BtVS S8.35 "Twilight" Part Four
Since darkness seems almost certain to fall when the counts come in tonight I distract myself with geekiness and comic books.
Imagine there's no heaven
When #33 came out it made me think of West Side Story:
The whole "I loved you the moment I saw you," the bulging glow, the history-making, the destiny earned is quintessential Angel, who always wanted to believe he’d make it. Like in the musicals. Somehow. Someday.
In the actual musical “Somewhere” is the song Tony and Maria sing when they’ve given up hope that the world they know has a place for them. The yearning it expresses, the longing for something better has violent consequences including Tony’s death and Maria’s despair but the ending is hopeful, implying that their world has changed, the gangs will make peace. The world they knew was a nasty brutish place, ending it was portrayed as a positive.
Twilight is a place that exerts a power over its subjects. Twilight is that place for us, which Tony and Maria sing about. Twilight is the brave new world Buffy hoped she might create with her slayer spell, the world without sin. Miranda. Somewhere the yearning for makes the yearners forget where they come from, where they are. The kingdom is coming, no need to take thought for the morrow or for the people left behind.
Angel loves Connor. But Angel's way of expressing that love includes effectively reinventing Connor as a person. Wiping his son's memories to allow him to be the happy, well-adjusted, platonic Connor of Angel's hopes and dreams.
ANGEL: That's the beauty of it. It looks that way because you made it that way…We build it ourselves Buffy. Paradise is ours to write.
ANGEL: You know where they are. They're wherever you want them to be.
ANGEL: We can help them. We can fix it. We can fix EVERYTHING Buffy. After all these centuries---No more fighting---no more failing---No more dying.
Twilight, or so Angel seems to believe, would allow him to write/create the Connor who was always meant to be. It's a higher plane not the imperfect, doomed material world. Much of #33 (as has been noted) was a pretty straightforward homage/allusion to Alan Moore's Promethea. As I understand it that story ends with Promethea ending the world so a new more real reality can be born and I can honestly see Angel being tempted by that kind of anti-materialist philosophy. When he was Angelus the world wasn’t bad enough for him, he had to go ending it. As Angel it’s not good enough. Angel has very little underlying faith that the world can be a better place. He plays lip service to it with the champion talk but his last stand in NFA was never supposed to save the world only slow its decline. Becoming Twilight's subject seems to have taken Angel's natural fatalism and amplified it to the point where it dominates every thing else in his personality but it’s an in character weakness (Angel has always been weak).
It’s not a weakness unique to Angel. Willow tried to destroy the world to stop people’s suffering. Buffy brought back from heaven could see only “hard, and bright, and violent.” What saved them both wasn’t abstract philosophy but concrete connections, friends, family. The costume Buffy is wearing when she makes her brave new world go Daffy Duck and rips a hole in it is Nikki Wood’s, another slayer with strong ties to the world (despite Spike being ignorant of them). Maybe Buffy should have been more angry with Angel. Maybe Xander should have been more angry with Willow instead of giving her yellow crayon speeches. Maybe her friends shouldn’t have forgiven Buffy for trying to kill them in Normal Again. She doesn’t yet know the full extent of what Angel, through becoming Twlight’s instrument, unleashed on the world but she has at least some inkling of why he was tempted.
Returning to the Promethea connection because it’s not the first time that book has been alluded to in the series or the book. "Promethea" is a goddess-like metaphor for the power of story and imagination who manifests through a series of individuals or vessels. At the end of S4 Buffy adopted the visual stylings of Promethea and the promethean figure of Sineya emerged both as the First Slayer and as a representative of the Slayer spirit. Buffy gives an earlier version of the “give me back my friends” motif to her in Restless and asserts her (Buffy’s) individuality “You’re not the source of me.” Despite her rejecting Sineya, the idea that Buffy has a special connection with all those who went before her has been part of Joss’s slayer mythology from the beginning and has been a running thread in S8 with the dreamspace and the collective memories and most recently with Buffy’s ability to sense other slayers as one of her emerging superpowers. Without that background Twilight dressing Buffy as previous slayers and Angel as their vampire nemeses makes little sense. It could be key to understanding Angel’s stranger pronouncements, in particular that line about:
ANGEL: After all these centuries---No more fighting---no more failing---No more dying.
Granted Angel has been around a while but "all these centuries" suggests more than two or three. In Twilight he and Buffy seem to represent the entire Slayer/vampire line. It’s a big picture perspective that could explain the more pompous nonsense Angel comes out with:
ANGEL: The outcome is beyond us. The only absolute in the earth is that it will end.
Enjoined Buffy talked a little like that in Primeval. Being more gestalt than individual also fits with the way he finally starts looking as well as talking like Angel in his “Okay.Lets Go.” panel. The brow darkens just before the clothes return to normal and old broody is back.
http://hazelk.dreamwidth.org/108012.html |
comments | Comment at Dreamwidth
Imagine there's no heaven
When #33 came out it made me think of West Side Story:
The whole "I loved you the moment I saw you," the bulging glow, the history-making, the destiny earned is quintessential Angel, who always wanted to believe he’d make it. Like in the musicals. Somehow. Someday.
In the actual musical “Somewhere” is the song Tony and Maria sing when they’ve given up hope that the world they know has a place for them. The yearning it expresses, the longing for something better has violent consequences including Tony’s death and Maria’s despair but the ending is hopeful, implying that their world has changed, the gangs will make peace. The world they knew was a nasty brutish place, ending it was portrayed as a positive.
Twilight is a place that exerts a power over its subjects. Twilight is that place for us, which Tony and Maria sing about. Twilight is the brave new world Buffy hoped she might create with her slayer spell, the world without sin. Miranda. Somewhere the yearning for makes the yearners forget where they come from, where they are. The kingdom is coming, no need to take thought for the morrow or for the people left behind.
Angel loves Connor. But Angel's way of expressing that love includes effectively reinventing Connor as a person. Wiping his son's memories to allow him to be the happy, well-adjusted, platonic Connor of Angel's hopes and dreams.
ANGEL: That's the beauty of it. It looks that way because you made it that way…We build it ourselves Buffy. Paradise is ours to write.
ANGEL: You know where they are. They're wherever you want them to be.
ANGEL: We can help them. We can fix it. We can fix EVERYTHING Buffy. After all these centuries---No more fighting---no more failing---No more dying.
Twilight, or so Angel seems to believe, would allow him to write/create the Connor who was always meant to be. It's a higher plane not the imperfect, doomed material world. Much of #33 (as has been noted) was a pretty straightforward homage/allusion to Alan Moore's Promethea. As I understand it that story ends with Promethea ending the world so a new more real reality can be born and I can honestly see Angel being tempted by that kind of anti-materialist philosophy. When he was Angelus the world wasn’t bad enough for him, he had to go ending it. As Angel it’s not good enough. Angel has very little underlying faith that the world can be a better place. He plays lip service to it with the champion talk but his last stand in NFA was never supposed to save the world only slow its decline. Becoming Twilight's subject seems to have taken Angel's natural fatalism and amplified it to the point where it dominates every thing else in his personality but it’s an in character weakness (Angel has always been weak).
It’s not a weakness unique to Angel. Willow tried to destroy the world to stop people’s suffering. Buffy brought back from heaven could see only “hard, and bright, and violent.” What saved them both wasn’t abstract philosophy but concrete connections, friends, family. The costume Buffy is wearing when she makes her brave new world go Daffy Duck and rips a hole in it is Nikki Wood’s, another slayer with strong ties to the world (despite Spike being ignorant of them). Maybe Buffy should have been more angry with Angel. Maybe Xander should have been more angry with Willow instead of giving her yellow crayon speeches. Maybe her friends shouldn’t have forgiven Buffy for trying to kill them in Normal Again. She doesn’t yet know the full extent of what Angel, through becoming Twlight’s instrument, unleashed on the world but she has at least some inkling of why he was tempted.
Returning to the Promethea connection because it’s not the first time that book has been alluded to in the series or the book. "Promethea" is a goddess-like metaphor for the power of story and imagination who manifests through a series of individuals or vessels. At the end of S4 Buffy adopted the visual stylings of Promethea and the promethean figure of Sineya emerged both as the First Slayer and as a representative of the Slayer spirit. Buffy gives an earlier version of the “give me back my friends” motif to her in Restless and asserts her (Buffy’s) individuality “You’re not the source of me.” Despite her rejecting Sineya, the idea that Buffy has a special connection with all those who went before her has been part of Joss’s slayer mythology from the beginning and has been a running thread in S8 with the dreamspace and the collective memories and most recently with Buffy’s ability to sense other slayers as one of her emerging superpowers. Without that background Twilight dressing Buffy as previous slayers and Angel as their vampire nemeses makes little sense. It could be key to understanding Angel’s stranger pronouncements, in particular that line about:
ANGEL: After all these centuries---No more fighting---no more failing---No more dying.
Granted Angel has been around a while but "all these centuries" suggests more than two or three. In Twilight he and Buffy seem to represent the entire Slayer/vampire line. It’s a big picture perspective that could explain the more pompous nonsense Angel comes out with:
ANGEL: The outcome is beyond us. The only absolute in the earth is that it will end.
Enjoined Buffy talked a little like that in Primeval. Being more gestalt than individual also fits with the way he finally starts looking as well as talking like Angel in his “Okay.Lets Go.” panel. The brow darkens just before the clothes return to normal and old broody is back.
http://hazelk.dreamwidth.org/108012.html |
comments | Comment at Dreamwidth