ARTICLE: An Ode To The Death Of Love

[Kimber <kacoe@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thought y'all might be interested in this. It's a decent read.....and
here's the link to the article
http://www.scifidimensions.com/Aug02/deathoflove.htm

~~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 airing on 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 Oz and 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, and she 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
nature all 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 unrealistic touch, 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 change
her brand of shampoo. The lack of surprise on Xander's part was
especially puzzling, considering that he had known Willow since
kindergarten, and that he 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-threatening for 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.