Bargaining
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
The two-part episode entitled "Bargaining" that opens season six of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the most extraordinary episode in the entire run of the show. It's a carnival celebrating neither death or life but of mourning itself.
Keep in mind, I've seen so many Buffy episodes at this point I feel like I've been dipped in chocolate. Throughout the run of the show, I've seen Buffy's personality deteriorate as she's moved from a machine of irony (projected like a tuba blast by the show's goofy title), a teenaged girl with great verbal dexterity, to someone much darker and heroic and more remote: which is to say, she's gone from being an audience surrogate, like Willow and Xander, to becoming, through the third and into the fifth seasons, a powerful avatar of heroism. With this transition, however, Joss Whedon and his writers painted themselves into a corner. They started Buffy determined to illustrate Buffy's dual existence as a normal girl and as a hero. She was a cipher (for the demands of the role it was sufficient that Gellar appear blond--ordinary--and essential that she not overstep that boundary) but her language was not. She never lost her ability to speak pragmatically, quickly, with wit and in her own defense. Yet as Buffy faced more and more grief (Angel's departure, her mother's death) her verbal faculty diminished: instead, she started giving more St. Crispin's day-type speeches with flitting, watery eyes. Where once she went tit-for-tat, taunting her enemies, now she scolded them. And so what she was left with was actual violence. Her stunts started looking a lot more coordinated, but the only time she was herself, stripped of violence, was when she was grieving.
Still, the writers tried feebly now and again to give her a life. In the fourth season, someone flat-out asks her, in the service of getting her a date, what sort of things she likes. She struggles to answer this question. Now, with Willow and Xander, this question wouldn't have to be asked: Willow likes to learn, especially about magic, and Xander likes comic books and girls. They have characteristic faces and an arsenal of soul-revealing facial tics which, for television, is a full personality. Both retain their status as audience surrogates, constantly cracking jokes about the absurd, nasty things they're seeing. But Buffy, of the eternal suffering and acne-free face, has to think awhile before she somewhat pathetically answers that when she was a kid she used to like the Ice Capades.
What is Buffy, when she's not in action? By the fourth season, zilch, almost nothing. It's hard to know what her fourth-season romantic interest, Riley, really sees in her, since he's not let in on her status as a hero. Ever since her fling with the good-but-vampiric (and like all teenaged boys) Angel, Buffy was good for just one kind of romance: the representative, tragic, personality-erasing kind. Which doesn't make her entirely unsympathetic. I know some people like that. They're even sort of heroic. This wasn't her fault. What was happening to Buffy was the TV writer's interpretation of adulthood, which, compared to teenage life, lowers the stakes in what is meant by the word "ordinary": not love, danger, graduation, but rather, jobs, senescence, death. In culmination, just to drive the point home, she fatally flung herself, grinning, at the end of the fifth season, into a cloud of mystical energy in order to save her sister.
And so by the start of the sixth season we know she's really dead, and not just because we can see a gravestone (which reads, "She saved the world a lot"--cute). In soap operas and vampire movies, after all, no one stays dead. No, we know she's dead because this came at the end of the season, and because viewers of the show as it was originally aired knew that the show would be making a tentative, between-season switch from one station to another, a switch from which the show may have withered and died, or come back boring. So her death was real, in a sense, and her "resurrection" would have to be disorienting because it was not necessarily inevitable.
So when Bargaining aired, there was no doubt that Buffy would be resurrected. The salient facts were this: it had been months since her death, and she was buried underground, so how? They didn't bend over backwards for this one: Willow casts a spell. Instead, what's great about this episode are the multiple "versions" of Buffy that populate the program until her resurrection, which make depressingly explicit this notion of Buffy having been a cipher for the duration of her short, brutal life. First, you've got the Buffybot, built late in the last season (in a rather abrupt and goofy plot twist) as the locus for Spike's confused undead lust. In Bargaining the Buffybot has been been reactivated as a fighter during the course of Buffy's absence in order to keep Sunnydale's vampire population in a state of panic. In this capacity the Buffybot shorts out a lot and so flubs her language (again, the defining element of Buffy in life) saying things like, "that'll put marzipan in your pie plate, bingo!" when she stakes a vampire. But it does "the job" almost as well as Buffy--like all robots, the Buffybot makes explicit the whole alienation of labor jazz. Buffy's "personality" never had to be there in order to fight vamps. This reflects back to the rest of her life, since she's sufficient for other tasks, too. She attends parent-teacher day at Dawn's school and even acts as a surrogate parent for Dawn (a notion which goes unremarked but which is apparently upsetting to Buffy's friends). Yet that's not the only, or the worst, "Buffy" lurking through this episode.
At one point before the resurrection Xander and Willow do what amounts to a little brainstorming session. "Scenario," says Xander, "we raise Buffy from the grave, she tries to eat our brains." To which Anya replies that zombies don't eat brains unless instructed to by their "zombie masters." Willow dismisses the point out of hand but paints a scenario in which Buffy is trapped "in some sort of hell dimension...suffering eternal torment." Cue the Buffybot, who walks into the living room with a great gash on her forehead, from which circuitry sparks and fizzes. "I think my feet are broken," she says.
Now, "alienation from labor," is a great verity, I know, because it's been made plain to me by a number of shitty jobs I've held. Likewise, suppressed ideologies and underlying sexuals I do not discount. Here, however, I would argue for the power of surface, and of the literal text of what's being said. This cornucopia of undead Buffies, both shown and suggested, is cathartic first and not much else, because as audience members we live through her as a violent action figure, one who gets "things"--vamps, whatever--done in a way that we can't. As consumers we want her back so we can watch her: that desire is bald and on the surface. Bargaining gives us our wish, but threatens us with a dissolute, weak version of what we love, a Buffy not so much undead as rerun and recycled. Mourning on television is eternal resurrection. But here, Whedon is deternined to make us pay for it. There will be a ritual.
The ceremony commences, both on-screen and off. Like every audience faced with a cliffhanger, we approach the material with a certain cynicism, having been cheated before. Our ritual involved funereal jokes about the death of the program we most love. On screen, Willow, Anya, Tara and Xander sit in a circle above Buffy's grave. A lightshow commences and innocent Willow begins to vomit cobras or something. Some terrible bargain has been struck, we know. Nearby, the Buffybot begins to get hounded by a demonic motorcycle gang straight out of S. Clay Wilson. Willow and her friends run, frightened and disappointed into the woods adjacent to Buffy's grave. "So it didn't work," says Willow, weeping and beat down from her extramoral effort. We exhale: get on with it, already.
It's at this point that the show has the excellent bad taste to actually descend into the earth and rest on the locus of Willow's efforts: the camera slides through a lot of dark red California dirt, getting darker and darker, until it finds a box, and in that box is a shriveled, eyeless blonde corpse. It's difficult to describe the shock of finding Buffy's this way. She's the star, after all. Imagine stumbling upon Jayne Mansfield out on the highway with her dead pursedog: that's what it feels like. This is not just what our dreams come to, but now it's where our supposedly deathless, televised dreams come to. Floodgates open. Suddenly a thousand nubile bodies could be supposed in that box: Mary Richards, Marge Simpson, Chelsea Clinton, Princess Di. We get a good look at Buffy and then a weird wind blows and her invisible eyes flip over like the lights of a pinball machine and become visible, and her flesh inflates back to life, and she wakes with a terrified gasp. She looks around myopically and susses out where she's been trapped. She begins to tremblingly scrape at the inside of the box. Soon she's panting and bashing it with her fists. Such is the price of syndication.
Above ground, the Buffybot is actually drawn and quartered by a group of revving motorcycles. Above ground, Buffy later explains where she had been the whole time, the place where all television shows go when they've been canclled on a high note and saved from the living death of profitability and automation: "I don't understand about theology or dimensions, or ... any of it, really ... but I think I was in heaven." And so the final Buffy effigy is introduced, Buffy-as-angel, and, like the paparazzi after a brief stint of mourning after Di's death, the show can now commence with its visceral weekly thrill.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 11:41 AM,
1 Comments:
- At 11:30 AM, Justin F. Farrar said...
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dude, e-mail me! -justin
btw, buffy rules. glad you're finally turned on, man.
