new vid - "Bachelorette" - Buffy the Vampire Slayer - ensemble
Bachelorette
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Song/Artist: Bachelorette by Björk
Duration: 4:15 minutes
Summary: In the shape of a girl.
Spoilers: whole series
Premiered at vividcon 2009 non-attending premieres. Thank you very much to betas bradcpu, buffyann and sockkpuppett.
Click to viewI'm a fountain of blood
In the shape of a girl
You're the bird on the brim
Hypnotised by the whirl
Drink me, make me feel real
Wet your beak in the stream
Game we're playing is life
Love is a two way dream
I'm a whisper in water
Secret for you to hear
You are the one who grows distant
When I beckon you near
Leave me now, return tonight
The tide will show you the way
If you forget my name
You will go astray
Like a killer whale
Trapped in a bay
I'm a tree that grows hearts
One for each that you take
You're the intruder's hand
I'm the branch that you break
Hum-yeah!
As usual, this is me putting forth an argument. It's not the argument, and I haven't quite worked out to what extent it is a fully supportable interpretation of canon. But it's an interesting viewpoint, and I think an important one which deserves to be articulated.
At some point Joss Whedon made an interesting, sweeping commentary of BtVS seasonal Big Bads as representations of social issues for a young woman: season 2 was the Bad Boyfriend, season 3 was the Father Figure. Whedon then laughed and admitted season 4 was about a robot and let the analogy rest, but I think a valid extension can be applied throughout the series, if not season by season, then at least in a broad-brush sense.
To that end, it was never my intention to make a vid that merely says "Look at these bad, bad men treating Buffy/women badly! Boo!" And if that's the way the vid ultimately came across, then I can't apologise enough. What I wanted to show was patriarchy as a concept, and the different instances that concept could embody. It is not meant to be taken as a blanket critique of men being men, or at least not beyond the privileges - if any - that they unconsciously inherit simply by being born into the structure.
For me, the most important thing is that these issues can be universally true to women, not just for Slayers or female characters in this fiction. At one point or another, most women have to face most of these issues in society, whether or not they are consciously aware of it being such: issues of sex and virtue; of father figures and control; of the "old boys' club" which imposes structural concepts on education and the workplace; and - at the very end of the spectrum - misogyny as tangible violent acts against women.
The last issue is the most physically hurtful, but by the same token is easiest to identify as a target. The other issues seem far more insidious and, to the majority of us, seem to represent something far more immediate yet much harder to pin down.
As an argument vid toward one particular reading of the source, I'm well aware of how it excluded certain evidence in order to make its point. Take Maggie Walsh, for example, or Faith's sexual dominance, or what Gwen Post represented to the Council. While in text I could spend a lot more time discussing how these women provide counterarguments and perhaps could have provided rebuttals, they were necessarily excluded from the vid because of the limited time frame and the ambiguity of constructing an argument through visuals alone. I would love to overcome this shortcoming one day, but right now I'm still thinking there are inherent restrictions in this medium that makes it impossible. As usual, I see a vid as primarily a blunt instrument, and the kinks have to be ironed out elsewhere in words.