Tradition and Spec Ops: The Line

 Whereas if we approach the poet…we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.

                                                --T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent.

There’s a moment in Spec Ops: The Line, after you’ve unwittingly dropped white phosphorous upon unarmed, undefended, innocent civilians and unsuspecting, innocent U.S. Army aid workers; after you’ve discovered the former 33^rd command team executed and decomposing; after you’ve discovered the radio that Colonel John Konrad is ostensibly using to get in your ear and show off what a general prick he is—there’s a moment where you find two men hanging from a bridge. One is hanging for the crime of stealing water. One is hanging for the crime of killing the family of the man accused of stealing water. And you have to choose who lives, and who dies.

I killed the man who killed the family.

You find out later that this was all a hallucination of the shattered mind of your player character reeling from the guilt of the white phosphorus incident and turning his erstwhile commanding officer into a bogeyman to blame for his failings. But that doesn’t make the action any less indicative. When I thought I had to make a choice, I chose the man who killed the family. I thought that was justice.

Here’s what I didn’t consider:

Killing the snipers holding us hostage and making the decision. This you can do.

Shooting out the ropes holding both men, to try and free them. This you can also do. The game is smart enough to give you more options; to think outside the box and take choices that you didn’t know were there.

I didn’t do any of that. Didn’t even cross my mind. I was given a choice, and I chose.

Was this the sort of instinctual training video games have given me that Spec Ops was intentionally trying to subvert? Was this an indication that I’m not one to think outside the box or seek another way? If I’m given two terrible choices, will I take one while ignoring everything else but the choice at hand? Do I in my heart of hearts believe that I knew who deserved to die—and what’s more, did I?

You might say it doesn’t matter. It’s just a videogame. A situation with as much bearing on real life as last morning’s Dora the Explorer. It doesn’t say anything about you. These platitudes, I think, miss the point. At worst, they’re the same sort of cognitive dissonance that Spec Ops so glibly introduces the interactor to. A willful denial of circumstance.

Spec Ops gave me a choice. And I chose. And when I really, truly dwell on it—I honestly believe I would have made the same choice in a real-life circumstance.

What does that say about me?

But we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

There’s a not-insubstantial faction of video game fans that have been awaiting the genre’s first foray into “high art” (whatever that means) since the Playstation 2/Xbox/GameCube era. These are the people that are fellating Spec Ops as the greatest achievement since Super Mario Bros. 3. There an also not-insubstantial faction of video game fans—not casuals, mind you, but true “gamers”—that find the whole argument not only tiring, but foreboding. Games don’t need to be art; games just need to be fun. Games don’t need to appeal to the masses. Games just need to appeal to us. We’re fine the way they are, so what’s the fuss (Note: Channeling Dr. Seuss, apparently. –E). These are the people that upon playing Spec Ops would insist on the platitudes written above. There is only one difference between these groups of people: introspection.

Introspection is, after all, the root of criticism. And the growth of art coincides with criticism. The moment when man evolves from saying “I like this” to asking “Why do I like this?” and then proceeding from there. It’s how things are shaped.

Spec Ops: The Line is a third person cover-based shooter from Yager studios. It is a quasi-continuation of a franchise of largely forgettable games made for the original PlayStation. Its gunplay is functional, but basic. Its combat is stuck in the mid-2000s. It's short – 5-6 hours on normal difficulty setting (which, to be fair, is very much a challenge). All in all, at its most basic gameplay components, Spec Ops is nothing to write home about. It is in all the ancillary functions where it excels.

Games inhabit a unique place among entertainment, and in fact most other endeavors, in that they are a synthesis of product and art, and often the former is given far more weight. In this way games bear more in common with carpentry than most other art. That’s not a put-down, it’s just the way it is: the utility of the thing is inherently as important as how it looks. The interacted object (the game, in this case) only can be considered passable if at the least it fulfills the purpose consigned upon it by the interactor (the player). It’s great to have a fancy bookshelf, but if it collapses to kindling when any weight is put on it who’s really profited? 

Gaming’s relationship between these two facets remains at best uneasy. Games with severe gameplay limitations—bordering on outright broken—often are given a pass because of aesthetic and story. Likewise games sometimes are forgiven childish storytelling because of awesome gameplay. Balancing the two is a master act that few games have pulled off, and Spec Ops is not one of these. As competent as its gameplay is, it remains merely that: competent. 

So as a game, Spec Ops cannot be considered perfect. And it is not perfect. What it is is important. And its importance makes it great. As with comedy, timing is everything in art; this being the case, Spec Ops has pulled off one of the most gut-wrenching punch lines in the young history of the medium. Release a game like this when online gaming and the realistic brown shooter of both third-and-first-person variety hold sway over half the industry with an alarming dearth of context, release it near the end of a decade-long conflict that caused a nation to question its moral rectitude and how it treats its men and women in uniform, release it in the correct moment, and you have transcended the formula of gameplay and narrative. You become something great. This, ladies and gentlemen, is art.

Tradition is a matter of much wider significance…It involves, in the first place, the historical sense…not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature…has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

The fact that you’re being duped—or at the very least that something is going on that you’ve hitherto been unaware of—doesn’t, believe it or not, occur until a bit after the white phosphorus incident, and the gameplay itself is what gives you the hint. The white phosphorus is gut-wrenching, unexpected, a twist that in a modern military shooter is akin to something out of Homer; that is, ingloriously sublime. A quintessential horror so beautiful in its atrocity its takes one’s breath. It is a seminal moment in the game, and in a perfect world would become a seminal moment in gaming. 

But it’s not quite there that you start to suspect something’s going on beneath the surface. It’s after, directly subsequent to the in-game moment enumerated at the beginning of the post.

Ludo, Adams and Walker have to make their way through a sandstorm to shelter on the other side. In game this is nothing knew. A gameplay affectation that you’ve done at least once before, maybe twice. But for some reason—maybe the white phosphorus incident, maybe an intentional gameplay mechanic, it becomes something a lot more gruesome. An insane, twisted, harrowing run from both the elements of nature and man. A lack of clarity in conflict. For me, even with all I had heard about the style of the game, it was here that I started to understand its complexities, forcing you on a heart-pounding pace from checkpoint to checkpoint, bullets flying, enemies hidden and flanking, on and on and on, not-stopping, not even bothering to slow down. Really, just barely hanging on to survival. The game tosses you into a conflict with severe flippancy and doesn’t quite care if you live. Firefight after sandstorm, atrocity after injury and not a second to catch your breath. I soon came to the realization that the game’s not on your side. It’s not wanting you to have fun. It’s wanting you to barely keep up. It wants the veins to pop out of your arms and your eyes to go bloodshot and to have you leaning forward in the seat feet planted on the floor and teeth gritted. It’s not interested in your relaxation, only your comprehension. I tried to play this game in a position of comfort. It didn’t work out too well.

Suddenly the merely-competent gameplay carries a sinister undercurrent. Enemies obviously spawning from distinct points, weather related vision-obscuring disasters, bullets whizzing every which way, cover sometimes shattering right in front of you, your characters reactions to injury slowly turning from professional notation to unhinged raving. The game won’t let you leave. If you play it, you will work. You will not have fun. But you won’t be able to put it down either.

This is called engagement, and it’s a concept that games have a hard time fulfilling, internalizing, or appreciating. Engagement is not the same thing as fun. They are not mutually exclusive, certainly: something can be fun and engaging very easy, and quite often this is the case. But there is a certain a certain level of fun that is not engaging at all. This is time-wasting fun. Fun that is a distraction but that you can put down whenever you want. Like a game of horseshoes.

Spec Ops is notable for being on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. In many ways it is not fun at all. Literally. From its tough slog of the gameplay to its fast, near Olympian sprint-like pace from fire fight, cutscene, fire fight, cutscene, to those accused, hell-bound turrets near the end of the game when you’re storming the hotel, Spec Ops cannot really be designated fun in any way, shape, form or fashion. Even its video-gamey aspects—say, slowing down when a perfect headshot sends a guy's entire skull blasting like shrapnel from the ruined stump of his neck—come and go so fast that there’s barely any time to relish such a “fantastic kill.” No fun, no happy-go-lucky, no pleasure in seeing a man’s head get blown off, what kind of garbage Call of Duty clone is this?

The answer being that it’s no Call of Duty clone at all. It is engaging, it is gripping. It is not a pleasure to play Spec Ops—but it does make you think. It is in the same vein as Call of Duty and Gears of War, but not of the same blood. It carries the same tropes, but it spins them in different ways, makes the player truly examine what, exactly, it is they are doing. It doesn’t try to be Battlefield. Instead, it does something much more important: it responds to them.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

Criticism creates growth in all walks of life. Criticism is how we learned what does and doesn’t work, what we should and shouldn’t do. This holds true as well for video games. And Spec Ops is an encouraging step forward for the medium, if only that it signifies that games have reached a point where they can respond to themselves.

There have been games before that critique the medium as a whole, or critiqued its unique relationship to an interactive other (the gamer) that’s an integral part of its function. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Bioshock immediately jumped to mind. But gaming has never really been able to respond to the products of its own creation. Part of this is its relative youth as a medium. The story aspect of video games has been around pretty much since its inception, but its use of narrative has only been salient since maybe the nineties. Not to mention the advent of gaming period didn’t come until the late seventies. Meaning gaming simply hasn’t had time to respond to itself. It hasn’t done enough, built enough of a foundation. For a while there was nothing really to respond to. 

But we can’t deny that gaming hasn’t really desired to respond to itself either. There have been other concerns. Fanservice is one, both the sexual and power fantasy kind. The onus is more on making something that the interactor will want to keep interacting with, rather than something that has an impact or imparts a message. And it hasn’t really shown much of a push to move away from that, the ubiquity of online play being a huge contributor here. Being as online play and online multiplayer is nigh-expected for games, and being that there are only a few genres and types of games that can comfortably accommodate online play, instead of response, there is merely a sort of uniform Xeroxing effect. Even Spec Ops has an online segment, for no real reason other than, probably, the publisher wasn’t willing to put it out without an online segment because, probably, fans of games, especially this genre of game, are going to expect it to be there no matter how underwhelming. There has been no response, merely imitation. Spec Ops: The Line, in a perfect world, represents a response, and the beginning, perhaps and maybe, of a movement.

Art is about response. Every so-called new thing is built upon the old, and completely indebted to it. It is why the old axiom about “reading a lot and writing a lot” if you want to make a career of the latter practice is always bandied about. You have to not only read story, but understand its history. What others did, why they did it, why it matters, if its old, cliché, been done before. How to put your own twist on it.

In this post-structuralist world this attitude is a mite bit disregarded. The individual creativity is triumphed over all, really. It’s the individual who creates things in a vacuum, and the “best” artists are people who are able to take this so-called vacuum and make art from it. This is why a lot of art gets accused of “ripping someone off” even if similarities to anything else are negligible. Why people rebut the landmark qualities of Citizen Kane with cries of how thisthisandthis were done before in this movie. This is also why the average poem in a college bi-monthly literary magazine is uniformly terrible. There’s no room in a post-structuralist, rigidly individual society for reliance on others, especially on dead people in the past.

But such a paradigm does exist, has always existed, and will continue to exist. All art, even groundbreaking art, will have everything from is spice to its base firmly rooted in the history of the respective medium; what is up to the individual artist is to take the history offered to him and decided what to do with it. How to spin it in his own way. And Spec Ops breaches the issue through what I will go ahead and title the Star Wars method.

Star Wars was a response to a lot of things. It was a nod back to the serials of the 1930’s, the space adventures of Buck Rogers and company that so entranced George Lucas as a child. It’s also a firm adherent to the “hero’s journey,” a trope and methodology of storytelling that has been around since literally the beginning of human history, and probably a while before. But for our purpose, we’re going to talk about the other response of Star Wars, the one that made it such a popular, lightning-in-the-bottle film in 1977. And that is its message of hope; but not just that it had a message of hope—that good triumphs over evil, and there are still heroes and a bright future for humanity—but that its message of hope came at an indescribably perfect time. Star Wars¸ whether George Lucas meant it or even realized it, was a response to the doom and gloom of the early seventies cinema, a doom and gloom which of course mirrored the zeitgeist of American culture as a whole. And its 180 degree twist from the accepted notions of film narrative at the time is what made it such a phenomenon, and that, more than anything, is how it changed cinema’s landscape, even more than its revolutionary special effects. It was the attitude of Star Wars that made people really think about how they viewed their life and they way they watched movies. Star Wars could not have existed, or certainly would not have made the impact it did, without the years of cynicism that came before it.

The case is the same for Spec Ops. The very existence of a decade’s worth of brown, realistic shooters is what made it not only possible, but so heartfelt. It’s the attitude. Spec Ops is responding not to simply a trend in gaming, but to a movement that becomes more unsettling the longer you gaze at it. As game guru Tom Bissell suggests, the game really compels us to look in the mirror and ask: are we all not a bit crazy to like these "realistic" shooters? The answer’s a bit more complicated than a yes or no. What’s not complicated is what Spec Ops signifies for the industry, if we let it. If it can change the scope or make people dwell on this or that advertisement just a little bit more—then it will truly have done something that’s to this point unheard of in the medium of video games. It will cause a shift, and change in the movement. Romanticism was a reaction to the cold, sterile logic of Enlightenment. Will the era of the Realistic Shooter be replaced with the era of the Introspective Shooter? Will Spec Ops herald a new era of video game criticism and intra-medium comportment? Only time will tell. But what a landmark for the industry if it could.

Someone said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.

I was in GameStop the other day when an advertisement for the new Medal of Honor came on. Touted for being written by Tier One or Line One former military—pardon the glitch in memory—and promising the most realistic war experience ever seen in a videogame. What does it mean that Spec Ops: The Line alone made me regard this advertisement with more than a bored dismissal, but without outright disdain? Does a piece of art that makes a person looks at even a small portion of their life with more consideration indicate a master work? Maybe not. But maybe, just maybe, Spec Ops is a sign of something more. A sign of things to come. A sign that games, while not necessarily having to be serious, might just take what exactly they’re saying more seriously.

Until next time,

Mr. E 

A Word About Words, and a Small Defense of the Thesaurus

You know the one thing worse than some hack giving people advice on writing? Some hack giving people advice on writing even though said hack has never published anything significant, that’s what. So blame it on my inherent, college-ingrained sense of self-worth that I’m going to talk a little bit about word choice today; but hey, if Harold Bloom can go off and declaim writers even though he’s never done real writing in his life, then so can I!

This post began a few weeks ago when I, on a whim, bought a book by a newish author who shall not be named--we'll bestow this author the obnoxious moniker of Author-in-question, for anonymity's sake. 

I try to do this--that is, buy books from relative unknowns--when I have a couple of dimes to rub together, and as an English major said times are usually few and far between. But it was a mass-market paperback and one day when I get my book deal I would want some young scamp to take a chance on my book, so with the hopes of deferred karmic recompense I bought this novel and settled down to read it…

…and couldn’t finish it.

Question: am I ruined by quality? Or—let’s be honest here—perhaps not quality, but pretension? Am I forever doomed to hold texts to a higher standard simply because I’ve been exposed to the highest of the high so many times? Maybe, yes. There’s a popular misconception about all art nowadays that everyone’s opinion is correct and that a critic’s opinion—the voice of someone who has far more experience with a respective medium—holds no more weight than a yokel who sees one movie or reads one book a year. And while Art is, of course, subjective, and while no one can say whether someone’s opinion is “right,” it certainly is true that someone’s opinion can be, shall we say, more informed.

If I was say, a plumber, and some commodities broker hired me to fix his bathroom, and then started lecturing me on what he thought was wrong and how I should fix it, I would probably be pretty miffed, right? Maybe would say something along this lines of how I was trained to do this and have experience at it and you don’t? No one would question that. But someone saying that they might have more insight or a wider perspective on art because they’ve studied it for two decades gets lambasted for being pretentious, esoteric, and haughty.

Now it doesn’t help that a lot of people who say they have insight and perspective are pretentious, esoteric, and haughty—but the point still stands. Roger Ebert’s not going to be impressed by the same movie someone who’s watched three movies in their lifetime will be. Doesn’t make the latter wrong for liking a movie, just without a wider perspective.

PICTURED: Pretension.

With that being said, what I’m about to say here is entirely in line with the classic English Major syndrome, that is a focus on language at the expense of other aspects of the novel. And the sad part is that the plot of the novel in question is rather interesting. Neat characters and dynamics, a sort of Borgia-esque internecine can’t-trust-anyone family scheme, cool stuff. Yet I still couldn’t finish, and the entire reason I couldn’t was word choice.

This is why I ponder whether over-exposure to literature has sort of ruined me for the average genre milieu. Would someone who hasn’t studied texts for years not be able to finish a book just because of word choice? Certainly the book is well-known enough to be read, so obviously someone doesn’t care, but why do I?

We have the make a distinction here: by word choice, I don’t necessarily mean “writing.” Author-in-question's writing is serviceable. Nothing special, but it does its work and sometimes comes through with splashes of latent ability. It’s not the writing as a whole that’s in question here. It’s how the author specifically moves along and describes character actions.

In an average two-spread, the main character “stiffens” in reaction to outside stimuli an average of three to four times. She stiffens to bad news, to unexpected news, to unexpected turns of events, to suspicion, to physical contact, to emotional contact. She stiffens in the cold night air and stiffens in the hot summer sun. She stiffens by land or by sea. She stiffens when alone or when sleeping with a god.

Of course that’s not the only instance. The main character and most of the supporting characters have a tendency to look surprised, be surprised, stay surprised. And they’re smiling. All sorts of smiles of all shapes and sizes and intentions. She smiled menacingly. She smiled mischievously. She smiled happily. She smiled sadly. She smiled with treachery  in her eyes. She grinned—fitfully, remorselessly, bathykolpianly. I made it through two thirds of the book reading about the variations and different kinds of smiles, and then I just could not take it any more, and the characters and story—despite being interesting, were not involving enough to make up for it as in, say, the Harry Potter series.

It’s apparent what happened here, starting with the status of Author-in-question, who is not Stephen King, George RR Martin, or even Joe Abercrombie. Undoubtedly, Author-in-question is under weight of both contract and fiduciary concerns. Author-in-question has to keep cranking out books, and has to make a living while doing it. This leads to sloppy and repetitive writing. Author-in-question has cranked out five books in a three year period. That’s tough, guys. That’s very tough. And by no means is it a knock on Author-in-question; I’m not saying that Author-in-question (Note to self: Am really starting to appreciate pronouns. --E) should be “taking the sanctity of the art more seriously” and spending three years making sure every single phrase is unique and eloquent. It’s simply the way it is. To write even a short novel—that is approx. 50,000 words or what NaNoWriMo asks for—takes about a month, and when those are finished they usually aren’t very good. A seventy thousand word novel written at even a quick pace can take two months or three, if you’re lucky. With bills to be paid and contracts to be met, there’s much less time to edit said novel before sending it off to the publishing editors, who aren’t going to call the author and say “Um, you know, is there another modifier we can use here instead of stiffen?”

This leads into the second attribute of this kind of word choice, which is the intractable rule “show, don’t tell,” a saying that pops up so many times in a creative major that they should just emblazon it over the door.  See,  Author-in-question understands that you can’t (or rather, can’t and maintain any credibility) just say, over and over again:

     She felt shock about that news. “I can’t believe the news I just heard!”

     She felt shock about him touching her. “I can’t believe you touched me!”

This is in clear violation of the “show, don’t tell” policy. So instead, the character stiffens. She stiffens in reaction to every shocking turn of events. Or the characters smile/grin. They smile/grin so much that you could replace them with Disney mascots and probably no one would notice. This is all in an effort to find a way to display the characters sudden surprise without “telling” us, but ironically it’s overused to the point that it’s basically what the Author-in-question's doing anyway. “She stiffened” basically becomes a stand in for “she was surprised,” which defeats the whole purpose of saying “She stiffened” in the first place. 

Question: how could Author–in-question have fixed this problem?

Answer: I don’t know if Author-in-question could.

Writing is hard, people, as I have elucidated in previous posts, and it’s especially hard when you’re under contract, and especially especially hard when you have bills to pay, and especially especially especially hard when you’re not Faulkner or Thomas Wolfe or David Foster Wallace.

The greatest writers somehow create an atmosphere without speech modifiers, but where you understand how the characters are speaking anyhow. A sort of tacit adverb. Which is what “stiffening” in the case of this novel amounts to. It’s an adverb by another name. To wit:

I stiffened. “That’s not a nice thing to say.”

Is just a different way of saying.

“That’s not a nice thing to say,” I said, surprised/angry/confused.

And the true geniuses out there find ways to make the dialogue work without over-reliance on these types of modifiers. They use them, but as a tool and not a means to lean on to describe character action without violating the inviolable “show, don’t tell.”

But this author, and 99% of all authors/writers/pretenders (the last one including yours truly), don’t have the luxury of such an inherent grasp of language and cadence.  Instead, we have to make do with other tools and tricks of the trade, and one of the most overlooked is the thesaurus.

PICTURED: Making a comeback.

The thesaurus has really gotten a bad rap in recent memory. It used to be a go-to tool for people concerned about word choice, but too many pedants ruined it. Now it’s almost anathema to use a thesaurus, because, of course, people who do are trying to impress others. Or don’t have the chops to come up with words on their own, and no writer should admit that they can’t come up with words on their own.

Of course, most writers can’t come up with words on their own, not at will, not in the manner Saul Bellow can, and in this way a thesaurus can prove invaluable.

That’s not to say it isn’t a delicate situation to use one, so be forewarned. Because you should not aspire to subsist in the comportment of individuals who utilize the lexicon in regard to every particular utterance transcribed to papyrus; those are the people who ruined the thesaurus to begin with. But when you’re writing and you discover that you’ve used the word “stiffened” to describe character reaction for the fiftieth time? There are worse things to do than pop open a thesaurus, even if just to inspire another turn of phrase, or a means to get across what you’re saying in a different and perhaps more effective way.

Stephen King, in On Writing, advises that you should use the first word that comes to your head, if it’s vivid and descriptive. And while that’s for the most part true, a lot of people eschew the second clause. Sometimes a word pops into our heads, and it’s adequate—but we know it’s not getting across the full oomph of what you’re trying to imply. It’s a subtle nudge in the back of a writer’s head that the word they’re using, while it gets the point across, doesn’t quite hammer it home.

For example, say you’re writing a character whom you want the Reader to know is an inveterate, creepy skeeze. You do this through dialogue and action. And so you have him say:

“That dress is very becoming on you,” he said, smirking.

Now certainly this line characterizes this guy as a schmuck at best. But that’s not what you’re going for. You want a creep factor too. You want the Reader not only wary of the character, but to possess a specific type of wariness. A smirking guy commenting on a woman’s clothing is something a douchebag you need to watch out for would do. But it’s not getting across the creepiness factor—and you’re drawing a blank. You know there’s a better word for this, but you can’t think of it. Don’t worry. It happens. So you open up your thesaurus and—

Bam! Perfect!

“That dress is very becoming on you,” he said, leering.

Both words mean basically the same thing; but one is stronger than the other, and implies something totally different. Now, the guy’s not just a worthless playboy, but a worthless playboy who also carries an insidious air of predation. The word “leer” even sounds creepy—off, somehow. It’s a sound an animal would make while being brutally and slowly killed. Much more effective, condenses the narrative, and in one word characterizes the guy perfectly.

So don’t be afraid of the thesaurus if you’re facing deadline and need to get a draft to the editors. Don’t overuse it, of course: that defeats the purpose, and simply using a synonym for “stiffen” every time will become just as noticeable as simply using “stiffen” every time. But as a spice, it’s a great, easy way to vary the writing, and could possibly remind you or inspire a turn of phrase or a means of getting across your characters actions that’s better than anything you’ve thought of before.

Until next time,

Mr. E

The Power of Fandom

I call it "Mount Whedon"

Yet Another, Perhaps (Slightly) Different, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Top Ten List, Part 2

 To continue my additional raindrop in the maelstrom that comprises Buffy: The Vampire Slayer top ten lists:
(Note: See part one here)

5. Season 2, Episode 10: What’s My Line, Part II

When I was making up this list it surprised me, looking back on it, how underwhelming the first half of Season 2 is, especially when I had consistently disregarded people who said as such. Oh, they’re just so focused on the Angelus arc that they’re missing out on all the gems! I said, with the casual dismissive wave that a deposed pontiff gives to his jailer in denial of his incarceration. For whatever reason I remember the first half of season 2 being much better than it actually is, perhaps due to blowback from the earth-shattering awesomeness beginning with episode 13; not to mention that the first half of the season does contain Angel and Buffy in the happy-go-lucky all-is-rainbows portion of their relationship—the only time that’s so in the whole series—and we’ve already mentioned how I feel about sappy romances. There’s also the specter of newness—when you watch something the first time you are caught up in what seems like an interesting story and the Buffyspeak and Spike and Sarah Michelle Gellar prettily bouncing around. It’s only after you look back over it that you realize there are few episodes you have any desire to see again, and reviewing the episodes from the first half of season two—even just a few weeks after I watched it completely through the first time—the survey says “lackluster.”

To wit, of the twelve episodes comprising the ‘pre-Angelus’ arc of season two, only “Halloween” and “School Hard” are regarded with any monumental praise (maybe you can throw “The Dark Age” in there as well, if only that it gives us backstory on much-beloved Giles), and another, “When She was Bad,” is at most divisive and fits the mold for some hack's “Out-of-the-way” top ten list. Otherwise, we have such stalwarts as  “Inca Mummy Girl” and “Reptile Boy,” both entrenched firmly in the “Ugh” category; “Ted,” which even John Ritter could not save; the Invasion of the Body Snatchers/ Alien ripoff “Bad Eggs,” and the confirmedly “meh” “Some Assembly Required.” There’s also “Lie to Me,” an episode a lot of people find noteworthy but I find pretty well tedious, excepting the last five or so minutes and the introduction of the character that becomes known as Anne.

But even if you include “Lie to Me,” at most we have four well-regarded episodes out of the first twelve, which is not exactly a stellar track record. And two episodes that are either ignored or guilty pleasures or simply personal favorites. One being “When She Was Bad,” the other being “What’s My Line, Part II.”

“What’s My Line, Part II” (or part one, for that matter) are by no means great or singularly compelling episodes (they wouldn’t really be making this list if they were), but I find the second part specifically favorable for two reasons: one, it’s the introduction of Kendra, the Vampire Slayer who was called during Buffy’s (technical) death at the end of season one, a fan favorite black Irish woman who for some reason keeps insisting that she’s from the Caribbean.

The second, of course—see continued emphasis on sappy romance—is Xander and Cordelia’s wonderfully farcical romantic get-together, which is perfectly fitting in tone and presentation, and the expression of pent up angst and aggression the two feel not only towards their situation, but towards each other, a cycle that cements Xander and Cordelia’s relationship as my second favorite in the series after OMGBangel!.

Add to that an eventual curb-stomping for Spike that leads to his wheelchair-bound arc that, in turn, leads to the season finale, and you have a recipe for a—well, for a decent episode with enough good moments to make a list like this.

I think “What’s My Line, Part II” also accomplishes the overlooked function of digging deeper into what being the Slayer means—or rather, is supposed to mean. For Kendra, it means isolation and lifelong training and study, straight by the book; there’s an insidious implication that that’s how it’s supposed to be, and that what Buffy’s doing is not only inappropriate but outright revolutionary. As Giles says (paraphrasing), the handbook didn’t work so well for her. I don’t recall an episode before this one that really digs into this dynamic, save for a few times Giles becomes exasperated with Buffy’s obstinacy. But Kendra, for all her Caribbean-Irish brogue and character change, personifies the less-savory aspects of the whole Slayer bent.

There’s a decent percentage of people who very-much dislike the reveal in Season 7 that the creation of the Slayer was in effect a product of demon-raping a helpless young girl and removing all free will and volition in order to make her solitarily combat the demon menace. And while I agree that it’s not exactly the most inspiring of origin stories, I have to ask: what else was it going to be? There was always this shadow of suspicion over the Slayer mythos, something that you look at with cocked-eyebrow: a young girl—and only a young girl, mind you—gets “chosen” to be railroaded into a destiny that ideally (according to the authorities) removes her from all meaningful contact with the human race and ends for the most part with her demise before the age of 20 or so, all the while lorded over by the evolved form of those creepy old men (though there are some women now. Some.) who still want to control her and ask her to sacrifice all hope of living in pursuit of an impossible goal that they themselves refuse to get actively involved in (as Giles says sometime in season three, Buffy’s fighting a war while the Council’s just waging one).

That more than anything is what makes this episode more than what it appears on the surface. It’s the first true, extended (and wonderfully subtle) look at what a Slayer’s expected to be, do, and give up, something that’s expanded upon and brought to fruition five years later.

PICTURED: Come on, people, you know they belong together.

 

  4. Season 6, Episode 5: Life Serial

A lot of season six is regarded with a slight tinge of nausea, and that’s understandable. I finished reading the Joss Whedon critical companion a few days ago (1), and one of the essays brought up a good point, that though the apathy and distance Buffy has in six makes complete sense, it’s hard to relate to such a protagonist, and that is explanation for the sharply divided opinions on the UPN boot up.

I can't argue with that. I still contend that not having seen the previous five seasons before I saw (most of) six helped me be much more lenient on it than I otherwise would have—but at the same time, it is hard to cheer for a protagonist whose just so damned depressed.

Which is why I found “Life Serial” to be so wonderfully hilarious while simultaneously being so heartbreakingly sad. It’s one of the few times in entertainment I can remember laughing and wanting to give someone a hug at the same time.

The episode boils down to Buffy trying to be all upbeat! in her attempt to get back on track—efforts that will be consistently foiled by the Trio in their laughable Bond-villain best. Fittingly, an argument about who, exactly, is the best Bond provides a significant  piece of dialogue among the three.

I never did hate the Trio as much as many others—although I think their early season appearances were actually better, before everything turned so GRIM AND GRITTY. Right now they’re just a bunch of adulthood-resisting doofuses that spray paint Death Stars on their child molester van and make jokes about magic bones.

PICTURED: Although...that is pretty nice.

Still, there’s nothing beating the completely true-to-life parody of the retail industry in the latter part of this episode. Jonathon’s time-loop torture provides a stunning metaphorical reality on the doldrums of minimum wage customer service, and as with “Doublemeat Palace,” my own true-life retail experience endears me to this episode, because who in the retail industry hasn’t had that moment where you are entirely sure you’ve gone through this same play of customer interaction before, and all the shoppers faces are melding together, and you’re bending over backwards just so they don’t yell at you because getting yelled at for $7.25 an hour’s just not worth it; while every hour seems to take on distinct similarities until you’re not really sure that time is moving at all anymore and nothing you do matters.

So when Buffy, during one loop, does nothing but burst into tears while Anya and Giles look on, perplexed, I simultaneously howl with laughter and want to run up and tell her everything’s going to be okay.

Ironically, “Life Serial’s” time loop ends with one of the happiest finales in the Buffy series, with a minimum wage associate actually satisfying a customer. Truly a fairy tale for the ages.

3. Season 3, Episode 2: Dead Man’s Party

If there’s one rogue bit of licorice in the chocolate froth bonanza that is season three, most people would peg it as this one. It’s probably the most underwhelming episode in Buffy’s best season, chock full of melodrama, angst, conflicting characterizations, and a clichéd, dull zombie story.

And man oh man, do I dig it.

I like the angst. I like the melodrama. I think it makes total sense.

It’s safe to say that none of the Scoobies are completely right in this situation. Xander et. al don’t, despite what they say, grasp exactly how traumatizing it was for Buffy to run a sword through someone she loved to save the world. And Buffy never quite gets the emotional torment that she put her friends, and most saliently, her mother through. And you know what? That’s perfectly acceptable to me. It’s how a lot of heady arguments end up, and most of the time they don’t get resolved by the convenient attacks of a zombie horde that kills half the people in your house…well.

“Dead Man’s Party” also has the distinction of containing another of my favorite bits of dialogue in the whole series:

GILES: Unbelievable. "Do you like my mask? Isn't it pretty? It raises the dead!" Americans!

The episode does a respectable enough job exploring the distance between people who not only have not seen each other for months, but are harboring unspoken resentment towards one another. Xander et al are doing what they think is best and Buffy’s trying to do the same, but neither of them, in reality, feel comfortable enough with each other to really talk to one another, and when it finally does boil over in the (in?) famous argument in Buffy’s living room, I don’t know, it just feels sort of natural to me. The volanco’s been building, it explodes, and everything cools down again—with the help of Zombies, in any case.

“Dead Man’s Party” remains perhaps the worst episode of highly-praised season three. But unlike a lot of people, I don’t mind friends airing out their grievances against one another. There’s always the chance that it might ruin the relationship, but at the same time, if the relationship survives, it’s all the stronger for it.

PICTURED: Angst. And is it just me, or was SMG absolutely smokin' this season?

2. Season 4, Episode 1: “The Freshman”

I’ve already pretty well covered my unashamed love for Season four in my jot about “Pangs,” but it doesn’t hurt to reiterate here just how good of a season I think it is, and how well of a transition I think it works for the series as a whole. Season four is the literal mid-point of the series—three seasons before, three seasons after—and as such not only serves as the epilogue to the adventurous days of yore—or maybe just high school—but the prologue to the darker story lines to come—I mean, a lot of the point of “Restless” is the foreshadow to entire rest of the series.

Now that I write that, I could argue the juxtaposition comprises a lot of the problems Season 4 has. In a way, it's season 1 again with a larger budget: a show that is no longer sure where it’s going. It tries to capture the fun and hijinks of the previous, adolescent seasons while also moving forward into the darker, grimmer version of the adult seasons (Note: And on that parcel, has anyone ever thought about just how dark and oppressive season 5 actually is? I mean, even before “The Body,” with Joyce getting her tumor and all the drama surrounding that—it’s really very heavy stuff. –E), and in doing so it spreads itself thin, which is where I believe most of the reaction towards season 4 comes from, said reaction comprising a really violent form of shrug. It’s funny to me, because an average fan can rattle off about ten or so episodes from the season that they really really love, and still say it’s their least favorite, which either says something about willful denial or about how important a good season-long arc is.

Episode 1 of the season, while being nothing to write home about, resonated with a person less than a year out of college. Remember what I said about timing? College aged Buffy virgins, I think, would be a lot more invested in what happens on screen this season than younger fans, because as usual the writers capture enough about the rigors of college to make it “feel real,” including those feelings of displacement and loneliness that comes with such a life change and having to cope with someone you’re forced to live with but don’t click with. There are some obvious unrealities involved, not the least of which is that Buffy and what’s-her-face’s dorm is about the size of a suite in the Waldorf-Astoria, but on the other hand I just love the part where we’re in the vampires' lair and they’re hanging up a poster they took off a student they've killed, and said poster is one of about three all new students seem to buy, in one fell swoop revealing just how much of a shallow tool the average college freshman is (yours truly included). Considering my college had a poster sale every first week back, and considering how many of the same ones tended to pop up in every “deep” proto-Heidegger's dorm, this is an aspect of the college experience that the writers nailed on the head—as is the snoring roommate.

A lot of people have a problem with Buffy’s fighting techniques in this episode—how she’s basically manhandled by a queen bee and a bunch of loser vampires, but Buffy’s powers have always been at the mercy of metaphor and confidence—just look at the season 1 finale “Prophecy Girl.” Throughout the series she’s portrayed as being at her best when she’s focus, confident, and sure of herself, qualities of which she possesses none in this episode until the end, where she (gratifyingly) comes through and kicks butt.

Plus, it includes the famous .gif-worthy “stake twirl”:

PICTURED: The Spin. And is it just me, or was SMG absolutely smokin' this season?

And by the end Buffy’s once again reassured of her place as a slayer and as a human being.

Come to think of it, “The Freshman” fits my thesis of season 4 being caught between two worlds. Everything before season four had a season opening episode where Buffy’s concerned about being the Slayer and coming to terms with its attributes, most blatantly in season 3’s opening “Anne,” but true as well in “When She Was Bad” and even in the very first (two-parter) “Welcome to the Hellmouth”/”The Harvest.” Everything after four is much more complicated. “Buffy vs. Dracula” (Season 5), had a bit of the “what a Slayer is” theme, but Buffy was never really down or complacent about what she was doing and the goings-on with Dracula mainly serve to make Buffy take the calling more seriously. Season six (“The Bargaining” Part 1 & 2) is mostly concerned with the Scooby gang and everyone figuring out Buffy’s alive. And season 7 has her completely okay and even passing on some of her knowledge to Dawn. The whole series, of course, deals with Buffy’s questions about destiny and life and what being a Slayer entails, but the season openers before 4 have a very clear, defined arc:

• Buffy tries to forget about her duty; (starting over, repressing, running away)
• Buffy comes under some trial of fire; (vampires appear, the Master’s getting resurrected, slaver demons come-a-calling)
• Buffy reaffirms her place and identity.

The first three seasons do this, the latter three do not, and therefore it’s all the more indicative that season 4 is trapped between two worlds: adult 5-7, adolescent 1-3. Four opens up with the usual arc elucidated above, and ends with a highly experimental and foreboding episode hinting towards what is to come.

So maybe that's why I love this episode; it's the last time we see the old formula, before the break.

1. Season 5, Episode 17: “Forever”

How do you end a list like this? Seriously asking. Conventional wisdom says you’re supposed to end these “top ten” things with a “bang,” right? But how do you end with a bang when said list is comprised of episodes that you’ve said right from the beginning carry very little bang at all? Quite a conundrum.

I gave some serious though to the issue—maybe up to three minutes; my solution? To conclude with what many consider to be a “very good” episode, but one that most don’t put in their top ten or twenty. “Forever” might be someone’s #21, and you won’t find many people who don’t like it--but it’s not part of the elite either (well, not usually. I sure someone has it as one of their top-ten favorites somewhere).

Yes, it’s cheating, but sue me; “Forever” is not “Out-of-the-way”—but really people, what choice do I have? Am I supposed to end this list with “Gone” (which, by the way, I also really like)? I could, but let’s face it, no matter how much I like “Gone” (and it barely missed this list), it is, at the end of the day, a one off episode with huge weaknesses that most people would like to forget, and that even I wouldn’t really miss if its negative got lost in some great conflagration.

So we’re going to end on a high note, and make no mistake “Forever” is the highest of the high for a list like this. I’m talking Olympus Mons-to-Mariana Trench high. Still, despite it being well received, I’d posit that it doesn’t get the attention it deserves. A lot of that has to do with it being in the unfortunate position of coming subsequently after “The Body,” one of the highest (and deservedly so) rated episodes not only in the Buffy canon, but in television period. Whatever follows such an episode, no matter how good, is going to, even minutely, undergo a type of erasure, like a brilliant yet small star being shadowed by the well of a quasar.

Everyone raves about how well “The Body” interprets death and what its immediate emotional response feels like (which they should). But few(er) people dwell on how well “Forever” manages to take it one step further, and truthfully express how the aftermath of death feels, when a few days have been put between the initial trauma. How do people deal, what are their reactions, where do they turn? If “The Body” is a quintessential exercise in the suddenness of death, then “Forever” is a quintessential exercise in how we move on.  Dawn wallows in her grief, Buffy tries to keep everything inside and act the adult. This culminates in one of my top ten favorite moments in the series, when it is Buffy—not the impulsive, emotionally devastated Dawn—who almost answers the door, ready to welcomes a half-dead zombie substitute Joyce into their home. This few seconds is so effortless heartrending, creepy and moving, and I might just appreciate it more than I did any comparable single moment in “The Body.”

And as if to put icing on the cake, Angel shows up! Now isn’t that just jolly? After a funeral? For a beloved character?

PICTURED: :sob: Those two had only each other.

I’m sad again.

“Forever” is one of those fly-under-the-radar episodes that does little great, but everything right. Its tone and feel, its subject matter and the way it treats the characters are all the perfect follow up to one of the greatest episodes of television of all time; and while it certainly is doomed to live in “The Body’s” shadow, it deserves its own recognition, because it does what Buffy does best: treat the themes and characters with respect and truth. And that’s all anyone can ask for.

In Summation:

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little—tiny—almost nonexistent—experiment in the realm of top ten lists. Buffy: The Vampire Slayer was and is a remarkable show. This goes without saying; what can never be overstated is the courage and conviction with which it was created: the incorrigible desire to try new things, many of which didn’t work, but plowing on ahead anyway to foster an environment where anything could happen: where all the characters could lose their speech for 2/3s of an episode, or burst into song, or inadvertently turn their boyfriend evil in a succinct, touching and terrifying metaphor—all these are hallmarks of a piece of entertainment that somehow is able to go beyond, to move higher. When even the truly flaccid and picayune episodes of a television show still have some merit: a line here, a look there, an action scene that takes the cake—you know something special is taking place, and the culture seems to agree. Many great television series become sort of “lost to time,” subsumed in the popular culture, and even those that escape that fate all-to-often are reduced to parodies (Bewitched) or That One Thing they did (Newhart, St. Elsewhere). But with Buffy, there are too many moments too list. Too many “one things” and too many unique ideas. Too many great characters and stories. It’s too touching, too true to life, too conversation-worthy to be forgotten. At least, I sincerely hope so. Because any world where something as great as Buffy: The Vampire Slayer can be relegated to a one-off on Family Guy is a sad world indeed.

Until next time,

Mr. E

(1) I encourage everyone to check out this companion, chock full of most of Whedon's career, including what was (at the time) some pre-release ruminations on what The Avengers might look like. A lot of the essays are short and very basic, but there's plenty of good stuff in there.

And that's to say nothing of the cover:

It's like someone combined an Obama poster with Oh Brother, Where Art Thou's color scheme. And I just love how they have him looking off to the left all deep and philosophical. Still, there's no denying it's a good buy. Everything from Buffy to his comic work is in there.