I recently watched a YouTube reactor react to the tragic, sometimes shit happens, death of Tara in the season six episode of Buffy entitled "Seeing Red". The reactor to this episode and to season six of Buffy whinged over the course of his fifteen minute video about how the death of Tara was yet another example of the dead lesbian cliche in Western films and television, a cliche that admittedly has been prominent allegorically, metaphorically, and, more recently, literally in American television and beyond, and about how season six of Buffy undermined everything Buffy had done up to that point. The evidence he offered for this assertion? The magic which Tara and her girlfriend Willow is coded as a metaphor for sex and once Tara and Willow reconcile after their breakup from earlier in season six, they have sex and almost immediately afterwards Tara is shot and killed by Warren. Dead lesbian. Dead lesbian cliche. Case, or so our reactor concludes, closed.
There are, of course, problems with this argument as anyone who has ever watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer closely knows. Magic was coded in a number of ways in Buffy the Vampire Slayer over the course of its television run. The magic of Amy's mother in the season one episode "Cheerleader", for instance, is coded as negative and as a metaphor of parents sucking the life out of their children who they are convinced are not living up to the potential they have for them. The magic performed by Amy at the behest of Xander in season two's "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered", a magic that is ostensibly supposed to make Cordelia reconcile with the Xandman after she dumped him so he can break up with her, is coded as humorous and potentially dangerous for, to paraphrase Buffy's Watcher Giles, love, or more accurately obsession, can lead to jealousy and jealousy can lead to verbal and physical violence. Romanticism, history seems to tell us, has, in fact, probably killed and maimed more people than Hitler and Stalin combined. Other instances of magic as both humorous and potentially dangerous include
Willow's use of magic to try to forget Oz, Willow's boyfriend who has
left her and Sunnydale after a complication in their relationship in the
fourth season episode "Something Blue". The magic performed by Willow to restore Angel's lost soul in season two's finale "Becoming" is coded as positive, as a ritual act that honours the memory of Angelus's victim Jenny Calendar, the computer science teacher Buffy's watcher Giles fell in love with, who was killed after using the computer to reconstruct the the spell that would restore Angel's soul, and as a good thing because it restores Angel's soul, if, tragically, a bit to late. Tara's undermining of a spell she and Willow cast in the season four episode "Goodbye Iowa" in order to find the new big bad Adam, is coded as mysterious and we don't learn the reason for Tara's action until the early fifth season episode "Family".
It is true that Buffy did also code magic, in much of season four and season five as a marker of lesbian attraction, specifically for the mutual attraction of Tara and Willow, and for lesbian sex, specifically the lesbian sex between Tara and Willow. Given the fear that the studios that made American television shows like Buffy had, after the demise of the sitcom Ellen in the wake of the main character's coming out on that show, a demise some network executives appear to have attributed to Ellen's coming out, the portrayal of lesbian attraction and lesbian sex had to be lightly danced around on commercial American television for much of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Buffy certainly danced around lesbian attraction and sex via its use of magic as a metaphor or an analogy for sexual attraction and lesbian sex between Tara and Willow beginning with the fourth season episode "Hush". This was hardly the only metaphorical or analogical use of magic in those seasons, however. Magic was also used as a metaphor and analogy for addiction and particularly Willow's addiction to magic during those years, an addiction that becomes clear clear--though it may have precedents in retrospect--in season four's "Something Blue", the episode that directly precedes "Hush", the episode in which Tara and Willow meet for the first time and an episode in which the sexual frisson between the two of them explodes off the small screen.
Given this evidence, in order to make the argument that magic is a metaphor for sex and that Tara is killed because she had sex with Willow just prior to her murder at the hands of Warren, one has to ignore not only the fact that the sex Tara and Willow have before Tara's death is literal, but one has to ignore the various ways that magic has been coded over the course of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from 1997 to 2003. In the world of scholarship such an approach in order to be compelling must, if the hypothesis is to be at all compelling, tell us how and why the other ways magic has been coded in Buffy are irrelevant to the accidental death of Tara in "Seeing Red". Unfortunately, this is not the approach our YouTube reactor and others like him, including many fan scholars and scholar fans, take. But then, given the empirical evidence it is an approach they do not and probably can not take. What they, including our YouTube reactor, can and often do instead is to simply ignore any evidence that conflicts with their "opinion" dismissing and coding that which does not concur with their "opinion" as simply an "opinion". The problem, a problem that should jump out at anyone which prefers their analysis empirical rather than politically and ideologically correct, is that magic has, factually speaking, been coded in several ways in the Buffyverse and this fact has bearing on Tara's murder in "Seeing Red". The fact that many simply dismiss such empirical evidence as "opinion" gives us a peek into how contemporary socialisation works and how the social and cultural construction of reality works to construct alternative cultural and ideological universes that appear to be impervious to empirical reality. And so it goes.
No comments:
Post a Comment