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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Heretical Musings On Buffy The Vampire Slayer

  
  

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Matthew Fluxington
20:56 / 23.06.04
This isn't about kink. It's about low self-esteem.

Right. It seems to me that at the end of Buffy, Faith begins to realize just how much of her sexuality was ruled by her low self esteem and insecurity, opening the door for her to fully claim her own sexuality. All that time, she was playing at kinkiness and was open to anything, but the implication at the end is that she may actually become kinky if she learns to trust her partners. I don't think that she was Saved By Monogamy, because that's probably not how it would've went down. I think Robin just finally helps her out of a rut that she'd been in.
 
 
PatrickMM
23:54 / 23.06.04
And something similar happens to Faith in Who Are You? when she's overwhelmed by having sex with Riley, because it actually means something to him. He doesn't need to have her in any position, like she suggests, just being her is enough. That's one of my favorite things about the episode, the way the body switching is used as much more than a gimmick, and serves as a major turning point for Faith's character.
 
 
Cat Chant
08:25 / 24.06.04
'the lesbian community' are claiming someone who wasn't necessarily theirs.

Well, except there isn't a lesbian community in Buffy, for a start, and the people (eg me) who claim Willow is gay are just listening to what she says about herself...

I'm sorry, I know Willow is a fictional character and the decision to make her "gay" rather than "bi" was the writers', not hers, but I just get riled over this refusal to believe what the woman says. It seems to me to be as rude as using the wrong gender pronoun for a trans person. ("I don't care what 'he' says, she is a woman, and it's my right to pronounce on that!")

I mean, there should be more bi characters on telly, and the Buffy writers in particular are both homophobic and biphobic at times - and generally fairly clueless about the whole thing. I agree about that. But within the imperfect fictional set-up, Willow's identification as gay makes perfect sense and I don't see any reason why we can't accept it on her own terms.
 
 
Ex
12:35 / 24.06.04
Despite being a big fan of self-identification as the only way to go on identity issues, I don’t think it can quite settle this one precisely because it’s a fictional character. I wouldn’t be respecting a person’s self-identity, I’d be respecting Joss Whedon’s fictional world. Declaration of self-identity by fictional characters can be used for some really shabby purposes (e.g. “Luscious Lezzer Lindy: I Miss Manmeat!” – if a person called Lindy wanted to discuss her complex sexuality with me, I would listen attentively, but seeing similar porn headlines inspires me to critique the text.)

If you respect utterly the face-value declarations of characters, you can end up with the House Elves – invented to spout self-effacing tripe.

So on one hand, I would like to encourage respect for self-identification, but on the other, suspicion of written universes is also good.

Anyway, all this is beside the point, as I also don’t see any problem with Willow being gay. I’d have found it disrespectful if they’d tried to do a whole ‘Urgh, never really liked Oz that much anyway’ thing in order to cement her gay identity, actually. You can write the breezy segue of “Gay now!” down to sloppy scripting but I quite liked it; it did look so much more as though Xander was headed for the tormented teen coming out plot, and I’m rather glad it didn’t go that way.

But a bi character would have been nice also. One who wasn't necessarily bloodsucking and evil would be nice, although I'll take what I'm given...
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
16:11 / 24.06.04
There's a kind of liberal conservatism that exists, we have our safe neutered black character, we have our safe goth character, we have the adult authority figures who are normally wrong in the face of our teenage heroes (BTW, this bit is not Buffy or any show-centric) and we have our gay character who normally doesn't get to make sex at all. The more I look back on it the more I believe that Buffy and Angel were very liberal-conservative...
 
 
Warewullf
18:51 / 24.06.04
Ah hang on now, Willow and Tara had a lot of sex and Willow almost went down on Tara during her big song, Spike and Buffy had that weird post-rape rough sex, Buffy and Riley shagged constantly, as did Xander and Anya. In sex terms, at least, they were hardly conservative.
And frankly, I was glad that they had a "safe neutered black character" rather than Angry Black Man®

The shows weren't about accurately representing the melting-pot-that-is-America. It was girl versus monsters. Realism need not apply.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
08:53 / 25.06.04
Well, you see, it's conservative because you never got to see Willow and Tara fucking each other with dildos with tight close-up shots on their genitals.

You've got to cut the Buffy folks some slack in regards to how much sexuality they could get away with showing on network television - it's not necessarily up to them, you know. Buffy was a tremendously sexual show, especially in comparison to other shows on network tv at the time. They got away with a LOT, even if they had to make some compromises. There are plenty of sex scenes with Willow/Tara and Willow/Kennedy which pushed the envelope for how lesbian sexuality could be shown on television in the US. You really have to think about this in context, not just in how your fantasy tv show would be.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
08:55 / 25.06.04
Also, I'm not sure if Robin Wood really qualifies as either a Big Angry Black Man or a Safe Neutered Black Man - he seemed rather like some point in between to me. Robin's not one of my favorite characters, but I do feel that they were writing simply as a man, rather than as a Political Viewpoint.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
10:52 / 25.06.04
Oh, I'm glad you read and paid attention to the bit when I said the examples weren't Buffy-centric and were generalities... And compare what we saw of Willow and Tara with the episode where Buffy and Angel have great big animal sex before Angel goes evil again. I can't believe that a four-year old program that's insanely popular has to titpoe around it's portrayal of (especially in this case) girl-on-girl action because of being fear of being cancelled by TV channels. That sounds like a bullshit excuse for timidity.
 
 
PatrickMM
15:33 / 25.06.04
Calling Buffy sexually conservative, even with the lesbian relationship, is sort of missing the fact that in the world we live in now, and particularly four years ago when the show was airing, there's just not that much tolerance for lesbian sex on TV.

I'm not sure on this, but I don't think the WB would allow them to have Willow and Tara kiss, or at least strongly discouraged it. Now, I'm not saying that they couldn't have just disregarded the WB, and put whatever they want in, but the WB could just as easily have cut stuff from the episode, and I don't think ME would want to get in a feud with the WB, just because they could. It's quite possible that had Willow and Tara's kiss in the body not been in a really long take, the WB would have tried to get them to cut it out.

Yes, Buffy and Riley or Buffy and Angel did some comparatively explicit scenes to what Willow and Tara did, but we never saw Willow and Oz, or even Xander and Anya doing the sort of sex scenes that Buffy did. Xander and Anya talked about sex a lot, but we didn't actually see that much of it. And, while it may have been too little, too late, the Willow/Kennedy scene at the end of the series was right up there with the other two scenes from that episode.

I think the restrictions led to much more interesting scenes between Willow and Tara. The spell scene in Who Are You is much hotter than Buffy and Riley in Where the Wild Things Are, and the candle blowing out at the end of New Moon, or the afforementioned "spread beneath my willow tree," from the musical are certainly more memorable than Willow and Kennedy's actual sex scene.

It's network TV, and there's restrictions. Very few other shows on network TV had ever been as upfront with sexuality as Buffy. It was already number one on the Parent's Council list of "bad" shows, what more could they do?
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
15:37 / 25.06.04
You're so unforgiving about this, and you're just not being realistic.

It's not just Joss and his people's point of view, it's not just the WB/UPN - they all have to contend with network affiliates and advertisers, and those advertisers are beholden to public pressure groups. The producers and network people have to do all that tiptoeing or else they stand to lose a LOT of money and the show goes off the air and everyone involved is out of a job. There's a lot of major risks involved, and sometimes it's just not worth the fight and the trouble to push things too far when you're already getting away with a lot.

It's amazing that Buffy was ever made at all, or that Willow was ever written as queer to begin with - it certainly never would have had a chance on the four biggest networks.

I realize that you're getting all of this tv second hand, but I do believe that you're missing a LOT of the context of American television because you just never see it. It seems crazy that I have to tell you this, but you know things are a little different in America, right?
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
15:39 / 25.06.04
Just so no one is confused, I was addressing Flowers in my last post.
 
 
PatrickMM
16:02 / 25.06.04
Just to add to what Flux said, look at the Janet Jackson boob scandal. You can barely even see anything, and yet it becomes a national scandal. This is the way American broadcast TV works. I'm not going to generalize, but over in Britain, things are very different, and also, you may get a skewed perspective of what we have. Things like The Sopranos, or Six Feet Under are anomalies, and only exist because they are on HBO, pay TV. Because Buffy wasn't, it was subject to a lot of cultural rules about what's acceptable, especially at 8, the "family hour." It's awful that things are this way, but they are, and Whedon can't fight it too much.
 
 
Gary Lactus
18:26 / 25.06.04
The first thing about Buffy that piqued my interest was the scene in season 2 where the high school swimming coach (who's been turning his team into mer-men) gets chucked into a pit to join his randy, slimy creations. Buffy peers down into the darkness while Xander comments:

"Gee, I guess those boys must've really loved their coach!"

Implying the obvious.

Really got to me, esp when I realised that this was going out at 6.30 in the afternoon.

They got SO much stuff through.
 
 
PatrickMM
19:57 / 25.06.04
The thing I still can't believe they got on the air was in the episode, Family, when Spike is having this fantasy where Buffy comes to his crypt, and play-fights him. He's over on the bed, and she says, "I'm coming, I'm coming right now," then you cut to Spike and Harmony having sex. No doubts about what that means.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
20:30 / 26.06.04
So, she likes having sex with women, she identifies as a lesbian, and she "clearly isn't" one? Why?

Well to explain my own personal problem with it, the writers never wrote it in. Willow doesn't identify as a lesbian, the people in control mark her as one and I'm just not happy with that. She's had two serious relationships, one with a man and one with a woman, she doesn't talk to anyone about her sexuality, she says she's gay a couple of times but never discusses her choice, she just is. It's bullshit- who has a serious relationship and then rejects the whole basis of it in a drama without a slight nod. If Willow had become a lesbian I'd be happy as pie but she never went through the process, she switched with the relationship, it's precisely the kind of thing that's terrible about queer characterisation but it's also the kind of thing that people assume about bisexuals. That's why the words of the writer or creator or someone are wrong because they too are assuming... it's a complete letdown, they should have written it all in.
 
 
Warewullf
09:58 / 27.06.04
Ok, we never got saw Willow going through the whole self-doubt thing and agonising over her feelings but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
There was quite a build up of the relationship between Willow and Tara before anything actually happened, though. It certainly didn't happen overnight. (Plus, there was the foreshadowing in Dopplegangland, planned or not.)
 
 
Tryphena Absent
16:19 / 27.06.04
That's not what I mean... look all they needed to do was script a conversation about Oz. One conversation between Willow and someone else about how she could be a lesbian when she clearly adored him. It's not difficult, no agony is needed, even a joke would have worked, 30 seconds of screentime. In Doppelgangland Willow was bisexual- she came on to everyone and that screams yet another continuity error from the writers. Oh but wait, only the writers identify Willow as an out and out lesbian. I feel like I'm on crazy pills!!
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
16:33 / 27.06.04
I bow before Flux, by the way, is there a rule against specifically using 'lesbian' in that time of day show like Buffy? I'm just wondering why Willow never used the word.

In real life I'm all for people identifying however they want, I'd have no problem with Willow deciding she was a lesbian now (or just 'gay', hoom), on TV with the issue of the visibility of different sexualities, the bisexual community needs more visibility than the gay one.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
17:42 / 27.06.04
My memory is hazy, but I think I remember Xander referring to Willow as being lesbian, more than once even.

The problem is, you're asking for perfect consistency in a medium which is ruled by beaurocracy and is written by a team of ten or more people. That's not totally unreasonable, but given how they were unsure of how to handle Willow's sexuality for a long time (I saw an episode with Whedon commentary in which he says that they were thinking of keeping the lesbian relationship between Tara and Willow in the subtext until they realized that it was too obvious and had to be dealt with), it's just going to be a bit messy.

I'd argue that in the context of American pop culture, bisexuality among cute white girls is represented far more often than that of full-time lesbians, so Willow coming out as definitively gay is the bolder move.
 
 
PatrickMM
23:31 / 27.06.04
In Checkpoint, Willow and Tara refer to themselves as "lesbian gay-type lovers." I can't remember any other specific occurrences, but I'm sure there's probably some more.

And, this is interesting if you want to see what the people making the show had to say about the Willow/Tara relationship as it was beginning.
 
 
Cat Chant
08:49 / 28.06.04
In Doppelgangland Willow was bisexual-

And a vampire, of course - which does start making it look like "gay" = redeemable/sympathetic but bisexual = evil in the Buffyverse. I was also thinking about how Xander's 'heterosexuality' incorporates an awful lot of same-sex attraction (leaving aside the possible Spike encounters, there's the crush he gets on Jonathan which doesn't lead to any articulated/explicit speculation about his sexual identity). So you're right that the Buffyverse has a bad blind spot about the possibility of bisexuality.

I guess the thing is that I feel like there's no mystery about how Willow could have adored Oz and then decided to identify as gay, so I don't need a conversation about it, any more than I do about how people manage to walk along the ground. But the lack of any reference at all to him after he left is slightly surprising - I mean, Xander refers to the praying-mantis teacher-woman he had one encounter with back in Season One, and Buffy never stops going on about Angel, so it's more usual for past partners to be remembered, and that does look like they're trying to erase Willow's past in a certain way.

Okay, you're starting to convince me that it should have been addressed more clearly. On the other hand, though, I think that in itself - and maybe taking it out of context in a slightly dodgy way - the fact that Willow doesn't have to talk about the switch is one of the nicer things about sexuality in BtVS. You can see it as the show just saying something like: "Yeah, she loved Oz, now she's gay. Figure it out for yourselves. It's not that big a deal," rather than insisting it's something that requires justification.

And Flux - saying that something is not sexually conservative because it had to be sexually conservative to get past the censors doesn't make any sense. Just because BtVS was maybe the best it could be in the context of US TV doesn't make it a cutting-edge comment on queer sexuality, and it doesn't put it beyond criticism. I mean, it's not like anyone here was writing to the network trying to get it taken off the air for its homophobia: you can point out something's shortcomings (and be fully aware of the cultural context which produces those shortcomings - in fact, criticising the way queerness gets depicted in BtVS is probably aimed more at the cultural context than at BtVS itself, or at least at the way the show intersects with its context of production) without writing it off entirely.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
13:45 / 28.06.04

And Flux - saying that something is not sexually conservative because it had to be sexually conservative to get past the censors doesn't make any sense.

That's true, but my whole argument is that given all of the factors involved in creating the show and getting it on the air, it's more than a little foolish for anyone to expect any kind of coherant message about sexuality on the show. Honestly, I think that we should all just be grateful that the show managed to be pro-queer at least 99% of the time. That's a major achievement for an American television show aimed at teenagers.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
14:16 / 28.06.04
I guess the thing is that I feel like there's no mystery about how Willow could have adored Oz and then decided to identify as gay, so I don't need a conversation about it

Yeah well I agree to an extent, I never really cared myself, it's just the writers of BtVS annoy me because they just shouldn't say anything about it. Their answer should be that they think they made it clear in the show. Now obviously they didn't because my housemates at university used to ask questions about Willow's sexuality during every episode but who cares, leave us with some space. So there isn't really any mystery though actually it's a mystery to me how they managed to destroy a character like Willow in the last season.

I'm really just bearing a massive grudge against the Buffy writers and anything they say. It's their own fault.
 
  

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