Friday, May 11, 2007

Lessons Learned from Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in a Post-Deadline Haze

1) Freedom is brief and overrated*
2) Who speaks and why is a question for the privileged
3) ditto for 'why me'**
4) In times of darkness, saying no during violent sex-acts is a code word for 'yes'***
5) Goodbyes are hard and people don't know or like each other****


NOTES:
*Like, Buffy goes to heaven and they pull her out. Then she turns invisible and they pull her back. Tough love. She's only ever dialectically free.
**Buffy's like, 'I don't want to be the slayer' but if she wasn't then she'd just be a girl working in a burger bar who threw her education down the toilet and sleeps with dead people. Nobody wants that.
***Except for in the bathroom where the harsh lights indicate reality and the domestic world which he wasn't supposed to enter and can never be a part of. Dirty sex is for crypts, making love is for beds, let that be a lesson. (Also see treatment of death for similar patterns; death isn't real or sad because if it was Buffy would be a killer, but in 'The Body' the harsh sunlight and lack of soundtrack and continuous shots throughout indicate the gravity of the situation, a 'real' death [though compromised by the compulsory inclusion of a vamp to save confusion for potential first-time viewers])
****Sarah Michelle Gellar didn't even attend the wrap party at the end of the season.