Buffy as identity figure and everywoman
May. 15th, 2013 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettThis post springs from a conversation in IRC with randomling and batrachian.
We were talking about characters, and about how ambivalent I feel towards Buffy - how angry she makes me, so often, and how much I want to give her a hug, and how invested I am in unpicking her psychology, compared to how little interest she holds for (many?) other people.
I think that ambivalence has been pretty obvious from the get-go, and in fact I'm deeply amused at how it's played on in tags: buffy the manic pixie dream girl, I say, angry and flippant and aggressive - and scared, and hurting, however much I didn't want to recognise it.
Some of it is obvious: being failed by authority figures? I've got that. A father I desperately wanted to love me more, to pay more attention to me, to recognise what mattered to me and how much? Yep. The trauma of illness on behalf of the parent you love, and having to step up to responsibility and care-for-sibling? Yes. Keeping desperate secrets? Terror of hurting or harming people you love, of not being able to keep them safe enough? Of living in a world where It Is Always Real? Yes, yes, yes.
And then randomling said: and her experiences with violence.
And I thought: ... huh. Yes.
Yes.
Yes, I know what it's like to be thrown across a room and into a table. Yes, I know what it's like to have the only way to make someone stop hitting you be to hit them back. Yes, I know what it's like to calculate whether you can fight back, and whether you can fight back well enough. Yes, I know what it's like for that to be daily life.
Yes, I do not want to know these things, but I do.
Yes, I wish I'd been able to fight back better. Yes, I recognise safety in violence. Yes, I want to be her.
Part of my anger - my she's-a-manic-pixie-dream-girl - is that I was viewing her as a blank slate, an everywoman, a female lead who'd been sandblasted down to nothing, so that everyone could identify with her.
What randomling pointed out to me is that actually - that isn't the case. Yes, she's been sandblasted, and yes, she is traumatised (I read her as having severe PTSD and trauma-related issues, though that's rarely made explicit), but she isn't an everywoman. That I'm placed so well to identify with her - with the violence, with the death, with the abuse - isn't actually a problem with the character.
And that makes more sense of why I'm so angry with her.
Because: she was handed responsibility and she couldn't let it drop. Because: her mother died, and she had a family to hold together in the absence of her father, and she didn't handle it like I would have done. Because: she knows how much she will hurt, and will hurt others. Because: the text does not explicitly problematise how much, how hard, she tries to subsume herself to others and the service of others, as though if she only tries hard enough and is good enough she will be able to keep them safe, stop them hurting, not hurt them herself. Because: she is written as variably competent, sometimes vastly incompetent, to suit the conceit of an episode, not as an extension of how scared she is of letting people down. Because: she tries to empty herself out, be what is desired of her, and nobody loves her any the more for the effort.
Because: in spite of all this, she gets support and she gets love and she survives. Because: she has Giles, and not all of the people who were supposed to take care of her failed.
Because: I want to hold her - me - close, and make it better, and make it safe. Because I am scared for her (me); because I am furious that the writers chose to put someone through this (literal, metaphor-made-physical) hell on earth; because I wish I could be more like her; because I wish I were less like her. Because I recognise more of myself than I would like, in her deliberate emptiness in a desperate attempt to prevent herself harming the people around her.
Every now and again something makes me stop and look back on my history, on the strange duality of "it was lovely" running in parallel with "it was horrific": on the best summer of my life that is also the first time I made concrete plans for suicide; on the happy(ish) childhood that involved being hit with a cricket bat; on the recognition that my normal by-and-large isn't.
It's an odd kind of vertigo, this reminder that when I talk about these things, these experiences, people recoil and flinch in horror, and then reach out to swaddle me in love until I can hardly breathe, that only serves to remind me of how unusual (and, simultaneously, how pedestrianly ordinary and commonplace) I am, my past is. So that's why I hated Buffy, and that's why I love her: because she holds up a mirror in which I'm unrecognisable unless I stare and squint and reposition the lighting, but the shuffling and rearrangement makes all sorts fall out.
It's not easy, but it is right.
randomling and batrachian.We were talking about characters, and about how ambivalent I feel towards Buffy - how angry she makes me, so often, and how much I want to give her a hug, and how invested I am in unpicking her psychology, compared to how little interest she holds for (many?) other people.
I think that ambivalence has been pretty obvious from the get-go, and in fact I'm deeply amused at how it's played on in tags: buffy the manic pixie dream girl, I say, angry and flippant and aggressive - and scared, and hurting, however much I didn't want to recognise it.
Some of it is obvious: being failed by authority figures? I've got that. A father I desperately wanted to love me more, to pay more attention to me, to recognise what mattered to me and how much? Yep. The trauma of illness on behalf of the parent you love, and having to step up to responsibility and care-for-sibling? Yes. Keeping desperate secrets? Terror of hurting or harming people you love, of not being able to keep them safe enough? Of living in a world where It Is Always Real? Yes, yes, yes.
And then randomling said: and her experiences with violence.
And I thought: ... huh. Yes.
Yes.
Yes, I know what it's like to be thrown across a room and into a table. Yes, I know what it's like to have the only way to make someone stop hitting you be to hit them back. Yes, I know what it's like to calculate whether you can fight back, and whether you can fight back well enough. Yes, I know what it's like for that to be daily life.
Yes, I do not want to know these things, but I do.
Yes, I wish I'd been able to fight back better. Yes, I recognise safety in violence. Yes, I want to be her.
Part of my anger - my she's-a-manic-pixie-dream-girl - is that I was viewing her as a blank slate, an everywoman, a female lead who'd been sandblasted down to nothing, so that everyone could identify with her.
What randomling pointed out to me is that actually - that isn't the case. Yes, she's been sandblasted, and yes, she is traumatised (I read her as having severe PTSD and trauma-related issues, though that's rarely made explicit), but she isn't an everywoman. That I'm placed so well to identify with her - with the violence, with the death, with the abuse - isn't actually a problem with the character.
And that makes more sense of why I'm so angry with her.
Because: she was handed responsibility and she couldn't let it drop. Because: her mother died, and she had a family to hold together in the absence of her father, and she didn't handle it like I would have done. Because: she knows how much she will hurt, and will hurt others. Because: the text does not explicitly problematise how much, how hard, she tries to subsume herself to others and the service of others, as though if she only tries hard enough and is good enough she will be able to keep them safe, stop them hurting, not hurt them herself. Because: she is written as variably competent, sometimes vastly incompetent, to suit the conceit of an episode, not as an extension of how scared she is of letting people down. Because: she tries to empty herself out, be what is desired of her, and nobody loves her any the more for the effort.
Because: in spite of all this, she gets support and she gets love and she survives. Because: she has Giles, and not all of the people who were supposed to take care of her failed.
Because: I want to hold her - me - close, and make it better, and make it safe. Because I am scared for her (me); because I am furious that the writers chose to put someone through this (literal, metaphor-made-physical) hell on earth; because I wish I could be more like her; because I wish I were less like her. Because I recognise more of myself than I would like, in her deliberate emptiness in a desperate attempt to prevent herself harming the people around her.
Every now and again something makes me stop and look back on my history, on the strange duality of "it was lovely" running in parallel with "it was horrific": on the best summer of my life that is also the first time I made concrete plans for suicide; on the happy(ish) childhood that involved being hit with a cricket bat; on the recognition that my normal by-and-large isn't.
It's an odd kind of vertigo, this reminder that when I talk about these things, these experiences, people recoil and flinch in horror, and then reach out to swaddle me in love until I can hardly breathe, that only serves to remind me of how unusual (and, simultaneously, how pedestrianly ordinary and commonplace) I am, my past is. So that's why I hated Buffy, and that's why I love her: because she holds up a mirror in which I'm unrecognisable unless I stare and squint and reposition the lighting, but the shuffling and rearrangement makes all sorts fall out.
It's not easy, but it is right.