Newsgroup: it.fan.tv.buffy
Titolo: Whedon's war

Angel strozza Spike
-spoiler- :-)))))))))))))
http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_05.20.04/film/boxpopuli.html
BY JOSHUA OSTROFF
Joss Whedon, the creator of the late lamented Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
its freshly staked spinoff Angel has built his career on metaphors. Using
genre conventions like vampires and demons, he concocted a Buffyverse where
high school really was hell.
After the final Angel episode on May 19, fans are facing the first
Whedon-less TV landscape in eight years. As the real world got darker, so
did his shows, which expanded beyond the personal teen traumas to include
more socio-political subtexts. On both Buffy and Angel, Whedon and his
writers used horror to come to grips with the war on terror.
During the final season of Buffy, which closed shop a year ago, Whedon
morphed his femme fatale into a Dubya-like general, gathering up her army
of slayers-in-training and endlessly speechifying about sacrifice. The show
took on a black-and-white "you're-either-with-us-or-against-us" tone that
mirrored the post-9/11 Afghan invasion rhetoric.
"They think we're gonna wait for the end to come like we always do," Buffy
lectured. "I'm done waiting. They want an apocalypse? Oh, I'll give them
one ... we just became an army. We just declared war ... There is only one
thing on this earth more powerful than evil and that's us. Any questions?"
Her autocratic attitude temporarily drove away most of her allies and the
final battle was won when punk-vampire Spike, with the help of a magic
amulet, turned into a pillar of fire, essentially becoming a suicide
bomber. But despite a twist that shared her powers with other slayerettes
around the world, the 2002-3 season felt like an endorsement of the Bush
Doctrine's pre-emptive warfare.
However, Whedon's personal politics, especially in regards to gender issues
and sexual orientation, are clearly left-of-centre, and, while Buffy was
concluding, his short-lived third series, Firefly (soon to be a feature
film) came at global politics from the completely opposite angle. The
sci-fi western dealt with a Han Solo-like spaceship captain named Mal and
his battles against the post-war galaxy-ruling Alliance.
"Mal's politics are very reactionary and 'big government is bad,'" Whedon
explained to The New York Times. "And sometimes he's wrong -- because
sometimes the Alliance is America, this beautiful shining light of
democracy. But sometimes the Alliance is America in Vietnam: we have a lot
of petty politics, we are way out of our league and we have no right to
control these people." In other words, the heroes of Firefly kind of came
off like jihadists fighting American imperialism, for good or ill.
For Angel's fifth and final season, Whedon repurposed the program. The
250-year-old titular vampire-with-a-soul took over the demonic law offices
of Wolfram & Hart, the apocalypse-minded firm that Team Angel had been
fighting since he left Sunnydale for LA back in 1999.
The story arc leading to this was over-complicated, but essentially they
hoped to use the law firm's vast resources to do far more good than their
hand-to-mouth existence previously allowed. The caveat, of course, was that
their new office was "a business, boys, not a bat cave" and therefore they
had to keep the profits rolling in from their still-evil clients.
The new theme asked the question, "Is it possible to do good in an evil
world without becoming tainted by it?" Perhaps recognizing that Buffy had
seemingly endorsed Bush's militarism -- and that in light of Gulf War II,
the world had gone considerably less black-and-white -- Whedon used Angel
to make a more complex argument.
The politics were subtly laid-out in the season's first episode, with an
offhand remark about Bush Sr. signing a deal with the devilish law firm and
having Texan science-geek Winifred Burkle put up a Dixie Chicks poster in
her lab. Over the course of the admittedly uneven season, episodes focused
on whether or not Team Angel were becoming corrupted by the institutional
evil around them. Over and over they struggled with soul-crushing
compromises -- one resulted in Burkle's death, another delivered a human
baby to a demon cult -- until Angel discovered the apocalypse they were
trying to prevent was "well under way," that they were "fighting an
invisible war."
Ah, the "War on Terror" subtext was back, but now the battle had become
murkier -- not unlike Iraq.
Though scripted and filmed prior to the growing prison-abuse scandal, with
US soldiers committed morally indefensibly acts in the name of the greater
good, the series-ending storyline became eerily prescient. All season,
Angel has been distracted, trying to negotiate evil into slightly lesser
evil -- always the plan of the mysterious, conflict-profiteering "Senior
Partners," who may as well be the neo-con cabal of Cheney, Wolfowitz and
Rumsfeld -- rather than acting like a champion for good.
Mirroring the horrific pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison, the
penultimate episode, "Power Play," opened with a man being beaten in a dark
room -- his hands bound, his head covered by a burlap hood. He offers
relieved thanks when Angel finally appears, but instead of liberating the
victim, Angel vamps out and drinks his blood.
Being the hero, Angel had an ulterior plan with which to save the day
(albeit at the cost of too many lives) but despite the exploration of moral
ambiguity that runs through all his work, Whedon's final message is clear:
the ends don't justify the means. It's not enough to simply wage war
against "evil," the good guys still have to act morally better than the bad
guys, or else there's no real difference at all.
Jolan Tru
-- 
Filippo "Hytok" Simone - L'oracolo sampdoriano di Sunnydale
La Casa degli Elfi 
http://members.xoom.virgilio.it/hyterdeflok/
Commissione Voyager 
http://www.voyageritalia.com/
http://www.ussexcalibur.it/

Hytok wrote:
[cut]
Mah! Non mi pare un'analisi molto sensata... in alcuni punti si', ma in
generale mi pare piu' campata in aria che altro.
-- 
Laz - [
http://www.dimensionedelta.net
]
"We came, we saw, we kicked its ass!"