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shadowkat[I'm lazy so doing two posts in one.]
Saw both the film Milk and rewatched Tabula Rasa to cheer self up after Milk.
Speaking of Milk, just read that openly gay African American male writer E. Lynn Harris died of heart disease at the age of 54. In case you have no idea who this guy is - he was a literary pioneer in the mid-90s thanks to a 11 influential novels that opened a dialogue about sexual taboos within the African-American community. One of his novels - Basketball Jones hit the NY Times best-seller list, a rarity. It was a book about an African-American Man struggling with his sexuality. "Years ago, it would have caused me great pain to even write the word "gay" on paper to describe myself," Harris wrote in his memoir What Becomes of the Brokenhearted. "Writing has allowed me to change my self-hatred and doubt into true self-esteem and self-love." Sad to hear he died. Wasn't that impressed by Milk. Overrated movie that meanders all over the place like most of Gus Van Sant's films. I left it feeling like I knew very little about the characters. I did however understand why Dan White shot Milk and the Mayor - it wasn't really about gay rights so much as about power and White's increasing insecurities and the fact that he felt completely suffocated and trapped - he felt that Milk and the Mayor were responsible - because both were in his face. Of course they weren't. And it's not at all surprising to me that White took his own life a couple of years later. Scean Penn was amazing in the role, of course. But James Franco and the other actors, with the possible exception of James Brolin, barely registered. I found myself wandering about doing chores during it. I'm just not a huge fan of bio-pics, I'm afraid. Oh one thing that I found very interesting in the film - Harvey Milk tells one politician who calls him "queer" that this is an insulting term and derogatory, that he prefers "Gay" and fought for "gay". I find this interesting because I've noticed that several people online are using the word "queer".
Then I watched Tabula Rasa, after watching OMWF the day before - from Buffy. These two really need to be watched close together. One is the reveal and one the aftermath. And together they pretty much set up the arcs for each character. They also show how each character is handling real world challenges and struggling with them. I identify with this season a great deal. In some ways more so than any of the other seasons.
Before I go talk about Tabula Rasa and Once More With Feeling (OMWF) - a few words about All the Way. All the Way sets up this mini arc. You sort of have to watch All the Way to understand what is happening in the other two episodes. Several things happen in All the Way:
1. Xander announces that he is marrying Anya, then proceeds to freak out about it and retreats outside and starts gobbling munchies. He has, as Anya pointed out, earlier, been in avoidance mode. Captain Coward is driving this ship she tells him in Flooded.
2. Willow and Tara have a fight about the fact that Willow uses magic to fix everything regardless of what it is and heedless of the consequences. If they need decorations and have no time to get any from the store - voila - decorations, plus better than whatever they could have bought at the last minute. If they need to find Dawn at the Bronze - Willow can do a spell and put people in another dimension for a fraction of a second, long enough to see Dawn. This scares the bejeezus out of Tara - who stops her from doing the second bit at the Bronze. But does not stop her from magically turning down the volumn so they can hear one another. The fight escalates and Willow unable to deal with Tara being angry at her - casts a spell to make Tara forget it ever happened - once again heedless of what such a spell could do to Tara or what doing that sort of spell might mean. From Willow's point of view it just means they aren't fighting. She's fixed things. Plus Willow's feeling pretty confident - she pulled Buffy out of hell after all.
3. Dawn takes off and it is revealed that she's been stealing things.
4. Spike at the MAgic Shop runs into Buffy, he asks if she's up to some rough and tumble - meaning patrolling. Buffy misunderstands him and thinks he means sex, and looks shocked.
Spike confused states..."patroling. you and me. hello?" The sexual tension is building and Spike's frustration with her is building as well. When Buffy gets bored and tired of being with her friends, she takes off to patrol with Spike, only to run into someone killed by vamps. She goes to Spike's crypt - he greets her and says Giles must have told her. She's surprised, making it clear to him that she didn't visit him because of Dawn.
5. When Dawn is safely back in the fold - Giles asks Buffy what she is going to do about Dawn. Buffy says - oh you can handle it for me. You take care of it. Giles reluctantly does so.
Next episode is OMWF, followed by Tabula Rasa. OMWF is the episode in which all the things bubbling under the surface in All the Way pop. While Tabula Rasa is the one in which the characters attempt to find a way to handle what happened in OMWF and fail miserably.
1. Giles. In the past I've admittedly been a bit hard on Giles. But when I rewatched OMWF and listened to the songs, and watched Head's facial reactions...it became clearer. The first song - I've Got a Theory - Giles catches the fact that Buffy doesn't care. He hears her say, "does it even matter? Why should we even care? Another demon, big whoop. And dying?
Not a big deal." No one else seems to catch it, but Giles. But then Giles has been watching Buffy like a hawk since she returned from the grave. Later in his song - Standing in Your Way or I Wish I Could Stay - he sings that he would like to take care of all of her problems, would like to slay her demons, pay her bills, guide her through - but all he is doing is preventing her from standing tall on her own two feet. His presence is making it difficult for her to move forward. She's no longer a child, no longer his student. He has to let her make her own mistakes, just as he once did. It is possibly the hardest thing that a parent has to do in life - and that is to let their child go out in the hard cold world alone. Our parents want to protect us from the monsters, they want to take care of all of our problems - but by doing so they make it impossible for us to figure out how to do it ourselves. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Giles' realizes that staying hurts Buffy. He has to leave. His focus is on Buffy. Buffy is his child, his ward. Xander and Willow are students that he cares about, but he is not responsible for them - like he is for Buffy. In OMWF he attempts an experiment - he won't help Buffy, he'll let her take care of it. Then he panics and goes after her. Much as he did in The Freshman in S4. And like the Freshman - he really doesn't help. Spike saves Buffy in OMWF not Giles. After OMWF - Giles buys the ticket to go home and at the end of Tabula Rasa leaves. He tells Buffy why he is leaving, but all she hears is that he is abandoning her.
2. Xander. Xander summons the demon thinking it will just be singing and dancing, and show that everything will be okay. They'll express their true feelings and be happy family. Xander is handling the bad things in life by avoiding them. When the singing and dancing happen - he calls off work at his construction site so he doesn't have to deal with the workers dancing.
When he and Anya sing their song...it is all the things they are avoiding telling each other and all the things he is afraid to hear. Instead of dealing with them he states - move it along, nothing to see here. This is over. Under the rug. It's an old coping mechanism. If I don't see it - it doesn't exist. When he finds out that they drug Buffy out of heaven, he states in Tabula Rasa - me like Buffy, me Buffy's friend, me happy she is back. I ignore everything else - and it will just go away. We'll pretend it never happened. We'll have dinners and video clubs. Anya and Tara are both resistant to this idea - stating that they need to deal with it directly, they need to talk to Buffy about it and find a way of helping her. But Xander doesn't want to deal with it. Any more than he wants to deal with the fight between Tara and Willow or the problems between him and Anya. When Willow and Tara have a fight in Tabula Rasa - he can't leave the room fast enough. Instead of backing Tara and telling Willow that she is using magic to fix things, he avoids the problem. Sweeps it under the rug. Runs away from it. Just as Xander runs away from the problems in his Restless Dream in S4.
3. Willow. Tara's song to Willow in OMWF is an apt one and it is bracketed by her song about having to leave. Tara sings I'm under your spell and this is wonderful, then realizes ...wait I'm really under your spell. What the writers are doing here is complicated and you have to pay close attention to catch the nuances. In Tabula Rasa - Tara tells Willow that she is doing what she has been doing for quite some time now - using magic to fix things regardless of the danger or consequences. Willow states isn't that what magic is for - to fix things, to help, to make things better, I just want to save people. And Tara states - "it may have started out that way, but now you are using it to make the world into the place you want it to be. To help yourself. Not others. And that's not what magic is for. You could hurt someone. You could hurt yourself." This conversation sprouts directfly from Willow's previous statements: I didn't want to know that she might be in heaven. I refused to see it. We were selfish. I was so selfish. (she's admitting here that she brought Buffy back for herself not to save her, and justified it by assuming without any proof that Buffy was in hell). Then she states, wait I can fix this. I can redeem myself. I can do a spell and make Buffy forget and everything will be all better. Tara immediately responds "no". When Willow argues with her.
Tara brings up what Willow did to her. That she played with her mind, her memory. Not unlike Glory had. This shocks Willow. And Tara says you are relying on magic to fix all your problems, everything you don't like, and you are now using it to fix me. You don't want us to fight? We talk about it or we don't fight. You don't try to erase the fight with magic and control what I think or feel. Willow responds to what Tara says - in this way:" I can go off magic. I won't use magic for an entire month. I don't need magic." Note - it is not Tara who is saying that Willow is addicted to magic nor is it the writers, it is Willow who is leaping to that conclusion. Willow is not addressing why she is using magic. Tara states that Willow is using magic to make the world work the way she wants it to. She does not say you are addicted to it because it makes you feel good. Willow leaps to that conclusion. Willow thinks it is an easy fix - I can just stop. So Tara, uncertain what to think, says, give it one week and we'll see. Willow doesn't last a day...she does the spell to make both Tara and Buffy forget, but she's not careful about it - she screws it up and causes everyone to forget and to forget the wrong things like anything that they are worried about or makes them feel bad about themselves. What she does is exactly what Tara is talking about. This behavior is what is scaring Tara. And it blows up in Willow's face just as Tara feared it would. What Tara doesn't know - is Willow was doing this type of magic and for those reasons long before she ever met Tara. Magic is how Willow escapes herself, how she deals with problems. If OZ leaves? She does a spell. If OZ loves Veruca? Do a spell. If she is lusting after Xander? Do a spell.
4. Buffy. Buffy is avoiding her problems in another way. She's depressed and wants to feel.
All she feels is numb. She wants the passion back. The fire. It's what she sings in Going Through the Motions and in Walk Through Fire and in Give me Something to Sing About.
And to a degree in All the Way - it's her reaction to the festivities - why do I feel numb?
Why don't I care? With Spike - she feels something. He pushes her buttons. He turns her on.
When she kisses him...she sings, I know this isn't real, but I just want to feel. She kisses death. And loses herself in him. I've known quite a few people in my life who have used sex to escape their problems. The kinkier the sex, the, how to put this, more wild and abandoned with not strings - the better. They want the orgasm, not the love. They aren't having sex to make love. It's not about making love. It is about fucking your brains out, fucking until you have that moment - where you are released, you leave your body, and are free. When Buffy kisses Spike - she dies a little. Just as she did when she kissed Angel. When I kiss you, she told Angel, I want to die. The vampire's kiss is metaphorically a death kiss. Also "little death" is an euphemism that has been used for sexual release.
A lot of people confuse sex with love. You can have great sex and not be in love. Being in love does not guarantee you will have great sex. Sometimes people have better sex with total strangers. Sometimes just with themselves. With Spike, Buffy escapes herself. She escapes Dawn, the bills, the life of the normal girl. "I try so hard to be the normal girl in this glittering world.." or in Tabula Rasa - the verse in the song Goodbye to You.."the last three years feel as if they aren't real..." unimportant. She states in Tabula Rasa before she loses her memory - "you guys don't know what it's like, how hard it is, what this feels like..".
So, when Giles leaves, Buffy pushes Spike away at first, then..goes to him. Lets herself be lost in his embrace. She doesn't want to think. She doesn't want to be alive. When she kisses him - she is embracing the slayer inside her, the demon inside, the part that she had denied last season. She's giving into it. She's doing what Spike states in Fool for Love: "Sooner or later there will come a time in which you'll want it. Death's embrace. All slayer's do. To know what it is like. That final rest. That gift. You want to embrace it. Give in to it."
When she looks at him in horror, he advances. "You know you want it Buffy. Come on. You know you do." And moves, not to kill her, but to kiss her. Here they do the dance again - except Buffy is coming at him, telling him she wants him, wants him to embrace her. She wants to embrace the grave.
She doesn't quite see Spike. Tabula Rasa makes this clear. None of the characters truly see each other. Spike doesn't quite see Buffy or know what to make of her, and I don't think he's that self-aware of what he wants either. In Tabula Rasa - when he finds out he is a vampire, he wonders why he doesn't want to bite her, why he fights his own kind. Maybe I'm a good vampire. A vampire with a soul. Buffy retorts that this is lame. (Been there done that, after all...some part of her...knows this.) And his name in Tabula Rasa - a play on words is Randy. He is a bit randy. He won't turn down sex with Buffy. He tells Riley that in Into the Woods and in his own dream in Out of Sight, Out of Mind. But he does want her to love him.
If Spike saw Buffy clearly and to do that he'd need a soul, I suspect, not that those who have one see her either...he'd realize that she is not capable at this point of loving anyone. She is empty of feeling. She can't feel. She desperately wants to feel. People who are physically depressed can't love someone. They want to escape themselves. Buffy can't understand why anyone would love her at this point. I'm hard she thinks. Unfeeling.
She says this to Holden Webster in Conversations with Dead People and to Giles in Intervention. It's what she tries to say in Tabula Rasa. It's not that she doesn't care about the others - she does. But she can't really love. The passion isn't there.
So she is escaping through sex. Through sexual release. She's giving into lust. Embracing the darkness. She is kissing death. And when she does so...she falls into him, devours his mouth. Pulls him into herself. Lets him fill her up. Then comes to and pushes him away, disgusted with herself, at what she has become.
At the end of Tabula Rasa, Giles has followed through on his promise to leave in order for Buffy to find her own way, Xander has turned a blind eye on what is happening around him thinking if he ignores it it will go away, Willow has chosen magic to fix all ills sending Tara off into the night in disgust, and Buffy has fallen into Death/Spike's embrace, escaping from what is happening. The song Goodbye to You, Goodbye to Everything I knew...echoing in the background, underlining the choices they've made. The episodes that follow show how the characters choices play out and how they handle them.
Saw both the film Milk and rewatched Tabula Rasa to cheer self up after Milk.
Speaking of Milk, just read that openly gay African American male writer E. Lynn Harris died of heart disease at the age of 54. In case you have no idea who this guy is - he was a literary pioneer in the mid-90s thanks to a 11 influential novels that opened a dialogue about sexual taboos within the African-American community. One of his novels - Basketball Jones hit the NY Times best-seller list, a rarity. It was a book about an African-American Man struggling with his sexuality. "Years ago, it would have caused me great pain to even write the word "gay" on paper to describe myself," Harris wrote in his memoir What Becomes of the Brokenhearted. "Writing has allowed me to change my self-hatred and doubt into true self-esteem and self-love." Sad to hear he died. Wasn't that impressed by Milk. Overrated movie that meanders all over the place like most of Gus Van Sant's films. I left it feeling like I knew very little about the characters. I did however understand why Dan White shot Milk and the Mayor - it wasn't really about gay rights so much as about power and White's increasing insecurities and the fact that he felt completely suffocated and trapped - he felt that Milk and the Mayor were responsible - because both were in his face. Of course they weren't. And it's not at all surprising to me that White took his own life a couple of years later. Scean Penn was amazing in the role, of course. But James Franco and the other actors, with the possible exception of James Brolin, barely registered. I found myself wandering about doing chores during it. I'm just not a huge fan of bio-pics, I'm afraid. Oh one thing that I found very interesting in the film - Harvey Milk tells one politician who calls him "queer" that this is an insulting term and derogatory, that he prefers "Gay" and fought for "gay". I find this interesting because I've noticed that several people online are using the word "queer".
Then I watched Tabula Rasa, after watching OMWF the day before - from Buffy. These two really need to be watched close together. One is the reveal and one the aftermath. And together they pretty much set up the arcs for each character. They also show how each character is handling real world challenges and struggling with them. I identify with this season a great deal. In some ways more so than any of the other seasons.
Before I go talk about Tabula Rasa and Once More With Feeling (OMWF) - a few words about All the Way. All the Way sets up this mini arc. You sort of have to watch All the Way to understand what is happening in the other two episodes. Several things happen in All the Way:
1. Xander announces that he is marrying Anya, then proceeds to freak out about it and retreats outside and starts gobbling munchies. He has, as Anya pointed out, earlier, been in avoidance mode. Captain Coward is driving this ship she tells him in Flooded.
2. Willow and Tara have a fight about the fact that Willow uses magic to fix everything regardless of what it is and heedless of the consequences. If they need decorations and have no time to get any from the store - voila - decorations, plus better than whatever they could have bought at the last minute. If they need to find Dawn at the Bronze - Willow can do a spell and put people in another dimension for a fraction of a second, long enough to see Dawn. This scares the bejeezus out of Tara - who stops her from doing the second bit at the Bronze. But does not stop her from magically turning down the volumn so they can hear one another. The fight escalates and Willow unable to deal with Tara being angry at her - casts a spell to make Tara forget it ever happened - once again heedless of what such a spell could do to Tara or what doing that sort of spell might mean. From Willow's point of view it just means they aren't fighting. She's fixed things. Plus Willow's feeling pretty confident - she pulled Buffy out of hell after all.
3. Dawn takes off and it is revealed that she's been stealing things.
4. Spike at the MAgic Shop runs into Buffy, he asks if she's up to some rough and tumble - meaning patrolling. Buffy misunderstands him and thinks he means sex, and looks shocked.
Spike confused states..."patroling. you and me. hello?" The sexual tension is building and Spike's frustration with her is building as well. When Buffy gets bored and tired of being with her friends, she takes off to patrol with Spike, only to run into someone killed by vamps. She goes to Spike's crypt - he greets her and says Giles must have told her. She's surprised, making it clear to him that she didn't visit him because of Dawn.
5. When Dawn is safely back in the fold - Giles asks Buffy what she is going to do about Dawn. Buffy says - oh you can handle it for me. You take care of it. Giles reluctantly does so.
Next episode is OMWF, followed by Tabula Rasa. OMWF is the episode in which all the things bubbling under the surface in All the Way pop. While Tabula Rasa is the one in which the characters attempt to find a way to handle what happened in OMWF and fail miserably.
1. Giles. In the past I've admittedly been a bit hard on Giles. But when I rewatched OMWF and listened to the songs, and watched Head's facial reactions...it became clearer. The first song - I've Got a Theory - Giles catches the fact that Buffy doesn't care. He hears her say, "does it even matter? Why should we even care? Another demon, big whoop. And dying?
Not a big deal." No one else seems to catch it, but Giles. But then Giles has been watching Buffy like a hawk since she returned from the grave. Later in his song - Standing in Your Way or I Wish I Could Stay - he sings that he would like to take care of all of her problems, would like to slay her demons, pay her bills, guide her through - but all he is doing is preventing her from standing tall on her own two feet. His presence is making it difficult for her to move forward. She's no longer a child, no longer his student. He has to let her make her own mistakes, just as he once did. It is possibly the hardest thing that a parent has to do in life - and that is to let their child go out in the hard cold world alone. Our parents want to protect us from the monsters, they want to take care of all of our problems - but by doing so they make it impossible for us to figure out how to do it ourselves. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Giles' realizes that staying hurts Buffy. He has to leave. His focus is on Buffy. Buffy is his child, his ward. Xander and Willow are students that he cares about, but he is not responsible for them - like he is for Buffy. In OMWF he attempts an experiment - he won't help Buffy, he'll let her take care of it. Then he panics and goes after her. Much as he did in The Freshman in S4. And like the Freshman - he really doesn't help. Spike saves Buffy in OMWF not Giles. After OMWF - Giles buys the ticket to go home and at the end of Tabula Rasa leaves. He tells Buffy why he is leaving, but all she hears is that he is abandoning her.
2. Xander. Xander summons the demon thinking it will just be singing and dancing, and show that everything will be okay. They'll express their true feelings and be happy family. Xander is handling the bad things in life by avoiding them. When the singing and dancing happen - he calls off work at his construction site so he doesn't have to deal with the workers dancing.
When he and Anya sing their song...it is all the things they are avoiding telling each other and all the things he is afraid to hear. Instead of dealing with them he states - move it along, nothing to see here. This is over. Under the rug. It's an old coping mechanism. If I don't see it - it doesn't exist. When he finds out that they drug Buffy out of heaven, he states in Tabula Rasa - me like Buffy, me Buffy's friend, me happy she is back. I ignore everything else - and it will just go away. We'll pretend it never happened. We'll have dinners and video clubs. Anya and Tara are both resistant to this idea - stating that they need to deal with it directly, they need to talk to Buffy about it and find a way of helping her. But Xander doesn't want to deal with it. Any more than he wants to deal with the fight between Tara and Willow or the problems between him and Anya. When Willow and Tara have a fight in Tabula Rasa - he can't leave the room fast enough. Instead of backing Tara and telling Willow that she is using magic to fix things, he avoids the problem. Sweeps it under the rug. Runs away from it. Just as Xander runs away from the problems in his Restless Dream in S4.
3. Willow. Tara's song to Willow in OMWF is an apt one and it is bracketed by her song about having to leave. Tara sings I'm under your spell and this is wonderful, then realizes ...wait I'm really under your spell. What the writers are doing here is complicated and you have to pay close attention to catch the nuances. In Tabula Rasa - Tara tells Willow that she is doing what she has been doing for quite some time now - using magic to fix things regardless of the danger or consequences. Willow states isn't that what magic is for - to fix things, to help, to make things better, I just want to save people. And Tara states - "it may have started out that way, but now you are using it to make the world into the place you want it to be. To help yourself. Not others. And that's not what magic is for. You could hurt someone. You could hurt yourself." This conversation sprouts directfly from Willow's previous statements: I didn't want to know that she might be in heaven. I refused to see it. We were selfish. I was so selfish. (she's admitting here that she brought Buffy back for herself not to save her, and justified it by assuming without any proof that Buffy was in hell). Then she states, wait I can fix this. I can redeem myself. I can do a spell and make Buffy forget and everything will be all better. Tara immediately responds "no". When Willow argues with her.
Tara brings up what Willow did to her. That she played with her mind, her memory. Not unlike Glory had. This shocks Willow. And Tara says you are relying on magic to fix all your problems, everything you don't like, and you are now using it to fix me. You don't want us to fight? We talk about it or we don't fight. You don't try to erase the fight with magic and control what I think or feel. Willow responds to what Tara says - in this way:" I can go off magic. I won't use magic for an entire month. I don't need magic." Note - it is not Tara who is saying that Willow is addicted to magic nor is it the writers, it is Willow who is leaping to that conclusion. Willow is not addressing why she is using magic. Tara states that Willow is using magic to make the world work the way she wants it to. She does not say you are addicted to it because it makes you feel good. Willow leaps to that conclusion. Willow thinks it is an easy fix - I can just stop. So Tara, uncertain what to think, says, give it one week and we'll see. Willow doesn't last a day...she does the spell to make both Tara and Buffy forget, but she's not careful about it - she screws it up and causes everyone to forget and to forget the wrong things like anything that they are worried about or makes them feel bad about themselves. What she does is exactly what Tara is talking about. This behavior is what is scaring Tara. And it blows up in Willow's face just as Tara feared it would. What Tara doesn't know - is Willow was doing this type of magic and for those reasons long before she ever met Tara. Magic is how Willow escapes herself, how she deals with problems. If OZ leaves? She does a spell. If OZ loves Veruca? Do a spell. If she is lusting after Xander? Do a spell.
4. Buffy. Buffy is avoiding her problems in another way. She's depressed and wants to feel.
All she feels is numb. She wants the passion back. The fire. It's what she sings in Going Through the Motions and in Walk Through Fire and in Give me Something to Sing About.
And to a degree in All the Way - it's her reaction to the festivities - why do I feel numb?
Why don't I care? With Spike - she feels something. He pushes her buttons. He turns her on.
When she kisses him...she sings, I know this isn't real, but I just want to feel. She kisses death. And loses herself in him. I've known quite a few people in my life who have used sex to escape their problems. The kinkier the sex, the, how to put this, more wild and abandoned with not strings - the better. They want the orgasm, not the love. They aren't having sex to make love. It's not about making love. It is about fucking your brains out, fucking until you have that moment - where you are released, you leave your body, and are free. When Buffy kisses Spike - she dies a little. Just as she did when she kissed Angel. When I kiss you, she told Angel, I want to die. The vampire's kiss is metaphorically a death kiss. Also "little death" is an euphemism that has been used for sexual release.
A lot of people confuse sex with love. You can have great sex and not be in love. Being in love does not guarantee you will have great sex. Sometimes people have better sex with total strangers. Sometimes just with themselves. With Spike, Buffy escapes herself. She escapes Dawn, the bills, the life of the normal girl. "I try so hard to be the normal girl in this glittering world.." or in Tabula Rasa - the verse in the song Goodbye to You.."the last three years feel as if they aren't real..." unimportant. She states in Tabula Rasa before she loses her memory - "you guys don't know what it's like, how hard it is, what this feels like..".
So, when Giles leaves, Buffy pushes Spike away at first, then..goes to him. Lets herself be lost in his embrace. She doesn't want to think. She doesn't want to be alive. When she kisses him - she is embracing the slayer inside her, the demon inside, the part that she had denied last season. She's giving into it. She's doing what Spike states in Fool for Love: "Sooner or later there will come a time in which you'll want it. Death's embrace. All slayer's do. To know what it is like. That final rest. That gift. You want to embrace it. Give in to it."
When she looks at him in horror, he advances. "You know you want it Buffy. Come on. You know you do." And moves, not to kill her, but to kiss her. Here they do the dance again - except Buffy is coming at him, telling him she wants him, wants him to embrace her. She wants to embrace the grave.
She doesn't quite see Spike. Tabula Rasa makes this clear. None of the characters truly see each other. Spike doesn't quite see Buffy or know what to make of her, and I don't think he's that self-aware of what he wants either. In Tabula Rasa - when he finds out he is a vampire, he wonders why he doesn't want to bite her, why he fights his own kind. Maybe I'm a good vampire. A vampire with a soul. Buffy retorts that this is lame. (Been there done that, after all...some part of her...knows this.) And his name in Tabula Rasa - a play on words is Randy. He is a bit randy. He won't turn down sex with Buffy. He tells Riley that in Into the Woods and in his own dream in Out of Sight, Out of Mind. But he does want her to love him.
If Spike saw Buffy clearly and to do that he'd need a soul, I suspect, not that those who have one see her either...he'd realize that she is not capable at this point of loving anyone. She is empty of feeling. She can't feel. She desperately wants to feel. People who are physically depressed can't love someone. They want to escape themselves. Buffy can't understand why anyone would love her at this point. I'm hard she thinks. Unfeeling.
She says this to Holden Webster in Conversations with Dead People and to Giles in Intervention. It's what she tries to say in Tabula Rasa. It's not that she doesn't care about the others - she does. But she can't really love. The passion isn't there.
So she is escaping through sex. Through sexual release. She's giving into lust. Embracing the darkness. She is kissing death. And when she does so...she falls into him, devours his mouth. Pulls him into herself. Lets him fill her up. Then comes to and pushes him away, disgusted with herself, at what she has become.
At the end of Tabula Rasa, Giles has followed through on his promise to leave in order for Buffy to find her own way, Xander has turned a blind eye on what is happening around him thinking if he ignores it it will go away, Willow has chosen magic to fix all ills sending Tara off into the night in disgust, and Buffy has fallen into Death/Spike's embrace, escaping from what is happening. The song Goodbye to You, Goodbye to Everything I knew...echoing in the background, underlining the choices they've made. The episodes that follow show how the characters choices play out and how they handle them.
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Date: 2009-08-03 12:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-03 04:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-03 04:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-03 04:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-03 04:27 pm (UTC)Harvey Milk in the film Milk sort of left out transgendre, lesbians and bisexuals or the film makers did. Actually transgendre and bisexuals get kicked by both sides - gays/homosexuals and heterosexuals.
Queer...includes people who may fall into fetish and not be bi, gay (lesibian and homosexual) or transgendre - which may be some people's difficulty with it. But Masq's correct it is the most inclusive.
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Date: 2009-08-03 04:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-03 10:02 am (UTC)Having said which, I still like to feel that if he'd realised how dangerously depressed Buffy was, he would have held off leaving for a while.
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Date: 2009-08-03 04:08 pm (UTC)When he sings "Standing," he doesn't realize how depressed Buffy is, so it's understandable that he would see her as relying on him too much and want to remove himself. But once she reveals that she had been in heaven, I do feel like he ought to have figured out that this isn't a normal "not wanting to grow up/take responsibility" issue, and reconsidered leaving just then.
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Date: 2009-08-03 04:47 pm (UTC)Except, I think he's more or less shoving it under the rug much in the same way that Xander does. Giles is in a way going against the teachings of the Watcher Council in regards to Buffy. They would have told him to stay, to be her boss. But Giles treats Buffy not as his slayer, but as his daughter.
And, I think, as many parents tend to do, he follows his own parents dictates - in that he figures she'll be fine if he lets her alone. Spike actually sings it in OMWF and I think that Giles more or less echoes the view, its a very male pov actually - "You'll get along...you just have to start living.." stiff upper lip and all that. Giles also doesn't deal with emotional problems and conflicts well - he tends to ignore them.
He ignored Buffy/Angel and was more or less oblivious to what had happened to turn Angel into Angelus until Willow verbally slaps him. This is also to some degree a father/guy thing.
I know when I was dangerously depressed (several years ago) - my father's attitude was "get over it" and "work it out". He couldn't handle my depression. He wanted to solve the problem by paying my bills or getting me out there to find a job. Which is what Giles does - he tries to get Buffy a job, he asks her what her plans are, he makes her train again, he pays her bills. He thinks you solve it by doing. When that doesn't seem to work - he thinks okay if I leave you to your devices, let you fall down and pick yourself up - you'll figure out how great you are. Maybe your depressed because you think you need me to make everything work?
Keep in mind that during the last two seasons 4 and 5, Giles went through his own mid-life crisis. He no longer has the library or the school. He's not really a Watcher any more. He's been running the magic shop but it probably isn't doing that well, and he seems a bit out of his depth. Anya is enjoying it more than he is. (Tabula Rasa gets that across quite well, as does All the Way...in neither episode is Giles happy to be in that store.) After Buffy died, he went home to England and set up a new life for himself there. Friends, family. Coming back is inconvienent. He no longer wants to be in Sunnydale and he doesn't feel like he belongs in Sunnydale.
I think Joyce would probably have dealt with Buffy's depression differently. But she also would have reacted the way Giles' has, and the others...you're the hero, you are back now, be happy, so we can go back to our problems. That's how people handle people who are depressed. They don't know how to fix things...they feel frustrated.
Was it the right thing to do? No. Giles should have stayed. He even says as much in Grave. But at the time, when he chose to go it made sense. He did not see how bad Willow was (after all its not like she hadn't done it before - Something Blue), nor appreciate the depth of Buffy's depression (she'd been depressed before - in S3 after Angel died, in S2 - when she came back from summer vacation, in S4 after Angel left and she started school, and in S5 after her mother died and things worked out.)
The explanation for it is in his Restless Dream - where you see him saying I'd had things to do, I'm not needed here, and she's just a child with me...if I go she grows up.
At this point - I think Giles staying would have been out of character, because from his point of view he is doing the right thing. And for him it's incredibly painful. As he sings - it kills me to do this for you, but I must.
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Date: 2009-08-03 05:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-03 05:44 pm (UTC)Ah, yes. Completely agree. Like Willow bringing Buffy back and Xander not letting Anya know how he feels...he really doesn't know he's doing anything wrong, but it doesn't let him off the hook either.
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Date: 2009-08-03 02:46 pm (UTC)I just watched the last two episodes of S6 last night w/a friend who has never watched Buffy all the way through, and you know: I think season 6 might be my favorite season....
they are all good, but this one really did advance the character arcs (taking skin along with it) in ways few shows ever attempt to do.
And I was so glad my friend was totally unspoiled for, and surprised by, Giles showing up:
"I'd like to test that theory"
lol