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Thought y'all might be interested in
this. It's a decent read.....and here's the link to the article
~~Kimber
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An Ode to the Death of
Love
by E. A. Week "Let's face it, none of us is ever gonna have a happy,
normal relationship."
- Buffy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "I Robot, You Jane" I come to bury Tara, not to praise
her.
Fans of TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer
will know Tara (Amber Benson) as half of the lesbian-Wiccan duo of Willow and
Tara, one of the only gay couples on network television. Tara was shot to
death during a recent May sweeps episode, causing anguish amongst some factions
of the show's dwindling viewership. The Willow-Tara relationship has been
regarded favorably by the media, but for the most part, the mainstream press has
not reacted much to Tara's demise, perhaps because of a general consensus that
the series, now heading into its seventh season, is well past its prime.
Buffy is old news, and understandably, the critics just might not care any
more.
When the show began airingon the WB
in 1997, high school sophomore Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan), Buffy's
sidekick and best friend, quickly became one of its most popular
characters. Brainy, nerdy, and hopelessly shy, Willow represented a kind
of Everygirl in contrast to beautiful superhero Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle
Gellar) and rich, self-centered Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter).
Mentally already in college and socially back in fourth grade somewhere, Willow
could hack into the Pentagon, but could barely converse with her
classmates. Not many teenage girls might identify with Buffy's physical
prowess or Cordelia's glamour and popularity, but they could certainly
understand Willow's awkwardness and unrequited crush on childhood friend Xander
Harris (Nicholas Brendon). In the classic tradition of adolescent angst,
Xander first fell for newcomer Buffy, then began dating the snobby Cordelia,
completely oblivious to Willow's longing for him.
In the second season, Willow's
mixture of brains and sweetness did, however, catch the eye of Oz (Seth Green),
a guitarist in a local grunge band, and the two began dating. But her
crush on Xander persisted nevertheless. Early in the show's third season,
she unexpectedly attracted his interest, and the two went through several
episodes of illicit necking; later in the season, when Willow learned Xander had
lost his virginity to bad girl Faith (Eliza Dushku), she locked herself in a
bathroom stall, and cried. In a refreshing demonstration of teenage
maturity, Oz refused to kiss Willow when she wanted to make Xander jealous,and
later, he refused her sexual advances when she was trying to regain his trust
after her infidelity. They didn't make love until they graduated at the
end of season three, and Willow referred to their first time together as "the
best night of my life."
Seth Green's career blossomed over
the summer of 1999, and he left Buffy abruptly at the beginning of its fourth
season. The show's writers had already planned a year-long arc for Ozand
Willow, material which then could not be used. Series creator Joss
Whedon's solution to the imminent crisis was to introduce a female love interest
for Willow, in the form of fellow-witch Tara. Scarcely four episodes after
the obligatory heartrending split with Oz, Willow and Tara were exchanging
furtive glances at a college Wicca group meeting. Later in the episode,
they clasped hands to combine their magic, and telekinetically shifted a soda
machine. When Willow demurred, "I'm nothing special," Tara responded,"You
are," dialogue which all but crashed to the floor. If viewers couldn't
tell right away where this new "friendship" was heading, they probably had never
watched Xena.
The writing on Buffy?previously some
of the sharpest on television? inexplicably took an abrupt turn for the worse in
its fourth season, and Willow's new romance was not immune. Given Whedon's
enthusiasm for Tara, it's curious that he didn't give her more of a personality
and a plotline. She was based almost whole-cloth on Willow herself (shy,
bookish, a practicing witch), and at times, the two characters became so wan and
colorless that it was virtually impossible to tell them apart. Tara had
little role in the larger narrative, and her stilted dialogue with Willow
consisted almost entirely of clumsy, obvious innuendo and metaphor. One
early scene had Tara suggesting, "Maybe tonight, I mean, if you're not doing
something you could come over, and we could do something." In lieu of
lovemaking, the two "made magic," casting spells blatantly coded as sex,
complete with candles, heavy breathing, passionate moaning, and a swelling
orchestra. To celebrate their love, they adopted a cat they dubbed Miss
Kitty Fantastico, a moniker any ten-year-old with a dirty mind could
translate. (Matt Roush of TV Guide would refer to this nonsense as "the
sensitive exploration of Willow's sexuality.") In their first half-season
together, Willow and Tara engaged in perhaps ten minutes of actual, meaningful
conversation.
Poor acting exacerbated the wretched
scripts. Without a dramatic anchor, Benson was hopelessly adrift, andshe
rarely rose above the material. Hannigan, who in the first three seasons
had invested Willow with warmth, humor, and animation, seemed to become
disengaged from the character, and her performances grew increasingly
listless. Perhaps most distracting of all, the two heterosexual actresses
never established a comfortable rapport in their portrayal of a romantic
couple. Even after two seasons of working together, their on-screen
exchanges had the self-conscious awkwardness of unworldly adolescents playing
"let's pretend we're gay."
The lackluster quality of the writing
stemmed in part from Willow's having barely any reaction to this ostensibly
enormous development. Her lack of surprise might be interpreted as proof
that deep down, Willow knew she was gay, but the show's writers claimed
repeatedly that they wanted her sexuality to be a non-issue (Hannigan herself
declared, "it's just two girls in love!"). Neither argument holds much
water. First, if Willow knew she had been repressing a lesbian natureall
along, that needed to be made explicit in the scripts. Second, it defies
common sense that someone so emotionally volatile would go through a profound
life change without any confusion. Willow's relationship with Tara was not
presented as a latent bisexuality, a rebound affair, or experimentation, but as
a flat-out, 180-degree orientation switch from straight to gay?with no narrative
scaffolding to support the transition.
In a similarly unrealistictouch,
none of the characters had much reaction to her big news. Buffy was
initially startled but immediately supportive; all the other reactions were
played strictly for laughs. Willow's friends never questioned her taking a
female lover, acting as if she had done nothing more remarkable than changeher
brand of shampoo. The lack of surprise on Xander's part was especially
puzzling, considering that he had known Willow since kindergarten, and thathe
had been the object of her considerable passion only a season earlier.
If nobody inside Willow's circle
questioned her orientation, nobody outside of it even noticed when she and Tara
held hands, danced, or kissed in public. Even by liberal standards, such
casual acceptance is difficult to believe. Willow and Tara's relationship
came across like a fantasy in which a gay couple can be completely open about
their romance, and everyone accepts them. One might argue that there's no
ill in presenting a vision of a world where homosexuals can live free of
discrimination. However, the universe of Joss Whedon has never been a
utopia; both Buffy and its spin-off series, Angel, have hit their highest notes
in episodes where the characters are conflicted, and the world around them is
full of pain and darkness.
Whedon takes particularly perverse
pleasure in dashing his characters' chances of happy romance. Every one of
his couples has ended in disappointment, if not outright tragedy, the lovers
driven apart by a combination of internal flaws and external pressures. In
contrast, Willow and Tara's relationship was conspicuous in its almost absolute
harmony; by Whedon's own standards, they were absurdly happy, right up to the
last instant of Tara's life. Even when the couple separated in the sixth
season, it was due to Willow's contrived "magic addiction" rather than a truly
organic disagreement. Predictably, the estrangement didn't last long,and
the two reunited with an episode of marathon makeup sex.
Whedon himself has shown many times
that the best drama springs from tension between characters, and in the absence
of conflict, no real drama is possible. Tara so thoroughly lacked flaws
that any friction between her and Willow simply couldn't happen. Moreover,
Tara's development consisted entirely of bids for the viewer's pity: she
stuttered; her mother had died, leaving her in a family of abusive bigots; she
was briefly incapacitated by the hell goddess Glory (Claire Kramer); her memory
of an argument was wiped by the magic-addicted Willow. A paragon of
goodness and responsibility, Tara was always the victim. On the occasion
of her one wrongdoing (blinding her friends to the presence of demons, nearly
getting them all killed), she was instantly forgiven, the transgression never
mentioned again. This absence of consequence contributed to Tara's
blandness and to the complete lack of edge in her relationship with Willow.
Despite Whedon's often huffy and
petulant public defense of Tara, she ultimately turned out to be completely
disposable, sacrificed on the altar of shock value and ratings. Willow and
Tara were never about female empowerment or gay equity; they were a straight
male's girl-girl fantasy: pretty, passive, long-haired, and childish.
Their lives had no larger gay context: they had no interest in gay art, no
involvement in gay politics or a gay community. They had no gay
friends. They conformed to heterosexual norms in every way. They
weren't written for a gay audience; they were written to be non-threateningfor
straight viewers. The show's writers may have declared Willow and Tara's
orientation a non-issue, but they milked the "hot girl-on-girl action" for all
the attention it was worth, often highlighting the pair with everything from gay
jokes to breast jokes to blatant insinuations of oral sex.
Despite the poor quality of both
concept and execution, Willow and Tara garnered a loyal fan base, and the pair
earned Whedon critical kudos for a choice that many considered brave and
daring. If Internet fan response is any indication, a good number of
people only wanted to see a same-sex couple, regardless of how well or how badly
the characters were written. In the end, that was all viewers got?and
nothing more.
E.A. Week is a graduate of both
Mount Holyoke College and Syracuse University. Her tastes in television
range from The Powerpuff Girls to The West Wing, and some of her previous
articles can be found at Whoosh! She currently lives and works in the
greater Boston area.
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