Once More With Feeling

[Updated May 2, 2013]

I’ve watched Once More With Feeling more than any other episode (Becoming and Chosen are close), and I think I like it better every time. There are so many clever, subtle points that I can’t possibly mention them all, so I’m just going to hit the main issues.

Joss gave extensive commentary, part of which explains his goal in the episode:

“The important thing was to set up not just this show, but the rest of the season, the rest of the series. The episode before, the episode after. … I didn't want to say, "Look! We're better than a TV show!" I wanted to say, "You can do all of this in an episode of television. It just depends on how much you care." And because I think one of the other things about musicals is everybody saying, "Oh, look! We're taking you outside the world of television. We're better than the world of television." Which of course drives me crazy. I love TV. I love what you can do with it. And to be able to go this far emotionally, and be this silly on a regular old episode of television – albeit eight minutes over – is a way of saying, "This is just an episode. This is just what we do. It's not better, it's just TV in all its glory." And the way I celebrate musicals, I celebrate this medium; and hopefully that comes through a little bit too.”

I’ll start with the most important fact about Buffy: she’s depressed.  We learn this in the teaser, with Buffy staring blankly at her suddenly different alarm clock and then coloring a page all in black. She tells us that she’s depressed in the opening song. Joss: “This number here – very much in the Disney tradition, what Jeffrey Katzenberg would call an 'I want' song. … the song where the heroine tells you exactly what it is she's missing in her life. Which in Buffy's case is her life: she just doesn't feel connected.” Follow the lyrics, with my emphasis added to make the point:

Every single night, the same arrangement
I go out and fight the fight.
Still I always feel this strange estrangement
Nothing here is real, nothing here is right.

I've been making shows of trading blows
Just hoping no one knows
That I've been going through the motions
Walking through the part.

Nothing seems to penetrate my heart.

I was always brave, and kind of righteous.
Now I find I'm wavering.

Crawl out of your grave, you'll find this fight just
Doesn't mean a thing….

She does pretty well with fiends from hell
But lately we can tell
That she's just going through the motions….

Will I stay this way forever?
Sleepwalk through my life's endeavor?....

Going through the motions
Losing all my drive.
I can't even see
If this is really me
And I just want to be-

Aliiiiiive.

Buffy’s description of her emotional state fits with the symptoms of depression:

“Depression is a medical illness that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest. Depression can cause physical symptoms, too. … [I]t affects how you feel, think and behave. Depression can lead to a variety of emotional and physical problems. You may have trouble doing normal day-to-day activities, and depression may make you feel as if life isn't worth living.”

Her other 2 songs reinforce the theme: “I touch the fire and it freezes me/I look into and it’s black….I want the fire back”. The fire, of course, is emotion. She’s not feeling any, a classic symptom of depression (“blunted affect”). Later she begs Sweet to “give me something to sing about”. There’s no melody when she reveals that she’s been pulled out of heaven. Even her participation in “What Can’t We Face” is more fatalistic than optimistic. Joss: “she says what appears to be a rousing chorus of ‘We can handle this, we're a great team’, but what she's actually saying is ‘I'm bored, it means nothing to me, they've got nothing new.’"

The fact that Buffy is depressed should come as no surprise. I mentioned in my post on Bargaining that the title referenced the third of the stages of grief; depression is the fourth stage. As in every other season, episode 7 is giving us the key to the season, just as Joss specifically stated in the passage I quoted above.

If we translate this back into life terms, Buffy devoted her late teenage years to achieving the goal of adulthood. Now that she got there, she finds that it isn’t some glorious, heavenly state, it’s hard work. She doesn’t want to do it, so she’s “going through the motions” of her slaying. She’s listless and lifeless, passively aggressively refusing the return to reality to put it in Hero’s Journey terms. As we’ll see, slaying isn’t a job that she can sleepwalk through, it requires commitment and dedication. The absence of these will have significant consequences. Joss is setting up the season, indeed the rest of the series, right here in this episode.

What makes OMWF such a great episode – it would almost certainly win a fan vote for single best/favorite episode – is that it doesn’t “merely” establish Buffy’s arc, it gives us important information about each of the core 4. I’ll take them in turn.

Joss explains Giles’ song this way: “He's singing about, you know, it's every parent's dilemma. ‘I want to take care of you, but eventually I have to teach you to take care of yourself.’” This is a very basic theme common to all parents. Buffy has to make decisions on her own now, but she’s not doing that (as we saw at the end of All the Way, an incident Giles mentions here). The whole point of Giles’s role from here on out is that he needs to remain involved in Buffy’s life but not to the point of making decisions for her. She’s going to need to learn from her own mistakes, not from Giles doing things for her. As I mentioned in my post on Bargaining, I think a lot of fans struggled with this even though it’s a very natural life transition.

Note that when Giles tries to explain how he’s “standing in the way”, Buffy doesn’t hear him. She doesn’t want to. Metaphorically, Giles is useless at this point. Buffy’s crisis is one of the spirit, not the mind.

Dawn feels stifled, which we see when Giles takes the book away from her in the teaser, from her insistence that she can stay alone in the house, and from her brief song: “Does anybody even notice/does anybody even care?” Her dance was an effort to escape confinement. I’ll suggest that this is a metaphor for the journey her character will take in S6.

In his commentary, Joss says: “Here we see in this dance how [Sweet’s] bringing Michelle– bringing Dawn – to a more mature, almost sexualized place; that she's been saying "I'm ready to go here, I'm ready to grow up", but she's not sure that she is. And as in a classic fairy tale, which is the feeling I wanted to get from this particular sequence, the demon shows her a little bit more of herself than she knew was there. And although it frightens her, she comes out the wiser for it after he's defeated.”

This follows very naturally from the events of All the Way, but I should also note the metaphor in All the Way: Dawn is Buffy’s inner child, and Dawn kissed a vampire, just as Buffy did all the way back in Angel. That’s what Buffy herself does at the end of OMWF. There’s additional foreshadowing in All the Way which I’ll mention in two more episodes.

Although Xander just committed publicly to Anya in All the Way, we now see that “committed” is the wrong word. He’s harboring important doubts, notably about Anya’s fundamental nature (“am I marrying a demon?”). He told Anya in Into the Woods that he was “powerfully, painfully” in love with her. The inner doubts revealed in OMWF call that declaration into serious question.

Maybe he’s right to harbor those doubts. Anya spent 1000 years as a demon, inflicting untold harm on humans. While we’re assuming she now has a human soul (it’s never stated), her actual understanding of human nature remains a work in progress (e.g., The Body). Xander has to confirm for himself that Anya really is “reformed”. More importantly, Anya herself has to do so.

Separate sentence to emphasize the point: their relationship stands in obvious parallel to that of Buffy and Spike, now that Buffy took the next step and, putting aside her doubts for the moment, kissed an actual vampire (which I’ll discuss in succeeding posts).

Joss had a fairly whimsical take on making Xander the guilty party: “Just for fun. Just because we didn't see it coming.” Joss aside, Xander’s invocation of Sweet was (and remains) very controversial among fans. Not only did he fail to learn his lesson in Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered, but in this case it appears that multiple people actually died. His motives, of course, were much better this time, but the consequences reinforce the theme, mostly relevant to Willow, that magic is not a toy.

The spell is consistent with his song: he'll never tell because he's deliberately blinding himself to the problems. He's not seeing how serious Buffy's situation is, he's completely blind to Willow, and he's repressing his own doubts about Anya. Given that he himself created his problem with Anya, it's not surprising that he'd want to escape rather than deal with it. That's pretty much going to be true for everyone in S6.

Sweet can be defeated, but not killed, as Joss explains: “And to me it was never about killing him, because ultimately he represents something you can't kill off. And so rather than that I thought it would be better if he had his own send-off, a little reprise of his bluesy number, which would contain, of course, the title of the piece. As a way of saying, "I've done my work, and you can't really undo it." He's not a guy you kill. Even though people die – he's a demon, don’t get me wrong; just because he wears really well-designed costumes doesn’t mean that he's anything other than a villain – but he is the musical, incarnate. And he's all around us; and that's where we put him. We made sure that he ended up in the air, more than life, settling all over them. It's a symbol thing, you know.”

This brings me to the one person who didn’t sing: Willow. There are various explanations why she didn’t. The real world reason is that Alyson Hannigan was uncomfortable with her voice and begged Joss not to make her sing. Within the story, the explanation that I like best is that the point of Sweet’s magic was to force the characters to reveal their inner selves – “all those secrets you’ve been concealing” – but Willow can’t reveal her inner self because her whole persona is devoted to concealing it (see her dream in Restless).

I also see Willow’s relative silence as consistent with the fact that she represents Buffy’s spirit. DEN at AtPO suggested at the time that Willow, like Buffy, was already burned out before Sweet even appeared:

“We all process BtVs through our own matrices. Some posters are students of religion or philosophy. Others know literature. I study war, and suggest that there may be some useful parallels and comparisons to be drawn from that field as well. More even than Buffy, Willow resembles to me one of those teenagers of the "Greatest Generation" who became a fighter pilot or a Marine rifleman and spent four years learning to do what they had to in order to survive. That experience did not always produce judgment and maturity in other areas of life.

Willow has been fighting on the Hellmouth since she was sixteen. More than Xander, more even than Giles, she has been what Buffy calls her in "The Gift:" "my big gun." She has no Slayer powers (goddess knows she's been seriously hurt enough times) and no Watcher. Willow's hacking and her magic alike have been developed to fight evil. She has held things together, rallying the Scoobies time and again when Buffy was absent, or non-functional--or dead! Indeed, I believe Willow has never had any time off the line since the show began!

If we extend this "combat" matrix, it is no wonder that by now Willow's judgment is poor; that she uses threats rather than reason in her interaction with Giles; that she compounds mistakes in spellcasting by casting more spells. She doesn't question herself in the musical because she can't afford to: she might break. Even the forgetting spell on Tara, inexcusable in any principled sense, can be interpreted as the act of a person who can no longer bear the limited stress of a lover's quarrel.

None of the above is meant to give Willow what another thread on this board calls a "get out of jail free" card. I do wish, however, to suggest that Willow is no less burned out than post-resurrection Buffy. She has her own version of the thousand-yard stare.”

While Willow didn’t sing, the fall-out from her “forget spell” in All the Way reveals a great deal about Willow to Tara: “God how can this be/Willow don’t you see/there’ll be nothing left of me?” Willow’s fear of confrontation has created a far more fraught confrontation to come.

We don’t get to that confrontation in OMWF, so I’ll hold off discussing it and deal with another issue which I see discussed often on the net and which Groovypants specifically raised in a comment to my post on All the Way. I’ll talk about it only with some trepidation because I know that people have very strong reactions about the issue.

The issue is rape. In order to discuss that, I need to set up the facts as we saw them. At the end of All the Way, Willow performed her “forget” spell and erased Tara’s memory of their fight. Though the chronology isn’t completely certain, it appears that the events of OMWF begin the next morning when Tara finds the Lethe’s Bramble under the pillow, but mostly continue on the day after – the scenes skip to a night patrol in which Buffy sings the opening number and then to the following morning when she walks into The Magic Box. Later that afternoon – say, 45 hours after the spell – Willow and Tara had sex as Tara sang “I’m under your spell”. She was, both metaphorically and literally. Some viewers claim that when Willow had sex with Tara after erasing her memory, that amounted to rape.

There are two ways we can look at this claim. One is that, regardless of how it appears in real life, it was rape within the show. I discussed this point in my Introduction and it happens all the time in performance art. An easy and slightly related example would be Buffy and Angel having sex. We can be very sure that David Boreanaz and Sarah Michelle Gellar did not actually have sex in that scene. It was merely filmed to make it appear that they did. Nonetheless, within the show itself it remains true that Angel and Buffy had sex. This is a dramatic convention and applies to a nearly infinite variety of plot events.

We therefore need to decide first if Willow’s behavior was treated as rape within the show. The answer (a mild spoiler, I guess) is that it was not. At no time in the series will it ever be described that way. As far as I’m concerned personally, that’s the end of the inquiry. In a dramatic sense, it doesn’t matter what we would call the events if they occurred in real life, any more than it’s important that DB and SMG didn’t “really” have sex. What’s important is how we’re supposed to interpret the events within the show.

Nevertheless, the issue remains controversial so I’ll move to the next step. What viewers seem to mean is this: that if Willow’s behavior had occurred in real life, it would (or should) have constituted rape. We have to be careful of this, because, of course, her behavior included magic, which doesn’t exist in real life. I’ll try to suggest a real life parallel, but the fact that the events are entirely fictional and can’t possibly “occur in real life” suggests that we need to be very cautious in how we interpret them.

Whether her behavior “should” be treated as rape is far too complex for me to address in a blog post. I’m going to limit myself to whether it does under CA law. Even with that limit, I’ll have to leave out a great deal of real legal analysis here, including important factors such as principles of statutory construction. This is a blog post, not a legal brief.

I’ll start with the text because all legal analysis starts with the text. California Penal Code Section 261 defines rape and I’ll quote the basic parts:

(a) Rape is an act of sexual intercourse accomplished …under any of the following circumstances:

(1) Where a person is incapable, because of a mental disorder or developmental or physical disability, of giving legal consent, and this is known or reasonably should be known to the person committing the act.…

(2) Where it is accomplished against a person's will by means of force, violence, duress, menace, or fear of immediate and unlawful bodily injury on the person or another.

(3) Where a person is prevented from resisting by any intoxicating or anesthetic substance, or any controlled substance, and this condition was known, or reasonably should have been known by the accused.

(4) Where a person is at the time unconscious of the nature of the act, and this is known to the accused. …

(5) Where a person submits under the belief that the person committing the act is the victim's spouse...

(6) Where the act is accomplished against the victim's will by threatening to retaliate in the future against the victim or any other person, and there is a reasonable possibility that the perpetrator will execute the threat….

(7) Where the act is accomplished against the victim's will by threatening to use the authority of a public official to incarcerate, arrest, or deport the victim or another, and the victim has a reasonable belief that the perpetrator is a public official….

(b) As used in this section, "duress" means a direct or implied threat of force, violence, danger, or retribution sufficient to coerce a reasonable person of ordinary susceptibilities to perform an act which otherwise would not have been performed, or acquiesce in an act to which one otherwise would not have submitted. The total circumstances, including the age of the victim, and his or her relationship to the defendant, are factors to consider in appraising the existence of duress.

(c) As used in this section, "menace" means any threat, declaration, or act which shows an intention to inflict an injury upon another.

While it’s a bit simplistic for full legal analysis, we can pretty much rule out any argument that Willow’s behavior could be considered rape under (a) (1), (2), (4), (5), (6), or (7). Her actions simply don’t fit any of those categories. [Note the discussion in comments about the possible application of (a) (1). Spoilers there, of course.]

That leaves subsection (a) (3). Now, her behavior doesn’t fit literally within the words of (a) (3) because Willow didn’t administer any “substance” (rohypnol, say). This is where the analogy of fiction to real life begins to break down. At best, we can say that Willow did something “like” administering a “substance”.

The problem is that there is no real life “substance” which has the very narrow, limited effect of her spell. Willow temporarily blocked one particular memory of a specific event. The “substances” we’re familiar with tend to affect all mental faculties at once; the victim is unconscious or completely lacking in the ability to reason. One’s a scalpel, the other’s a broadaxe. Being unable to remember a particular fact strikes me as intrinsically different from being entirely unable to exercise conscious judgment.

To illustrate the difference, I’ll try an analogy. The best I can do for a real world example is to compare Willow’s behavior to a lie. Suppose my partner wants me to do something which is very important to her, but I fail to do it. She asks me about it and I don’t want to fight so I lie and say I did it. We then have sex, which we wouldn’t do if we just had a big fight.

If you accept my analogy (and you certainly don’t have to), it seems unlikely that most people would consider this rape, at least not within the meaning of the statute. Unlike the case with drugs, a person who has been told a lie has full conscious judgment and understands the nature of the act. In addition, it’s hard to define the kinds of lies which would result in criminal liability. The statute recognizes a particular kind of deception – impersonating the victim’s spouse – but that’s a lie which changes the basic nature of the act. Most lies are far less significant and “little white lies” are common and not generally criminal. Whether other lies should be considered or not, they aren’t under the existing law.

I can’t stop the analysis with this argument, however. Legal reasoning may begin with the text, but it seldom stops there. Only in cases where the text is capable of only one meaning do we lawyers ever look just at the text, and that’s very rare. What’s often true is that a text seems plain and unambiguous to us, but other people see nuance there. That’s not surprising – it’s the same issue we face in analyzing a TV show or a poem.

This bothers some people. They want legal answers to be fixed, determinate. If a text is plain to them, it must be plain to everyone else and those other people who read it differently are just being dishonest. The legal system is a bit more open than that, and one of its solutions to the problem of meaning is to look to see how other courts have interpreted similar problems. Maybe they see something we don’t.

The problem in this case is that this brings us back to the lack of real world comparisons for fictional events. There aren’t going to be any cases “similar” to Willow’s spell because there aren’t any real world actions “like” it.

If a viewer is willing to compare Willow’s behavior to giving Tara a date rape drug, despite the problems with that analogy mentioned above, then there will be cases supporting a finding of rape. If not, then it’s going to be hard to find support for any legal argument that it’s rape, regardless of how you may feel philosophically.

That conclusion may seem tame, though it’s pretty easy to see that I personally don’t consider Willow a rapist. She’s plenty guilty, just not of that. The fact that I can’t absolutely rule out the alternative just means that, to paraphrase LOTR, lawyers are like elves and will say both yea and nay when you ask them for advice.

One final comment on the episode as a whole: it’s an absolute disgrace that Joss Whedon never won an Emmy.

Trivia notes: (1) Anyone who’s interested in the music of this episode, or of the show generally, should read Music, Sound, and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (2) The line “she ain’t got that swing” is presumably a reference to the Duke Ellington song, “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”. (3) Xander’s “respect the cruller” line is a reference to the movie Magnolia. (4) David Fury was the mustard singer, while Marti Noxon got the parking ticket and Joss himself was one of the pallbearers in the graveyard scene. The choreographers, Adam Shankman and Anne Fletcher, were dancers in the parking ticket scene. (5) Dawn mentioned pterodactyls, which were (very roughly) winged reptiles capable of gliding or flying. (6) Joss mentions in the commentary that Dawn’s backpack was actually his. (7) Dawn took the talisman which was lying on the counter, thereby setting up Sweet’s threat to take her to the underworld and continuing a plot point which will be important later. (8) Tara referred to bacchanals, which are basically drunken revels. (9) When Giles said that he was a “hair’s breadth from investigating bunnies”, there’s probably a pun intended. The phrase “a hair’s breadth” means “very close”. The word “hare”, meaning a bunny, sounds like “hair”. (10) Willow said she wasn’t “large with the butch”, which is a slang expression meaning she’s not particularly masculine (as a stereotype of lesbian women). (11) Xander’s use of the phrase “get-a-roominess” is Joss-speak for the phrase “get a room”, used to describe couples who are getting too romantic in public. (12) The demon’s name is Sweet, though that’s never spoken on the show. His “That’s entertainment” refers to the movie of that title. He was talking about the man who died while dancing, which was an homage to the Hans Christian Andersen short story The Red Shoes. Continuing to dance helplessly is also perhaps a metaphor for Buffy’s situation. (13) When Xander says that under California law Anya will own half of his waffles, he’s referring to California’s system of community property under which (simplifying) spouses own half of all property acquired during marriage. (14) Xander got syphilis from the Chumash spirit in Pangs. (15) Anya mentioned David Brinkley, who was a long time news anchor on NBC. (16) Anya’s “I take the Fifth” refers to the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution, under which accused criminals need not testify against themselves. (17) Anya mentioned the “fourth wall”, which is an imaginary wall that would separate the stage from the audience if it were real. To “break the fourth wall” means to have the actor directly address the audience rather than another actor. (18) Anya’s description of her song as “retro pastiche” means it’s in an old style and consisted of a variety of parts combined from different artists. For a “book number” see the link. (19) Giles’s reference to the police “taking witness arias” uses an opera term to describe a song. (20) Yma Sumac was a famous Peruvian soprano. (21) Spike’s song is titled “Rest in Peace” which is the phrase traditionally put on tombstones. James Marsters played the guitar for the song. (22) Spike’s “I can’t find my sweet release” is a sexual statement: he can’t have sex with Buffy. (23) Tara assured Dawn that the “lord of the dance” was not the scary one, referring either to Nataraja, the depiction of the Hindu god Shiva as he dances to destroy the universe, or to Michael Flately’s musical of that title. (24) Sweet’s minions all wear masks depicting former US president Richard Nixon. (25) Sweet’s reference to a “soft-shoe” is to a tap dance performed in shoes without the hard metal taps which make the clicking sound you hear from a tap dancer. (26) Sweet’s reference to buying Nero a fiddle is to the story that the Roman Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned.  (27) The flower Willow used for her forget spell was called Lethe’s Bramble. Lethe was one of the 5 rivers of Hades in Greek mythology. If you drank from it, you immediately forgot everything. (28) Spike commanded Sweet’s minion to “sing” which is American slang meaning “talk”, and in context is a pun. (29) Spike’s “someday he’ll be a real boy” is a reference to Pinocchio.  (30) When Buffy says that Dawn’s in trouble so it must be Tuesday, she’s referring to the fact that the show appeared in the US on Tuesday nights and that she’s constantly rescuing Dawn. (31) The opening guitar theme to “Walk Through the Fire” sounds very much like that in Paul Simon’s “Sounds of Silence” (which happens to be my favorite song). This may be coincidence, but the opening lyrics of “Sounds of Silence” fit the depression theme perfectly: “Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again.” (32) Compare Buffy breaking down the door at the Bronze to the scene in The Harvest where she can’t – it’s a sign of how far she’s come. (33) Xander asked Sweet if he had to be Sweet’s “queen”, making a pun on the word which means both female royalty and a gay man. (34) Spike’s “get your kum-ba-yayas out” refers to the old Negro Spiritual song “Kumbaya”, as well as (probably) to the Rolling Stones album “Get Your Ya Yas Out”. (35) Spike’s mention of seventy six trombones refers to the song of that title in the musical The Music Man. (36) Musicals frequently end with a kiss, as formerly separated lovers overcome the impediments to their relationship. Joss noted the genre tradition – “the curtains close on a kiss, God knows” – while subverting it by having Buffy kiss Spike. I’ll discuss this in more detail in two more episodes.