The Hollow World

[aycheb]

Well the S5 discs arrived and just to be contrary I decided to start watching in the middle. Really just to see how A Hole in the World and Shells play when you see them in one sitting, which is how I first saw Surprise/Innocence and that was good.

Comments

I love the Hollow man imagery, the poem by Eliot brought to life

[ann1962]

hollow thing(s). Hollow, empty, a nothingness bounded and framed.

In every episode in S5 there are shells, coils, stuffed couchs, stuffed men. Even, IMO, DB is dressed tightly to exaggerate that image. In the gym where Spike and Illyria spar, there is a stuffed dummy on the wall. There are photos on the walls of shells. The quilt over Fred's bed is a design replicates Star of Bethlehem with has ties back to the Slouching towards... episode having to do with memory and its loss, which is also the same pattern almost as the tile on the floor of the lobby of W&H. Couchs replace chairs in S5. Big stuffed couches that get torn apart. Angel as puppet gets the stuffing torn out of him. The coils, mortal as they may be, hee, are most presented in the W&H labs. This whole season used this images just wonderfully. I could go on... LOL. I love S5. Sorry for the run on sentences lol.

Re: I love the Hollow man imagery, the poem by Eliot brought to life

[aycheb]

Wow, I hadn't thought of half of those. Maybe there should be a drinking game:-)

superplin had a post a while back linking Angel's dream in Soul Purpose of Fred emptying him out and herself later becoming Illyria's shell. All the talk of hollow does make me think of the monologue in Passion (looks it up)

If we could live without passion, maybe we'd know some kind of peace. But we would be hollow. Empty rooms, shuttered and dank...

Maybe its something Angel or even Joss has been afraid of for a long time.

[elisi]

I watched AHITW and Shells recently (I don't have the dvds - yet, but I taped the episodes when they first aired). I didn't have any clever thoughts, really, but I liked this post a lot. And I always come back to the_royal_anna when it comes to these episodes. She just has the most gorgeous post that leaves me impressed all over again every time I read it.

Actually about Wes/Fred, she has a very interesting point in her post on Lineage.

Anyway, to get back to your post... I really like your last point. I'd never thought about it like that before, but it makes perfect sense.

[aycheb]

Thanks for the links, it's always a little intimidating writing where so many smart people have gone before.

That final transition always makes my cry and I was trying to figure out quite why. It seemed to connect to a bit in The Return of the King (the book not the movie) where Sam looks up and sees a star and has some thought about the Shadow being but a passing thing and there still being light and high beauty forever beyond it's reach. All very tolkeinesque but it worked for me ( well obviously with the embarrassingly accurate recall and all). You could imagine him (Tolkein) in the first world war trenches looking up and maybe having a similar hope.

[elisi]

Oh, the Tolkien-connection is wonderful! (And I have that recall thing too!) The end is the bit where I almost cried too (more so than the death) because there's so much hope and expectancy etc. And knowing how Fred's story will end up makes it heartbreaking. But then - she would never have been happy just to stay at home with her parents, safe and unchallenged. *sigh*

I'd love to write more, but my brain is refusing to co-operate at the moment.

[midnightsjane]

Oh beautiful! I loved that moment in the book, it felt so hopeful and true. That in the darkest night, the stars shine more clearly, a beacon to the light.

[superplin]

With one of the major themes of the season being the nature of corporate culture perhaps it’s only appropriate that by the end of the season the only ‘women’ who survive are Harmony as the archetypal blonde secretary and Illyria as every company man’s nightmare of the ball breaking, effortlessly superior, corporate bitch.

Oh, yes, definitely. Contrast with the slayers who arrived en masse to protect Dana at the end of Damage: I definitely believe this is deliberate.

There’s a definite impression that while the men have made this bright and hollow world they’re not really at home in it. To quote Spike: "There's a hole in the world. Feels like we ought to have known.”

Very prettily put. ;)

Coupled with Shells and I am very dense but it’s only just hit me that A Hole in the World and Shells are both synonyms for hollow thing(s). Hollow, empty, a nothingness bounded and framed.

I highly recommend macha's exegesis of Shells, as well as her piece on AHitW, and Sylvia's undefinable work on the two episodes.

What is the essence of Fred

[aycheb]

Thanks for the links.

And later she turns into Illyria, who is sort of a walking anime character, a female superhero-ish sort.
Wonder Woman of course. Although Illyria is rather less user friendly than the original comic - makes you wonder how she'll turn out in Joss's movie.

He does go back, eventually, but only after he goes through hell upon realizing the very personal consequences of his actions.
He does yes and the comparison with Angel's point In the Darkis very apt. I suppose if you look at the corporate thing from a racial rather than a gender point of view, it's telling that Gunn can't ultimately survive there either. But I should probably cut talking about things I don't know much about while I'm ahead. I did like that he kept his lawyer skillz and yes that he went back to Anne at the end

[spacedoutlooney]

He does go back, eventually, but only after he goes through hell upon realizing the very personal consequences of his actions. Even though he tried to convince Angel back in A5.06 The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco that the work they do from the upper floors is just as important and helpful as the classic "helping the helpless" gig--moreso, even--it seems that he fell into the trap Angel feared back in A1.03 In the Dark:

Angel: (regarding "daytime people" and why he shouldn't become one of them) They have help. The whole world is designed for them, so much that they have no idea what goes on around them after dark. They don’t see the weak ones lost in the night, or the things that prey on them. And if I join them, maybe I’d stop seeing, too.That's a really good point. The necrotempered glass on W&H and on Angel's cars and airplanes really act as a ring of Amara substitute, at least as far as sunlight is concerned. Angel's persistence in trying to continue going out at night saving girls in alleys as an effort to prevent losing touch

[midnightsjane]

Wonderful post, and I love the point you make that by taking away the female leads, the emotional and moral core of their world has been sucked out, leaving a hollow shell. I remember reading Macha's discussion of these episodes over on http://www.teaattheford.net/, and how the images of shells were everywhere.
Interesting thought, that the reason Wesley would say he loved Fred before he knew her was that he was really in love with the mythos of the madonna-whore; his version of Fred was the shell he filled with that mythic ideation, the perfect woman.

[aycheb]

ME walk a fine line between showing how things are in 'big business' and reducing all the female characters to symbols. I think the fairly frequent reminders that there are people like the slayers and the Burkles and Anne still out there help mitagate against the latter. As for Wesley that's a smart way of putting it, his Fred was a shell and maybe that's the source of his guilt over the whole thing. If he hadn't reduced her to an ideal maybe she wouldn't have become a nightmare.

[spacedoutlooney]

If he hadn't reduced her to an ideal maybe she wouldn't have become a nightmare.

Ooh, well put!

[londonkds]

Excellent boiling down of the gender aspects, although I personally think Illyria is too inhuman and androgynous to be seen as a symbol of corporate women (looks back over sentence and realises that might actually have been the point)

I personally was interested by the way that Harmony becomes incredibly warm and maternal to Gunn after Wes stabs him, almost as if there has to be one designated mother figure at all times.

[aycheb]

That's true she was acting out of character for these episodes at least. Maybe Gunn's man-pain was so in need of mothering that it even drew maternal feelings out of Harmony. Which is kind of 'nature abhors a vacuum' as you say.