A Road Less Travelled

Warning: For those of you who are in the midst of watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and are pre season 5 there are some serious spoilers in this post. You have been warned. Please don’t hate me if your eyes accidentally slide over this warning and proceed onto the post which, as I’ve just said, is full of spoilers. Got it?

At least two of my all time favorite television shows are Joss Whedon creations. (That would be Buffy and Firefly for those of you keeping track.) Somehow this man manages to consistently create characters that I come to care about and care about quite a lot. I don’t watch Buffy for the vampire fights or even the supernatural Scooby Doo aspects of the show. I watch it and keep watching it because there are a group of characters who have chosen to go through life together. Their life just happens to involve vampires, monsters, and apocalypses.

And yet the episode that touched me the most and tore right through my defenses is an episode about a very normal occurrence. Throughout season five Buffy’s mother has been struggling with a brain tumor. She goes through surgery which is a complete success, recovers and starts picking her life back up. She goes back to work, she’s able to take care of her daughters again and she even goes out on a date with a guy who sounds very nice. And then at the end of an episode Buffy comes home and finds Joyce, her mother, dead on the couch.

The next episode is powerful, heartbreaking and masterfully done. It feels more like real life captured on tape than a TV show. Halfway through the episode I realized there was no music, there were no background noises. All of the awkward pauses of grieving people who have no idea what to do echoed against an empty backdrop. All of the emotions were just what you could see; there were no musical cues to tell us what to feel. Instead of a musical score implying what we should be feeling we had to focus entirely on the actors portraying a world that has suddenly come apart.

We had to watch Buffy call 911 and numbly try to revive her mother. We had to watch the paramedics. We even had to see Buffy’s hopes as she imagines her mother is all right. We watched the doctor explain that Joyce had suffered an aneurysm and we heard what Buffy imagined he’d said. The first reactions of Buffy’s fourteen year old sister and all Buffy’s friends who had all looked to Joyce for mothering.

When we started the episode I decided I was going to try to keep my distance. It was far too familiar. I even succeeded for a time. I was clinical and noting movie making techniques. But it didn’t work. What really got me was one character’s confusion. Anya is fairly new to being human and she often says the wrong thing and doesn’t understand some of our social forms and assumptions. So she’s getting ready to go be supportive of Buffy with the rest of the gang, but she doesn’t know what’s going to be required of her. She doesn’t know what to do so she keeps saying the wrong thing and looks heartless. One of the other characters yells at her and she completely falls apart. What she said then made such total sense to me.

She said, “But I don’t understand! I don’t understand how this all happens. How we go through this. I knew her, and then she’s— there’s just a body, and I don’t understand why she just can’t get back in it and not be dead… anymore! It’s stupid! It’s mortal and stupid! And… and Xander’s crying and not talking, and… and I was having fruit punch, and I thought, well, Joyce will never have any more fruit punch, ever, and she’ll never have eggs, or yawn, or brush her hair, not ever, and no one will explain to me why!”

It’s the total confusion that went straight through my technical evaluation and my distancing. I understand that confusion. This group that habitually dealt out death to dangerous creatures had to deal with a death close by and no one, not one of them, knew what to do.

It was Anya again who said one of the few truly helpful things one can say to someone who is grieving. Into a moment of silence she says really loudly “I wish Joyce didn’t die! Because she was nice. And now, we all hurt.” It was when people said things like that to me that I felt like they’d really cared.

Part of me wants to watch this episode again and again just so that I can feel those feelings again because it was such truth there on the screen. And also so that I would remember because there are short, significant bits of my life that are a blur. Part of me never wants to watch it ever again because it was an accurate portrayal of life as it deals with death. There is something both appealing and frightening about that much truth. It rubs raw and leaves you feeling spent like you’d cried for a week.

When the episode was over and Raquel and I had dried our eyes I had to say again how impressed I was with the cinematography of the episode. Even the nearly random vampire attack near the end that was probably put in to break the tension had the feeling of reality while the coffin shopping and funeral in the next episode felt like TV. It’s this skill that makes Joss Whedon shows so enduring and engrossing. By the by, it’s also what makes them somewhat dangerous so I’d recommend you watch Joss Whedon shows with someone to talk about them with. Sometimes he turns truth on its head, but not this time. This time he got it exactly right.