At this time 25 years ago I didn't know that my life was about to change. “Bottom line is, even if you see 'em coming, you're not ready for the big moments…. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does…. So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that counts. That's when you find out who you are.”
Hi, Mark. I know the feeling. I’ve started reading your book, and I want to thank you. It’s generous towards the show in many ways that I still can’t be, and you’re absolutely right to be. I watched it when it aired, and when it ended I deleted it completely, in a far from composed reaction. Then, a year ago, I watched it again after a conversation with a friend and was completely dumbfounded by the achievement, and the length of ethical compromise it had to go to get there. You’re right. It’s the best thing ever done on TV. Maybe I can “swallow” the price now, for the sake of the gift.
ReplyDeleteMy name’s Nurit, btw. Not anonymous :)
DeleteWelcome Nuril. I hope this will be like the ending to Casblanca: "Welcome back to the fight, Rick. This time I know our side will win."
DeleteAnd thank you for reading. Feel free to talk about it here.
Thanks, Mark! And thanks for answering me. I got to the point in your book where you ask how the show managed to turn a rape/murder metaphor into hilarity in season four. I'm writing something about BtVS now, and I realized I might have an answer for you, so I'm attaching it here: Take what happens after Spike attempts to bite Willow in season four. Alison Hannigan plays to a text that implies that Willow is attracted to vampires, to the self-allure inherent in attracting vampires, and to the equation of being attractive and becoming a vampire. It’s one of those instances where her interpretation of the subtext is spot on in performance. She plays Willow as attracted to Spike. James Marsters’ performance meanwhile brings the subtext to the surface. His Spike transitions from repeat failure to angry child to concerned brother to dismissive friend, again to concerned brother, to old classmate, to acquiescent sceptic, old classmate again, to self-accepting disillusionist to self-ironic in impression of seduction to disillusioned – and later, when she does the concerned sister, he does the petulant child. In short, he exposes the complexity of emotions Willow is not ready to confront and lends her the breather to return to the comfort zone she resents. It’s completely accountable psychologically, considering she’s been an autistic sadist as a vampire in the show’s past, had refrained from killing herself as that vampire later, and no one ever mentions it. More, in view of his “condition”, the fact that it’s Spike doing the showing suggests that this wealth of stifled desires and personae is her target practice. Part an exploration of self-infatuation and part evaluating her pathetic situation as a male without a penis. The question is how low she is willing to go for the fantasies behind the emotions. The answer is no answer at all, and she shares it with Spike, who didn’t want to hurt her a bit. That’s why he promised he’d kill her quick, right? It’s the layer of sociopath they share, of not assigning the appropriate significance to what they’re willing to do – moving: her morally down, him up. For her, though, the danger involves a transformation. Becoming a vampire. Spike is offering. For him the danger is greater and more immediate. Another hour of this with Willow, and he’ll forget he’s a vampire. They’ll start a support group together. That’s why Marsters is doing the heavy lifting of emotional explication and not Hannigan. Spike is the one fighting for his life – from the coo monster. They think it’s funny, the scene thinks it’s funny, and underneath it all, both characters become uncanny, like their world.
DeleteVery nice!
DeleteThanks. Well, I only watched the show last year, after "deleting" it with disgust twenty years ago, so for me it's new. "Our side" definitely wins this time, despite the occasional cringe ("Drink me." Oh, brother). I'm in the ekphrasis stage (term lifted from Sue Turnbull).
ReplyDeleteHah! You taught me a new word.
DeleteShe uses it in an article on her initial reaction to Spike in School Hard. She gives it as the need to describe in words the impact or impression of another's performance. I'm definitely in the ekphrasis stage as far as BtVS goes. I'm really happy that you liked what I posted here. I'm posting another, going to AtS for something that I need later for BtVS, and I'd love for you to read it and tell me what you think. Nobody I know cares about this show. If you tell me to shut up after this one, I promise I will.
DeleteIt looks like it's too long. I'll try to break it into several comments.
ReplyDeleteThen there’s Anne and Kate. Especially Kate. If the writers planned on what actually happened with Kate, from the moment she entered the show to the moment she left it, then in light of AtS’s post-Kate progression and ending, by the holy crap! Strike me dead right now. This thing almost takes BtVS’s Spike-on-the-Buffy-grind for the performative subversion of a concept through characterization, and that’s no mean feat considering I’m weighing one scene against two seasons. At first glance, it’s debatable whether Anne or Kate are characters at all. Being that Anne is repeatedly renamed, she is the first, and overt, AtS-style series of transitions in and out of states on either show, going way back to her vampire wannabe beginning on BtVS. Her final constant is Angel’s mission, unquestioned, untarnished, one box at a time, forever. Kate is Anne’s diametric opposite. Seemingly, she is a Buffy fight mode (with an almost equally distasteful father) that neither transitions nor evolves. Angel reads in her his own stagnation as a vampire for whom evolving doesn’t exist. It’s in her attitude every time they meet. Their similarities are many, starting with the father’s rejection, the endless fight, the hypocrisy, the weakness, the conceit of self-appointed limitations and self-assumed crusade, the bigotry. They culminate close to home, in their similar attitudes toward Angelus, their hypocritical equating of Angelus and himself (neither truly lives up to it), and by the end of season five, long after she’s gone, like she had done he too abandons his mission, seemingly under the weight of external forces. Apart from the fact that he’s rejected here, and he’s not used to that in blonde women, Kate’s a golden opportunity to cement the same-old story he tells himself about the transmigration of his soul, which licks his wounded vanity. He sees it vindicated every time he comes looking for his own self-hatred in her reaction to him. When he erupts at her pig-headedness, it’s a two-in-one ticket to ride that combines fury and release. The fury, at her obtuseness overtly but also at his own conceit, covers for the secret he hides. Why he’s coming back. It’s like a drug, that release. Every time she so clearly fails to get him, and sees in him Angelus through a bigot’s lens, is one more time she vindicates Angel and Angelus as distinct. When the drug wears off, he comes back, because in his heart of hearts he knows that his guilt porn of assuming Angelus’ crimes is his way of distinguishing what isn’t distinct. The distinction is a lie, even if he’s not clear on the how yet.
ReplyDeleteKate’s situation is a lot simpler. The second episode of AtS outlines it. She’s been burned by men, not by vampires, and she reacts to him as a man with a bonus. Imagine being a woman who works with men, and who’s been burned by men, and who fears and wants the approval of men. Now imagine that you’re in close physical vicinity to a man of inhuman physical strength. I’ll say it again, to drive the point home. A man of inhuman physical strength. Whom you also read as inhumanly knowledgeable in the torture and breaking of women like you read about in really old, musty books. Long before your time. And you’re attracted to him, the episode says. What’s wrong with you. You are, again that word, cardinally excluded from comprehending, and all you’re left with is the close physical vicinity to this man – ‘man’ says it all – of superhuman strength. The more Kate and Angel interact, the clearer it becomes to her that he doesn’t see her at all. How could he, with Darla and Buffy as primal and recent experiences? She doesn’t know that. The point is, she can vindicate nothing for him. She’s completely below his radar, and he forgets that he rejected her to begin with. She reacts to the man, for wholly human reasons, while he’s all obsessed with being a vampire.
The concept I see overturned in Kate’s last scene on the show is Angel’s crucible. The transmigration of his soul. I owe the notion, as a Ulysses fanatic, to Mr Leopold Bloom. The soul in the “Buffyverse” deserves a separate discussion, but for the purpose of this one let’s just say that when the soul is an entity in a story, whatever the properties of that soul are, its transitions become a problem of the story. Whether it is lost, gained, enacted, bartered, shared, or sold, once introduced, it will commute. Any story featuring this entity introduces it in the presence of either chance or evil. In BtVS and AtS it is evil. I want to note that metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls, can basically take two forms, depending on the role that form – or if you like, fantasy – takes in a story. The soul can either transition or transform. In any story of interest, however, those waters will be muddled fast, and the “Buffyverse” is no exception. Whether it’s the symbolic affectation, the vampires, or the relational characterization, BtVS and AtS handle this transmigration all the time, even in their most absurdist scenes and episodes. They overtly bring it into the plotline with Darla in her pregnancy and her demise. But there are three moments on both shows that I could detect where the story sublimates the soul, brings its journey to a screeching halt. The Angel-Kate scene here is the most quintessential one, the most explicit – not the most important or profound. It ran parallel to the first of two on BtVS – to my mind the most important, not the most profound – on February 27, 2001. The implication of what it says is that Angel and Angelus are one morally responsible culprit, in that the presence or absence of a moral compass, even of a conscientious self, does not weigh the scale against action – comprising of the will to act, the power to enact, and witnessing the act done. It is also the most quintessentially tragic of the three, not in the fatalistic way the “Buffyverse”’s aesthetics loves so much, but in the human moment of Angel’s own character. A soul quiescent becomes irrelevant and is subsumed. Angel, the man redeemed, has by his own act of redemption damned himself for all his past actions, and it doesn’t matter in the least. He says it himself, and still fails to hear it. What he sees in that moment is Kate’s affirmation of his own self-hate, because she’s still under his radar, and because she’s not very good with words. Spike will come on the show in season five, out of his own moment of the soul quiescent. William that he is, he will tell it to him like it is again and again. He won’t hear it then, either. That’s the nature of his conceit.
ReplyDeleteHere’s what happens with that scene from season two’s Epiphany, the Angel perspective. Kate’s rejection of Angel is the prophecy that enacts itself. Considering where AtS takes him going forward, her rejection of him is not only fully justified, it’s what pushes him down the road of his own corruption. Angel and Harmony spell out that point in black and white in the show’s finale, using that thing again. The soul.
Angel: You betrayed me. You are betraying me now, even as we are talking.
This is exactly what Angel did to his chosen family five minutes ago, soul and all, in his final goodbye to the human world. Harmony responds, and what they say sums him up from start to finish. All that knowledge, and a zero-sum impact. He has been – and will endlessly go on – accumulating meanings without referents. He is a vampire.
Harmony: Because you never have any confidence in me.
Angel: No, because you have no soul.
Harmony: I would if you had confidence in me. (ANGEL 5.22).
Recall who Angel is, because the writers sure do. He’s that guy who wants Lolita at first sight but who’s too afraid to help her out and in general can’t help himself and whose father’s disappointment in him will last lifetimes. Now let’s say he’s over all that. He’s obviously not, when he’s obsessed with something someone did to him a century ago that he calls soul and won’t shut up about it, but let’s say. He’s still Liam without the will prefix. Now Kate, who is quite Buffy-like in the sense that she can research Angelus well enough but hasn’t a shred of insight in her, becomes more and more hostile toward him the more horrors she tracks. She’s very vocal about it, too. Then she gets fired for it, takes pills, and calls the one guy he just knows she doesn’t want to talk to to tell him about it, as a by-the-time-you-read-this gaslight suicide note spoken while very stoned. From the pit of his sex-absorbed obsessive Darla despair he hears her, runs over, breaks down the door and, one might think, saves her life. When she comes to, she says thanks. And throws him out. He doesn’t doubt that her actions are a one-note absolute constant of rejection, and that is Kate. Forever. “You made me trust you”, she tells the phone. Never mind that. She keeps going. “You made me believe”. If I’m Angel, it’s the worst self-deception I’ve ever heard. For me as a viewer, it is the best single line characterization and the greatest load of bullshit spoken by a character on both AtS and BtVS. But I’m Angel, so it doesn’t cross my mind that Kate doesn’t even know which words to pick to describe what she feels. All I know is that it’s something that has never been backed by action. He made her do nothing.
ReplyDeleteNow she’s on her way out of the show, and she sits with Angel in his courtyard. “I think maybe we’re not alone in this” is her conclusion of it all. It leads to the close of what resonates with me as the most subversive moment in the televised “Buffyverse”, and I’ve seen BtVS’s Chosen. It’s the one that struck me the hardest when I first watched both shows, that held the greatest hope for me, and still does, and the one I never forgot. Because, out of the grim, dark AtS fairy tale, it is the one that more than any other neither sugarcoats nor slanders what it is to be a human being. She says she is “convinced”. In my italics, “Since I am alive to be convinced.” From Angel’s perspective, it’s the prophecy that fulfills itself. The point of what he just told her, but with the meaning taken out. Without the thing that matters, what is is all there is. Her tautology rejects everything he just said. What is she “convinced” of, exactly? That all he wants to do is help? The truth of the matter is that she really didn’t think he’d come for her, and that’s the only thing she says to him. It is possible that at one time he did truly believe that people shouldn’t suffer as they do, and he should know, since he caused much of that suffering. But Kate doesn’t hear his take on kindness. She’s so entrenched in her rejection, that she turns to a higher power. She’s “very grateful”, she “got cut a huge break”, she “believes” – and he’s sitting right there. Four seasons later, he takes it out on Lindsey. When he tells him that “you haven’t heard a word I’ve said, for like, years back”, it’s the belated response of the frustrated mass murderer who tried a little, and it was a little hard, and Kate rejected him, so by degrees he signed off on all humans. And now he lies about that, too.
Once upon a time, Angel acted like people do, and sat in the courtyard with Kate. All he wanted was to be heard by the human being next to him. And for all he knew, she sat there much like she called him after she’d taken the pills. They had that kind of reconciliatory conversation, and all the words seemed right. They’ve resolved their differences. It will be okay. Only, the lonely beast must have asked himself later. What does she believe now? And I’ll ask for him. What has belief got to do with it? Does she finally believe that there are some things that can’t be explained? But she’s known him and his world, the full package, for over a year. Does she believe in God now? Because if she does, she rejected his plea in the moment he spoke it. She “believes” because Angel did what every human being could have done without thinking after the door was down, and walked in? Does she believe in the everyday and ordinary now? What’ll she do about it? Live? And if she believes in the ordinary, the everyday, the human, then Angel’s father can rest easy even if his condemnation of his son has worn off. Kate’s here to replace him. Her condemnation of Angel will last forever. His redemption has come and passed. Saving Kate was his only clean act of kindness in eight “Buffyverse” seasons. Blink and you’ll miss his ordinary human moment. He didn’t, or he wouldn’t have said that all that matters, the only meaningful thing in the world, is what we do. But when all is said and done, what weighed with him was that the implication didn’t sit very well with his resume. Now, never let it be said that Angel’s not a showoff. If he hoped that Kate would miss the implication, he certainly didn’t hope she’d throw the baby with the bathwater. Right now, he says. What we do right now. For once, when he includes himself in the world of people, he has the right to do it. And she responds with “maybe we’re not alone in this”. To a vampire. From where he’s sitting, she’s just excluded him from the only authentic human moment he’s ever had and now will ever have. She won’t be the referent to hold his meaning, but not because she’s rejecting him. The show made sure to keep him totally oblivious to Kate’s own authentic human moment. That’s the tragedy.
ReplyDeleteHere’s how it goes from Kate’s perspective. Yes, live. That’s what she’ll do with his act of kindness. To Angel, like Angelus, living is a cheap commodity in strangers. For Kate, it’s the only life she has. It’s true that Angel didn’t make her trust him. She did, for the duration of a phone call, and that was her leap of faith – a very small one as regular television fare goes, but very realistic for her character otherwise. That’s why she’s blabbering about belief and about not being alone. On a small, everyday scale, she discovered what Buffy did in Becoming 2. She has herself. Her fear of Angel is her fear of men tenfold. She needed for her fantasies to crumble, and to try for suicide, to tell him about it. She is very much like him. She needed the crutch of the fantasy of impending death to tell him she cared. Another showoff. If all it took for her to come to was a little cold shower, there was no dying and no nothing, just passing out, especially when she didn’t need anything else to be totally fine a minute later. It doesn’t change the fact that he came, and helped, and if the big bad monster did that, maybe she’s just had her own epiphany about men. They’re just people, the good, the bad, the everything. They will reflect your actions back at you, and every once in a while, an ordinary man will do the kind thing. So she comes to him – a bigger act of courage – to share the moment with him. Her act, not her words, says thank you. She’s not very good with words. She says so. And she doesn’t know his drama any more than he knows hers. She could guess at his baggage with God and all His Vocabulary if she had a shred of insight in her. She doesn’t. Her expression of grace translates for him as denial. It’s in the last words she says to him. If he listened to her body and her actions, he’d see a different story. She’s giving him all the affirmation she has it in her to give.
ReplyDeleteKate’s taken out of AtS on what is in my inclinations the second highest note of the “Buffyverse”’s greatest achievement. Gut-wrenching characterization from false dichotomies. Becoming real from fantasy. Angel was human for a moment in what he did, not in what he was, and he saw the implications, and it was too much, too damn hard, envisioning redemption always in the present action, making room to pay attention to others who will not reflect it back to him, beyond his guilt and his bloated ego. He never achieves Anne’s transition into the effortless one box at a time, where redemption is not a process nor an act, just the constant state action flows from, which his vampire constitution is fully capable of and had already been in before his fin de siècle soul. If he had done, he’d see that futility is an eight-letter word, and he’d see what redemption really is in Kate’s body sitting beside him, in his own courtyard. Above all, he’d see the implication of her phone call beyond the psychology of it, as an act that, in the ontology of their universe, is defined by its teleological outcome. Here’s everything there is to be said of their character in a nutshell: she did invite him in.
I really like this. I think you should publish it somewhere like the reddit AtS board. I'm sure you'll get some critics -- everybody does -- but I'll be very curious about the overall reaction.
DeleteI will, absolutely. I don't mind critics. Who doesn't get those? I started writing what I was thinking/feeling about BtVS, and it's becoming a monster-sized text. I'll have to think what to do with it after I'm done. And I'm reading your book, and that's a genuine pleasure!
ReplyDelete