Weblog Entry - 10/11/2002: ""

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10/11/2002 Entry: ""

It is a gloriously mild, tender, golden October evening, way up in the 70s, and I've been out walking around and breathing it in. Tonight the temperature will commence to drop like a brick, and tomorrow at this time it could be snowing. And so it all begins again.

I'd been puzzling all afternoon over wherefore the stiffness and soreness in my left arm/shoulder/wrist, when suddenly I remembered -- duh, dumbass, maybe because you got hit by a bike this morning? Truly, I'd forgotten, but while hurrying to work this morning, I pedaled out of the blind alley and got hit broadside from the left by a young lunatic biking madly down the sidewalk. Nobody fell over, bikes seemed undamaged, no blood was visible, so we exchanged apologies (we are Minnesotans, after all) and went our ways. But the aging body remembers small insults of this kind more tenaciously than it used to. And so ho for the ibuprofen and the heating pad. Must remember not to sleep on that side tonight.

Speaking of sleep, while I'm in this vein of boring self-absorption, I actually remember a dream from last night (infrequent event). Someone had died in my house, some pudgy elderly male stranger, and I knew that I needed to do something about this--call the cops, call a doctor, something--but I was having a paralysis of will and action, the sort of indecisive dithery passivity that characterizes my waking life these days, and I couldn't decide what to do, or make myself do anything, and finally I just stuck the body in a corner, where it slowly mummified, over some period of time, during which I kept trying to pretend it wasn't there, except that periodically I'd find little things around the house -- a tooth; a severed finger; a chunk of hair -- and I'd think in a panic Oh god, I really have to do something about that! I have to make myself do something! Woke in a state of deep exhausted self-loathing. I think the subconscious is hitting me with the big stick of "Kat? It is well past time for the together-gettingness of shit to ensue."

I started some grouching about this week's Buffy a couple of days ago, and though I think there was more I wanted to say, if I don't post it now it won't get posted, so for what it's worth, if you're interested, check here.

Arm hurts. Going now to settle down with some Maker's Mark and the Twins-Angels game.

There were some parts of this episode I enjoyed, most of them revolving around Anya, whom I sometimes really like and sometimes really don't, depending on how she's written from week to week. But I knew from the opening that I was going to have a hard time with this episode, because if there's one plot structure I loathe, it's the extended-misunderstanding one. You know, where the key letter goes astray, or the two characters just miss each other, or someone sees event X and interprets it as Y, or whatever. Now I grant that this episode wasn't really in that camp--the mutual invisibility of Willow and Buffy-&-Xander had some story-arc underpinnings and wasn't just being played for The Wacky--but it felt enough like that kind of story to make me grind my teeth.

Also bothering me was the scene in the cave with Willow and the MotW, for two reasons:

a) Can we get clear on just what the deal is currently with Willow's powers? I was totally not buying whatever line they used to rationalize her powerlessness against the demon. It's eminently clear she still has her powers, that she's still doing magic, and so making her powerless in this specific situation simply seemed like a cheesy and arbitrary plot device--let's have Willow In Peril--tossed in to amp up the emotional wattage and jerk us around, and I hate being emotionally jerked around.

b) The specific nature of the jerk-around--the blatant overtones of rape, in that scene--bothered me a lot, which I think was intended, but that doesn't make me like it. I think I'm one of the very few people who wasn't really disturbed by Spike's attempted rape of Buffy in Seeing Red, because I never for a minute believed that she was in any actual danger; as I said after the episode aired, it's always been crystal-clear that Buffy is as strong as Spike, and that she can and will kick his ass down the street whenever she feels like it, or at the very least hold her own against him. What he did was stupid, yeah, and unpleasant, but it didn't unsettle me, because I've never for a minute believed that Buffy would let Spike do anything to her that she ultimately wasn't willing to let him do.

But in the scene with Willow creeped the hell out of me; because of the arbitrary way she'd been stripped of her power, it felt gratuitous, and there was a meanness to me about the sexualized overtones of the attack. Depictions, or threats, of sexual assault disturb me more than anything else (which is why I can't really watch Oz), and I felt like the episode was exploiting those disturbing overtones in ways that hadn't been earned through any kind of emotionally-logical setup. Genuine imbalance of power is what makes sexual assault scary to me--the underlying but pervasive awareness that I, like most women, carry around with me that I'm really not as strong as most men--and, going back to the previous paragraph, I felt like the episode had to toss in an arbitrary plot-swerve to posit that imbalance of power here.

I'm reserving judgment on the whole redemption/reassimilation of Willow thing until we see how it plays out over the next few episodes. There are some real inconsistencies and ambiguities in how the show handles issues of forgiveness and forgiveability -- Laura S. discusses these in a marvelous list post that I wish I could reproduce here. Anyway, more on that later, perhaps. Or perhaps not.

Replies: 4 comments

Word. Wordy word to the tenth power. This is exactly how I felt while watching this episode (much of it from between my fingers.) I don't understand why Willow has to be brought low in such an anvillicious way. Why can't these characters ever talk to one another. They alsways resolve issue with explosive violence (Dead Man's Party) or dead silence (the issue of Buffy sending Angel to hell). Willow killed two people. How do you deal with someone who has that much viciousness and power inside them. In addition, Willow fucked them all both physically and mentally. These people have major trust and forgiveness issues that need to be discussed.

After the discussion, Willow needs to hand Buffy a little unbreakable orb, which is magically connected to Willow's heartbeat, that can be activated with a spell if Willow ever goes psycho again.

Posted by Cydney @ 10/13/2002 11:04 PM CST

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