The Feminist Filter: Dead Man's Party

[gabrielleabelle]

I'm done with my final and, thus, done with my undergrad! *dances*

I'm celebrating by having a beer and slapping up the feminist filter post for Dead Man's Party. What? My way of celebrating is UNIQUE!

Mission Statement:This series is intended to outline the feminist text of each episode so as to provoke and encourage open discussion. It's not so

Comments

Motherhood and BtVS

[local_max]

So Buffy has two parent figures, one for her human world (Joyce) and one for the demon world (Giles). But it's also one female and one male. And this episode, more than most others, reveals the narrative bias toward Giles, which to me is genuinely unfair. I don't know if I blame the show exactly, because it does feed into Buffy's POV quite well -- but it is unfortunate. So, Joyce behaves pretty badly in this episode, and I'm not excusing that -- but it's worth remembering exactly how empty her life is, besides Buffy, and how much the narrative REPEATEDLY ENSURES that her life is empty besides Buffy. She has two romantic/sexual flings in the first three seasons, and in both times she's chemically induced into it by food (Ted's druggy things/the band candy) and is to an extent shamed for it by the show. She has no other friends that we ever see in any episode of the show besides Pat, here -- in Fear, Itself she says she's made friends, but it seems as if she doesn't have anyone else she's close to as of this episode. And let's

Re: Motherhood and BtVS

[local_max]

This is all a little exaggerated for effect -- and Giles' role is much more complicated than this episode suggests. Also, much of what I say depends on how you read the episode's metaphors. Still, I think this does reveal something about the show, and about Buffy: the show, and we, only are aware of Joyce having any life external to Buffy, besides a vague sense that she works at the gallery, when it hurts Buffy. And it's pretty easy to jump from there to the conclusion that Joyce is a failure as a parent for having an external life. Ted and this episode both end with the new person in Joyce's life, who is a threat to her total devotion to Buffy, being killed by Buffy. Buffy is justified in both cases, don't get me wrong -- but it's a tragedy, to me, that the show posits this as the only type of story that can be told about a single mother from the POV of her daughter. It is, in a sense, what many teenagers feel (I'm thinking of myself here): an inability to connect to your parent as a person, and to see any aspect of the parent'

Re: Motherhood and BtVS

[gabrielleabelle]

I have much love for all this comment. Great observations.

ETA: On other topics, I read Cordelia's line as her trying to understand Buffy's POV -- she knows that Buffy feels responsible (qua "overitentify[ing] much" in IOHEFY. I think the bigger problem is that Buffy blames herself, and that Cordelia, in her typical role as shadow, is only voicing what she suspects/knows Buffy feels, not stating what her read of the situation is. OTOH, Cordelia does nothing to dispel the idea that it's Buffy's fault.

Good call. I can see that.

Re: Motherhood and BtVS

[local_max]

:D I was a bit worried about posting it -- because I do think that Joyce also does fail significantly in the show, and I don't want to minimize that...but I think her failures are also understandable, when we look at how hard it is for her (and how the narrative also sort of 'traps' her into a certain role).

[mcjulie]

I've always felt like this episode was a bad match between the emotional arc and the supernatural element. Xander's line about how you can't "bury stuff" actually makes it worse. It feels like the writers acknowledging the two don't fit together and attempting to stick them together anyway, by authorial fiat.

So what is this episode about? I think it introduces some themes that are going to come back big in Season 6, notably Buffy feeling displaced from her own life, and the people around her not being willing to really consider the depths of her depression or offer any help. Everyone (except maybe Giles) is mostly concerned with how her absence hurt them. (Although I do think Joyce has Buffy's number when she accuses her of running away, at least in part, to punish Joyce for the "don't come back" line. But I also think Joyce was awful during that scene and kinda deserved the punishment, so