[ week 19 | 34 ]
How it blew, in somewhat more detail.
Thursday, 07.07
No, it is not verboten to, in the course of an action-adventure-genre thingie, kill a lesbian character who’s happily ensconced in a healthy and marvelous relationship. Of course not. To suggest otherwise is silly and wrong-headed—as silly and wrong-headed as, say, insisting that the violence dealt to Buffy in the course of an ass-kicking adventure is indicative of some crypto-misogynist agenda, or the fact that Buffy suffers must necessarily render her victories but hollow ones. Pah! We want equal-opportunity ass-kicking; we want heroes and minions of all sexes, colors, genders, creeds and sexualities to be capable of Taking One For the Team; Going Out With a Bang; Quick With that Last, Poignant Bon Mot; a Knight in Armor of Whatever Color Dying for Lad or Lady Fair or Foul. Even to be struck down by a random bullet to prove something about the cruel, capricious nature of Life, to rot like an aloe-flower, and all to sauce a weakling season of a show now past its prime with a biting something of fragility and non-perpetuity.
That’s not what pissed us off, no.
What you don’t do is Fuck It Up. What you don’t do is crude jokes like sticking her name in the opening credits; what you don’t do is drop lead-weight anvils left and right—for God’s sake, I thought I was watching that bit from the Top Gun parody where the wingman stumbles under a ladder, breaks a mirror and trips over a black cat on his way to his plane. What you don’t do is save it for the absolute last-minute kicker, a tempo we know in our bones from all those Moldavian wedding massacres of yore. (What you really shouldn’t do is pull a stupid ass comic book trick—and God help me, but I mean that as an imprecation—of shrieking about it in the coming attractions. You might as well hang blood-dripping letters in the air: IN THIS EPISODE, SOMEONE DIES!) What you sure as hell should not do is fail to shock us or surprise us, to give us a reason to give a fuck.
But the primo key thing you shouldn’t do—especially if you’re a show that’s kicked open any of a number of doors, has a rep for thinking and caring and understanding how things like sex and gender and sexuality work, that’s known for tweaking and twisting expectations into new and different and powerful shapes, shapes we’ve always wanted to see and never had before—and this is what brings us back to the lesbian thing—
See, if you’ve got this ground-breaking lesbian relationship, and then you split it up (for good reasons, even if the reasons were badly handled, but that’s for another day), and then you make a point of finally bringing them back together, what you damn well don’t do—especially on a show that’s made a point about pushing some envelopes when it comes to openly dealing with the sex life of its young characters except when it comes to the aforementioned lesbian couple, who get a couple of chaste embraces and a slow dance and a kiss only in extreme emotional circumstances (until, of course, the show moves to a new network hungry for ratings, but then after a couple of kisses you break them up, so)—what you don’t do is open this particular episode with them lolling ostentatiously in bed, what you don’t do is let them spend half the episode there, or making jokes about it, or however well-meaning you were having other characters so blatantly celebrating it, what you don’t do is for this one episode only bring their relationship up to the par of every other heterosexual relationship you’ve shown and then at the very end of it punch a bullet through her chest and splatter her girlfriend with her blood.
Because no matter what point you’re trying to make (about mortality? the ugly contingency and randomness and meaninglessness of life? about grief? didn’t you do all that last season with the death of Buffy’s mother and much, much better, too?), we’re pattern-making creatures, we are. We look for reasons even where none were ever intended, and we’re smart and savvy enough to look beyond the story plane to the storyteller’s, the reasons—call them morality or expediency or ineptitude—for doing what they do. And end of the day, you look at all of that, and the history of the show, and what you did, and you’re left with one conclusion, and it’s pretty crystal clear, and it isn’t the one you think you have to worry about—people thinking she died because she was a lesbian, because she was getting nookie with another girl, or bitching about how that’s the message you were trying to put across, all unknowing or not. —That’s silly and wrong-headed and me, I’m much more pissed about the linkage you left lying right there in the open, which says so much about how much further we all of us have to go, but you were supposed to be out there in the front leading the way, and you weren’t, you fell back, you dropped the ball, you screwed it up big time:
See, it’s pretty fucking clear that the only reason she finally got the on-screen nookie was that she was going to die.
Idiots.
(Am I overreacting? I don’t think so. My touchstone, the Spouse, is as pissed off as I am. Not so theatrical about it, no. But she doesn’t take these things nearly as seriously as I do, and still.)
—Anyway. That was Tuesday night’s episode. Wednesday night over on FX, where they’re rerunning Buffy seasons one through five, I tune in to catch the seven o’clock. Lindsey Crouse as Maggie Walsh lecturing about communication, and that odd little moment when you suddenly realize it’s a dream—Riley telling Buffy, “If I kiss you, it’ll make the sun go down”—and which one is this again? The girl, the box, the nursery rhyme—oh, yeah. It’s “Hush.”
Which was, of course, Tara’s first appearance.
So maybe I’m not going to watch next week’s tired-looking rehash of Vamp Willow, Evil Willow, Addicted-to-Magic Willow, oy. Maybe I’m just going to pull the plug on the whole thing. It’s never fun to watch a thing you once liked die a slow and lingering death, and it’s hard to hold a television show’s hand and provide what comfort you can, so what’s the point? I’d much rather walk away whistling, remembering Tara and Willow, trapped in that basement, trying to push the vending machine against the door to keep away the bad guys, linking hands and sharing that Look and then, turning as one, blam! Elegance and power and understatement, shivery well done. Not letting the bitter disappointment drag down what has been an excellent run, for the most part. Just remembering the good times and catching the occasional rerun and otherwise walking away.
(But: I am a morbid and obsessive fellow. Perhaps you’d noticed?)
[ # ]
The requisite Buffy post.
Tuesday, 22.09
Well.
That blew.
(You know, Gilmore Girls doesn’t suck...)
[ # ]
Management humbly suggests.
Monday, 20:53
Obligatory catching up: yeah, I’ve been tired; juggling two day jobs and a couple of freelance gigs and arguing with myself over Where All This is Going tends to wear me down. There’s a number of pieces littering on a number of computers across town—possible links, aborted rants, pop cultural jokes and sexual trivia, but I kept putting them down and not picking them up again. I’ve a new piece over at Ruthie’s Club—“The Arb”—if you’ve paid your dues; anyone who read the piece I ran in the Fish Tank a few weeks ago should realize “The Arb” is very similar to that one in all the ways that it isn’t terribly different, so. Plus, gorgeous illustration by good friend Jason December. (Yes, I’m still working on that piece I ran in the Fish Tank a few weeks ago. Not quite there yet.)
More plugs, because that’s what I’ve got the energy for this week, or today, at least: yes, the album is kind of overshadowed by the one “hit” right out of the gate, but damn, what a song. “From the d to the i to the l to the do,” heh. And even if some of the rest comes off as Ani lite, there are some other beauts, and I’ll give props and cash to anybody with this much attitude. That I like. (And I do like.)
Otherwise: and this has less to do with Sex than it does with some of the reasons why books like Judith Levine’s are so important, and how our government is perpetrating (yet another) devastating evil in the name of private morality—go, now, order or beg or borrow a copy, and read this before she gets all inevitably rock star on your ass. She can turn a phrase and clock an analogy and her insight’s as keen as her tongue is quick, and if I’d been half as smart in high school as she is—well, I’d’ve burned out twice as fast as I have, maybe.
Oh: and new shoes. Definitely, go buy some new shoes. A sharp yet subtle pair of two-tones. Nice.
