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Two questions about Buffy/Angel
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thedeadlyhook's thought-provoking questions.
4. What Buffy and/or Angel spinoff would you really like to see? (ignore all concerns of actor availability, etc. - what stories would you want to see continued? Feel free to get elaborate)
Oh, well, obviously it’d have Spike in it. And, um, Illyria. Who would beat Spike up a lot, because they both seem to enjoy that. But what they’d actually do, I’m not sure. Spike has always seemed to me the quintessential outsider, so it’s awfully hard for me to imagine a show in which he himself constitutes the inner ring. Equally, I can’t see him as one of those Incredible Hulk-like heroes, who drift around from episode to episode, always meeting new people and never fitting in. Another part of the problem, as I see it, is that AtS5 Spike is essentially at peace with himself. There’s no conflict anymore between who he is and who he wants to be, whereas Buffy was always internally divided thanks to Burden of Slayerness and poor old Angel is always going to be at war with himself. For me, personally, a central character needs an internal contradiction in order to be dramatically interesting. The only thing I can think of that might generate some internal tension is if Spike had to deal with Dru, but I can’t see that being maintained for an entire series. It might stretch to a mini-movie, though, as long as he was really conflicted and not just miserable-but-going-to-do-the-right-thing. So I guess, for a series, Angel would have to come back as well, so Spike could be all conflicted about him, especially now that he’s rediscovering his inner Angelus. Also, since the best Buffy episode by several miles was OMWF and the best Angel episode I’ve seen was Smile Time, I would like the spin-off to include an equally inventive and funny meta-episode, though I have absolutely no concrete suggestions as to what it should be.
5. What's the strongest message you'd say the Buffy and/or Angel series transmitted to you (intentionally or not)?
With the caveat that I didn’t necessarily agree with any of the messages that I identified, I thought Buffy gave us a fairly conventional set of Western individualist ethics: trust your instincts, not external authorities; the people you love matter more than people you don’t (trading the Mayor’s box for Willow; not killing Doppelgangland Willow; not killing Dawn; and, yes, not keeping Spike chained up in LMPTM, though this one is also covered by Trust Your Instincts); and you cannot do good by doing evil. This last one is the most important, I think. Buffy is the opposite of a Realpolitiker, she refuses to live in a world that demands that sort of behaviour for her. She doesn’t kill humans, she doesn’t kill the innocent, and she doesn’t kill those that are no immediate threat. It makes her easy to identify with and her heroism easy to accept, because she never has to get her hands dirty. Thinking of it in evolutionary terms, there is always a conflict between the way we want people to behave towards the population in general (sacrificing the few for the good of the many) and how we want them to behave towards the small group of people we, personally, love (no way am I going to sacrifice my kids, not even to save the world). Because, from a passing-on-the-genes point of view, I benefit if people unrelated to me will sacrifice their kids to save mine, but not if I have to sacrifice mine to save theirs. Clearly, much stronger emotions are evoked by a threat towards the people in we care about than the broad masses we don’t know (and numbers really don’t enter into it, not at gut level). Buffy never makes an emotionally unpopular choice, and that makes her easy to admire, but at a narrative level it prevents the character from having to face any really hard moral decisions, because she’s always given a get-out clause.
I think Angel sells us a much more complex version of that same message, namely that you can do good by doing evil, but you can’t be good if you do evil. Buffy keeps her hands scrupulously clean and still manages to save the day; Angel can only save the day by getting his hands so dirty that he’s close to indistinguishable from the guys he’s fighting. It’s an immensely cynical view, and it reminds me vividly of Schiller (who is a German classical playwright – you may have come across his Mary Stuart or Don Carlos [hee, this might conceivably interesttoysdream – I saw a fabulous production of Don Carlos in London a few years ago starring, of all people, Dayna from Blake’s 7. And her performance as Dayna not withstanding, she was terrific as Queen Elizabeth of Spain]). Anyway, the point of all this rambling is that I have had a love-hate relationship with Schiller for years, precisely because he is so enormously pessimistic about the possibility of political activism. He lived in a time of tyranny, under a despot, and he was a passionate advocate of political freedom, but every single one of his characters who tries to bring that freedom about ends up corrupted. AtS5 made me feel the same way about Joss – he believes passionately in the need to fight evil but he also seems to believe that fighting evil inevitably corrupts.
thedeadlyhook's thought-provoking questions.4. What Buffy and/or Angel spinoff would you really like to see? (ignore all concerns of actor availability, etc. - what stories would you want to see continued? Feel free to get elaborate)
Oh, well, obviously it’d have Spike in it. And, um, Illyria. Who would beat Spike up a lot, because they both seem to enjoy that. But what they’d actually do, I’m not sure. Spike has always seemed to me the quintessential outsider, so it’s awfully hard for me to imagine a show in which he himself constitutes the inner ring. Equally, I can’t see him as one of those Incredible Hulk-like heroes, who drift around from episode to episode, always meeting new people and never fitting in. Another part of the problem, as I see it, is that AtS5 Spike is essentially at peace with himself. There’s no conflict anymore between who he is and who he wants to be, whereas Buffy was always internally divided thanks to Burden of Slayerness and poor old Angel is always going to be at war with himself. For me, personally, a central character needs an internal contradiction in order to be dramatically interesting. The only thing I can think of that might generate some internal tension is if Spike had to deal with Dru, but I can’t see that being maintained for an entire series. It might stretch to a mini-movie, though, as long as he was really conflicted and not just miserable-but-going-to-do-the-right-thing. So I guess, for a series, Angel would have to come back as well, so Spike could be all conflicted about him, especially now that he’s rediscovering his inner Angelus. Also, since the best Buffy episode by several miles was OMWF and the best Angel episode I’ve seen was Smile Time, I would like the spin-off to include an equally inventive and funny meta-episode, though I have absolutely no concrete suggestions as to what it should be.
5. What's the strongest message you'd say the Buffy and/or Angel series transmitted to you (intentionally or not)?
With the caveat that I didn’t necessarily agree with any of the messages that I identified, I thought Buffy gave us a fairly conventional set of Western individualist ethics: trust your instincts, not external authorities; the people you love matter more than people you don’t (trading the Mayor’s box for Willow; not killing Doppelgangland Willow; not killing Dawn; and, yes, not keeping Spike chained up in LMPTM, though this one is also covered by Trust Your Instincts); and you cannot do good by doing evil. This last one is the most important, I think. Buffy is the opposite of a Realpolitiker, she refuses to live in a world that demands that sort of behaviour for her. She doesn’t kill humans, she doesn’t kill the innocent, and she doesn’t kill those that are no immediate threat. It makes her easy to identify with and her heroism easy to accept, because she never has to get her hands dirty. Thinking of it in evolutionary terms, there is always a conflict between the way we want people to behave towards the population in general (sacrificing the few for the good of the many) and how we want them to behave towards the small group of people we, personally, love (no way am I going to sacrifice my kids, not even to save the world). Because, from a passing-on-the-genes point of view, I benefit if people unrelated to me will sacrifice their kids to save mine, but not if I have to sacrifice mine to save theirs. Clearly, much stronger emotions are evoked by a threat towards the people in we care about than the broad masses we don’t know (and numbers really don’t enter into it, not at gut level). Buffy never makes an emotionally unpopular choice, and that makes her easy to admire, but at a narrative level it prevents the character from having to face any really hard moral decisions, because she’s always given a get-out clause.
I think Angel sells us a much more complex version of that same message, namely that you can do good by doing evil, but you can’t be good if you do evil. Buffy keeps her hands scrupulously clean and still manages to save the day; Angel can only save the day by getting his hands so dirty that he’s close to indistinguishable from the guys he’s fighting. It’s an immensely cynical view, and it reminds me vividly of Schiller (who is a German classical playwright – you may have come across his Mary Stuart or Don Carlos [hee, this might conceivably interest
toysdream – I saw a fabulous production of Don Carlos in London a few years ago starring, of all people, Dayna from Blake’s 7. And her performance as Dayna not withstanding, she was terrific as Queen Elizabeth of Spain]). Anyway, the point of all this rambling is that I have had a love-hate relationship with Schiller for years, precisely because he is so enormously pessimistic about the possibility of political activism. He lived in a time of tyranny, under a despot, and he was a passionate advocate of political freedom, but every single one of his characters who tries to bring that freedom about ends up corrupted. AtS5 made me feel the same way about Joss – he believes passionately in the need to fight evil but he also seems to believe that fighting evil inevitably corrupts.