Willow, destroyer of worlds

The most disturbing "Buffy" season ever ends with our most beloved character becoming a monster -- without losing our sympathy.

By Stephanie Zacharek

May 22, 2002 |

There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

-- T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"

We don't like to think of television as art. When we're drawing up the divisions of what can and can't be thrown into that immense handbag of a category, we readily acknowledge that the right sorts of books and movies can usually slip right in. The boundaries are even more porous when we're talking about fine art; its jellyfish embrace expands to hold both the paintings of the great masters and installations consisting solely of toilet seats.

But what do you do with a show like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"? "Buffy," created and produced by Joss Whedon, started out as a show about a group of teenagers dedicated to pulverizing the vampires and demons who had invaded their previously tranquil town of Sunnydale (the name alone marks it as a magnet for evil; it's like a virgin begging to be corrupted). From the start "Buffy" has always had hidden, or not so hidden, strata of emotional riches. But now, at the end of its sixth season, "Buffy" has grown up and out into a deeply layered epic, with characters that some of us feel we know as well as Captain Ahab, David Copperfield or Emma Bovary.

It's pointless to spend much time wrestling with the question of whether TV can be art (of course it can be and often isn't). But there have been many days when, after a particularly potent "Buffy" episode, I've found myself feeling vaguely off my game, my mind clouded with a gauzy, muted sense of dread. When a show jostles your equilibrium to the point of haunting your days or robbing you of sleep, when it finds a place in your imagination that also rubs, hard, at the core of who you think you really are, it starts to look like something more than what we simply call TV.

The season finale of "Buffy," which aired Tuesday night, followed weeks of buzzing on "Buffy" online message boards, some of which have been vibrating resoundingly with charges that "Buffy" is anti-gay, misogynist, or both. Some fans in the lesbian community have asserted that by killing off one-half of the show's lesbian couple -- Tara, the girlfriend of the very mild-mannered, very brainy but also, we now know, very powerful Willow -- Whedon destroyed one of the few positive lesbian role models on television. Thus, they argue, it follows that he's most certainly anti-gay. Other fans have said that every character who gets killed off on the show is either black, gay or a woman (or any combination of the three), which surely marks Whedon as a misogynist and/or a racist.

What it really tells us, though, is that Whedon has an ear for tragedy that draws from some of the most classic examples, from ancient Greece through Shakespeare and beyond. The characters that he loves (and we love) the most are also the ones who suffer the most. I don't think it's a coincidence that most of those characters are women. Since the beginning of the show, Whedon has reserved the richest and most troubling complexities for his women characters. No one escapes suffering in Whedon's universe, but we're made to identify most with the women: both with minor characters like Joyce Summers, Buffy's mother (who was almost always an annoyance and yet whose death left an unimaginable void), as well as, of course, the two women who pump more blood into the show than anyone else -- Buffy and her best friend, Willow.

The season finale of "Buffy" belonged, unequivocally, to Willow, despite the fact that Buffy is the series' star. It didn't have the queasy-making resonance of Whedon's finale last year. In that episode, he did the unthinkable by killing off his own heroine. (She would later be raised from the dead against her will, inciting a longing in her that will not be fulfilled until the day her heart again stops beating. And that's just a subthread.) But this year's finale nevertheless threw the show and its characters into yet another light; it has changed the shape of their shadows, showing us things in them -- resources of unusual bravery and cruelty -- that we couldn't previously have imagined.

Next page: Beloved Willow: The perpetrator in what may be the most grueling torture scene ever shown on TV