buffy, a fact which writers and directors alike referred to with what can only be described as "glee."
However, in doing so they missed the point. A show about vampires and demons does not NEED any more material to make it seem dark or heavy or hard-hitting, what it needs is writing light enough so we do not collapse under all that darkness. The writers of shows like these must walk a fine line between storylines heavy enough to keep things interesting and us coming back for more, but light enough so that we want to invest our time and energy into the show when most of us have more than enough darkness in our lives already.
Marti Noxon failed at walking that line.
Now on 'Private Practice', she seems to have done the same thing. Private Practice is a show with consistently upbeat music, ridiculously gorgeous actresses and actors who look like underwear models. The characters are interesting and two-dimensional but not terribly complicated, people whose little tics and weirdnesses are made all the more humorous by their seemingly "together" lives. It is a show about people trying to put their lives together in a world whose basic, casual cruelties threaten to rip their proverbial hearts out of their chests on a regular basis. From parents trying desperately to have children to young women debating whether to adopt out their children to disturbed OCD patients calling therapist Violet out of the office in the middle of the day to Sam and Naomi loving each other but staying divorced because they've come too far to turn back now whether or not their divorce has been a mistake to a man married to two women stupid enough to recommend both to the same doctors, the world these doctors operate in is not so much violent as it is mean. People do mean things or dumb things and wreck their own and others' lives without meaning to, and that is where the true tragedy lies. However, people also go way out on limbs to help one another, and love and live in spite of it all and that is also miraculous. That is where the true heart of the show lies, and its watchability, is in the characters' ability to pick up after every mini personal tragedy and move on from it.
Way back in season two of 'Private Practice', it seemed the show would depart from similar doctor shows. No one would die or get shot or wind up in the hospital themselves, there would be no bloodshed or extreme violent exerted for no reason other than to underline a point.
This show seemed far subtler than that, seemed willing to do with humor what other shows chose to do with violence.
Then something changed.
That something was Marti Noxon.
Now former best friends Naomi and Addison are at one another's throats because they believe they are in love with the same man, Violet has lost all of her quirkiness in pursuit of being a good, if heavily made-up, mother, and wanderer Pete seems to have settled down with her. Rather than finding a way to wander with Pete the way she seemed so eager to do earlier in the series, Addison also seems to have settled down, with Sam, who up until recently was her best male friend and hangout buddy without a trace of sexual tension to them. Cooper seems actually invested emotionally in his relationship with fiancee Charlotte, rather than simply biding his time until Violet realizes she's in love with him and he can take the next step with her. Naomi and Sam's daughter Maya is married at fifteen and has a child, and Dell is dead. Oh, and Addison's ex-husband's formerly drug-addicted sister is on the show to liven up the mood with some self-deprecating humor regarding her own sluttiness, to the benefit of all I'm sure. In other words, these people have all settled, whether in the quality of the doctors they accept at their Practice or in their choices of mates or in their decision to buck tradition and avoid the heavy makeup that has a tendency to make shows feel so claustrophobic. The mix-n-match nature of the love games played within the Practice does not help at all either.
Oh, and Cooper's fiancee, Charlotte, esteemed surgeon in her own right and head of her own practice has been attacked by a former patient. Why? I'm sure I would know if I was still watching the show, but sadly [though not so much for me] I am no longer watching the show. Charlotte is yet one more cute, blonde, hardass of a woman who's been attacked pretty much for no reason at all by somebody she trusted. Marti Noxon is herself blonde, so hmm, I am sensing a theme. Oh, and also, Charlotte is like Buffy in being the kind of woman that no man would ever want to mess with if he knew what was good for him. Charlotte would have to be raped at gunpoint after being fed a drug cocktail and even then she would have to have some pretty heavy-duty tape over her mouth for a rape to occur. Even then, she would probably track the guy down and tear off his balls. Instead, we have proud, haughty Charlotte who sacrifices nothing for no man and demands the kind of kinky sex from her fiancee that would make the rest of us blush just to contemplate has become a victim. Overnight she has become the kind of woman who calls a doctor from a rival medical facility who up until that moment she seemed to have had very little but contempt for to come sit by her bedside and hold her hand. She demands said woman keep the rape secret and does not even tell her boyfriend. I am fairly certain she does not press charges, though again, I have not watched the show, only read what I have online.
Look. Like I said, I am all for people writing about rape. It just seems that if you're going to broach such a difficult and emotionally-charged topic, you might wanna do it right. For a solid example, check out Oliva Benson's almost-rape on 'Law and Order: SVU.' That woman was in a female prison precisely to smoke out whatever guard had been raping prisoners there. She was out of her element and in strange physical territory, had been eating crap food and was deprived of sleep from sharing a cell with strangers. She still fought back with everything she had, and was eventually "rescued" by a fellow SVU detective. She later used her experience to put the perp behind bars.
This is the kind of experience that any woman with Charlotte's or Buffy's past herstory of kicking ass and taking names if not outright prisoners and kicking the **** out of any guy who came too close that she didn't like would have to go through to be anywhere near a sexual assault. Season two Buffy dropped a guy--hard--in high school gym class for the simple crime of touching her ass uninvited to do so. She killed her own ex-boyfriend and declared "soulmate" Angel in order to save the world. She punched the same supernaturally strong ex-boyfriend when she believed him to be wrong in harboring a fugitive, which I can admire even if I dont personally believe she was in the right. She saved herself from seemingly disastrous situations time and time again. Yet the one time she is being assaulted in her own bathroom, on her own territory the best she can come up with is to scream in a very ineffective and girlish voice? Yes, she was injured at the time, but for heaven's sake she could have said that and probably stopped the whole thing right there. All she had to do was tell Spike she would talk to him later but had been injured in the fight, and he would have left...but no. Ineffectual screaming and pounding the air with her fists was the best she could come up with. Meanwhile Spike comes out of this situation looking as though he was deliberately trying to take advantage of Buffy in a weak moment, which of course was incorrect because he could not have known what had happened to her.
Why? Say it with me now: she did not tell him.
Meanwhile I have seen nothing in Charlotte's character to indicate she would refuse to call the police, file a report or even request an armed escort if she felt that she was at all in danger from a patient. Her situation, too, could have been avoided by simply asking Cooper to walk her to her car...but no. Charlotte may have an independent streak, as her apparent lack of friends would attest to, but there is no evidence she would cling to that autonomy at the risk of her physical safety or her life. She may have an active and imaginative sex life, but that's about fantasy. She does not go in for extreme sports or otherwise seriously dangerous activities. She has shown no signs of being a thrill-seeker.
She thus has no motive for endangering her own life in this way. Women tend to know when we are in danger, and unless we have been conditioned into repressing that intuition--which so far as we know Charlotte has not been as her childhood seems to have been nearly ideal--she would have no reason not to listen to that sixth sense of hers. This storyline is dramatic, but it is fundamentally stupid.
Learn from your mistakes, Marti Noxon, before you do this all over again.
It's a very privileged thing to invade others' spaces, whether intellectual or literal, and start to mold that area according to what you personally wish it to be. It is also deeply cruel, another form of colonization, and the opposite of what is necessary for healing anything at all.
Interestingly, the set-up of this all is quite similar to Angel--Marti Noxon takes over the space once occupied of Shonda Rimes here much in the way she once did for Joss Whedon. Like Joss was with "Firefly", Shonda's attention here has been taken up by a new show ["Off the Map"]. Marti Noxon is again using that space to her advantage. Stop insinuating your way into others' worlds, Marti.
Please stop writing until you can see your characters as separate from yourself, instead of the means with which to work out your personal issues.
Signed,
A Concerned Viewer [who would like to have my shows back now, please]