azdak

This arose from a discussion with avidrosette, who I hope will soon get around to writing her own essay on how dramatic form affects how we understand what the characters say in Buffy.


In the discussion about “What is canon?” it became clear to me, largely thanks to executrix, that there are two main uses of the word "canon" in fandom. The first is the more academic sense of "text", that is to say what is actually up there on the screen, the actions the characters carry out, the lines they actually say (even if the writers wanted something else but the actor muffed it, as was apparently the case with Buffy's S7 line "Why does everyone think I'm still in love with Spike?" which had originally been written as "Why does everyone still think I'm in love with Spike?"). Canon in this sense can be self-contradictory. In School Hard, it is canon that Angel is Spike's sire, in FFL it is canon that Dru sires Spike. So far, so unproblematic. But there is a second, more fannish sense of canon as "What really happened". Many fans like to think of their show as having some kind of platonic existence outside the text itself – what we see on screen merely gives us an indication of "what really happened", but the truth resides elsewhere (a popular view is that the truth resides in Joss Whedon's head since he is the main creative force behind the show. Much as Jane Austen knew what happened to all of her characters after the books ended – Jane Fairfax dies in childbirth and so forth – so Joss knows what happens after Chosen and Not Fade Away, and his ideas are considered more "canonical" than those of the fanficcers because he has privileged knowledge of "what really happened"). When canon is used in this sense it is not only possible but logical to say that when the text contradicts itself, only one version is canonical. School Hard is wrong, that isn't what really happened; FFL is correct. Canon in this sense also allows the possibility of reading the text for clues to the sub-text, which is understood to be "what really happened". What we see on screen of the interaction between Spike and Angel or Faith and Buffy is scanned for hints of the true story, of the slash relationships that were suppressed in the interests of not upsetting the networks. The episodes are understood not as all that there is ("canon" in the academic sense) but as a guide to "what really happened", and they may be deliberately misleading ("Spike didn't go to Africa to get his soul out!") or merely hint obliquely at what really happened ("We've never been intimate – except that one time" = ""Spike and Angel; they were hanging out for years and years and years. They were all kinds of deviant. Are people thinking they never... ? Come on, people! They're open-minded guys!" ).

So the meaning of the word canon has been shifted somewhat in order to fulfil an important communicative need in fandom. The idea that in some sense the events of the show "really happened" is crucial to the way we debate all sorts of fannish issues. Characters are treated as if they are real people with a complex psychology which neverthless allows us to make predictions about how they would or would not behave in certain circumstances. Magic, souls, vampire physiology etc. are investigated as if they had some kind of existence (which implies internal coherence) beyond being a convenient plot device. Since textual inconsistencies work against this attitude that the events of the show in some sense "really happened", fanwanks are invented to reconcile the competing "facts" or to explain out-of-character behaviour.

But this approach to the text, as a guide to "what really happened" runs into problems when it comes to comedy (I should make it clear here that I'm not referring simply to funny moments, but to the form entire episodes take. Humour and comedy aren't exactly the same thing – tragedies can contain funny lines and funny moments but that doesn't make them comedies). The fact is that the genre conventions of comedy work against the notion that the events shown on screen are in some sense real. Without going into theory of comedy here (because, well, snore!!), the main point is that comedy doesn't treat events as if they were real, in the sense of "if this happened in real life, this is how people would actually behave". Quite the contrary, comedy is stuffed with all kinds of wildly improbable coincidences, mistaken identities and contrived happy endings that would bring our suspended disbelief crashing to the floor if they happened in another genre. In direct contradition to fannish tendencies, comedy treats events as if they didn't really happen. The near certainty of a happy ending in comedy is one of the features that enables us to view what we see as if it weren't "real" (black comedy is the exception here, of course, but you don't get proper black humour in the Buffyverse). Not only do we know that nothing bad is going to happen to the main characters, we also accept that certain apparent threats needn't be taken seriously, and this is true even of threats that would be seen as very serious if they occurred in a straightforwardly dramatic context. In Pangs, when Xander has syphilis, we know he isn't going to die, so far from being shocked at the callousness with which the other characters disregard his illness, we find the discrepancy between how they ought to behave and how they actually behave funny. There's no need to interrupt the business of the episode to rush Xander to hospital, however sensible that would be in real life, because we know his syphilis isn't real, it's "funny syphilis", as Xander himself subsequently calls it.

The non-reality of comedy also allows for the exaggeration of character traits for comic effect – people behave much more stupidly or selfishly or cruelly than they do in non-comedy episodes. This creates a problem for the "it all really happened" perspective because such behaviour seems out of character when it's removed from the comic context and viewed as part of a real-life history. In Something Blue Buffy disregards Giles's blindness to snuggle with Spike in a way that would be startlingly selfish were it not played as comedy (and she doesn't behave like this because she's under a spell – Willow orders Buffy to marry Spike, not to behave like an arsehole - but because the episode is comic and therefore we don't expect the characters to behave as they would in real life). As in Pangs, the discrepancy between how Buffy ought to behave and she actually behaves is a source of humour.

The non-reality of comedy isn't restricted to the major characters, either. In OMWF we see a man burn up before our eyes. In real life, this would be a shocking experience, but when the shot of the man burning is followed by a shot of a demon smiling and saying "That's entertainment!" we interpret it differently – this isn't gruesome, it's funny. That line tells us explicitly that we aren't supposed to indentify with Sweet's victim, we aren't supposed to react to him as if he were a real person, it's okay to find the situation funny not horrifying. When this distancing from the characters doesn't work, when we react to them as if they were real people with the same capacity for suffering as ourselves, then comedy doesn't work. It only works if we don't think of what we see as "real". Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed that in my post on morality I didn't include Xander's summoning of Sweet and his lack of punishment for said deed on my "Scoobies first" list. I didn't include it, because to my mmind it doesn't have the same status as, say, Faith's murder of the Mayor's henchman. Because OMWF is a comedy, Xander's action isn't "real" in the same way. To argue that he has the deaths of dozens of citizens on his conscience is to overlook the form of the episode in which his action occurred, to ignore that it isn't meant to be read in the same way as a drama or a tragedy.