From: "macha" To: Sent: Friday, October 18, 2002 5:43 PM Subject: [Bloody_Awful]on writing [about, in, of] the buffyverse Let me ride on his grace for awhile. (Polly Jean Harvey, "Teclo", TO BRING YOU MY LOVE) its partly spike that does it. he's quicksilver. he demands pyrotechnics. whether he's dancing the dance of death or the dance of birth, he is always somehow dancing over the waters of creation. he is always mythic, he is always real. he inhabits fully every space he occupies. grace and terror and craft and longing and loss live inside him in every moment. there is a hunger in him for more than blood: for connection, for meaning. spirit and imagination, Dru said. time has been erased for him, but he continues to work on folding space, because he is cursed with a lethal dose of human feeling, and cannot bear to be eternally Apart. nothing is ever black and white for him, despite his costume, he is all red and bronze. and it's partly JM's acting: he inhabits with such physicality this complicated role with its infinity of rough edges on which actors can cut themselves, lose themselves and lose the role. he can go very big, he can go very small, and he always seems to know which way to go. and he's famous for sparking with whoever he's playing against, adding extra layers. but the most important thing is, every moment he's on camera, you are watching every moment of his very long life: you are watching William, AND Spike, AND X-Spike, AND WilliamBecoming. so as Spike feels and remembers everything the audience is impelled to follow the trail behind his eyes. which is in the best sense the acting equivalent of how the buffyverse is constructed. it's written to resonate endlessly on different levels (and i take the entity spinning at the centre of that web to be The Mind of Joss). it demands a style of commentary that matches its complexity. because the Work is chronological but not linear: you can read it back to front, you can pull from it at random, and it still makes interesting connections, new truths, when you shake it up. it demands poetry, surrealism,... and possibly the kind of transverse crosshandwriting victorians liked to use. it draws on chaos theory. it makes long string music. it slips in and out of fourth dimension. so it seems to me we need to use all these forms, macro and micro, if we are to talk about it at all. yet it's effortlessly artless in style about the stories it tells. it doesnt telegraph when it's being difficult; instead it is at pains to make it look simple, in that way that so often characterizes great artists and the very best art. but make no mistake, as a Work it is a seamless whole that is intensely literate, lyrical, and profound. the archetypes it mixes up and spews out in the innocent guise of ordinary life are verities that over time break down, reform, and rebirth themselves. it has acquired a life of its very own. it opens out endlessly, like an altdorfer painting. it is so alive that when it is done, it will never be finished, only framed. and i think we will continue to write around it endlessly, working at all the edges of that canvas, long after it's 'done'. seven years, and to me it just keeps building, every episode, on every episode before. i can still feel it gathering power every week while it rolls over everything else on television. echo. momentum. action painting, the human body as medium. resonances. residual harmonics. a bell ringing in the empty sky. it hides its mythic structure in plain sight: Buffy is still just a girl, and Spike is still just a brokenhearted poet. they live in an ordinary town, and have ordinary problems: even Spike, though immortal, still has to buy his blood from the butcher. but they each are the sum of all they have been in themselves: shallow and well-intentioned, giving and taking. and they are the sum of all they have experienced: pain and loss and love and glory. and being a Slayer, and being a vampire, are transforming experiences that continue, still effecting growth and change, still exacting affect as their price. so they are real, and yet they are Other. and beyond that, they are defined by their relations to family and friends: even for Spike, Dawn is family, Clem is friend, and the Scoobies are in there somewhere (though we've only seen that portrayed clearly in Bargaining 1 so far). and beyond all that, in relation to one another, they become something more, always: and that also grows and changes over time, in relation to everyone else. so it can certainly all be read on a RealLife level, and left at that. but to deny the mythic structure hidden under the RealLife surface is to miss the true power and the glory of it, which is of course in itself a good postmodern joke on that portion of the audience and leads to a spate of criticism of the order that Mutant Enemy bunch are just too smart, or too smartassed, for their own good. myself, i like this game much better: take the plunge, see what comes up from the depths to contemplate today. every time i see Restless, it plays differently: cause it's playing off all the episodes that hadnt happened yet when it was first shown. every time i see Innocence or Becoming 2, they play differently, because now i have a whole new set of Consequences-Down-the-Line to attach to them. everything can be read so many different ways, and i've come to the understanding that joss means most of them; the Alternate episodes like The Wish and Normal Again play off some of those possibilities. and all the possibilities remain alive years and years later, unless they've been stepped on in a later episode: because, in the classic jossian disclaimer, the writers do reserve the right to have a better idea. seven years later, here we are. and Buffy's eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, died twice and been resurrected, returned from Hell, lived in but not of this world, divided her power into aspects and given away the dark side to Faith, played Joan of Arc, and bested a god. she's not always good but she's Good. anyone wanna seriously claim there arent any archetypes to be had? Spike has played The Trickster, the Holy Fool and now appears headed for the Tragic Hero and/or the Tanist King. together there are a few hints that together they might be playing out hieros gamos, the marriage sacred to the Earth (Earth). back to the beginning, huh? well, let's see: how about Buffy Inanna Summers, the Queen of Heaven and Earth (and later the Underworld), and Goddess of Power (and Fertility). and oh yah, in that original version of the Orpheus/Eurydice myth, it's Inanna who descends to the Underworld to retrieve her consort lost to the land of death. and gates, there are gates in that one, and a gatekeeper ("keep your ticket, you'll need it later"). or, could be, something else entirely, no? YES (grinning hugely here)!! i havent got a clue what's really gonna happen. and isnt that GREAT!! the chaos of creation. the buffyverse as a hunter's stew, bubbling up in a forest in the midst of presentday california. with witches, yes. every age is in need of a mythology that speaks to them. in this oh so secular world, i think this is ours: delivered to us every week by the ultimate medium with a message, our very own television, in the language of the day. how brilliant, and funny (don't forget funny), an image is that in itself, for our just desserts at the beginning of another millenium? this world(view) we comment on is rich, so rich, that how can we talk about it other than in metaphor, in costume, in sprung rhythms, in lyric cadences, in stream of consciousness, in cinematic images, with Shakespearean gravitas and with, occasionally, a diabolically giddy joy? when something interesting happens that changes our perspective on the entire canon and we have to step back yet another layer, again, to see the whole - those are fabulous moments. finding a language that does justice to this enquiry, and further does honor to the Work, is an interesting endeavor. thank you for sharing it with me. macha@ntl.sympatico.ca unspoiled and therefore free