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.

3 comments:

Addison Lande said...

media dissection is the greatest past-time. save knitting

Anonymous said...

Very interesting

Chris Paul said...

It is still better than Greys Anatomy though (maybe I´m missing an apostophe there). A capitalist wet dream disguised as creamy entertainment bleach to the heart. Work and family and leisure condensed and inseperable from the institution, and any autonomy of the personality riveted and stifled to the same. Now that´s heroism for you. That´s human betterment. That is medicine. *knits*