Watching Season 5 of Buffy...
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Watching Season 5 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer is strange, not just because I've devoted such a frightening amount of my supposedly precious time to it (which, strange, yes, but in a different way) but because the the season's original airdates lead up to the cataclysm of September 11, 2001, like a trail of gingerbread leading to a great vat of toxic waste. The incredible, dark Season 6 began only one month after the event (about which, more later). If your talking strictly in terms of the time it was aired, then Season 5 is the penultimate expression of pre-9/11 thinking. Death dominates the season along with an oppressive alienation from life. I'm not sentimental enough to say that there were televised signs and portents leading up to that date, embedded in the story arc like whorls on clerical robes. There weren't. But the season luxuriates in death in a way I don't think could happen now.
The season begins with Dawn, Buffy's previously unmentioned little sister, suddenly appearing without warning and without any recognition by the regular characters that she had not been acknowledged before. Life in the fifth season continues with her tagging along as if it were normal. Such logic-busting plot developments are common in television, of course. Yet while in a movie or a contemporary novel such an unearned development would be deeply dissatisfying, in a long serial narrative sudden intrusions such as Dawn's become as forgivable as they would be in life. As with David Copperfield's few completely arbitrary run-ins with Mr. Macawaber during the course of his narrative, we don't ask how such a fortuitous meeting came to be, but only how it will affect the character we've come to empathize with completely.
So it's fantastic--spoiler follows--that somewhere near the fifth episode Dawn is exposed as the embodiment of a weird plot contrivance by a gaggle of tonsured (Franciscan? why?) monks who conjure Dawn, and all the memories anyone ever had relating to Dawn, out of a mystical ball of energy which could potentially open up the gates of hell, and which would presumably be safe under Buffy's protection. As Buffy and her mother slowly piece together the strange fact of Dawn's existence (deciding after long deliberation that, yes, they'll keep her), the audience has to re-think exactly how far they will allow a television plot to stray from any semblance of narrative unity. It's like a slap on the hand, gentle but powerfully interrogative. When Dawn, who is the last to be let in on the contingencies of her own existence, finally learns the truth, she falls into despair. "What am I?" Dawn asks, after having cut herself. "Am I real? Am I anything?"
It may be a little too big-time geeky to suggest that this scene is an interrogation by the repressed element of what we want in fiction (diagetic fantasy--up to and including a wish for a little sister suddenly fulfilled--along with convenient non-diagetic elements such as nimble editing and an attractive cast), directed at whatever in fiction is dominant because it's supposed to make us quality people (a unified narrative and a mimetic fidelity to reality). Instead I'll simply say that it's a great representation of how it feels to be at the nadir of adolescence. It also culminates in a tremendous bad-vibe feeling towards life, an existentialism not supported by texts but presented as it really feels by ordinary people, usually adolescents. A great, crushing sense of the weird, come all of a sudden. This revelation dominates the first half of season 5.
The second half of the season is dominated by death. Soon after Dawn's revelation to herself, Buffy's mom dies suddenly by, of all things, a brain aneurysm (I will mention here that I am far more frightened of brain aneurysms than I am of vampires or anything--sex, adulthood, the Other--they might appear to represent). Then, at the end of the season and quite surprisingly, so does Buffy.
The mother's death is presented with all the tricks and stops naturalism can muster: there is not even a score, and all the background noise is oppressively part of the world the characters inhabit. When the pronouncement of the death is made official, not only does Buffy fall to the floor and vomit, but the camera follows her as she walks to the kitchen, pulls off a length of paper towel, and returns to the scene to wipe it off the carpet; which scene is to naturalism as the car chase scene in Bullitt is to its opposite. There are notably only two moments of fantasy in the entire hour. The first comes at the beginning of the episode, when Buffy calls 911. The operator leads her through basic CPR, which Buffy clumsily performs over her mother. In doing chest compressions, however, she accidentally, and with only a moderate motion, breaks her mother's sternum. The moment goes by without mention, underscoring the finality of her mother's condition, as well as Buffy's inability to do anything about it, in spite of her fantastic strength.
The second moment of fantasy in this otherwise naturalistic episode comes when Dawn is attacked by a vampire in the morgue locker where her mother is being stored. On paper it seems--if you're attuned to Buffy-logic--frightening and powerful. On screen it looks as goofy as those not attuned to Buffy logic might think it would. Rhonda Wilcox makes an noble effort to defend the inclusion of the vampire, discussing images of threshholds that play throughout the episode and how Buffy finally, in the end, "breaks through" the threshhold into the morgue in order to keep her family together. Again, this makes sense on paper.
Finally, Buffy dies, which is not something that is significant of itself until she is resurrected. About which, as I've said, more later. Gotta love the inscription on her tombstone, though: "She saved the world a lot."
posted by Greg Purcell @ 3:12 PM,
