thesublemon

[thesublemon]

the storytelling in severance season two so far is reminding me somewhat of farscape season three. both use a scifi conceit to literally split characters into different selves, and thereby explore their competing desires, particularly with regards to romance, and selfhood by extension.

(spoilers for both)

in farscape season three the protagonist is split into two equal selves. one of the john crichtons is able to resolve two seasons of romantic tension, and be in a happy relationship with his alien love interest. meanwhile the other john, bereft of love, obsessively attempts to perfect the technology that will take him home to earth. metaphorically, it’s a conflict between two versions of home, or selfhood. a self that is familiar, versus one that is alien. john yearns for a version of himself that can have it all: earth and aeryn, past and future, known and unknown. but the myth that underlies the season is icarus, and the folktale is the dog with with two bones. one of the johns does seem like he will get it all, and will even be healed of the scifi-metaphor for pain and trauma that haunts his brain—the neural chip harvey. but it turns out that this perfect resolution is impossible. the john that tries to have it all dies; the john that remains as the show’s main character is the john that has nothing. it turns out that it is not possible to simultaneously change and not change. “you can’t go home again,” essentially. if john is to truly move forward, according to the show, he must confront the reality of loss that is inherent to becoming something new, regardless of whether that new thing involves beauty and wonder (love) or something terrible (pain).

similarly in severance season two so far you have one version of mark who has spiraled downwards without love. and who, as of the most recent episode (2x03 “who is alive?”), is willing to risk himself to get that past love back. this is contrasted with a version of mark who “has everything.” he is not shattered by grief, he has a new love interest, he still has some innocence. like the johns, one mark is obsessively fixated on a former state, and one is able to narratively advance. but the fact that the story of how good the more innocent version of mark has it comes from lumon (“the mark i’ve come to know at lumon is happy”) emphasizes how much it is, indeed, a story. that version has also experienced loss, and suffering, and his existence is, of course, literal corporate slavery. it potentially foreshadows that now that one mark is attempting to “have everything” to an even greater degree, by stitching together his separate selves, that something will go wrong. like farscape with icarus, there are two myths suggested by the show so far: the orpheus and eurydice myth, which doesn’t bode well, and the persephone myth, which could go in a number of directions.

both shows use the season’s credit sequence to express the idea of self-conflict. in farscape, the narration over the season three credits is split into two echoing voices, and its description of the show’s premise becomes divided and confused. instead of john saying he’s “just trying to find a way home”, and to meanwhile “share the wonders i’ve seen” as he does in the credits for seasons one and two, john in the season three narration wonders if he wonder if he should “open the door” to earth, or leave it shut. he starts asking questions: “are you ready?”, “or should i stay?” he starts describing the things he’s seen as both “nightmares” and “wonders”. similarly the credits for season two of severance are full of duality and conflict. there is imagery of gemma on one side, and helly on another. the women flicker and run in opposite directions. meanwhile the two marks simultaneously work together and seem at odds. sometimes one mark pulls and carries the other. but instead of the season two credits ending with the two marks merging, as they do in the first season credits, one mark now attempts to crawl its way out of the other.

in general, both shows seem to use the idea of pain, grief, or trauma as a kind of psychological splitting point. and use romantic love to make the longing and loss (the positive and negative) involved in change more visceral. in mark’s case, the metaphor is pretty literal and immediate—the starting premise of the show is that he has split himself into two consciences because of grief for his wife. in john’s case, the metaphor takes a bit longer to develop. he changes in increasingly dark ways over the course of the first two seasons, and only by season three is it time to physically split him in order to explore the implications of those changes. this difference makes sense based on the type of story that each show is derived from. severance is more of a modern gothic tale, exploring the consequences of repression in an eerie atmosphere. farscape on the other hand, is more of a modern odyssey or wizard of oz, a mythological tale of displacement and change.

i don’t have predictions on specific developments in severance, but i’m interested to see where it goes with the metaphorical framework it’s set up so far. like farscape, it could easily end in a dog with two bones sort of way—by trying to have two contradictory things, mark loses both. and perhaps that will be a necessary nadir on the path to some ultimate stage of resolution. regardless, it’s nice to see a new scifi show making use of the genre’s ability for metaphor in a way that doesn’t (yet) feel boring or underdeveloped, whatever it chooses to do with it.

[thesublemon]

some of my black and white photography from the last couple years. locations: austin (tx, usa), boulder (co, usa), lisbon (portugal), sintra (portugal), milan (italy) .

[thesublemon]

Translating ‘Tango’

This post will be an explanation of how I went about translating the 1999 performance of Sławomir Mrożek’s Tango without a personal knowledge of Polish—at the time I started, anyway—as well as a discussion of the translation philosophy I found myself adopting. For more context on the project and the play, see my original post [link]. This post contains spoilers for the play, though not immense ones. It’s fun to see the play blind, but you can read this without watching it.

Put simply, my approach was to use a variety of sources—both human and machine—in order to understand the “literal” meaning of the original text. From there, I would then hunt down more nuanced and idiomatic meaning. And finally, compose my own version. Scene by scene, here’s how it went:

1. Play the scene on youtube with the automatic transcription turned on and compare it against the script. One round comparing the Polish automatic transcription against the Polish script. One round comparing the automatically translated transcription against an automatically translated copy of the script. This gave me a basic idea of what was being said and if it differed from the script. The automatic transcription is far from perfect though. I would catch any more subtle differences as I worked, and as part of the editing process.

2. Run the scene’s corresponding pages through both Google Translate and DeepL. I tried a few different machine translation sites, but those two were the most reliable. They tended to have usefully different but similarly (in)accurate translations. That said, using any more than two had quickly diminishing returns, so I stuck with just those.

3. Compare the automatic translations against the two existing book translations. These are: the 1968 translation by Ralph Manheim and Teresa Dzieduscycka and the other 1968 translation by Nicholas Bethell and Tom Stoppard. Look for discrepancies. Look for idioms. Look for tone.

4. If any confusion arises, research. This meant a lot of googling of Polish grammar and idioms. I was lucky that, having studied a few other languages in the past, I had a sense of what threads to pull on. I’d watched a bunch of other Polish media recently, and read a lot of Russian literature (Russian and Polish are both Slavic etc), and that all helped point me in the right direction too. Since I didn’t know any native speakers, and didn’t have the money to pay one to be on-call, then if all other forms of research failed, I’d ask ChatGPT questions. It was useful for getting me unstuck, though limited in that I couldn’t trust its accuracy. If, at the end of this process, I was still unsure about something, I flagged it to have a human editor check later.

I wasn’t just researching basic meaning of course, I was also researching tone. What words sound familiar, crass, formal, academic, or simply strange? This is a play in which characters say a lot of strange things, and it was important to keep track of whether something sounded strange to me because it was supposed to be strange, or simply because I didn’t understand it.

I was also researching literary context. In Act III, for example, Artur insults his uncle Eugeniusz by calling him “you whitened/whitewashed corpse.” There were many possible translations of this. The Manheim translation translated it as “you whited skeleton” and the Bethell translated it as “you whited sepulchre.” I at first considered translating it as “you bleached pile of bones”, as I thought that might be the intended image, or “you bloodless corpse” if the important part of the image was not just one of death, but of lacking vigor specifically. However, neither insult seemed quite right because all of the other insults in Artur’s list emphasize Eugeniusz’s falseness and hypocrisy. In addition to a “whitened corpse”, he calls Eugeniusz a “stuffed nothing”, an “artificial organism” and a “rotting prosthesis.” Not having a Christian background, I didn’t realize at first that this was a probable Biblical reference. Research, however, pointed me to the scene in which Jesus insults the Pharisees by calling them hypocrites.

From the King James Bible: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye are like unto whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but are within full of dead men’s bones and of all uncleanness.” [link]

I then checked whether a Polish bible that predated Tango also used a version of “pobielany” for “whited” or “whitewashed.” This was the case. 

From the Gdańsk Bible: “Biada wam, nauczeni w Piśmie i Faryzeuszowie obłudni! iżeście podobni grobom pobielanym, które się zdadzą z wierzchu być cudne, ale wewnątrz pełne są kości umarłych i wszelakiej nieczystości.” [link]

The reference seemed highly plausible, especially considering Poland’s Christian culture, and Artur’s obvious Christ-like savior complex throughout Act III. So either “whited” or “whitewashed”—both are used in different English versions—seemed the word to use. I landed on “whitewashed corpse” as the total phrase. I didn’t like Manheim’s “skeleton” as skeletons are already white; what is gained by whitewashing one? And I didn’t like Bethell’s “sepulchre” either, as it makes the Biblical reference more direct than it is in the original. The idea of a fleshy corpse painted over with whitewash is exactly as grotesque as Mrożek’s original is. By keeping the word “corpse” I kept that image, and by using the more modern “whitewash” I kept the Biblical reference while being more evocative to a modern audience.

5. Examine the Polish original for style. Is there rhyme or repetition? Is there a phrase or word choice in Act I that gets echoed in Act III? If so, try to replicate. For example, in Act I Artur complains that Grandma Eugenia “przekracza granice”, or “crosses boundaries”. Later in Act III, Stomil declares that “there’s a limit”, to which Artur replies, basically: “Limits can be overcome. Didn’t you teach me that?”. Both exchanges use the word “granice” for a limit or boundary. All four of my sources varied in what word they used for “granice” during those two scenes. However, I decided that since the original uses just one word, I should as well. This would ensure that the connections between the scenes were as obvious—and reflective of the original—as possible. Since the word “line” is the most flexible, that’s what I used. Thus the dialogue became:

ARTUR: Grandma crossed the line. ELEONORA: What line? ARTUR: She knows what she did.

and

STOMIL: Then I forbid you! There’s a line. ARTUR: Lines can be crossed. Didn’t you teach me that?

6. Examine the line delivery in the video. Do the actors put emphasis in a certain place? Is there a long pause in the middle of a phrase? If so, arrange the sentence to reflect that delivery if at all possible. For example, towards the end of the play, Edek warns the family that they don’t need to worry about him taking over as long as they obey him. Most of the four sources put the concept of obedience at the end of the sentence, like so:

Bethell & Stoppard:

EDEK: I like a laugh, a bit of fun. Only I’ve got to have obedience.

Manheim & Dzieduscycka:

EDEK: I like a joke, like a good time. But get this: There’s got to be order.

Google Translate:

EDEK: I can joke and I like to have fun. There must only be obedience.

DeepL put it at the beginning, but it looked unnatural:

EDEK: And I can joke, and have fun I like. Only obedience must be.

However, the Polish original is closest to “Only obedience must be” and the actor that plays Edek delivers the line with a long, sinister pause between “Only obedience…” and “…must be.” Therefore, I wanted a phrase that started with the concept of “obedience” and ended with the concept of “must be”, but in a way that sounded more natural than what DeepL managed. Which is how I landed on:

EDEK: I like a joke. I like a good time. But obedience…is mandatory.

Speaking of style, I also decided to start both the “joke” and “good time” sentences with “I like” in order to give a sense of insistent repetition that exists in the original, even though the original doesn’t repeat “I like”. The original, as you can see from the DeepL version, starts each phrase with “And”, but that construct sounds weird in English in context. I also used “a joke” rather than “a laugh” or some other word because, as the automatic translations indicate, the word Edek uses (“pożartować”) contains the word for joke (“zarty”). And the play used the word “zarty” before when talking about how “The joke is over” and “[Stomil] has been joking for 50 years.”

(This is also a good example of why two different machine translations were useful. The Google Translate version of the line is a smoother translation. But the awkwardness of the DeepL version helped me understand the structure of the original. Meanwhile the human translations didn’t provide extra meaning, but did validate the accuracy of the machine translation, and gave me some stylistic ideas. Using “obedience is mandatory” came at the cost of using language that ideally would have been more casual—“I’ve got”/“There’s got”—as Edek tends to speak in a less refined way. In this case, it was a good stylistic idea, but one which I couldn’t use.)

On the other hand, sometimes I decided that arranging a sentence in a certain way wasn’t worth it. For example, in Act I, Eugeniusz petulantly snitches to Artur that “Edek ate the sugar.” However, the line as delivered in Polish is more like “The sugar was eaten by…Edek!” Because of this delivery, I considered translating it as “The sugar was because of…Edek!” But even though that sounded slightly more natural than “was eaten by”, it just didn’t look as petulantly funny as “Edek ate the sugar.” I decided that since the word “Edek” was recognizable, a viewer would be able to figure out how the line was delivered regardless of how I translated it. Therefore I kept the translation as “Edek ate the sugar” in order to convey the spirit of the underlying text, while trusting that the performance would speak for itself.

7. Once I’d given my translation my best-faith attempt, I paid an editor who spoke both languages to correct my Polish transcript and give feedback on my work (many many thanks to Maja Walczak). She helped me catch some subtle things I wouldn’t have caught on my own. For example, during the scene in which Edek is reading out his “principles” I had originally translated it as follows:

EDEK: Here it is. “I love you…and you’re asleep.” ALA: Anything else? EDEK: “It depends on the situation.” ALA: Oh come on, just read. EDEK: I was reading. That’s a principle.

“It depends on the situation” is an approximate translation of the Polish, which is “Zależy jak leży.” Without context, I assumed that the humor in the line just came from the fact that it was a bland, dismissive phrase that Ala wouldn’t recognize as a principle. That on its own is fairly funny, but not uproariously so. So I was surprised when the editor explained that this was actually a very well-known, very quotable exchange that people would reference and laugh about. She explained that the memorability comes from the fact that “Zależy jak leży” is short, simple, and most importantly—rhymes. I felt silly afterwards for not noticing that it rhymed. This turned out to be a clear case of how turning to existing translations for help rather than relying on personal fluency could lead my astray, because neither of the existing translations rhymed that line. Here’s what they had.

Bethell & Stoppard:

EDEK: Here we are. “My love is dead to the world.” ALA: What else? EDEK: No comment. ALA: Stop messing about—read. EDEK: I was reading—that’s a principle.

Manheim & Dzieduscycka:

EDEK: Here it is! “I love you, and you’re sound asleep.” ALA: That’s all? EDEK: “You made your bed, now lie in it.” ALA: Oh, come on, Eddie. Read. EDDIE: I did read. That’s a principle.

As you can see, both translations seemed to choose generically dismissive phrases, with no rhymes. The Manheim translation takes a stab at wit by using an idiom, which makes sense since—from what I could find—“Zależy jak leży” is also an idiom. But since I couldn’t think of an English idiom that meant “It depends”, I stuck with a version of the phrase “It depends” as that is a genuinely common English expression.” However, after the editor made her comment, I no longer felt beholden to such literalness. I ended up changing it to:

EDEK: Here it is. “I love you…and you’re asleep.” ALA: Anything else? EDEK: “Not today, go away.” ALA: Oh come on, just read. EDEK: I was reading. That’s a principle.

This new version manages to contain a short, funny rhyme that still conveys dismissiveness. And that made it a translation that felt truer to the spirit of the original, and that would ideally create more of the effect that the original creates in its target audience. Who know if it’s actually funnier or more quotable. But it was funnier to me.

Another example: At one point, Artur insults Ala, who has just cheated on him, by calling her “Ty kuro!” This translates literally as “You hen,” which is not something insulting, so I was a bit confused as to what it meant. The Manheim translation translated it as “You goose” while the Bethell translated it as “You whore.” Since the context and the actor’s intonation indicated he was giving a serious insult, I also chose at first to translate it as “You whore!” But the editor explained that “kuro” sounds a lot like an actually insulting word, “kurwo”, which can at times be translated as “whore.” The point of that line, therefore, is that he’s trying to insult Ala but can’t actually make himself say the insulting word—he is impotent and abstracted even in that moment. So I changed my translation to “You wh-horse!” This kept the idea that he was almost using the word “whore” but actually using an innocuous word for an animal.

*

When I started this project, I really wasn’t sure how much the translation would feel like “mine”. I assumed there was a good chance it would end up as some patchwork Frankenstein’s monster of my various sources, and if so, I intended to credit it as such. But as the process went on, I felt more and more ownership and authorship regarding my choices. This feeling increased as I came to understand the Polish better in my own right. It also increased the more I realized that I was bringing my own particular philosophy to bear when I made decisions.

I found myself thinking a lot about what matters in a translation of filmed dialogue, and how it differs from a text that is meant to be read or performed. As in all translation, movie translation requires making a tradeoff between loyalty and lyricism. As in all translation, one also has to decide how much of the character of the original language to preserve—the Polishness, Spanishness, Hindiness, etc—or to transmute into some cultural approximation in the target language. Different mediums also come along with different constraints. In the case of poetry, one might be constrained by rhyme or meter. In the case of drama, one might be constrained by whether or not a line will sound natural coming out of an actor’s mouth.

I noticed that there were choices I thought made sense for the script translations of Tango, but not for a filmed translation. For instance, both the Manheim and Bethell translations anglicize character names and remove diminutives. This is an understandable decision to make when translating a play that takes place in a neutral and ambiguous setting like Tango does. While there is a lot that is spiritually and contextually Polish about Tango, the specifics are not obviously Polish the way they are in something like Wesele ("The Wedding"). Wesele is another very famous Polish play, which is clearly set in the Poland of 1900 and is dense with Polish cultural references. Understandably, the English translation of Wesele by Noel Clark does not anglicize character names. But because Tango generalizes well, one may as well lean into that when composing a script that is meant to be performed by English-speaking actors for an English-speaking audience. If I was composing my own book version, I would strongly consider doing the same.

But filmed dialogue has not been generalized. The actors are delivering lines that are structured in a Polish way. They are saying Polish names and using Polish diminutives. An audience will be able to hear those names. And so, I tried to structure my translations in a way that would make use of what the actors were saying, and what an audience would be able to hear. I decided to leave in the Polish names and their diminutives—Artek, Arturek, Alunia, Edziu, etc. My experience from reading English translations of Russian novels is that while diminutives are a little confusing at first, one quickly gets used to it. Similarly, being familiar with Spanish, I couldn’t imagine English subtitles for something in Spanish turning say, “Pepito” into “Pepe” or “little Pepe.” It wouldn’t sound right. I figured I’d challenge people to understand at least one aspect of the actual Polish.

I placed a high priority on elucidating the acting. When translating dialogue for a dub, one wants the text to fit well with the film actor’s face (or animated character’s face), but half of the acting ends up being given to the voice actor doing the dub. The voice actor will elucidate the translation and film acting in their own way. But in the case of subtitles, the original actor is still doing all of the acting. They’re adding particular tones to particular words, and reacting in certain ways to the words that other characters say. Therefore, it was important to me to preserve as much of the nuance of those choices as possible. So I made an effort to translate everything the characters say—not to generalize at any point. It mattered to me to even translate filler words, since someone who doesn’t speak the language has no way of knowing if something that sounds like “uh” or “um” is actually an “uh” or “um” or a legitimate word. As I mentioned earlier, I also made an effort to structure sentences in English in a way that matched the Polish structure whenever possible. I put periods and commas where the actors paused, not just based on what might look correct on a page. If a Polish word sounded like an English word and meant the same thing, I tried to keep that word, and put it in the same place in the English sentence. Good acting will always speak for itself to some extent, and this performance is full of good acting. But it’s also a missed opportunity, even an insult, to not help clarify the choices that acting is made of—especially when it’s good.

In general, I was excited by how well subtitling a (good) performance of a play in its original language could provide access to the original spirit of that play. A different sort of access than reading or seeing a performance of the existing English translations. In a book translation of a script, it’s easy to justify taking liberties with the text. After all, some phrasings just sound better in English, right? And then once actors perform that text with its liberties, it’s another round in the game of telephone. When I first decided to make some subtitles for this Tango, I didn’t intend to translate it myself. I bought the Manheim translation, and figured I would just copy and paste it into subtitles, note the authorship at the beginning and end, and call it day. But it became immediately apparent that the translation would never work for subtitles, because the sentences were not arranged in a Polish way, were shorter or longer than in the Polish, and even occasionally cut, added, or mutated entire phrases from the original. The translation had mostly not changed the overall meaning of anything, but it didn’t match what was being performed in Polish. By virtue of needing (or choosing) to be loyal to the text as performed, I found myself being careful and precise in way in a way I wouldn’t necessarily have been otherwise. There was no room for wordiness, because the line deliveries didn’t allow it. I couldn’t add or delete things out of poetic license, because it would have been confusing when combined with what was on screen. Instead, I had to make things sound natural and poetic within the constraint of how long and in what way an actor was speaking.

The result, I think, is that it’s much clearer why this is considered a good play in its original context. You can read the existing English translations and understand just fine what the play is about. But there is a certain flab around that meaning. The script translations lose some of the joy in the biting precision of Mrożek’s wordplay, and the urgency and momentum of the dialogue. A performance in the original preserves that clarity, and a translation of a performance is (ideally) more likely to preserve that clarity along with it. This principle can be extended to various other aspects of the original, not just wordplay. Preserving diminutives, for example, adds shades to the way the characters interact that would be otherwise missing in an English performance.

In practice, of course, published translations tend to be executed with more care than subtitles. It’s rare that anyone in the English-speaking world talks about the translations of movies or TV shows, let alone filmed plays, with the same literary attention that is given to novels or poetry. I’ve long thought this was a mistake, as filmed dialogue can be as rich with meaning as any other kind of artistic use of language. If someone would publish a new translation of the book of a play, why not a new translation of a performance of it? Or of a movie? They all contain literary intent. And now that I’ve put my money where my mouth is, this seems even more obviously true than it did before. We’re missing out on experiencing art in new ways—both the original art, and the art of translation—by not treated filmed dialogue with the literary seriousness it deserves.

[thesublemon]

Theory, Reality, and 'Tango'

Happy to share a project I’ve been working on for the last few months. Around July, I happened upon a TV staging of the Polish play Tango by Sławomir Mrożek. Written in 1964, Tango is a classic of the mid-century Theater of the Absurd, as well as Polish avant-garde drama. It’s a highly famous play in Poland—a staple of high school curricula—but less well-known in the anglosphere these days. I enjoyed the staging a lot, and because it had no English subtitles, I thought I’d try to make some myself. This was a particularly fun project given that, as far as I know, the play hasn’t had a new English translation since 1968 [1]. I’ll use another post to talk a bit more about the translation process and the philosophy of translation that I found myself adopting—particularly how it differed from the philosophy I might have adopted if I was translating the play in book form, rather than a performance of it.

But for the moment, the long and short is that you can now watch Tango with my English translation on Youtube here. If you have a VPN (or are located in Poland), you can also watch on the Polish TVN website in better quality using a subtitle extension like Movie Subtitles or Substital. All subtitle files can be downloaded here.

As for the play. Tango takes place in a middle-class home of the 1960’s, and the drama centers on the dynamics between three generations of a single family. In Tango’s version of the world, permissiveness has won a complete cultural victory. Victorian traditionalism was overturned by the rebels and artists of the 1920’s, and all social values and conventions have since disappeared. Fed up with his family’s chaotic household, 25-year-old Artur, a member of the youngest generation, longs for his own form of rebellion. But with no conventions left to overthrow, the only rebellion remaining for Artur is rules and traditions. He attempts to instill order and re-impose tradition by force, but (avoiding specifics) it doesn’t go according to plan. In the end, no form of idealism wins in Tango. Not traditionalism, anti-traditionalism, or anti-anti-traditionalism. Instead, idealism ends up hollowed out and puppeted by those who are unscrupulous and willing to use violence to get what they want.

Tango struck me first because it was funny, and witty, and thematically felt startlingly relevant to the present day. This particular performance from 1999 that I’ve chosen to subtitle also struck me for being remarkably well-acted and well-staged. It’s tough to make absurdism feel emotionally genuine enough to have a dramatic effect, instead of descending into shallow pantomime and parody, and this rendition of Tango by director Maciej Englert pulls it off very well. The cast is comprised of some of Poland’s greatest stage actors of that time, and it shows.

But the play also made an impression on me because it seemed to be an unusual hybrid of theatrical modes, both in general and in the context of the Theater of the Absurd. Theater of the Absurd is often talked about as having a Western and an Eastern incarnation [2]. In the West, absurdism was considered existential and apolitical, while in the East—ie, in countries under Soviet control—absurdism was used to discuss ideas that were not safe to discuss directly. In reality, of course, this supposed division was not nearly so clear-cut. Especially since “Theater of the Absurd” wasn’t any kind of coherent artistic movement to begin with, but more of a general aesthetic trend [3]. Plenty of works that came out of the Western Theater of the Absurd had political attitudes, or at the very least observed dynamics with political implications [4]. And plenty of works that came out of the East depicted dynamics that resonated with people beyond those who lived within the Soviet bloc. This duality is especially alive in Tango, which is one of the reasons I found it such a fun and tricky play to pin down. On the one hand, one can read it as an allegory for, or commentary on, many specific things related to 19th and 20th century Polish history. On the other hand, the play’s ideas are also broad enough that it ends up feeling relevant to any number of cultures, eras, and situations.

This ink-blot quality is one of the reasons for the play’s lasting appeal. For example, how to read the collapse of values at the beginning of the play? Perhaps the social permissiveness refers to the actual liberalism of the 1920’s, and the failures of the intelligentsia that facilitated the Nazi takeover of Poland in the 1940’s. Or perhaps it refers to the destruction of decency and normalcy in the midst of war and occupation [5]. Or it refers to life on the shifting sands of Soviet dialectics, the struggle to create real meaning out of something that claims to be progressive, yet feels inherently insubstantial. Or it refers to a more general secular, postmodern condition. If values are arbitrary and self-created, then how does one choose what values to create? One reviewer of this staging observed how the impression Tango made had changed since 1964: "Artur's hysteria meant something different in the Polish People's Republic, a land of ideologues without ideals, than it does today. Searching for values at random was a mockery then—today it is perhaps one of the most moving scenes in the play.” 

(See also Martin Esslin in The Theater of the Absurd: “When Tango was first performed in Warsaw in 1964 it understandably produced a violent reaction: the audience interpreted the play’s message as a sardonic comment on Stalinism and its totalitarian structure of terror. But the play made an equally strong impact in Western Germany and other countries of non-Communist Europe…[T]he growth of arbitrary bureaucratic power, the erosion of political ideals and the consequent pursuit of power for its own sake by otherwise undistinguishable parties, led by crude, uncultured careerists, might also, after all, turn out to be a feature of…‘advanced’ Western societies.”)

All this said. I don’t think Tango is simply somehow “accidentally” about ideas that can be interpreted as being about something other than Poland’s immediate travails. Arguably, the duality exists in the text itself. The play is about Poland and Europe [6], it is in conversation with other Polish drama about Poland (Wesele, Dziady), as well as Polish absurdism (Witkacy, Gombrowicz). And it is also about things like values, and power, and art writ large, and is in conversation with Beckett, Ionesco, Chekhov, Shakespeare, and others. Specificity and universality feed each other—this is nothing new in art.

If anything, the tension between the specific and the universal seems like one of the biggest features of the play. Tango is a war between idea and reality, the abstract and the concrete. And this is another way in which it’s an unusual theatrical hybrid. You might even call it a theatrical identity crisis.

Broad history: Prior to the 19th century, Western theater did not tend to be realistic in the modern sense of it. Instead it was characterized by symbolism, exaggeration, and verse. Greek plays, opera, Shakespeare, Molière. Such theater could be subtle and true, but it did not generally aim for trompe l’oeil mimicry of real life, or have much interest in “regular” people and everyday events. Then after a 19th and 20th century turn towards realism (Chekhov, Ibsen, Shaw, etc), the Theater of the Absurd introduced a new and defiant kind of abstraction. In absurdist plays there might be internal, if absurd, logic, but the settings, characters and narratives tend to have only a limited amount of naturalism. Images are symbolic, language is Aesopian, and events take place in dreamy, generalized settings rather than a particular time and place. To the extent that absurdist plays use the concrete or naturalistic, it’s usually to immediately subvert it. Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, for instance, blares the Englishness of the characters and the setting, but in a way that is obviously nonsensical, and comedic (or horrific) precisely because it has only a superficial correspondence to the England of real life:

MRS. SMITH: There, it’s nine o’clock. We’ve drunk the soup, and eaten the fish and chips, and the English salad. The children have drunk English water. We’ve eaten well this evening. That’s because we live in the suburbs of London and because our name is Smith. [7]

Or The Lesson, another Ionesco, starts out in a naturalistically appointed room, with what could be naturalistic characters, but within two pages begins a jarring descent into blatant absurdity. Theater of the Absurd doesn’t just do away with realism, either. It also does away with the conventional narrative structures of both realistic and earlier, less-realistic theater. Various works in the Theater of the Absurd were called anti-theater for this reason. Instead of having a typical beginning, middle, and end, or problem-escalation-resolution, absurdist plays are often circular and unresolved. Vladimir and Estragon start Waiting for Godot waiting, and they finish it waiting. The endings of The Bald Soprano and The Lesson repeat their beginnings, like a mirror reflected in a mirror. Absurdity arises from the inescapable, Sisyphean nature of existential dilemmas, and this ends up reflected in the most basic structures of absurdist theater.

Compared to such plays, Tango makes a surprising amount of sense [8]. It has a beginning, middle, and end. It is not set in the real world, but it is set in “a” real world, with a vague but coherent history. The characters don’t speak like real people exactly, but they do have consistent motivations and personalities. They’re not anti-characters like the Smiths and Martins in The Bald Soprano. The play also contains various gestures towards naturalism. The idea of a play about regular people who live in a regular apartment, is taken straight from the realistic tradition. The stage instructions are detailed, insisting upon a set cluttered with specific items, with characters in specific clothes, all of which are taken from real life. Here’s an example from the beginning of Act III:

We see before us a conventional, bourgeois living room from half a century ago. The confusion, blurriness, and lack of contours are gone. The draperies, which had previously been strewn about—half-lying and half-hanging—giving the stage random folds and making it look like a rumpled bed, are now in their places and have become proper, regular draperies. The catafalque remains in the same place…but is now covered with napkins and trinkets, like an ordinary sideboard.

For a key moment of violence, Mrożek even makes a point of saying that the execution must be naturalistic:

Attention! This scene must be very realistic. Both blows must be performed in such a way that their theatrical fiction is not obvious. Have the revolver be made of rubber, or even feathers, or have [the actor] wear some kind of pad under [their] collar. It doesn't matter, as long as it doesn't look ‘theatrical’.

Tango also “makes sense” in that it (seemingly) contains the comprehensible allegory and symbolism of more conventional theater. Each of the characters could potentially be read as a representative of a different generation or some piece of the social fabric, much like the characters in Stanisław Wyspiański’s Wesele [9]. You can read grand-uncle Eugeniusz as the avatar of traditionalism—a class that supposedly cared about values, but in practice turned out to be craven and opportunistic. Or Artur’s father Stomil as the aging, ineffectual avant-garde. Or Artur’s cousin and fiancée Ala as “the people”, torn between Artur’s flavor of bullying idealism, and the vacant brutality of the family’s boorish houseguest Edek. 

Yet in spite of all of this “sense”, the play is undeniably absurdist, full of the kind of seeming nonsense typical of other absurdist theater. Artur punishes Eugeniusz by putting a birdcage on his head, or makes his grandmother lie on a catafalque. There are illogical exchanges like the following:

ARTUR: Will you be staying with us for long? ALA: I don’t know. I told my mother I might not come back. ARTUR: What did she say? ALA: Nothing. She wasn’t at home.

And in general, the events of the play progress in an absurd fashion. There’s no logical reason that Artur’s schemes for his family could actually change the social structure of the world. Supposedly serious things like murder and repression are casually and comedically invoked (until they aren’t).

ARTUR: You know what, Father? Why don’t we try [killing Edek] after all? There’s no risk. At worst, you’ll shoot him. STOMIL: You think so?

In other words, Tango references and evokes, in both form and content, the last few hundred years of Western theater. The cultural call-and-response of tradition, rebellion, and counter-reformation that it depicts parallels the artistic call-and-response of traditional theater, realism, and absurdism. It is bogged down by theatrical history much as Artur is bogged down by social history. Or as the family's apartment is bogged down by material history:

This table, even more than the interior as a whole, gives the impression of confusion, randomness and sloppiness. Each plate, each item, comes from a different service, from a different era and is in a different style.

There’s a certain confusion and chaos surrounding what kind of play this is supposed to be. Should a playwright comment on a social situation, express a human condition, or experiment with form? What kind of play is good for art? Good for people? Good in general? Tango features outright mockery of empty avant-garde theater, and an interesting ambivalence about symbolism. On the one hand, the play clearly uses symbolism. On the other hand, it was written in a context in which symbolism and indirectness were required in order for it to be performed in its original language behind the Iron Curtain.

Throughout the play, the characters debate the value of “form”, “reality” and “idea”, and how and whether to either achieve or integrate or discard them. It is the age-old debate, in both society and art, of how to balance theory with reality, truth with artifice. But–just as in history–none of the characters can resolve the debate, and most are hypocrites about their positions. The characters crave and fear reality in equal measure. Stomil, who makes impotent experimental theater, champions the idea of going “beyond form”--ie, going beyond things like rules and abstractions. He denounces the rule-loving Artur as a “vulgar formalist” and celebrates Edek for his “authenticity.” But for all that Stomil claims that his art is trying to achieve some sort of grand concreteness, his creations and explanations are all highly inaccessible and theoretical (after shocking his audience by setting off a gun: “By direct action–we create unity between the moment of action and perception”). And he admits that he doesn’t actually like Edek, who is sleeping with his wife Eleonora (“I’ve had my eye on that scoundrel for a long time. You don’t know how much I’d love to finish him off.”). Meanwhile Artur claims to want a return to order and tradition, but he also wants to rebel–something inherently destabilizing.

STOMIL: What do you want exactly, tradition? ARTUR: World order! STOMIL: Is that all? ARTUR: And the right to rebel.

And when he tries to follow through with his plans he finds the results hollow and unsatisfying. He finds that reality erodes principle, and yet principles that are not animated by an idea, that is in turn animated by reality, lack vitality and endurance. He strives for “a system in which rebellion is one with order, and nothingness with existence” that “will transcend contradictions entirely!” Much like Stomil with his theatrical gunshot, Artur thinks he can conquer such contradictions by wielding force–something seemingly fundamentally “real”. But in the end, his talent turns out to mainly be in exalting the concept of force, rather than actually embodying it.

Meanwhile Eugeniusz supposedly wants a return to propriety. Not so much order, like Artur, but an appearance of moral rectitude, the rituals of civilization (“Start a family. Brush your teeth. Eat with a fork and knife! Make the world sit up straight again instead of slouching.”). He detests Edek’s “filth” and the “degradation” of the rest of the family. Yet for all his love of the forms of properness, no one is more willing to lower himself than Eugeniusz. He is quick to abandon his supposed principles and attach himself to whoever has power.

This sense of contradiction and call-and-response between theory and reality is even echoed in the structure of the play. The first act starts out as more absurdistly symbolist–the characters play rhyming card games, Artur metes out his birdcage and catafalque punishments, Ala turns out to have been hidden under a table the whole time, Stomil puts on a play about Adam and Eve. Then the second act becomes more naturalistic, with long one-on-one, interpersonal conversations that contain more conventional dramatic stakes. And finally the third act combines both modes. The third act is full of both abstract ideas and images–the family in their tight old-fashioned clothes, Artur’s quest for a unifying philosophy–and regular human drama related to marriage and infidelity. Until it finally ends in a moment of violent naturalism, in the form of that realistic blow (“Attention! This scene must be very realistic.”).

Taken as a whole, Tango follows the pattern and tenor of dialectical debate, with satirical circularity. Soviet dialectics promised a means of navigating and resolving contradictions. It promised a means of understanding the cycles of history, and existing in the correct moral relation to them. Add more context, add more cleverness, and the cycles are no longer confusing. You can win them. In practice though, this version of dialectics often merely acted as an elaborate justification for otherwise unjustifiable political ends [10]. But unlike in a dialectical debate, Tango makes the crude, concrete conclusions explicit. The winner of Tango is not a dialectician. The winner is violent reality, simply wearing philosophy’s jacket. 

What Maciej Englert’s staging understands, and one of the reasons it had such an effect on me, is the real human feeling that suffuses the play. Artur’s confusion and distress are real. As is Stomil’s frustrated impotence, Ala’s love, or even Eugenia’s fear and irritation. The cozy, chaotic naturalism of the set (taken straight from the script directions) emphasizes this human scale. Tango is not simply a detached satire of Stalinism, “some abstract hypothesis, a play on words, a product of intellectual imagination.” It is about the tension between the human and everything more than human–and in order for that tension to work, the human aspect needs to be just as apparent as the abstract aspect. To paraphrase a good review, Artur in this production is both scary and pitiful, human and symbol. Eleonora seems at first a caricature, but “becomes unexpectedly moving in the scene in which she talks humanly, without a mask, to Ala.” While Ala is full of “the truth of unhappy feelings...the cynicism that usually dominates this role in other stagings is put in quotation marks; [she] only pretends to be nonchalant towards life.” And this is also why it is all the more crushing when both the human and the abstract turn out to have been paving the way for something worse, something they both lose out to.

*

Theater of Absurd appeals to me at the moment. It feels relevant. To the world, to my life. And the way Tango combines the Western and Eastern forms of the absurd gets at why. In the “Eastern” form, absurdism springs from a breakdown of logical reasoning that is imposed by external forces: war, authoritarian whim. Hence plays like Julius Hay’s The Horse, which tells the story of Caligula appointing his horse Incitatus to the Roman Senate, leading the population to start acting like horses. Or Václav Havel’s The Memorandum, in which bureaucratic characters are forced to communicate in an overly-rational neo-language that none of them can understand. In the “Western” form, absurdism springs from a more existential, post-modern breakdown of logical reasoning: how is one to make sense of existence if there is no objective logic? If all of the former institutions of meaning–religion, government, class, materialism, and so on–are meaningless, then what is left? And just as in Tango, it often feels today as if those two forms of absurdity have combined. If they were ever even separate.

No, of course I do not live under a totalitarian state, in the present-day West. I do not worry about gulags or famine or being hauled off in the night for saying the wrong thing. But there is a sense of institutional decay, and a sense of pretending otherwise about this. A sense that important details of my life are determined by obscure power struggles between people who are incompetent or ill-intentioned, or both. A sense of people going insane, and feeling proud of it all the while. A sense of nihilistic chaos lurking at the door, and people saying “Would it be so bad to let it in?” Meanwhile the internet accelerates countless forms of absurdity. It instills a surveillance mindset. It destroys old forms of reverence, and creates new, bizarre ones. Now you can see the most pathetic aspects of politicians and artists and intellectuals laid open on social media. Now you can see regular people turn themselves into grifters, beggars, and compulsive performers. It would almost be more dignified if people did this due to explicit government repression, or out of purely mercenary ambition. Instead of out of a more basic human, animal sense of precarity. Am I important? Am I safe? Do I have enough? Do I belong? Do you like me? Do you like me? Do you like me? 

Former markers of respectability are losing their meaning. Respectability itself is losing meaning. And quite possibly these things deserve to be destroyed, perhaps this is just normal cultural turnover, but it’s not yet clear what is waiting to grow out of the rubble. For a while, maybe a decade, there was a swing towards authenticity. Fetishistic authenticity usually, but authenticity nonetheless. Hipster natural material aesthetics–being into leather, wood, iron, pickling. Relatability, parasociality, confession. This all still exists to some degree, but has lost much of its awkward earnestness, some genuine desire to be post-ironic, some kind of novelty. The fakery of amateurism rather than cynicism. Now fakery and authenticity are so intertwined it starts to feel like both have lost their meaning. Performance and entertainment are endemic, except they’ve never felt less like entertainment, or more like narcotics. Performance gains its power from its tension with truth, reality. Without reality, performance is impotent. And yet it’s never been more important. Absurd.

The internet simultaneously creates an unprecedented awareness of reality, and an unprecedented detachment from it. There have long been ways in which one could be awash in information and entertainment from waking until sleep. Television, books. There have been means of stupefaction for even longer. Intoxicants of all kinds. But the internet is more than just a stream of information in which people can lie down, open their jaws, and passively drink. It is interactive, frequently intensely so. The information, unlike in a book, is often related to what is happening right now. And unlike in a paper or on the news, the information is often delivered by people in one’s social circle. Suddenly one is aware of a thousand different things, horrible and otherwise, and not only that, the awareness comes along with the opportunity for action–money, publicity, simple acknowledgement–and hundreds of people one knows can see that action. You can live your life in a holodeck world. Yet down the line, reality keeps being real, and is affected by that holodeck world–mortally and trivially. These are not new observations really. Still, that combination of interactivity, intensity and detachment turns “reality” into something that is both omnipresent and intangible. Absurd.

It’s always been absurd. “Reality” has always been both obvious and ineffable, something to philosophically struggle with. “Truth” has always been difficult to grasp, and difficult to represent. Map and territory, forever locked in combat. But just as circumstances made this fundamental absurdity feel closer to the surface in the mid-20th century, so does it feel closer now. Theater of the Absurd arrived on the heels of decades of talk of perfectibility. Nazi perfectibility, Soviet perfectibility, even the perfectibility of the liberal, capitalist order. Promises of surmounting the lesser aspects of humanity. Purge or plan society in the right way, and you’ll be on the way to becoming better than human. Yet time and again, those lesser aspects had a way of revealing and reasserting themselves. Murder, cruelty, exploitation. Pettiness, cowardice, selfishness. All of these things, it turned out, could thrive regardless (or because) of a system’s stated ideals. And perhaps we’re in another phase of finding out that the latest means of elevating humanity is simply enabling new and twisted manifestations of the same old problems. 

Idealism loses many times over in Tango. And each time it deserves to. The traditionalists repress, the rebels create listless chaos, and Artur’s anti-rebellion leads to repression once again, but this time with even less meaning behind it. Yet when crudeness without idealism–reality without idea–wins, it’s even more horrifying. So what’s the answer? Is there an escape? Will Godot ever appear?

Tango proposes the pessimistic view. Yes, the endless generational cycles of rebellion and counter-rebellion can end. The search for meaning and selfhood can end. History can end–in nightmare. Perhaps that’s not a productive view to live by. Certainly one could write an entire other essay about the persistence of human virtue. But sometimes it is a view that is worth inhabiting for a while.

*

[1] And because, it must be said, I did not know Polish at the time I started the project. The two previous translations were both written in 1968. One is by Ralph Manheim and Teresa Dzieduscycka, published by Grove Press. It can still be found in print as part of The Mrożek Reader, or used. The other translation is by Nicholas Bethell and Tom Stoppard. It is not in print that I know of. I was able to find it used in the collection Three East European Plays. Both translations have their strengths and weaknesses. Overall though, I wasn’t a huge fan of either one. They each do the job in their own way, but I also found them to be a bit wordy in a way that blunted the tight, biting quality of the humor of the original. If I had to choose, I would lean towards the Bethell and Stoppard translation for reading and the Manheim and Dzieduscycka translation for performing.

[2] See Marketa Goetz Stankiewicz in “Slawomir Mrozek: Two Forms of the Absurd” for a good discussion of this. Both as it applies to Theater of the Absurd generally, and to Mrożek specifically. [jstor] [scribd]

[3] From Martin Esslin’s introduction to The Theater of the Absurd:

It must be stressed, however, that the dramatists whose work is here discussed do not form part of any self-proclaimed or self-conscious school or movement. On the contrary, each of the writers in question is an individual who regards himself as a lone outsider, cut off and isolated in his private world. Each has his own personal approach to both subject-matter and form; his own roots, sources, and background. If they also, very clearly and in spite of themselves, have a good deal in common, it is because their work most sensitively mirrors and reflects the preoccupations and anxieties, the emotions and thinking of many of their contemporaries in the Western world.

[4] From Stankiewicz, “Slawomir Mrozek: Two Forms of the Absurd”:

to the Warsaw audience Ionesco and Beckett are felt to be political writers. Their characters, like Mrozek's slogan-spouting little men, are seen as victims of a specific way of life forced upon them. The ‘enemy’ can be identified, or rather he is discovered, while the laughter still echoes through the theater.

[5] Take this from The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz, describing the mental shock of conquest in WW2 Poland:

[A man’s] first stroll along a street littered with glass from bomb-shattered windows shakes his faith in the ‘naturalness’ of his world. The wind scatters papers from hastily evacuated offices, papers labeled ‘Confidential’ or ‘Top Secret’ that evoke visions of safes, keys, conferences, couriers, and secretaries. Now the wind blows them through the street for anyone to read…he stops before a house split in half by a bomb, the privacy of people's homes—the family smells, the warmth of the beehive life, the furniture preserving the memory of loves and hatreds—cut open to public view…overnight money loses its value and becomes a meaningless mass of printed paper….Once, had he stumbled upon a corpse on the street, he would have called the police…Now he knows he must avoid the dark body lying in the gutter, and refrain from asking unnecessary questions…Everyone ceases to care about formalities, so that marriage, for example, comes to mean little more than living together....Respectable citizens used to regard banditry as a crime. Today, bank robbers are heroes because the money they steal is destined for the Underground….The nearness of death destroys shame. Men and women…copulate in public, on the small bit of ground surrounded by barbed wire—their last home on earth.

[6] See Daniel Gerould’s interpretation from The Mrożek Reader: 

Tango takes the family as a microsociety, or scale model, for studying the history of modern Europe. The disintegration of the three different generations of the farcical Stomil clan, each representing a further step in the historical debacle, charts the decline and fall of European civilization from turn-of-the-century liberalism through interwar avant-garde experimentation to the present-day triumph of totalitarianism. By the use of parody and allusion (citations come from Shakespeare and the Polish romantic and modernist traditions), Mrozek creates a multi-layered work—a museum of modern European art, manners, and morals—which serves as a prism for viewing the relations of culture to power and for assessing the intelligentsia’s responsibility for glorifying force as the ultimate value.

[7] The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco, trans. Donald M. Allen.

[8] Even compared to much of Mrożek’s work prior to Tango. 

[9] Written in 1901, Wesele (or “The Wedding”) is one of the preeminent works of Polish theater. It tells the story of a wedding party celebrating the mixed-class marriage of a young city poet to a peasant girl. The party is made up of guests from all walks of Polish life, and they mingle uneasily over the course of the night. Ghosts from Polish history and mythology appear, exacerbating the social tensions.

[10] See The Captive Mind for a description of the experience of living in a political and intellectual atmosphere in which Soviet dialectical materialism was the dominant philosophy. It’s difficult to pick any one particular quote, but here are a couple:

Dialectics is the ‘logic of contradictions’ applicable, according to the wise men, to those cases where formal logic is inadequate, namely to phenomena in motion. Because human concepts as well as the phenomena observed by men are in motion, ‘contradictions contained in the concepts are but reflections, or translations into the language of thought, of those contradictions which are contained in the phenomena.’ [...] The Method exerts a magnetic influence on contemporary man because it alone emphasizes, as has never before been done, the fluidity and interdependence of phenomena. Since the people of the twentieth century find themselves in social circumstances where even the dullest mind can see that ‘naturalness’ is being replaced by fluidity and interdependence, thinking in categories of motion seems to be the surest means of seizing reality in the act. The Method is mysterious; no one understands it completely–but that merely enhances its magic power. Its elasticity, as exploited by the Russians, who do not possess the virtue of moderation, can result at times in the most painful edicts. Nevertheless, history shows us that a healthy, reasoning mind was rarely an effective guide through the labyrinth of human affairs. The Method profits from the discoveries of Marx and Engels, from their moral indignation, and from the tactics of their successors who have denied the rightness of moral indignation. It is like a snake, which is undoubtedly a dialectical creature: ‘Daddy, does a snake have a tail?’ asked the little boy. ‘Nothing but a tail,’ answered the father. This leads to unlimited possibilities, for the tail can begin at any point.

Paradoxical as it may seem, it is this subjective impotence that convinces the intellectual that the one Method is right. Everything proves it is right. Dialectics: I predict the house will burn; then I pour gasoline over the stove. The house burns; my prediction is fulfilled. Dialectics: I predict that a work of art incompatible with socialist realism will be worthless. Then I place the artist in conditions in which such a work is worthless. My prediction is fulfilled.

*

SOURCES

This list is not academically exhaustive, and isn’t trying to be. I was limited by what I could read in five months–both in terms of personal interest and ability, and in terms of what I could get access to. But it should give a general idea re: what has informed this post.

Plays & Fiction:

The Bald Soprano (Eugène Ionesco, trans. Donald M. Allen), The Lesson (Eugène Ionesco, trans. Donald M. Allen), Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett), Endgame (Samuel Beckett), The Maids (Jean Genet, trans. Bernard Frechtman), Tango (Sławomir Mrożek, trans. Ralph Manheim and Teresa Dzieduscycka, trans. Nicholas Bethell and Tom Stoppard), The Police (Sławomir Mrożek, trans. Nicholas Bethell), The Elephant (Sławomir Mrożek, trans. Konrad Syrop), The Memorandum (Václav Havel, trans. Vera Blackwell), The Horse (Julius Hay, trans. Peter Hay), Hamlet (William Shakespeare), Macbeth (William Shakespeare), Pygmalion (George Bernard Shaw), The Wedding (Stanisław Wyspiański, trans. Noel Clark), The Marriage (Witold Gombrowicz, trans. Louis Iribarne), Dziady, Part III (Adam Mickiewicz, trans. Google, trans. Count Potocki of Montalk), The Moon is Down (John Steinbeck), Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, trans. David McDuff), War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude), 1984 (George Orwell), Chekhov: The Major Plays (Anton Chekhov, trans. Ann Dunnigan)

Filmed adaptations:

Tango (1999, dir. Maciej Englert), Wesele (1972, dir. Andrzej Wajda), Wesele (2019, dir. Wawrzyniec Kostrzewski), Dziady (1997, dir. Jan Englert), Ślub (1992, dir. Jerzy Jarocki)

Non-fiction:

Anonymous, trans. Philip Boehm. A Woman in Berlin. 1954.

Juliette Bretan.“‘Life Makes Most Sense at the Height of Nonsense’: Interwar Polish Absurdism.” October 2020. [link]

Jan Bończa-Szabłowski. “The young one spoils everything.” November 3, 2010. [link]

Robert Brustein. “Foreword”, Chekhov: The Major Plays. 1982.

Michał Bujanowicz. “On Sławomir Mrożek - Playwright’s Tango.” April 2004. [link] 

Michael Childers. “The Direction and Presentation of Tango.” 1977. [link]

Martin Esslin. Theater of the Absurd, Third Edition. 2001.

Martin Esslin. “Introduction,” Three East European Plays. 1970.

Daniel Gerould. “Introduction: Mrożek for the Twenty-First Century,” The Mrożek Reader. 2004.

Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, trans. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward. Journey Into the Whirlwind. 1967.

Malwina Głowacka. “Tango.” Więź, No. 11. November 1, 1997. [link]

Joanna Godlewska. “Tango.” Przegląd Powszechny, No. 9. 1997. [link]

Jacek Kopciński. “Sleep and awakening.” March 2019. [link]

Jan Kott, trans. L. Krzyzanowski. “Introduction: Face and Grimace, ” The Marriage. 1969.

Janusz R. Kowalczyk. “Tender Irony.” Rzeczpospolita, No. 14. June 19, 1997. [link]

Magnus J. Kryński. “Mrozek, Tango, and an American Campus.” The Polish Review, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring, 1970). [jstor]

Keith Lowe. Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II. 2012.

Wojciech Majcherek. “The Last ‘Tango’ in Warsaw.” Express Wieczorny, No. 140. June 17, 1997. [link]

Czesław Miłosz, trans. Jane Zielonko. The Captive Mind. 1953.

Michael C. O’Neill. “A Collage of History in the Form of Mrozek’s Tango.” The Polish Review, Vol. 28, No. 2 (1983). [jstor]

Jerzy Peterkiewicz. “Introduction: The Straw Man at a Wedding,” The Wedding. 1998.

Jacek Sieradzki. “The author of ‘Tango’ dances with us.” Polityka, No. 37. September 13, 1997. [link]

Marketa Goetz Stankiewicz. “Slawomir Mrozek: Two Forms of the Absurd”. Contemporary Literature

Vol. 12, No. 2 (Spring, 1971). [jstor] [scribd]

Mardi Valgemae. “Allegory of the Absurd: An Examination of Four East European Plays.” Comparative Drama, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 1971). [jstor]

Jacek Wakar. “Great ‘Tango’ for the opening of a new stage.” Życie Warszawy. June 16, 1997. [link]

Piotr Zaremba. “Important ‘Wedding’ Anno domini 2019.” February 19, 2019. [link]

“Tango.” FilmPolski.pl. [link]

[thesublemon]

best picture

For the first time in a long time, I watched all of the movies nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars this year. Partly on a whim, partly for a piece I’ve been working on for a while about what is going wrong in contemporary artmarking. I cannot say that the experience made me feel any better or worse about contemporary movies than I already felt, which was pretty bad. But sometimes to write about a hot stove, you gotta put your hand on one. So. The nominees for coldest stove are:

Poor Things. Did not like enough to finish. I always want to like something that is making an effort at originality, strangeness, or style. Unfortunately, the execution of those things in this movie felt somehow dull and thin. Hard to explain how. Maybe the movie’s motif of things mashed together (baby-woman, duck-dog, etc) is representative. People have been mashing things together since griffins, medleys, Avatar the Last Airbender’s animals, Nickelodeon’s Catdog, etc. Thing + thing is elementary-level weird. And while there’s nothing wrong with a simple, or well-worn premise, there is a greater burden on an artist to do something interesting with it, if they go that route. And Poor Things does not. Its themes are obvious and belabored (the difficulty of self-actualization in a world that violently infantilizes you) and do not elevate the premise. There’s a fine line between the archetypal and the hackish, and this movie falls on the wrong side of it. It made me miss Crimes of the Future (2022), a recent Cronenberg that was authentically original and strange, with the execution to match.

Anatomy of a Fall. Solid, but not stunning. The baseline level of what a ‘good’ movie should be. It was written coherently and economically, despite its length. It told a story that drew you along. I wanted to know what happened, which is the least you can ask from storytelling. It had some compelling scenes that required a command of character and drama to write—particularly the big argument scene. The cinematography was not interesting, but it was not annoying either. It did its job. This was not, however, a transcendent movie.

Oppenheimer. Did not like enough to finish. But later forced myself to, just so no one could accuse me of not knowing what I was talking about when I said I disliked it. I felt like I was being pranked. The Marvel idea of what a prestige biopic should be. Like Poor Things, it telegraphed its artsiness and themes and has raked in accolades for its trouble. But obviousness is not the same as goodness and this movie is not good. The imagery is painfully literal. A character mentions something? Cut to a shot of it! No irony or nuance added by such images—just the artistry of a book report. The dialogue pathologically tells instead of shows. It constantly, cutely references things you might have heard of, the kind of desperate audience fellation you see in soulless franchise movies. Which is a particularly jarring choice given the movie’s subject matter. ‘Why didn’t you get Einstein for the Manhattan project’ Strauss asks, as if he’s saying ‘Why didn’t you get Superman for the Avengers?’ If any of this referentiality was an attempt to say something about mythologization, it failed—badly. The movie is stuffed with famous and talented actors, but it might as well not have been, given how fake every word out of their mouths sounded. Every scene felt like it had been written to sound good in a trailer, rather than to tell a damn story. All climax and no cattle.

Barbie. Did not like enough to finish. It had slightly more solidity in its execution than I was afraid it would have, so I will give it that. If people want this to be their entertainment I will let them have it. But if they want this to be their high cinema I will have to kill myself. Barbie being on this list reminds me of the midcentury decades of annual movie musical nominations for Best Picture. Sometimes deservingly. Other times, less so. The Music Man is great, but it’s not better than 8 1/2  or The Great Escape, neither of which were nominated in 1963. Musicals tend to appeal to more popular emotions, which ticket-buyers and award-givers tend to like, and critics tend to dislike. I remember how much Pauline Kael and Joan Didion hated The Sound of Music (which won in 1966), and have to ask myself if in twenty years I’ll think of my reaction to Barbie the same way that I think of those reviews: justified, but perhaps beside the point of other merits. Thing is. Say what you want about musicals, but that genre was alive back then. It was vital. Bursting with creativity. For all Kael’s bile, even she acknowledged that The Sound of Music was “well done for what it is.” [1] Contemporary cinema lacks such vitality, and Barbie is laden with symptoms of the malaise. It repeatedly falls back on references to past aesthetic successes (2001: A Space Odyssey, Singin’ in the Rain, etc) in order to have aesthetic heft. It has a car commercial in the middle. It’s about a toy from 60 years ago and politics from 10 years ago. It tries to wring some energy and meaning from all of that but not enough to cover the stench of death. I’d prefer an old musical any day.

American Fiction. Was okay. It tried to be clever about politics, but ended up being clomping about politics. At the end of the day, it just wasn’t any more interesting than any other ‘intellectual has a mid-life crisis’ story, even with the ‘twist’ of it being from a black American perspective. Even with it being somewhat self-aware of this. But it could have been a worse mid-life crisis story. The cinematography was terrible. It was shot like a sitcom. Much of the dialogue was sitcom-y too. I liked the soundtrack, what I could hear of it. The attempts at style and meta (the characters coming to life, the multiple endings) felt underdeveloped. Mostly because they were only used a couple times. In all, it felt like a first draft of a potentially more interesting movie. 

The Zone of Interest.Wanted to like it more than I did. Unfortunately, you get the point within about five minutes. If you’ve seen the promotional image of the people in the garden, backgrounded by the walls of Auschwitz, then you’ve already seen the movie. Which means that all the rest of the movie ends up feeling like pretentious excess instead of moving elaboration. It seemed very aware of itself as an Important Movie and rested on those laurels, cinematically speaking, in a frustrating way. It reminded me of video art. I felt like I had stepped through a black velvet drape into the side room of a gallery, wondering at what point the video started over. And video art has its place, but it is a different medium. Moreover video art at its best, like a movie at its best, takes only the time it needs to say what it needs to say. 

Past Lives. I’m a human being, and I respond to romance. I appreciate the pathos of sweet yearning and missed chances. And I understand how the romance in this movie is a synecdoche for ambivalent feelings about many kinds of life choices, particularly the choice to be an immigrant and choose one culture over another. The immigrant experience framing literalizes the way any choice can make one foreign to a past version of oneself, or the people one used to know, even if in another sense one is still the same person. So, I appreciate the emotional core of what (I believe) this movie was going for, and do think it succeeded in some respects. And yet…I was very irritated by most of its artistic choices. I found the three principal characters bland and therefore difficult to care about, sketched with only basic traits besides things like Striving and Being In Love. Why care who they’d be in another life if they have no personalities in this one? It’s fine to make characters symbols instead of humans if the symbolic tapestry of a movie is interesting and rich, but the symbolic tapestry of this movie was quite simple and straightforward. Not that that last sentence even matters much, since the movie clearly wanted you to feel for the characters as human beings, not just symbols. Visually, the cinematography was dull and diffuse, with composition that was either boring or as subtle as a hammer to the head.

Maestro. Did not like enough to finish. Something strange and wrong about this movie. It attempts to perform aesthetic mimicry with impressive precision—age makeup, accents, period cinematography—but this does not make the movie a better movie. At most it creates spectacle, at worst it creates uncanny valleys. It puts one on the lookout for irregularities, instead of allowing one to disappear into whatever the movie is doing. Something amateurishly pretentious in the execution. And not in the fun, respectable way, like a good student film. (My go-to example for a movie that has an art-school vibe in a pleasant way is The Reflecting Skin). There’s something desperate about it instead. It has the same disease as Oppenheimer, of attempting to do a biopic in a ‘stylish’ way without working on the basics first. Fat Man and Little Boy is a less overtly stylish rendition of the same subject as Oppenheimer, but far more cinematically successful to me, because it understands those basics. I would prefer to see the Fat Man and Little Boy of Leonard Bernstein’s life unless a filmmaker proves that they can do something with style beyond mimicry and flash.

The Holdovers. Did not like enough to finish. It tries to be vintage, but outside of a few moments, it does not succeed either at capturing what was good about the aesthetic it references, or at using the aesthetic in some other interesting way. The cinematography apes the tropes of movies and TV from the story’s time period, but doesn't have interesting composition in its own right. It lacks the solidity that comes from original seeing. (Contrast with something like Planet Terror, in which joyous pastiche complements the original elements.) The acting is badly directed. Too much actorliness is permitted. Much fakeness in general between the acting, writing, and visual language. If a movie with this same premise was made in the UK in the 60’s or 70's it would probably be good. As-is the movie just serves to make me sad that the ability to make such movies is apparently lost and can only be hollowly gestured at. That said, the woman who won best supporting actress did a good job. She was the only one who seemed to be actually acting.

Killers of the Flower Moon. The only possible winner. It is not my favorite of Scorsese’s movies, but compared to the rest of the lineup it wins simply by virtue of being a movie at all. How to define ‘being a movie’? Lots of things I could say that Killers of the Flower Moon has and does would also be superficially true of other movies in this cohort. Things like: it tells a story, with developed characters who drive that story. Or: it uses its medium (visuals, sound) to support its story and its themes. The difference comes down to richness, specificity, control, and a je ne sais quois that is beyond me to describe at the moment. Compare the way Killers of the Flower Moon uses a bygone cinematic style (the silent movie) to the way that Maestro and The Holdovers do. Killers of the Flower Moon uses a newsreel in its opening briefly and specifically. The sequence sets the scene historically, and gives you the necessary background with the added panache of confident cuts and music. It’s useful to the story and it’s satisfying to watch. Basics. But the movie doesn’t limit itself to that, because it’s a good movie. The sequence also sets up ideas that will be continuously developed over the course of the movie.* And here’s the kicker—the movie doesn’t linger on this sequence. You get the idea, and it moves on to even more ideas. Also compare this kind of ideating to American Fiction’s. When I said that American Fiction’s moments of style felt underdeveloped, I was thinking of movies like Killers of the Flower Moon, which weave and evolve their stylistic ideas throughout the entire runtime.

*(Visually, it places the Osage within a historical medium that the audience probably does not associate with Native Americans, or the Osage in particular. Which has a couple of different effects. First, it acts as a continuation of the gushing oil from the previous scene. It’s an interruption. A false promise. Seeming belonging and power, but framed all the while by a foreign culture. Meanwhile potentially from the perspective of that culture, it’s an intrusion on ‘their’ medium. And of course, this promise quickly decays into tragedy and death. The energy of the sequence isn’t just for its own sake—it sets up a contrast. But on a second, meta level it establishes the movie’s complicated relationship to media and storytelling. Newsreels, photos, myths, histories, police interviews, and a radio play all occur over the course of the movie. And there’s the movie Killers of the Flower Moon itself. Other people’s frames are contrasted with Mollie’s narration. There’s a repeated tension between communication as a method of knowing others and a method of controlling them—or the narrative of them—which plays out in both history and personal relationships.)

Or here’s another example: When Mollie and Ernest meet and he drives her home for the first time, we see their conversation via the car’s rearview mirrors. This is a bit of cinematic language that has its origins in mystery and paranoia. You see it in things like Hitchcock or The X-Files or film noir. By framing the scene with this convention, the movie turns what is superficially a romantic meet-cute (to quote a friend) into something bubbling with uneasiness and dread. This is not nostalgia—this is just using visuals to create effects. It doesn’t matter if you’ve seen anything that uses the convention before, although knowing the pedigree might add to your enjoyment. The watchfulness suggested by the mirrors and Ernest’s cut-off face will still add an ominous effect. It works for the same reason it works in those other things. Like the newsreel, it is a specific and concise stylistic choice, and it results in a scene that is doing more than just one thing.

In general, the common thread I noticed as I watched these nominees, was the tendency to have the ‘idea’ of theme or style, and then stop there. It’s not that the movies had nothing in them. There were ideas, there was use of the medium, there was meaning to extract. There were lots of individually good moments. But they tended to feel singular, or repetitive, or tacked on. Meanwhile contemporary viewers are apparently so impressed by the mere existence of theme or style, that being able to identify it in a movie is enough to convince many that the movie is also good at those things. The problem with this tendency—in both artists and audiences—is that theme and style are not actually some extra, remarkable, inherently rarifying property of art. Theme emerges naturally from a story with any kind of coherence or perspective. And style emerges naturally from any kind of artistic attitude. They are as native as script, or narrative, or character. A movie’s theme and style might not be interesting, just like its story or dialogue might not be interesting, but if the movie is at all decent, they should exist. What makes a movie good or bad, then, is how it executes its component parts—including theme and style—in service of the whole. When theme is well-executed it is well-developed. Contemporary movies, unfortunately, seem to have confused ‘well-developed’ with ‘screamingly obvious.’ A theme does not become well-developed by repetition. It becomes well-developed by iterationand integration. Theme is like a melody. Simply repeating a single melody over and over does not result in the song becoming more interesting or entertaining. It becomes tedious. However, if you modify the melody each time you play it, or diverge from the melody and then return to it, that can get exciting. It results in different angles on the same idea, such that the idea becomes more complex over time, instead of simply louder.

Oppenheimer wasprobably the worst offender in this regard. Just repeat your water drops, crescendoing noise, or a line about ‘destroying the world’, and that’s the same as nuance, right? Split scenes into color and black and white and that’s the same as structure, right? That’s the same as actually conveying a difference between objectivity and interiority (or another dichotomy) via the drama or visual composition contained in the scenes, right? When I watched many of these movies, I kept thinking of a behind-the-scenes story from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The story goes that Joss Whedon was directing Sarah Michelle Gellar in some scene, and when the take was over he told her how great she was, and that he could see right where the music would come in. And Gellar replied that if he was thinking about the music, he clearly wasn’t getting enough from her acting alone. This conversation then supposedly informed Whedon’s approach to “The Body,” a depiction of the immediate aftermath of death that is considered one of the best episodes of television ever made, and which has no non-diegetic music whatsoever. Not to imply that music is necessarily a crutch, or to pretend that “The Body” is lacking in other forms of stylization (it is a very style-ish episode). But more to illustrate the way that it is easy to forget to make the most of all aspects of a medium, particularly the most fundamental ones, once one has gotten used to what a final product is supposed to feel like. 

And that’s why most of these movies don’t feel like movies. They create the gestalt of a movie or a ‘cinematic’ moment—often literally through direct vintage imitation—without a sense of the first principles. Or demonstrating a sense of them, anyway. Who needs AI when the supposedly highest level of human filmmakers are already cannibalistically cargo-culting the medium just fine.

[1] “The Sound of Money (The Sound of Music and The Singing Nun).” The Pauline Kael Reader. (This book contains the full text of the original review, rather than the abbreviated review that I linked earlier.) 

[thesublemon]

Second video is up!

Up on my youtube channel, I’ve recently started a new series of analytical commentary tracks for the major episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “Commentary track” is a bit of a misnomer, since there’s editing throughout. But each video will follow along the entire episode nonetheless. Since this is the 25th anniversary of when the first episode aired, it seemed like a nice time to finally share the project here.

It’s a self-indulgent project, but also one I’ve wanted to do for a while. Largely because, despite the fact that Buffy remains widely beloved, and has exerted an incredible amount of influence upon the pop-culture landscape, it doesn’t actually seem to be a very well-understood show. Which is perhaps the reason that its influence has not necessarily been for the best. To me, the core of Buffy is not things like cute dialogue, superpowered characters, or a supernatural premise. It isn’t things like found family or a musical episode. None of that is what makes it good. At least not in and of itself. What makes it good is what makes anything I like good: its ability to consistently and coherently express a complex thematic level via the medium of film.

So whether or not you’ve seen or like the show, if you’ve ever been curious about what is worth taking away from it, and why it’s stuck so persistently in the craw of pop culture–even now–you might find the series of interest. 

[thesublemon]

Up on my youtube channel, I’ve recently started a new series of analytical commentary tracks for the major episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "Commentary track” is a bit of a misnomer, since there’s editing throughout. But each video will follow along the entire episode nonetheless. Since this is the 25th anniversary of when the first episode aired, it seemed like a nice time to finally share the project here.

It’s a self-indulgent project, but also one I’ve wanted to do for a while. Largely because, despite the fact that Buffy remains widely beloved, and has exerted an incredible amount of influence upon the pop-culture landscape, it doesn’t actually seem to be a very well-understood show. Which is perhaps the reason that its influence has not necessarily been for the best. To me, the core of Buffy is not things like cute dialogue, superpowered characters, or a supernatural premise. It isn’t things like found family or a musical episode. None of that is what makes it good. At least not in and of itself. What makes it good is what makes anything I like good: its ability to consistently and coherently express a complex thematic level via the medium of film.

So whether or not you’ve seen or like the show, if you’ve ever been curious about what is worth taking away from it, and why it’s stuck so persistently in the craw of pop culture--even now--you might find the series of interest. 

[thesublemon]

[video] Willy Wonka and the Inventor Mindset

It has been a very long time since I last posted! But I’m happy to finally be able to share something new. Decided to adapt one of my favorite old posts, willy wonka and the inventor mindset, into a video essay. It’s a pretty close adaptation, with some minor changes to correct errors in the original post and to make it flow better in video format. Hope you guys enjoy.

[thesublemon]

It took me years and years to understand what your name meant. First I looked at it, thought "sue-bull-mahn, what is that?" That was in 2015 or so. Then at some point I realized it was sub-lemon. Ah, something less than a lemon, but what does that mean? I have no idea. Then finally this year I was reading Wordsworth and thinking about the Sublime, and I got it. Must've been the longest it ever took me to understand something.

Ha, sorry about all those years of confusion. Yeah, it’s a play on “the sublime”. Also much more obliquely, and pretty much only in my head, a play on the idea of “a lemon”, as in a defective version of something. The idea of defective versions of the sublime, or like, versions that look good on the lot but you take them home and they won’t start, was funny to me. Six years ago, anyway. It was half self-deprecating, like I was possibly peddling bad wares, half about the many cases where art tries and fails to create sublime feelings, and half about the fact that I was mostly talking about pop-type art, which many people would think of as not being good enough for whatever that heightened sensation of awe and beauty is.

[thesublemon]

Dead Things, Part 2

This is the long-delayed continuation of my analysis of the intratextual parallels in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Dead Things.” I made some edits and added a section to that first part, so you might want to revisit it before reading the rest. In this half I’ll be discussing: (1) the issues of personhood and self-possession that the parallels to Faith bring up during the alley beating scene, (2) the context being used to frame Buffy turning herself in as a pseudo-suicidal act, (3) how the episode’s takes on identity and romantic love expand on the takes in the earlier seasons, and (4) why this sort of parallelism is interesting and valuable. More discussion of the episode’s themes around moral responsibility, agency, and identity is threaded throughout.

[Warnings: (1) This post assumes knowledge of the episode and show. (2) I discuss pretty much everything that happens in season six, which means there will be references to rape/assault. In addition to all the other unpleasant things that happen that season that one might not want to read about. (3) It’s about 11,000 words long.]

Part Three: Personhood and Possession

Buffy beating Spike in the alley is arguably the climax of the episode. So it’s significant that in the build-up to that moment, the episode establishes multiple parallels between Spike and Faith, and culminates in a parallel between Buffy and Faith. These are probably the most obvious references that the episode makes, the ones the average audience member is most likely to pick up on, and are therefore worth looking at in detail.

10. “Where’d they find her?”

Faith failing to dump the body in Consequences:

NEWS ANCHOR: We go now live to our field reporter, who is standing by at the waterfront with this breaking news about the murder that has shocked the Mayor and residents of Sunnydale.

FIELD REPORTER: Fishermen discovered the body today, the victim of a brutal stabbing.

Spike failing to dump the body in Dead Things:

COP #1: Where’d they find her?

COP #2: The river. She washed up half a mile from the cemetery.

What’s important about the parallels between Spike and Faith is, in my opinion, not just that the characters parallel each other on a meta level, but also the fact that what Spike does and says reminds Buffy of Faith. As we’ll see further on, Buffy’s attitudes towards Spike in this scene can be clearly read as her attitudes towards (and fears about) herself, which is also a role that Faith--as her season-three shadow self--once played. He reminds her of the tactics that Faith used to excuse her behavior and escape her moral responsibility. Like Faith, Spike attempts to cover up the death. Also like Faith, he expresses zero emotional conflict about it. Here’s what Faith said to Buffy when Buffy confronted her at the end of Bad Girls:

FAITH: Okay, this is the last time we're gonna have this conversation, and we're not even having it now, you understand me? There is no body. I took it, weighted it, and dumped it. The body doesn't exist.

BUFFY: (shocked) Getting rid of the evidence doesn't make the problem go away.

FAITH: It does for me.

BUFFY: Faith, you don't get it. You killed a man.

FAITH: No, you don't get it. (smiles) I don't care!

It’s a pretty chilling moment, both for Buffy and the viewer. It’s actually a bit like the moment that Warren kills Katrina. Faith has not yet descended into murder and betrayal, but that scene is when we realize that her bad-girl, devil-may-care attitude might actually go much further than we expected. So of course it would disturb Buffy that Spike plainly and firmly says that hiding the body was “what [he] had to do” and that it “doesn’t matter now.” His cool “Show them what?” is very similar to Faith’s “There is no body.” Both negate the existence of the problem--that a person died--which means, if you look at it a certain way, that they’re negating the dead person entirely. They’re not simply objectifying the person by calling them “a body”, they’re denying that the person existed or mattered at all.

The Dead Things scene is complicated, because on the one hand Buffy is right that these kinds of problems can’t necessarily be papered over, and given that both bodies are easily discovered, one can probably assume the show agrees with her. It’s also true that Spike’s lack of emotion about either Katrina’s death or personhood is almost certainly mean to reflect his inherent moral deficiencies (ie, soullessness). He was thinking of protecting Buffy just as Faith was thinking of protecting herself, rather than about what was “right.”

But it’s also obvious that Buffy too is trying to paper over something. If Spike and Faith were negating the personhood of Katrina and Allan Finch, then we might say that Buffy, by ignoring her own problems, is negating herself. An idea that’s backed up by the very self-abnegating language she uses when she beats Spike up--more on that in a bit. But just as Spike and Faith failed to truly hide the bodies, Buffy’s own problems will soon rise to the surface.

11. “How many have you saved?”

Faith in Consequences:

FAITH:  I missed the mark last night and I’m sorry about the guy. I really am! But it happens! Anyway, how many people do you think we’ve saved by now, thousands? And didn’t you stop the world from ending? Because in my book, that puts you and me in the plus column.

Spike in Dead Things:

SPIKE: Why are you doing this to yourself?

BUFFY: A girl is dead because of me.

SPIKE: And how many people are alive because of you? How many have you saved? One dead girl doesn’t tip the scale.

Once again, Faith and Spike are both advocates of a position that is not necessarily wrong, but also doesn’t demonstrate care for the moral value of the individual. Once again, Faith is trying to get herself morally off the hook, whereas Spike wants to help Buffy but lacks the ability to intuit moral distinctions. Yet both of them end up in the same place.

In general, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has never been a big fan of consequentialism. It seems to believe that actions can be absolutely moral or immoral, and that choice and intent matters for assessing that (im)morality. On the question of “chip versus soul,” for example, the show comes down decidedly on the side that Spike not killing people is morally meaningless given that it isn’t his decision. Giles’s moments of ruthless pragmatism are treated as just that: ruthless. When Giles kills Ben in The Gift, he describes it as an action not worthy of a hero. No matter how many people Ben’s death probably saves, Giles killing him is still treated as an inherently immoral act. 

So Spike and Faith’s position is “wrong” according to both Buffy and Buffy’s moral philosophies, because it suggests that actions don’t have absolute, inherent morality. If Buffy accepted Spike and Faith’s argument, then she’d be in the moral black even if she had killed Katrina deliberately. Moreover, because their position values relative outcomes, then saving 80 out of 100 people from a burning building would potentially be morally acceptable even if saving all 100 people had been possible. So when I say that their position “ignores the moral value of the individual” I mean that it (a) underplays the relevance of an individual’s particular moral choices, and (b) doesn’t treat people as worth morally caring about for their own sake. In other words, it undervalues personhood on two separate counts.

(Whether or not this is a good or coherent position on the part of the show, is something else entirely. One which I’ll leave actual moral philosophers to argue over. I’m only trying to articulate what I think the show thinks.)

What’s really interesting about this moment though, is the way it subverts the show’s own tendencies towards moral absolutism. As in the previous section, one could argue that Buffy, for all her goodness, is nonetheless undervaluing her own personhood. She is taking issue with Spike and Faith’s avoidant, overly-quantified relativism while failing to consider that punishing herself for something accidental is not a good outcome because she herself is a person. Not only that, but punishing herself would have consequences for all of the people she’s responsible for, which means she’s undervaluing them at the expense of overvaluing Katrina. So even though Spike’s position may be “incorrect”, Buffy is not clearly correct either, the way she was in Consequences. In fact, she is using Spike’s wrongness to justify her own flawed moral logic. She isn’t simply “valuing” Katrina, but also following an impulse to self-destruct. She’s taking refuge in absolutism in order to avoid responsibility and moral decision-making.

12. “That’s my girl”

Faith in Consequences:

FAITH: See, you need me to toe the line because you’re afraid you’ll go over it, aren’t you, B? You can’t handle watching me living my own way, having a blast, because it tempts you! You know it could be you!

Buffy punches her.

FAITH: There’s my girl.

BUFFY: No. I’m not gonna do this.

Spike in Dead Things:

BUFFY: You can’t understand why this is killing me, can you?

SPIKE: Why don’t you explain it?

She punches him. He takes it.

SPIKE: Come on, that’s it, put it on me. Put it all on me. (She kicks him) That’s my girl.

BUFFY: I am not your girl!

Bonus: The Mayor in 3x17 Enemies:

MAYOR WILKINS: Wonderful, wonderful. We don't want a replacement Slayer anytime soon. They can't all turn out like my girl Faith.

Bonus: Angel in 3x17 Enemies:

ANGEL: You still my girl?

BUFFY: Always.

Neither the Buffy and Angel scene nor the Mayor and Faith scene have the same structure as the Consequences and Dead Things scenes, but Enemies and Consequences happen in such close proximity and “my girl” is such a particular phrase, that I’m immediately inclined to try to link them. “My girl” is possessive, of course. It usually has romantic undertones, but doesn’t necessarily have to. It could also, as the Mayor demonstrates, be used by a fond and encouraging parent.

Looking at this on the page, it would be easy to read that exchange between Buffy and Angel as romantic. I suppose it is on some level. But I’ve always found something sad about it, particularly in the context of the Mayor/Faith dynamic. Just before the scene between Buffy and Angel, here’s what the Mayor says to Faith:

WILKINS: Well, you win some, you lose some. From where I'm sitting, it's batting average that counts. So you lost some friends.

FAITH: I wouldn't exactly call them friends.

WILKINS: Well, what are you worried about? Chin up! You don't see me looking disappointed. Heck, no. You know why? Because I know you'll always have me, Faith. I'm the best, the most important friend you'll ever have.

In other words, the Mayor’s promises of “always” are intended to keep Faith away from connections with others. Similarly, most of the Buffy/Angel arc in season three is about how they’re hanging onto something that cannot work, and it’s keeping them from developing as individuals. So the fact that Buffy and Angel echo the Mayor by using both “my girl” and “always,” seems to indicate that we’re meant to find the sentiments troubling as much as we’re meant to potentially find them romantic. Neither Buffy nor Angel are being strictly manipulative the way the Mayor is, but the idea that Buffy would think she “belongs” to Angel, even when she’s trying to get some distance from him, nonetheless comes off as an attitude that is meant to be seen as being dubiously good for her, and that she must ultimately outgrow.

In light of those scenes, I think it’s worth thinking of “my girl” in terms of self-ownership. When Buffy resists Faith, it’s after two episodes of Faith first emphasizing her and Buffy’s shared Slayerness, and later their (supposedly) shared guilt. As she says: “You know it could be you.” In other words, Faith repeatedly attempts to define Buffy’s identity for her, by claiming they’re of a kind. Similarly, Spike has suggested multiple times throughout season six that Buffy, as he says in Dead Things, belongs “in the shadows...with [him].” In Life Serial he tells her that she’s “a creature of the darkness, like [him]” and in Doublemeat Palace he baits her by asking her what kind of demon she is. In other words, he emphasizes Buffy’s (supposedly) dark and demonic nature in order to suggest that they belong together. In both cases, Spike and Faith’s assertions can in turn be read as metaphors for Buffy’s own fears that her nature as a Slayer is to be what Spike and Faith say it is, and that she does not feel in control of her identity. 

Spike and Faith even phrase their seduction the same way. In Bad Girls, Faith says multiple variants of “Tell me you don’t get off on this” to Buffy, which Spike echoes in the Dead Things balcony scene, when he says “Tell me you don’t love getting away with this.” Both, in other words, suggest that Buffy not only has dark or selfish impulses like Spike and Faith do, but that she actively derives sexually-coded pleasure from them. Which, as we saw in the dream sequence’s blurry combination of sex and violence, is something that Buffy has anxiety about.

So in both cases, when Buffy resists the “my girl” claim, she is resisting the other person’s pattern of attempting to define her identity. Their pattern of attempting to “own” or be the authority of her identity. Faith and Spike call Buffy “my girl” the moment she behaves violently, because it’s in their interests for Buffy to think of herself as violent--for her to feel more connected to them than to her righteous convictions. (Even if, in Spike’s case, he potentially thinks he’s doing something helpful--“Put it all on me”.) Just as the Mayor was trying to get Faith to feel more connected to him than to her friends, or Buffy and Angel were acting more connected to each other than to themselves. Still--because Spike and Faith are Buffy’s shadow-selves, her denials are not just about her resisting external influences. She’s also, even mostly, resisting the genuine, internal temptation that both characters represent.

But yet again, the moral situation in Dead Things is different and more complicated than it was in Consequences, and yet again, Buffy fails to understand that. In season three, the Mayor uses his leadership and authority to pursue his demonic agenda, and Faith uses her physical abilities to hurt other people. They’re relevant but pretty morally clear-cut foils in a season about Buffy growing into her own power and authority. It’s easy to say that Buffy should not be tempted to behave the same way.

But in season six, the problem is that Buffy is afraid of power. Spike is a temptation to Buffy, but the temptation isn’t about Buffy becoming an evil murderer, or even becoming the kind of person who would hide that she killed someone. Buffy is not particularly tempted to become a “creature of the darkness.” But she is tempted to believe that she is one. She’s tempted to isolate herself, and to hate herself, and to punish herself. She’s tempted to give herself a reason to not participate in the world. As a vampire, Spike is not immoral so much as amoral, someone that needs things like chips and love to tell him what to do because he can’t form his own moral identity. So the fact that Spike is Buffy’s shadow doesn’t mean that she’s tempted to become a monster. It means that she’s tempted to become a void. A “dead thing.”

In the leadup to Buffy attacking Spike, Spike (unlike Faith) doesn’t actually make any comments about who Buffy is, or whether she’s “wrong”. Instead, he tries to tell her she shouldn’t punish herself, and asks her to explain why she’s doing what she’s doing. Only that’s exactly what Buffy cannot tolerate in that moment. She cannot tolerate feeling like her identity is open-ended, or like she needs to defend her moral convictions, or like she might not deserve to be punished. But she also can’t tolerate the reminder that she’s been letting Spike define her, because she doesn’t like what he’s been defining her as. She doesn’t want to be her own girl, but she also can’t let herself be his. And this conflict pushes her to the breaking point.

13. “You’re nothing!”

Faith-in-Buffy beating up Buffy-in-Faith in 4x16 Who Are You?:

FAITH: Shut up! Do you think I’m afraid of you!? You’re nothing! Disgusting! Murderous bitch! You’re nothing! You’re disgusting!

Buffy beating up Spike in Dead Things:

BUFFY: I am not your girl! You don’t…have a soul! There is nothing good or clean in you. You are dead inside! You can’t feel anything real! I could never…be your girl.

In both scenes, Buffy and Faith are each clearly beating up the other person as a proxy for beating themselves. Both, as mentioned, use self-abnegating language. Faith describes herself as “nothing” and Buffy describes Spike (herself) as “dead inside,” with “nothing good or clean” in him (her). The parallel is made even more obvious by the fact that in both scenes it’s Buffy’s face delivering the beating.

What I’ve always liked about Who Are You? is the way it comments on Faith’s season three role as Buffy’s foil and pseudo-doppelganger. In season three, Faith was introduced to throw Buffy’s identity into relief. To make her conscious, even possessive, of her identity in ways she’d never been before. It was all very literary at the time, but the problem is, a real person can’t be a doppelganger or a foil. In real life, seeing yourself as a reflection or extension of someone else just means that you’re afraid or unable to create your own identity. Which is what Who Are You? makes explicit. The episode turns Faith from an abstract foil figure into a fully-fledged character who literally steals Buffy’s identity, and is shown to have a tenuous grasp on what kind of person she wants to be. It strips her of all the external things she once used to define herself--the Mayor, her body, being the anti-Buffy--and leaves her as “nothing”.

Without an external identity, Faith is forced to realize just how weak her internal sense of self is. How she’s failed to cultivate a self, because she doesn’t like herself (the irony of simultaneously hating and not having a self is perfectly illustrated by the way Faith switches between “You’re nothing” and “You’re disgusting”). How she maybe does yearn to have a self, but only knows how to steal one, not create one. The beating scene is the climax of the episode because it marks the moment in which Faith’s passive, figurative self-destruction is transformed into active, literal self-destruction. It is, ironically, one of Faith’s first true expressions of self, which is symbolically represented by the fact that she is returned to her own body in the middle of it.

But if Who Are You? was about Faith realizing how little self she has, then Dead Things is about Buffy realizing how much self she has. In Who Are You? Faith role-plays heroism in an attempt to dismiss it as silly and/or secretly egoistic and corruptible. But ends up disturbed by the taste of purpose and selfhood that it actually gives her. Whereas in Dead Things Buffy role-plays...not evil, but perhaps abjection. Powerlessness. And is disturbed to realize that she has power and selfhood after all. She spends the episode thinking she’s like Faith because she killed someone, when she’s actually acting like Faith by thinking of herself as “bad” and letting other people define her.

I’d argue that the point of the Dead Things scene is that it confronts Buffy with physical, violent evidence of her emotional state. She is forced to see evidence of the fact that she has feelings, and that her feelings affect people, including herself. She is forced to see her desire for self-destruction in full bloody technicolor. It echoes the opening scene, in which Spike and Buffy talk about the sex they just had, and it’s all unusually companionable right up until Spike tells her that he’s “never been with such an animal.”

BUFFY: (disturbed) I'm not an animal.


SPIKE: You wanna see the bite marks?


BUFFY: (looking away) You know, it's late, I-I should get home before Dawn goes to sleep.

In other words, Spike offers to show Buffy evidence of what she’s just been doing, evidence of her violence and desire, and she immediately wants to leave. She doesn’t want to see it. She hasn’t wanted to look at what she’s been doing with Spike at any point during their relationship. Just before they kiss for the first time, Buffy says “this isn’t real.” In Doublemeat Palace Buffy doesn’t look at him as they have sex behind the restaurant. In Gone Buffy only lets herself sleep with him once she’s invisible. At the beginning of Dead Things they’re shown swept “under the rug” together. Spike says it himself: after they have sex, she’ll usually “kick [him] in the head, and run out.”

The joke is, throughout the entire episode, Buffy has been trying to externalize her emotions. She’s been trying to externalize her desire to be punished. She sees Katrina as evidence of her wrongness, and jumps at the opportunity to be locked up for it. Not only that, but throughout her relationship with Spike, she’s been trying to “feel.” The line before they kiss is actually “This isn’t real / but I just wanna feel,” and she describes her encounters with Spike as “the only time [she feels] anything.” Moreover, for all that Spike insists that Buffy belongs “in the dark,” he also repeatedly suggests that she needs to “go on living,” “let [her]self live already,” stop punishing herself, etc. In other words, Buffy’s relationship with Spike is not just about her being self-destructive; it’s about her being caught between the desire to be alive, or to enjoy being alive, and the desire to be dead.

So when Buffy beats Spike bloody, she finally externalizes her emotions. She finally sees the bite marks. She finally has proof that she feels, and is not dead. Only it’s exactly in the way she didn’t want, so once again she runs away.

Part Four: Suicide and Self-Destruction

While Buffy’s attack on Spike is implicitly self-destructive, thanks to its parallel with Faith’s implicitly self-destructive scene, the lead-up to that attack has a few other very important parallels that also suggest that Buffy is in a self-destructive, even suicidal mindset.

14. “Dawnie, I have to”

Buffy in 5x22 The Gift, about to sacrifice herself:

DAWN: Buffy...no.

BUFFY: Dawnie, I have to.

DAWN: No!

Buffy in 6x02 Bargaining, Part 2, on the tower she sacrificed herself on:

DAWN: (in flashback) Buffy...no.

BUFFY: (in present) Dawnie, I have to.

DAWN: Buffy?

Buffy in Dead Things:

BUFFY: There's something I have to do. I have to tell what I did. I have to go to the police.

DAWN: The police?

BUFFY: Dawnie, I have to.

Bonus: Buffy’s final monologue in The Gift:

BUFFY: (voiceover) I love you. I will always love you. But this is the work that I have to do.

Bonus: Buffy to Dawn, earlier in the Dead Things conversation:

BUFFY: I know I haven't been everything I should be...everything Mom was. But I love you. I always will.

Buffy’s final scene with Dawn in The Gift shares a lot of language with her conversation with Dawn in Dead Things. There’s the “Dawnie, I have to” repetition. But Buffy also says things that sound a lot like “I love you. I will always love you” and “But this is the work that I have to do.” The implication of these similarities is twofold. First, it suggests that Buffy is in a mindset of righteous self-sacrifice. Second, it suggests that that sacrifice is pseudo-suicidal in nature. Dawn’s tearful claims that Buffy “wants to go away again” and was “happier where [she was],” make a lot more sense from a character perspective when you understand that the scene is calling back to the last times that Buffy killed or almost killed herself. Of course Dawn would think that the same thing is happening all over again.

Symbolically speaking, Dawn represents the idea of “life” in season six. On the tower in Bargaining, it’s Dawn (life) that calls Buffy back from the edge. As Buffy sinks deeper into her depression, it’s Dawn (life) that she neglects. In The Gift Buffy describes Dawn as “a part of me” and in Grave she says to Giles that when she crawled out of her grave she left “a part of me” behind. Grave then ends with Buffy taking Dawn with her out of a hole in the middle of a graveyard. Because she has finally found that part of herself again: the part that wants to be alive. With all of that in mind, it’s no coincidence that almost every time that Buffy is about to do something literally or metaphorically suicidal, it is framed in terms of Buffy abandoning Dawn. Because suicide is an “abandonment” of life.

But unlike The Gift, Dead Things does not frame Buffy’s self-sacrificial impulse in a positive light. In The Gift, Buffy sacrificing herself is a heroic moment because it’s her beating the pressures that have been telling her to sacrifice her values and kill her sister. In a season that is all about Buffy and the other characters feeling helpless in the face of mortality, Buffy killing herself is her, in a weird way, taking ownership of her mortality. Buffy is not portrayed as abandoning life in a bad way; she is allowing life (Dawn) to go on. Whereas in Dead Things, her “sacrifice” is not enabling anything. And because it does not enable anything, it is simply an act of self-destruction. One that Buffy is using her heroic nature--consciously or unconsciously--to justify.

15. “You’re not really here anyway”

Dawn in 6x02 Bargaining, Part 2:

DAWN: Buffy. You...you...you're really here.

Dawn hugs Buffy.

DAWN: (crying) You're alive, and you're home. You're home.

Dawn in Dead Things:

DAWN: You're never here. You can't even stand to be around me.


BUFFY: That is not true.


DAWN: You don't want to be here with me. You didn't want to come back. I know that. You were happier where you were. (crying) You want to go away again.


BUFFY: Dawn...


DAWN: Then go! You're not really here anyway.

To continue the discussion of Dawn-as-life, there’s another parallel happening during the conversation between Buffy and Dawn. Throughout the first half of the season, there are multiple shots of Buffy being hugged by someone and staring past them with a blank, unengaged expression. The first of those shots happens at the end of Bargaining, Part 2. Dawn hugs Buffy in relief, and tearfully says that Buffy is “really here”, but Buffy’s distant, haunted expression suggests that she may have been resurrected, but is not actually “really there”. If you think of Dawn as “life”, then the fact that Buffy is unable to participate in their emotional moment means that she’s not able to participate in life either. She still feels dead. At the end of After Life, Buffy shares another disconnected hug with Dawn. She is clearly trying to participate during that hug, but it nonetheless rings emotionally false. The scene calls back to an early moment from Bargaining, Part 1, in which the Buffybot dresses femininely, makes Dawn lunch, and hugs her. The implication being that Buffy in After Life is putting on a Buffybot-like act, behaving like a mechanical object, in order to make the people around her feel better. She is acting like something not-alive.

So when Dawn hugs Buffy in Dead Things, and Buffy stares emptily over Dawn’s shoulder, it is part of this pattern. Dawn thinks that she’s comforting her sister, but Buffy has already checked out. She’s chosen to pursue a kind of death, and this leaves her disconnected from Dawn. But this time Dawn picks up on it. In contrast to her dialogue in Bargaining, Part 2, Dawn now says that Buffy “[isn’t] really here anyway.” She’s been so absent from her own life that she may as well be dead again.

But Dead Things is Buffy’s low point, not the end of the story. Over the course of the rest of the season, she becomes gradually more emotionally engaged and committed to Dawn’s well-being. When Buffy and Dawn finally hug again in Grave, Buffy is right there with her sister. Her grip is intense, and her face is full of emotion. Her gaze points downwards instead of distractedly away. In Dead Things Dawn says “you don’t want to be here with me,” but in Grave Buffy says:

Things have really sucked lately, but it's all gonna change. And I wanna be there when it does. I want to see my friends happy again. And I want to see you grow up. The woman you're gonna become. Because she's gonna be beautiful.

In other words, Buffy’s desire to “be there” with Dawn is directly tied to her desire to live in general. The fact that Buffy is now fully present with Dawn means that she has finally worked her way to once more being fully present in life.

16. “Just let me go”

Buffy and Angel in 3x10 Amends

Buffy and Spike in Dead Things

The parallels between the Dead Things alley scene and the conversation between Buffy and Angel on the bluff in Amends are numerous, though they don’t share any exact dialogue. In Dead Things, Spike plays the role of Buffy, the desperate lover trying to use that love to convince the other to rise above their guilt, and Buffy plays the role of Angel, the guilty soul that has been tricked by the villain into feeling their guilt more acutely. Both Buffy and Angel are ambiguously responsible for the crimes that they are supposedly feeling guilty about--Buffy because Katrina’s death was, as far as she knows, an accident, and Angel because he didn’t have a soul. But their guilt over those crimes goes along with guilt about sexual and romantic desire that they do feel responsible for. Whether or not they should, of course. Angel is afraid that his desire for Buffy will cause him to lose his soul and become a monster again. Meanwhile Buffy is afraid that her desire for Spike means that she is somehow like (or complicit in the actions of) a soulless being. Angel speaking about “taking comfort” in Buffy is similar to Buffy saying that being with Spike is the only time she “feels anything.” It’s also potentially relevant that both Buffy and Angel are coping with having been brought back to life. Much of Angel’s guilt in Amends centers around his fear that he was only brought back from hell to be the tool of an evil force. And much of Buffy’s guilt in Dead Things is centered on her fear that she has been brought back “wrong.”

Both Spike and Buffy speak of wishing that they didn’t love their counterparts so much (“I wish that I wished you dead,” “You think I haven’t tried not to?”). Both Buffy and Spike try to forcibly prevent them from falling on their own swords. Both fail. Buffy and Angel only relent in their pursuit of self-destruction when divine snow and chance exoneration intervene. The basic message is the same in both episodes, that true moral responsibility means not giving up even when you want to. But in keeping with the rest of the episode, Dead Things adds new layers of complexity to that previously-established theme. In Amends, Buffy tries to talk Angel down by emphasizing that he has to keep fighting in the face of his guilt, and is pretty clearly acting as the voice of the author. Whereas Spike tries to talk Buffy down by using Faith’s Consequences logic and emphasizing the ways that Buffy isn’t actually guilty. He’s the voice of what both Buffy and the audience are used to thinking of as bad-guy logic. And yet he isn’t necessarily wrong. But Buffy can’t even consider that, because it doesn’t conform to the moral narratives that she’s familiar with--the narratives of Consequences and Amends. Where Amends has a romantic, Christmas-episode aesthetic, Dead Things is almost nauseating in its darkness. There is something fittingly “dead” about it. This complete lack of romance, moodwise, echoes the ambiguity that Dead Things introduces to the show’s formerly clear-cut morality. It is not obvious which choice--Buffy turning herself in, or not turning herself in--is actually the morally responsible, non-self-destructive one. Neither Buffy nor Spike are obviously speaking the author’s beliefs and telling the audience the lesson that they should come away with. Instead, the audience is left as adrift as Buffy is.

Part Five: Love and Identity

17. “I love you.” “No, you don’t.”

Buffy and Spike in Dead Things:

BUFFY: I have to do this. Just let me go.

SPIKE: I can’t. I love you.

BUFFY: No, you don’t.

Buffy and Spike in 7x22 Chosen:

SPIKE: I mean it! I gotta do this.

Buffy laces her fingers with his, and their hands burst into flames.

BUFFY: I love you.

SPIKE: No you don’t. But thanks for saying it.

In both scenes, the text leaves it ambiguous as to who is actually right. In both scenes, who is right is sort of beside the point. In Dead Things, the “I love you” exchange immediately precedes Buffy’s beatdown. When Buffy says “No, you don’t” it’s in the context of her own self-loathing, of her belief that she herself “can’t feel anything real.” She may genuinely believe that Spike doesn’t love her, for some definition of love, but what’s important is the fact that she feels the need to throw it in both of their faces. The point is that in order to treat both him and herself badly, she has to tell herself that neither of them have real feelings, that both of them are “dead things.”  She even goes so far as to insist that Spike “try harder” not to love her. She wants to escape moral culpability by believing that neither of them have moral value.

What’s interesting about the Dead Things exchange is the way it suggests that both Buffy and Spike think that romantic love is somehow ennobling. Something human and good. Spike mentions love to excuse and exalt his behavior, to explain why he can’t let Buffy make a choice she considers morally important. Meanwhile Buffy mentions love to imply that neither of them are living up to what love is supposed to be. How neither of them are human nor good. She is not lovable, and he cannot love.

Both of them, in other words, are using the ideal of love to escape responsibility in different ways. Similar to how Willow and Warren used “love” to justify their actions towards Tara and Katrina.

(Note that Tara brings up love again at the very end of the episode. She asks whether Buffy loves Spike, and states with a sort of straightforward sincerity that Spike “does love” Buffy. And this mention of love is part of the immediate leadup to Buffy’s emotional breakdown. The fact that Tara sees them both as capable of love in such an uncomplicated way is arguably the final piece of Buffy being unable to hide behind any external “wrongness.” By attempting to be comforting, Tara accidentally takes away Buffy’s last means of escape.)

Chosen, by contrast, I believe is meant to show that both Buffy and Spike are finally able to take responsibility in the ways they once avoided. It is Spike’s last scene on the show, one of the last scenes of the show, period, and it is therefore natural to read it as a resolution of (parts of) Spike and Buffy’s arcs. Spike’s “No you don’t” makes it clear that his self-sacrifice is not a romantic gesture, or at least not selfishly so, and is therefore free of suspect motives. He doesn’t need to make his behavior look good, doesn’t need to couch it in love, because he’s doing something bigger than himself that he considers important. His echo of Buffy’s “I have to do this” (“I gotta do this”) shows that he now understands the instinct to self-sacrifice that so baffled him when he didn’t have a soul. Buffy, in turn, honors both her own feelings and the sincerity of Spike’s actions. By stating that she loves him, Buffy is in some sense affirming that they are both “live things”. People who can love and be loved. People who can feel. People who can do good.

18. “I didn’t come back wrong?”

Buffy and Spike in 6x03 After Life

Buffy and Tara in Dead Things

I can’t prove that this was on purpose, though I’m fairly sure it was. Regardless, I found it notable that both After Life and Dead Things feature a two-shot with Buffy in her living room, and that in the Dead Things scene Buffy has not only switched places with Spike, she’s now the one in black. Both scenes also feature a similar little pas de deux (pictured), in which the characters look down, contemplating Buffy’s situation, and then look up to meet each other’s eyes.

I like the idea that this is calling back to After Life for a couple different reasons. Firstly, After Life is the episode that introduces the idea that Buffy “came back wrong.” Spike even uses that exact phrase:

SPIKE: Listen. I've figured it out. Maybe you haven't, but I have. Willow knew there was a chance that [Buffy]'d come back wrong.

Throughout After Life, characters fret that something’s wrong with Buffy. Anya thinks that Buffy’s “broken” and Tara wonders if Buffy’s “not right, or-or maybe like, dangerous?” They worry at how distracted and emotionally flat she is. Willow muses that when Angel came back from hell in season three, “Buffy said...he was wild. Like an animal.” It makes sense that Buffy would recoil when Spike calls her an “animal” at the beginning of Dead Things, just on the principle that it’s a word that makes her sound less than human. But that line takes on extra significance when you see it in the context of Willow’s After Life dialogue. “Animal,” “broken”, “dangerous”, “not right”, “wrong”: these are the words that have dogged Buffy since the moment she returned.

But ultimately, the Scoobies are eager to believe that Buffy’s fine. It’s Buffy herself that ends up most preoccupied about whether or not she “came back wrong.” Since she came back, she’s been miserable and disconnected from life. She began her sexual relationship with Spike the night he gleefully announced that his chip no longer registered her as human (“You came back wrong”), and the show implies that she’s been banking on that knowledge to explain her behavior to herself ever since. So by revisiting the immediate aftermath of Buffy’s resurrection, Dead Things is pointedly reframing the narrative of the season thus far. Both for the viewer, and for Buffy herself. It encourages one to go back to that moment in After Life and then replay the whole season with the understanding that everything Buffy did and said was her acting of her own volition, and with her full humanity. It’s a “twist” but not in a cheap, or even particularly shocking way. It’s a twist that’s central to the story of self-responsibility that the season and episode is telling.

Buffy sitting in Spike’s place is also a choice that’s rich with meaning. Season six spends a lot of time creating parallels between Buffy and Spike, and that process begins in After Life. Towards the beginning of After Life, Spike notices that Buffy must have “clawed her way out of a coffin” because he’d “done it [him]self.” In the scene pictured above he tends to her bloody knuckles, and then later in the episode he punches a wall and is shown with bloody knuckles as well.

In general, the season up until Dead Things leans hard into the idea that both Buffy and Spike, as resurrected/reanimated beings, are “dead” or have an understanding of “deadness.” It would take forever to list all of the references to Buffy or Spike being not-alive in Once More, With Feeling alone (“I just want to be / Alive”, “Since I’m only dead to you,” “Whisper in a dead man’s ear”, “So one of us is living,” etc). They have many scenes where they’re alone together, often in dark, chthonic places like crypts and basements, and Buffy tells him things that she doesn’t tell anyone else. In the opening shot of Dead Things, we see a literal casket next to Spike’s unused bed, a bit of scene-setting that tells us we should still see his crypt as a place of death, however domesticated.

That underground imagery has another connotation too. One of the biggest motifs associated with Spike and Buffy is the idea that Spike is “beneath” Buffy. He is frequently shown in a supplicating position, looking up at her while she looks down at him. We see it in Fool For Love (“Where does it lead you?”), The Gift (“I know you’ll never love me”), After Life (“Her hands”), and Once More, With Feeling (“You know / You’ve got a willing slave”). We’ll see it again in season seven, in Touched (“You’re a hell of a woman”) and the significantly-titled Beneath You. Compare the eye-lines of these two-shots from Fool For Love and Touched to After Life:

So it’s meaningful that season six features imagery of Buffy “being brought to Spike’s level”. In After Life she descends her house stairs towards him, a mirror image of the way she ascended them away from him in The Gift. In Once More, With Feeling she falls into an open grave with him, and in Smashed they fall into a basement while consummating their long-standing sexual tension. Many of their assignations take place in the lower-level of Spike’s crypt, including the one at the beginning of Dead Things. So there is a kind of full-circle finality, imagistically speaking, to seeing Buffy in Spike’s place, and later in a position of supplication (see 17). 

The simplest reading of the reversal is that Buffy has reached her lowest point. I think it’s the intended reading too. But understanding what Buffy’s “lowest point” means depends on understanding what it means for Spike to be Buffy’s shadow. Because again, it’s not about him being a monster, it’s about him being a “dead thing.” The season would not spend so much time telling us that Buffy feels “dead” otherwise. It’s about Buffy seeing herself as evil and wrong, and using that self-image to avoid her problems and check out of life. It’s about her potentially ending up doing immoral things because of that avoidance. Instead of embracing her agency, Buffy flat-out begs for Tara’s moral authority (“Tell me that I’m wrong”) the way that Spike has relied upon the moral authority of his chip or “what Buffy would want.”

But there’s also a more hopeful reading. When Buffy and Spike meet each other’s eyes in the After Life scene, the show suggests that the two of them are now on the same level, or could be on the same level. Instead of Buffy looking down at Spike and Spike looking up at Buffy, the two of them look equally at each other, and the camera looks equally at both of them. The framing of the shot is intimately close, an early indication both of where their relationship will go, and perhaps also the isolation of it. With that in mind, there is arguably something hopeful in the idea that however low Buffy feels in Dead Things, she is still on a level with Tara, someone who is unambiguously alive. The reversal also means that Buffy is now looking to a figure of life instead of to a figure of death. Lastly, the pulled-out framing of the shot speaks to the way that Buffy and the viewer are now seeing things as they are. Buffy now has full knowledge of the fact that she did not “come back wrong” in any meaningful sense. She has explored “death” in its entirety, and has nowhere left to go but towards life.

19. “Please don’t forgive me”

Faith in Angel 1x18 Five By Five:

ANGEL: I'm not gonna make it easy for you.

Faith throws herself against Angel.

FAITH: I'm evil! I'm bad! I'm evil! Do you hear me? I'm bad! Angel, I'm bad! (sobbing) I'm ba-ad. Do you hear me? I'm bad! I'm bad! I'm bad. Please. Angel, please, just do it. (still sobbing) Angel please, just do it. Just do it. Just kill me. Just kill me.

Angel wraps his arms around her, and they sink to their knees.

Willow in 6x10 Wrecked:

BUFFY: Get up.

WILLOW: I screwed it up, everything, Tara...

BUFFY: Yeah, you know what, you did screw up, okay? You could have killed [Dawn]! You almost did!

WILLOW: (crying) I know! I know! I can't stop, Buffy! I tried and I can't.

BUFFY: You can.

WILLOW: I can't! I can't, I ju...god, I need help. Please! (sobbing) Please help me, please.

Buffy in Dead Things:

TARA: I-It's okay if you [love Spike]. He's done a lot of good, and, and he does love you. A-and Buffy, it's okay if you don't. You're going through a really hard time, and you're...

BUFFY: What? Using him? What's okay about that?

TARA: It's not that simple.

BUFFY: It is! It's wrong. I'm wrong. Tell me that I'm wrong, please…(starts to cry) Please don't forgive me, please... (sobbing) Please don't...

She slides to the floor and puts her head in Tara's lap.

BUFFY: (sobbing) Please don't forgive me...

Despite the superficial similarities between these scenes, I’m most interested in the differences between the nature of each character’s crisis. There’s something telling in the implications of “Please kill me” versus “Please help me” versus “Please don’t forgive me.” What each character is begging for speaks to the problem they don’t want to do the hard work of solving for themselves.

In Faith’s case, the thing she doesn’t want to do is the hard work of atonement. In the Who Are You? beating scene (which aired not long before Five By Five, if you’re not up on the Buffy/Angel chronology) Faith, as discussed, describes herself as “nothing.” It therefore makes perfect sense that she’d beg to be killed, as being killed would in some sense mean permanently becoming “nothing.” If Angel killed Faith, not only would Faith not have to live with the weight of everything she’d done, she wouldn’t have to become anything better either. 

In Willow’s case, the thing she’s avoiding is emotional self-management. Willow has long had a problem with looking for the easy way out of emotionally difficult situations. In Lovers Walk, she tries to perform a “delusting spell” so that she and Xander will stop cheating. In Wild At Heart she tries to perform a revenge spell on Oz and Veruca, and in Something Blue she attempts to magic her heartbreak away. Not to mention how she handles her fights with Tara in season six. When she says that she “can’t stop” and “needs help” Willow may sincerely want to get better, but she’s also repeating her pattern of feeling like she can’t reign in her emotions or behaviors herself, and instead needs something or someone else to do it for her.

In Buffy’s case, the thing she’s struggling with is seeing herself as fully human. She cannot square her image of herself with the reality of how she’s been feeling since she came back. If Buffy were to forgive herself for her basic humanity, she would have to acknowledge that she is human in the first place. And therefore fallible and capable of feelings she doesn’t want to have, but also not consigned by her nature to be any particular way, morally speaking, the way a soulless vampire is. She would have to ask herself the question of whether she’d actually done something that needed forgiving. She would have to be her own moral authority. She would have to accept the possibility that she’s capable of feeling and doing better, and doesn’t inherently deserve to suffer.

But in all three cases, what looks like a moral crisis is actually more of a crisis of identity and agency. All three characters have been making decisions based on a certain image of themselves, and using it to not think about their behavior. They’re terrified by the prospect that that image was never based on any kind of objective, unchangeable truth. They are terrified by the prospect that they can define their identities themselves.

20. “Do you trust me?”

Spike to Buffy:

SPIKE: Do you trust me?

BUFFY: Never.

Buffy to Katrina in the dream sequence:

BUFFY: Do you trust me?

Bonus: Willow and Giles in 6x04 Flooded:

GILES: Do you have any idea what you've done? The forces you've harnessed, the lines you've crossed?

WILLOW: I thought you'd be impressed, or-or something.

GILES: Oh, don't worry, you've made a very deep impression. Of everyone here, you were the one I trusted most to respect the forces of nature.

WILLOW: Are you saying you don't trust me?

Bonus: Dawn’s theft revealed in 6x14 Older and Far Away:

BUFFY: Oh.

DAWN: Buffy...

ANYA: How are we supposed to trust you, Dawn? I mean, you...you say you didn't put us here, but look at this stuff! How are we supposed to believe you?

Bonus: Anya practicing her wedding vows in 6x16 Hell’s Bells:

ANYA: 'However, I do entrust you with...' (hears the others chuckling) What? Is something funny?

TARA: No, n-nothing, sweetie, just, just keep still. (smiling at Willow)

ANYA: Okay. Blah, blah, blah, misogynistic. Blah, blah, 'I do however entrust you...um, with my heart. Take care of my heart, won't you please? Take care of it because, it's all that I have. And, if you let me, I'll take care of your heart too.'

Willow and Tara look meaningfully at each other.

Bonus: Buffy and Spike in 6x19 Seeing Red:

SPIKE: Why do you keep lying to yourself?

BUFFY: How many times--(she composes herself). I have feelings for you. I do. But it's not love. I could never trust you enough for it to be love.

SPIKE: Trust is for old marrieds, Buffy. Great love is wild and passionate and dangerous. It burns and consumes.

BUFFY: Until there's nothing left. Love like that doesn't last.

Bonus: Buffy and Angel in 2x01 When She Was Bad:

ANGEL:  Why are you riding me?

BUFFY:  Because I don't trust you. You're a vampire. Oh I'm sorry, was that an offensive term? Should I say 'undead American'?

ANGEL:  You have to trust someone. You can't do this alone.

BUFFY:  I trust me.

Bonus: Buffy and Angel in 2x07 Lie To Me:

ANGEL: Do you love me? 

BUFFY: What? 

ANGEL: Do you? 

She takes a moment to consider her answer. 

BUFFY: I love you. I don't know if I trust you. 

ANGEL: Maybe you shouldn't do either.

Circling back to the very beginning of the episode now. I’ve saved this parallel for last because I think it’s a good summation of why Dead Things is so important to the season.

There are a lot of references to trust throughout season six. In fact there are so many references to it and they all seem so relevant, that it was hard to pick what to include here. The natural connection to make would be to Seeing Red, given that that episode features Spike’s catastrophic failure to live up to Buffy’s trust. And I have obviously included the dialogue from that episode. But Seeing Red is so controversial, and rape is such a thorny topic, that I think it can obscure how much groundwork the season lays around the concept of trust in general. The Spike and Buffy relationship, while crucial, is still just one part of it.

Willow’s trustworthiness, for example, is questioned throughout the season. First by Giles and later by Tara (“Wish I could trust / that it was just this once”) and the rest of the Scoobies. Just as Spike ends up justifying Buffy’s lack of trust, Willow ends up justifying everyone else’s lack of trust. She keeps on abusing magic even after Giles reprimands her, she violates Buffy and Tara’s memories even after she says she won’t use magic, and of course there’s eventually the Dark Willow arc, in which she uses her power to deliberately hurt everyone around her. Even Xander and Dawn aren’t exempt from discussion of trust in season six, despite the fact that they play a relatively minor role in it. In Hell’s Bells Xander betrays the trust Anya wants to put in him by leaving her at the altar. Dawn betrays the trust she wants the adults to put in her by stealing. 

And of course Buffy, as the title character around whom all these trust issues revolve, isn’t exempt either. When Giles leaves her in Tabula Rasa, he phrases it as a matter of Buffy needing to trust herself:

GILES: I've taught you all I can about being a slayer, and your mother taught you what you needed to know about life. You...you're not gonna trust that until you're forced to stand alone.

Buffy’s lack of trust towards Spike is thus framed extremely early in the season as a reflection of her lack of trust toward herself. But more on this shortly.

I see the season six preoccupation with trust as an extension of its preoccupation with agency, consent and violation, especially among intimate partners. Because the thing is, if being an adult means being responsible for creating your own life and identity, then that means that every other person can create their own life and identity as well. They can make their own choices. Which also means that they might choose to hurt you, or do something you don’t want. It means that if you want to open yourself to the vulnerability of loving someone, while also accepting that you cannot control or be responsible for their behavior, then the only option you have is to trust them. Love is vulnerable because you have to trust them. 

Which also implies that those who haven’t formed their own moral identity are inherently untrustworthy, especially in love. Spike is the most obvious representation of this. Of course Buffy wouldn’t trust Spike, of course everyone expresses distrust towards Spike throughout the season. Not just because he’s personally tried to kill them on multiple occasions, but because he has no independent moral self. In Smashed the story makes a point of showing how Spike behaves when he thinks his chip is no longer active, and is stinging from Buffy’s assertion that he’s an “evil, disgusting thing”: he attempts to bite someone. He’s not of one mind about biting the person, he appears to be talking himself into it, but he still attempts to bite them. Yet in Tabula Rasa we see how Spike behaves when he has no memory of being a vampire: he thinks he’s a hero. 

SPIKE: I'm a hero really. I mean, to be cast such an ugly lot in life and then to rise above it. To seek out better, nobler things. It's inspirational, isn't it? And the two of us...natural enemies, thrown together to stand against the forces of darkness. Utter trust.

In other words, Spike’s moral identity is extremely unstable. It’s based on external notions of how he thinks he should behave, whether that’s as someone “dangerous”, “evil”, “a killer” or as “a good guy, on a mission of redemption.” And “unstable” is basically the definition of untrustworthy.

(There are many other cases of Spike being unreliable or fluctuating between different moral responses over the course of season six. See his “First I’ll kill her / then I’ll save her”  lines in Once More, With Feeling, his promise to Buffy that “I don’t hurt you” just an episode before Seeing Red, him saying he can be a man in Smashed before going off to bite someone, him saying “trust me” in Dead Things before hiding Katrina’s body. Et cetera.)

While none of the other characters are soulless vampires, their identities are also in a state of flux. I’d argue that one of the points season six tries to make is that people in this stage of life, or maturity, are prone to hurting other people because they don’t know who they are yet. Xander proves he cannot be “entrusted with” Anya’s heart because he still thinks he’s going to end up like his parents. Willow hurts Tara because she’s insecure in her sense of power and usefulness. Xander deals with the vulnerability of love by giving up, and Willow deals with the vulnerability of love by taking away her partner’s agency. They ruin their romantic relationships either because they lack faith in their own identity, or because they’re threatened by the other person’s, or both.

So when Buffy echoes Spike by saying “Do you trust me?” the writing isn’t just suggesting that Buffy sees herself as the dominant partner. It’s suggesting that Buffy sees herself as an untrustworthy figure like Spike. It also implies that by ceding her agency to him, she is making herself as untrustworthy as him. But not “untrustworthy” in a general sense--untrustworthy in the sense that her identity, especially her moral identity, is unstable. Buffy letting Spike cuff her right after she says she would “never” trust him, is a very Spike-like kind of unreliability. Throughout their relationship, Buffy constantly says that she wants nothing more to do with Spike, before proceeding to...have things to do with him. The ambiguous consent that characterizes their sex life (“Don’t” “Stop me”) echoes Buffy’s own ambiguous feelings about who she is and what she wants.

Of course, Buffy eventually works past that. She draws a hard line in As You Were, and sticks to it. In turn, I’d argue that one of the points that Seeing Red tries to make is that Spike is not capable of doing this. This is why the bathroom scene brings up trust so explicitly, and why Spike is not in vamp-face at any point during it. Because his assault is not about him being a bloodthirsty monster. In the context of the season, monstrousness is not what being soulless means, and the purpose of the scene, among other things, is to reach a crisis point that convinces Spike that he needs a soul. Or more metaphorically, to be an apotheosis of the season’s dysfunctions. Instead, the scene is about the fact that he cannot see moral lines, or keep to them, even when it concerns the woman that he claims to love. He goes to Buffy intending to apologize, but ends up trespassing every single one of her boundaries. And it is this precise kind of inconsistency that makes him “untrustworthy”. He’s even inconsistent about the value of trust in the first place, considering that he asks to be trusted in Dead Things, but dismisses trust in Seeing Red. The point is that he may not be a monster, but he “can’t be a man” either. No matter how often he wears the face of one. He cannot grow in the way that Buffy was able to grow. Buffy’s untrustworthiness was a phase, but for Spike it is his nature. In turn, the fact that Spike ultimately chooses to change his nature, to commit to an identity by getting a soul, acts as a metaphor for Buffy’s own commitment to live by the end of the season.

(Whether that scene was the right way to accomplish this is a question that so many other people have tried to answer, that I’m not going to bother to address it. Whether it was wrong or right or right-but-badly-executed, there is nonetheless plenty that can be analyzed about it.)

Spike, as the soulless vampiric id of the show, is an exaggeration of being untrustworthy. But he was not the show’s first vampire exaggeration of untrustworthiness. The connection between love and trust that season six is so obsessed with has its origins in the season two relationship between Buffy and Angel. In season two, the show attempted to puncture the romance of the “mysterious older man” by having Angel lose his soul after he and Buffy sleep together. In both When She Was Bad and Lie To Me, Buffy suggests that Angel’s vampiric nature makes him untrustworthy, but that she loves him in spite of it. This ends disastrously, and no doubt is meant to inform her insistence that she cannot trust Spike enough to love him. Whereas Spike, as I discussed in the very first section, is still stuck in that Romantic season two mindset, in which passion is enough for love. The fact that Buffy has this association between passionate but untrusting relationships and pain, is one way of showing that her relationship with Spike is something that she’s using to hurt herself. But Spike, as a vampire, for whom “love and death and sex and pain” is “all the same damn thing”, cannot fully understand that this is what Buffy is doing. Nor can he fully understand that pain or a lack of trust is a bad thing. His statement that “You always hurt the one you love” echoes previous lines of his like “Love hurts, baby” in The Harsh Light of Day. Spike does not internalize that this association between love and pain is not desirable, until he attempts to combine passion with violence in a way that violates trust so badly that even he can tell it’s unromantic.

The line “Do you trust me?” may or may not have been meant to specifically echo Angel’s “Do you love me?” in Lie To Me, or Tara’s “Do you love him?” at the end of the episode, but evoking trust at all, particularly in the context of love and sex, is again, a way of showing that Buffy is doing something she knows to be painful and ill-advised. She is in a place of deep confusion. It’s yet another complicated update on the show’s early-season morality. In season two, the onus of trust was entirely on Angel’s shoulders and the point was the tragedy of needing to let go of teenage notions of romance, and less poetically--to beware of the dark side of men. But for all that season six makes a bogeyman of rapacious male sexuality, it also has its female protagonists make serious mistakes. Buffy in season six fears she’s become like the male vampires she’s so often called untrustworthy in the context of romance. Thus when she ultimately chooses to become trustworthy, to trust herself, it’s a decision that has weight because she was faced with the alternative.

End thoughts

Buffy is a good example of the kind of improvised narrative that I was discussing in a recent post. I’m aware that the writers of the show were making many things up as they went. Season six in particular I believe was one of the most improvised seasons, and that they were figuring out the specifics of the character arcs as the season went on. I’m aware that it’s quite possible that some of the connections I’ve made here weren’t intentional, or not to the degree of depth that I’ve ascribed to them. But at the same time, the undeniable intratextuality on display, to whatever degree of intentionality, is exactly how I’d expect a work that was improvising with a sense of Johnstone-type reincorporation to look. I have no idea whether the writers had planned out any of the details of season six back when they were writing the high school seasons. But that sort of planning isn’t necessary for a work to have meaning. Instead, Dead Things--and the rest of the season--has an attunement to what came before. It treats its own canon the way that another work might treat a broader cultural canon--as something to play with, and draw from, and which it expects its audience to have common knowledge of.

And because the show is so willing to integrate, and then reintegrate, both the images and themes it’s already established, you’re left with a feeling that the work has a continuity of idea, not just character or plot. Dead Things is able to present a complicated take on moral responsibility because it can build on, and respond to, the takes the show has explored already. Images like Buffy secluding herself on the Bronze balcony become a kind of anaphoric shorthand. This sort of self-referentiality works particularly well in season six, because the season’s themes are so bound up in the transition from childhood and adolescence to adulthood. When season six complicates the simpler morality of the earlier seasons, it echoes the way that growing up leads to seeing the world in a more morally complicated light. When the protagonists make mistakes that parallel the actions of “bad” characters, it echoes the way that growing up means becoming fully morally responsible for oneself. Which means being held accountable in ways one wouldn’t have been when one was younger, and accepting that one can have things in common with villains. 

The parallelism also fits with the season’s more meta themes that I discussed in my post on season six as a “post-myth” work. In particular, parallelism enables self-reflexivity. By comparing itself against itself, the show is able to criticize--or at least reframe--its own creative choices. Willow going off the deep end reframes her earlier-season moments of thoughtlessness as concerning foreshadowing instead of charming mistakes. Tabula Rasa and Dead Things reframe the sort of mind control that was played for comedy in episodes like Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered as something not quite so funny or easily forgivable. Spike’s increasingly harmful behavior reframes his charismatic roguishness as something to be more seriously questioned. Buffy’s season-long depression reframes her one-episode depressions in Anne and When She Was Bad as perhaps too-easily-resolved TV psychology. The parallels give these choices a self-conscious depth that they wouldn’t have if the writing simply attempted to make things “dark” in a way that had no connection to what came before.

Buffy is certainly a flawed show, writing-wise. It at times mixes metaphors and can be bizarrely morally and tonally inconsistent. But at its best, like in episodes like Dead Things, the seasons-long layering of imagery and theme result in TV with a truly unusual and masterful density of meaning.

[thesublemon]

planning ≠ coherence

I talk a big game about liking coherence in art, and it’s probably clear that I have an apophenic tendency to enjoy textual interpretation. And this might lead people to think that I have a preference for carefully planned and plotted art, or that I look down on the messy and improvisational. But this is actually almost the opposite of the case. Not because I don’t really like coherence, but because artistic coherence is something more complicated than planning, and isn’t even necessarily possible to achieve with planning.

The thing about improvisation, is that at its best it’s about finding the choice that feels right. I listen to jazz more than any other kind of music, and one of the reasons I like it so much is the exhilaration of someone landing on a musical idea that simultaneously makes a song feel bigger and more complete. A solo isn’t fun if it’s just a bunch of disconnected ideas (similar to how whimsy isn’t fun if it doesn’t also “work”). It’s fun if it picks up on the things that the other players are doing, or ideas that showed up earlier in the song, and then makes them feel like they go together. Even if they “go together” in the sense of being coherently discordant, eg repeating ideas that don’t work multiple times. If beauty is fit, then the joy of improv is finding fit in unexpected places.

This goes for narrative too. In long-running stories like comics, book series, and TV shows, much is often made about whether certain choices were planned from the beginning. If things were planned, that’s a reason for praise, and if things weren’t planned, that’s a reason for derision, either towards the showrunners or towards people attempting to interpret the work. Say, “This plot point only happened because an actor wanted to leave the show. Therefore it has no meaning to read into.” But making things up as one goes is not what makes a story lose its plot, so to speak. Making things up is only a problem if the things the artist makes up don’t go with what came before.

In Impro, a very excellent book about the craft of improvisation, Keith Johnstone calls this process of making-things-go-with-what-came-before “re-incorporation”:

The improviser has to be like a man walking backwards. He sees where he has been, but he pays no attention to the future. His story can take him anywhere, but he must still ‘balance’ it, and give it shape, by remembering incidents that have been shelved and reincorporating them.

Johnstone is big on the idea that satisfying narrative depends on a sense of structure, and that reincorporation is one of the most important tactics for creating structure. To paraphrase him, a story where a character runs away from a bear, swims across lake, and finds a woman in a cabin on the other side, and “makes passionate love” to her has no structure. It’s just a series of events. Whereas if the bear then knocks the cabin’s door down and the woman cries out that it’s her lover, then suddenly it feels like a story. Because not only has the bear been reincorporated, it has been linked to the woman. From this perspective, if a story has no sense of reincorporation, or new developments don’t make sense with what came before, then it will feel incoherent, no matter how planned out it was.

I also keep thinking about Paul Bouissac’s discussion of gags and narrative in The Semiotics of Clowns and Clowning. He explains that what makes a scene funny is not whether it strings a bunch of gags together, but how those gags are organized. To use an example from the book, it’s one thing for a clown to pretend to hurt its thumb, and ask for an audience member to kiss it. It’s another thing for it to keep hurting different parts and then finally hurt its groin and act scandalized at the idea that someone might kiss it. Bouissac calls this sort of repetition “anaphor”:

Anaphor is one of the main tools of textual consistency. In linguistics, it designates the use of pronouns or any other indexical units to refer back to another word or phrase in the text. It links together parts of sentences and bridges the grammatical gaps between clauses, which is a consequence of the linearity of language. In rhetoric, anaphors are repetitions of words or structures that build up the cohesion of discourse and create momentum toward a climax. In multimodal communication, words, gestures, objects, or musical tunes can play the same role by reminding the receiver—that is, the spectator in the case of a performance—of signs and events produced earlier in the act.

One of the things that fascinated me about Farscape as a teenager, was that in contrast to other scifi of the time, it made no pretenses of having been planned—unlike say, Babylon 5. Or even shows like The X-Files, Lost, or Battlestar Galactica that gave you the “feeling” of a plan whether or not they had one, or were capable of following through. Farscape felt incredibly coherent, both in terms of theme and plot, but this coherence came about purely on the strength of the writing’s ability to ideate and then reincorporate. It would take someone’s weird costume idea, like the villain having glowing rods that screw inside his head, and snowball that into a whole storyline where the villain is a half breed of one hot-blooded race and one cold-blooded race, and can only stay alive by thermo-regulating the inside of his brain. And then decide that his vendetta against the hot-blooded race has motivated his obsession with the protagonist since the first season. Yet these twists never feel like “ret-conning” in a pejorative sense, because it all feels narratively and thematically sensible. (Unsurprisingly, making the show was described as “more like improv jazz than plotting out a symphony”).

None of which is to say that I dislike planning or polish, either. Stephen King, as a so-called “discovery” writer, famously writes off the cuff, without outlines. As he puts it in On Writing:

You may wonder where plot is in all this. The answer—my answer, anyway—is nowhere. I won’t try to convince you that I’ve never plotted any more than I’d try to convince you that I’ve never told a lie, but I do both as infrequently as possible. I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible. It’s best that I be as clear about this as I can—I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course).

But his best stories feel like whatever bloat might have been generated from this narrative improvisation has then been pared down to what that improvisation was really getting at. And I can’t lie, I get a particular joy from reading or watching something and feeling without a doubt that the artist is in complete control of my experience. It was one of the most gratifying aspects of rewatching The Wire recently: the feeling that the little meanings and foreshadowings I was seeing in each choice were almost certainly intended. Nothing is more satisfying to an apopheniac than feeling like the patterns you see are actually real. And nothing is more annoying than a story that tries to pull some sort of reveal on you (“Dan is gossip girl!” “Angel is Twilight!” “Rey is a Palpatine!”) that doesn’t make any sense because it wasn’t intended from the beginning. Just because those characters existed in the story before, doesn’t make it good reincorporation. So if a story is a story because of structure, then if the choice is between a planned structure and no structure, the former is almost certainly going to be better.

Point is, it’s not really the process that matters. All creativity is improvisational in a sense, because all creativity involves making things up. What matters is how dedicated an artist is to the integrity of their work. If a writer has carefully planned their whole story out, with every twist and every theme clearly in mind, but can’t adapt if they start writing and find out that something they planned doesn’t actually work, that’s one kind of failure mode. The narrative equivalent of designing a perfect castle and then building it on a swamp. On the other hand, if a writer tries to go with the flow, but can’t reincorporate that flow, then that will be another failure mode. To the extent that I respond to improvisational art, it’s because improvisational art is often more attuned to these questions of whether something is moment-to-moment right. But what matters, above all, is the rightness. That’s what defines coherence. Whether there is a sense in the work that it is oriented around something, and whether the choices contribute to that something.

[thesublemon]

on reviewing

Watched a documentary on Pauline Kael a couple nights ago. It clarified for me why I always find her reviewing refreshing and frustrating by turns. Refreshing because she doesn’t tend to treat genre or subject matter as something sacred. She will watch many kinds of movies with the same degree of curiosity and judgment. Her instincts about whether a movie is working, or lying, or doing something new are also often very on point.

But she falls prey to the two big things that I think make reviewing a flawed, sometimes maybe even useless endeavor. Especially if the goal is to accurately describe what a work is.

1) An inability, or disinterest, in modeling why artistic choices work or don’t. For instance, at one point in the documentary she complains about artists and critics equating repetition with lyricism, and states that repetition in movies simply annoys her because it feels like belaboring a point that she’s already gotten. But that complaint misses out on an opportunity to explore why people would think that repetition is lyrical, or why an artist would reach for it as a choice. And whether, once you’ve modeled what the goal of repetition actually is, maybe there are good and bad versions. If it were me, I would argue that when repetition is good, it doesn’t actually feel like repetition. It feels like riffing. The artistic impact comes not from reiteration, but from reframing—and if it does feel like reiteration, then it’s probably weak repetition. If I were to make a similar complaint about a movie, I might instead complain that a motif did not add or gain complexity each time it appeared. Or I might complain that an attempt to convey monotony by unchanging repetition did not feel worth it, because I didn’t find the underlying point insightful enough to justify the experience of slog. Whatever my exact argument though, the point is that there would be a curiosity and emphasis on what the artist was trying to accomplish. And a generosity about what they could accomplish. As well as a self-awareness about my own values (like “density” and “coherence”) and the fact that I judge works by those values. Without this sort of meta-level mindset, reviews seem to quickly descend into authoritative subjectivity. Kael was good at viciously panning things, but how can a pan help the artist make better work unless it’s accompanied by some sort of model or rationale? Why would an artist listen to your opinion unless you first prove that you understand what they were trying to do? Without a level that exists outside of the reviewer, a review runs the risk of simply being an exhortation to appeal to that reviewer’s taste.

2) A love of saying things that sound good, regardless of whether they’re actually meaningful. At one point in the documentary, Renata Adler, another writer, attempts a takedown of Kael. But ends up making the exact mistake that Kael does.

RENATA ADLER: [Kael] has, in principle, four things she likes: frissons of horror; physical violence depicted in explicit detail; sex scenes, so long as they have an ingredient of cruelty and involve partners who know each other either casually or under perverse circumstances; and fantasies of invasion by, or subjugation of or by, apes, pods, teens, bodysnatchers, and extraterrestrials.

Compare to Kael’s own style of evisceration. Here’s her on The Sound of Music.

PAULINE KAEL: What is it that makes millions of people buy and like THE SOUND OF MUSIC—a tribute to "freshness" that is so mechanically engineered, so shrewdly calculated that the background music rises, the already soft focus blurs and melts, and, upon the instant, you can hear all those noses blowing in the theatre? […] And the phenomenon at the center of the monetary phenomenon? Julie Andrews, with the clean, scrubbed look and the unyieldingly high spirits; the good sport who makes the best of everything; the girl who's so unquestionably good that she carries this one dimension like a shield. […] Wasn't there perhaps one little Von Trapp who didn't want to sing his head off, or who screamed that he wouldn't act out little glockenspiel routines for Papa's party guests, or who got nervous and threw up if he had to get on a stage?

Having read both pieces, I think both writers identify something true about their subject (Adler even makes remarks similar to what I’ve already said). But are the pieces useful? Or accurate in a more total sort of way? Kael had particular kinds of movies she loved, it’s true, and tended to be bad at self-criticism about whether her preferences actually indicated any sort of objective reality. But Adler’s criticism of Kael is no more interested in modeling than Kael’s reviews are. It isn’t interested in an evenhanded consideration of what Kael gets right and wrong and why. What unites Adler’s takedown of Kael and Kael’s takedown of The Sound of Music is that they want to be takedowns. They want to be stylistically rollicking reads that create the aesthetic experience of nailing something to a wall. But the thing about wanting too badly to make an argument “aesthetic” is that it becomes tempting to gloss over anything that would ruin the aesthetic flow. Adler devotes a long paragraph to identifying all of Kael’s tics, and the wall of text is certainly rhetorically effective at making you feel like Kael is some sort of dirty-minded one trick pony. But at the end of the day, it’s rhetoric. Not really argument. Similarly, Kael is so delighted to be able to use phrases like “glockenspiel routines”, that it gets in the way of saying anything more considered. Which isn’t to imply that I think the writers don’t actually believe what they’re saying. On the contrary, I think they hold their opinions powerfully and sincerely, and are trying to identify something wrong in their culture by singling out and drilling down on the sins of one thing in particular. But nonetheless, by caring so much about being good bits of writing—and they are good bits of writing; there’s something juicy and relentless about Kael that sticks with you—they end up empty on the level of argument.

These two failure modes highlight the central problem of reviewing, I think. Which is that reviews tend to be three things at once: ekphrasis, analysis and evaluation (which implies some sort of rubric of quality, whether personal, cultural, or “objective”). This is partly understandable, given that art is an abstract, experiential thing and therefore difficult to evaluate or analyze without some degree of ekphrastic description. It if was easy to say what a work was doing, the artist wouldn’t have needed to make art of it in the first place. So it makes sense that the process of making a work legible enough to opine on would have to trade in artistry itself. It makes sense that in order to show an audience what a work feels like, a review would have to poetically reproduce that feeling. Similar to the way that the translator of a poem needs to be a good poet themselves in order to make the meaning and experience of a poem accessible to an audience in a different language.

The problem is that ekphrasis, being expressive, is also necessarily subjective, and not primarily concerned with logic. Which on its own, is perfectly fine. I’ve written a ton of ekphrasis on this blog. I’m pretty pro-ekphrasis. When it’s done right, there isn’t much like a bulls-eye poetic description of a work to make you feel like you get it on a level you didn’t before. But when that sort of writing is also trying to say whether or not a work is “good”, the expressiveness frequently gets in the way. It’s easy to state or promote an opinion expressively. It’s harder to defend an opinion that way. In good faith, anyhow. Which results in all of these reviews that succeed in observing true or true-feeling things about art, and do so in a sometimes deliciously readable way, but don’t leave me with the feeling that the writer has any consistent or defensible take on how art works. I can’t help thinking that I much prefer reading writing about art that keeps its purpose siloed. So either a piece that tries to poetically explain how a work affected them, or an academic work that tries to argue for an interpretation, or something more philosophical that puts forth a theory of what makes things good and bad and explain why a work does or doesn’t live up to that. I don’t want this to be the case. I think writing that can blend those three modes together is some of the best possible writing about art. But the average reviewer is not really up to the task, despite the fact that the review is probably the most common and widely-read type of writing about art.

(None of which is to say that I’m free of sin these regards. One of the reasons I try to keep the tone of this blog casual is because I want to be able to be able to play with these different modes of writing about art. And see where and when and how I can get away with blending them. It’s a practice space.)

[thesublemon]

more brief responses to movies. one good, three flawed.

May as well post these here instead of keeping them private.

The Firm (1989). Directed by Alan Clarke. Good old solid British realism. Pleasantly short and to the point. More movies should be willing to be short, instead of padding with story. Gary Oldman very good.

City of Joy (1992). Directed by Roland Joffé. Some beautiful photography, but dull and stilted storytelling, and erratic in tone. Gave up after 20 minutes. Hideous Kinky had similar ideas and elements but addressed and executed them a thousand times better. I enjoyed Hideous Kinky because it was almost an anti-Eat, Pray, Love: a white woman goes to India to escape Western life and a disappointing partner, but it turns out that the “east” or a more “authentic” and “exotic” life cannot provide any more spiritual insight than any other. Because people are people everywhere, spiritual hypocrites included, and you bring your problems with you wherever you go. Whereas this movie was a more boring “white person seeking enlightenment in India grows up by learning that hardship is real.”

A Dark Song (2016). Directed by Liam Gavin. Had a solidity to it and went some interesting places in a way that is unusual for contemporary horror. But ultimately felt too student-film for me to really like. I wanted more use of visual language to give it thematic focus. Kept comparing it to The Exorcist, which also tackles religiously-flavored horror, but with very tight and thematic visual language. Martyrs too, since that movie also features the long, brutal stripping away of a female character, followed by transcendence, except that whole movie is a commentary on the human yearning for those kinds images and stories. And so you leave it feeling purged of something and somehow…extruded by the work. In that artistic way. Whereas this movie got nowhere near my guts and so it could not provide that sort of transformative experience.

The Little Drummer Girl (1984). Directed by George Roy Hill. Screenplay by Loring Mandel (who also wrote Conspiracy). Based on a Le Carre novel. Starring Diane Keaton. A good movie, though ultimately missing something to really compel me. Some kind of aesthetic oomph. Didn’t help that the romantic connection at the heart of it was too limp to give the movie an emotional center. I most appreciated it on the structural level. The evolution of the story goes through a pleasant number of twists and turns. Despite the fact that the ending is inevitable (the Israelis killing all of the Palestinians), you’re still interested in how it will get there, and hold out some hope that something or someone will be spared.

[thesublemon]

three movies that should have been boring, but weren’t

I’ve been doing short write-ups of movies as I watch them lately, and I realized that the last three I watched were all united by the fact that they seemed like the kind of thing that should have seemed slow, or uneventful, or overdone, yet managed to compel me anyway. So I thought I’d compile them, in the interest of finding similarities.

*

Girlfriends (1978). Directed by Claudia Weill. A very good movie. Most impressive for the way it does so much with so little. A good example of how even in a genre that I should find insufferably overdone at this point—the struggling young NYC artist figuring themself out genre—can still be great if the artist has a strong, individual attitude and the guts that come with it. All it really takes for an “ordinary” topic to be interesting is for the artist to know what they want. I loved how unselfconscious it was. There was no sense that it was performing to what some imaginary audience would find cool, which is so often the problem with these sorts of stories (unless it’s something like Girls, which makes performativity its subject matter). This is one of the things that I think allowed all of its seemingly simple scenes to not be boring. Even if simple, the character tension in them was real and important to the writing. Whereas in writing that is looking for approval, the characters become vehicles for that approval instead of actual characters. And if they’re not actual characters, then they lose their ability to generate tension. Because tension is generated by things like “I have a model of what this person wants. When they face a new situation, I feel tense because my model predicts something about how they’ll behave.”

The Apostle (1997). Written and directed by Robert Duvall. One of those movies where it seems like nothing happens and yet you’re absorbed anyways. At least I was. It actually seems like an artistically perfect reaction to have because the point of the protagonist is that he’s a charismatic figure that makes people believe in God, but doesn’t actually have any real spiritual insight. Not unless you go in for his brand of born-again Christianity, anyhow. The movie could have chosen a much more intellectually tempting or palatable version of Christianity, so I think it matters that it focuses on a version that needs emotion and charisma to distract you from the theological emptiness. A version that comes off as nothing but a bunch of repetitions of slogans and platitudes, as if saying things enough times and with enough fervor makes them true. Yet you get to the end of the movie and you realize you’ve watched more than two hours of this religious bombast. It feels like something has happened, even though nothing has. The man is still a murderer, still preaching away. He hasn’t really progressed, even though he probably thinks he has. His “ascension” at the end is into the lights of the police cars rather than the light of heaven. Basically, it feels like there’s this question throughout, echoed by the “empty”-yet-absorbing nature of the narrative itself, about whether meaning created in the mind corresponds to anything real outside of it.

Also: Duvall is incredible in the role. His character is one of those characters that could so easily descend into caricature or pantomime, where the bigness of the deliveries is more about flattering the actor’s ability to be big than portraying a character who talks that way. But Duvall gets it exactly right. Every delivery feels totally embodied and character-driven, which is vital for making the movie feel like a thoughtful exploration of something, instead of something with an opinion it wants you to know. It’s a great example of not-needy acting and movie-making. A caricaturish depiction would let the movie off the hook—would be about giving the audience something obvious to approve of (there’s that issue of approval again). Whereas depicting a person with a huge personality in neutral way forces you to think about them in ways that aren’t simple or easy. The way you’d think about a real person if you had more information about them.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring (2003). Directed by Ki-duk Kim. A very good example of a movie that is both successfully meditative and successfully absorbing. I’m not sure why it succeeds so well on those fronts. It has many many beautiful images, but there are plenty of beautiful dull movies out there. I suspect it’s because first, the seasonal structure of the movie gives it an excuse to change tones and build on itself, which prevents boredom. It puts you in the mood of a puzzle box. Second, and probably more importantly, each section basically plays as a fairy tale, or parable. And fairy tales and parables are a very compressed form of storytelling that play on very basic human truths. Which means that all of the beautiful images and meditative moods have something narratively and philosophically precise to hang on. They’re not there as compensation for the fact that the artist doesn’t actually know what they want or mean. The fairy tale quality is also probably what allows the movie to get away with such obvious symbolism without feeling trite. Because you expect the symbolism in a fairy tale to be obvious. But that obviousness also doesn't feel annoyingly didactic because the point of a fairy tale is not just to teach, but to convey some sort of truth along with it.

*

Setting aside the formal competence of each of these movies, which is definitely a factor in what made them able to keep my interest, I notice they all shared one important quality: they all knew what they wanted. And if an artist knows what they want, then the pace of a movie can be superficially slow, or the content can be superficially empty, or subject matter can seem overdone, and it will feel focused anyway. The artist knowing what they want also seems to go along with not trying to perform to an audience, which also gives the movies focus. A lack of pandering--even subtle, subconscious pandering--means that there’s nothing to pull you out of the narrative spell by reminding you that you’re audience member and an outside world exists. It also means that only the artist is driving the artistic decision-making, instead of both the artist and some model of the audience in the artist’s head, which means there are no conflicting visions to add bloat. Lastly, the thing about performing to audience is that it makes a movie predictable, because the whole point is to anticipate what an audience already knows it wants. But in a slow or overdone genre, predictability of execution (though not necessarily subject matter!) will generate impatience and kill the pace in the water. If you already know how a certain story goes, then the pleasure comes from the artist’s take on it. And if the artist is trying to give an over-familiar take as well as an over-familiar subject, then what is the point? This is why an individual style will make an action movie feel fresh, but a shocking twist will not, necessarily. The individual style derives unpredictably from an artist’s personality, whereas the shocking twist derives predictably, ironically, from a desire to not come off as predictable. Of course, this theory also means that shocking twist is its own form of overdone content that could still feel exciting and new if it came from a confident artistic place.

[thesublemon]

I just wanted to say that I've been finding your recent posts really pleasant to read. Like they lack some sort of faintly unpleasant posturing that everything else is doing and thereby render it more sharply in experience.

Thanks very much! I’ve actually had to work pretty hard to steer myself away from posturing, or other things that might make my writing less “itself”. So it’s nice to hear that the effort has maybe paid off.

[thesublemon]

been rewatching the wire and just finished season two. honestly baffled that it was ever considered a bad season. it’s gorgeously, classically tragic and rich with literary parallelism and other arty, thematic stuff. but also never stops being grounded in the real-world nuance of its subject matter.

you’ve got this focus on family. the sobotkas, the barksdales, d’angelo and his ex and son, nicky with his girlfriend and daughter, jimmy trying to reconnect with his wife and children, kima and her pregnant partner, beadie being a single mother, the fact that it’s prez’s father-in-law that drives the case, nicky being “like a son” to spiros and the greek telling him he should have had a real son. 

you’ve got a focus on unseen labor, dying labor. the dockworkers and their dwindling jobs. the container of murdered prostitutes. herc and carver being ignored by the squad. the westsiders struggling to push shitty product and having to lay people off. working-class jimmy in his boat, towing a party yacht of rich people. there’s a question of who owes what to whom. is a union like a family, where you take care of your own by default? or are the barksdales like a union, where d’angelo pays his dues with jail time and is owed support from his family as a result? is society a union or a family, and what does it owe to struggling, unseen populations? what’s the point of being like a family if families fail their children all the time?

you’ve got a focus on stupidity. the tragedy of stupidity. where the characters all come off as cool and competent in season one, playing clever cat-and-mouse games, in season two it’s just one fuck-up after another. ziggy and his endless, clumsy schemes. stringer bungling the attempt to sic omar on mouzone. bodie failing to toss the guns. beadie tipping the squad’s hand by stopping the truck. nicky telling frank to meet with spiros and the greek. herc and carver dropping $1250 on the microphone. landsman not telling the detail about the glekas murder. the fbi guy accidentally giving tips to koutris. bubs trying to rob an ambulance. the boy getting shot through the window. over and over characters are forced to admit that they fucked something up. maybe it was their fault, maybe it was bad luck. but no matter what, something harrowingly stupid went wrong. it’s completely fitting that the detail of the season gets started because of something as petty as valchek having a grudge over a stained-glass window.

but that’s tragedy in a nutshell, isn’t it? half fate and half fallibility. half big sweeping generational drama and inexorable economic trends, and half individuals making individually terrible choices. it’s a duality one has to wrestle with when making sense of the broken systems that the wire is so concerned with. when people end up dead, or jobless, or in jail, it begs the question: what caused this? did society fail them? did their family fail them? were they born into a bad circumstance? were they doomed by their genetics? were they victimized by evil-doers or malign forces? were they trying their damnednest and with noble intentions, but were surrounded by too many fallible people, and failed to predict too many unpredictable events, and so they failed anyway? did they have the hubris to think that they could beat the infinite complexities of the world, and end up punished for it?

that’s the key of the season, i think. the hubris of engaging with complexity. the hubris of thinking you can make a quick buck with drugs, or talk your wife into taking you back, or stop your job from becoming irrelevant, or uncover an international smuggling conspiracy, or explain why baltimore is the way that it is. it’s the attitude that makes the show such an effective critique of broken systems in the first place. it understands that trying to convey the true complexity of things is a fundamentally hubristic exercise, and that trying to lovingly critique a system into fixing itself is probably as doomed as trying to fix a broken marriage. and yet it can’t give up on the stupid, tragic, inevitably quixotic hope of that.

[thesublemon]

quarantine has led me to use youtube more. food videos for recipes, yoga videos for exercise. but i find myself unsettled by it all, even as i consume it. aside from things like music, it all feels like porn. call it educational, call it asmr, call it clickbait, but the structure is still pornographic. each video promises some specific relief, and the comments get mad if the uploader skimps on the money shot. you watch a single video and suddenly your home page is full of youtube trying to guess what gets you off. oh you liked that shit? don’t you want to see this food get made? this house remodeled? this pimple popped? this package opened? this car detailed? this knife restored? don’t you want to see this person laugh at the same part of a tv show that you did? don’t you want to see them rant about the same things that you’re mad about?

i highly doubt this is a new thing to observe. and it’s not that i have a problem with videos dedicated to some abstract gratification, per se. the unsettling part comes from the way that this pornographic behavior is not generally labeled as such. even jokes that a video is “like porn” or that the uploader left out the “good stuff” seem to miss the connection that…no it’s not “like” porn, it pretty much just is. which means that the uploaders themselves are in the business of being pornographers. they act like camgirls, they’re just selling a slightly more esoteric satisfaction. while doing yoga to a video i have to turn off the part of my brain that thinks a pretty girl talking gently about relaxation is probably getting someone off in a literally sexual way. and it’s not that i think that’s a yoga instructor’s goal. it’s more like, by virtue of existing within youtube’s norms their style was bound to converge on something ineffably sexual. i’m aware of the series “fake friends” that gets into the so-called parasocial nature of the relationship between youtube personalities and their audiences. though i’m not sure if that series makes the connection to camming (i’ve only seen part of it). or to the content structure of the videos themselves. not just the fact that youtube personalities act out a social relationship with their followers, but that the access to intimacy is in fact what the person is selling—literally so, often enough. not just intimacy either. sometimes authenticity, sometimes narrative, sometimes both. i wore the same shirt for thirty days! i bought my dream house! an apology to my followers… the point is that the person is turning themselves into a source of gratification, and this affects the structure and presentation of the videos.

it’s something beyond pure sensationalism too, although sensationalism is a factor. sensationalism hijacks a person’s attention by leaning on their feeling that something is important. it often takes advantage of the instinct to gawk, and the promised voyeurism of that can indeed feel like a pornhub thumbnail. BAT CHILD FOUND IN CAVE! etc. or say, a headline indicating that a minority demographic committed a crime might promise the validation of a bigoted mindset. but youtube also feels like walking through a market full of people hawking their wares. it’s a competition to sell you the thing that you want. but in that amateurishly unsubtle way that i associate with sexual content.

to the extent that i have a “problem” with the way that youtube, and really, so much of the internet, seems to encourage this sort of content, it’s probably that it prioritizes the audience instead of the creator. i don’t particularly care that people get off to things. so do i. i also admire the ability of internet content to get to the point, and therefore reward attention. but it does make me uncomfortable to see content become about satisfying an audience potentially to the exclusion of a creator’s own impulses. it’s the content-ification of content, in general. you don’t want a recipe, or a story, or a song, you want content. it’s the same reason that visiting netflix tends to nauseate me lately. because everything feels so calculated to appeal. there’s always been gratifying media. it’s the bread and butter of reality tv, hgtv, etc. “do you want to find out what happens, and will we make it worthwhile?” is a basic, understandable question to ask. as i’ve talked about before, almost all art has a relationship to attention and gratification, and so to some extent the label of “pornography” is just a matter of a work’s location on a spectrum. the difference between youtube and other red light districts, is that it’s at once more unsubtle than netflix, and less explicit than a cam site. and the difference between youtube and the average cooking show or blockbuster movie, is that it’s motivated to be more purely oriented around whether the viewer is satisfied along some very immediate axis. instead of something that rewards attention, but has concerns besides whether the content is moment-to-moment acceptable to some specific audience.