Putting The Cop Shows Back In The Cop Shows Thread (And Even a Little Deconstruction, too!)

Liza Featherstone lfeather32 at erols.com
Thu Feb 18 13:48:12 PST 1999


I have been watching this new plot twist with both fascination and horror. the Faith/Buffy thing is about a raging conflict between appetite and social conscience -- this in a real-life cultural climate where both are totally suspect. (Faith, of course, is appetite, she loves sex and food and killing vampires; Buffy is cautious about everything, thinks she hates killing vampires and just does it to save the world)...Faith for a moment convinces Buffy that she can enjoy herself *And* save the world (not to mention things got pretty lesbo-suggestive between the two, which had to be punished, perhaps, since this is prime time TV and these are teenagers)...and then all this horrible stuff happens. it's taking a more moralistic tone with this story line than it has in the past, which I hope isn't permanent. but damned if I'm going to be missing any of it, it's so good. ambivalently addicted, Liza


>Oh, and BTW, "Buffy" has just jumped a quantum level or two in the past
>2 weeks, as slayer #2 (it's a long story), Faith, accidentaly kills a
>human and sends the whole show into much darker terrain than ever
>before.
>
>Just one teeny tidbit: Buffy confronts Faith as being in denial about
>what she's done, and Faith counters that Buffy's the one in denial, who
>needs Faith to act out what she's afraid to. Buffy doesn't respond
>verbally at all, instead her body language shows how torn she is by what
>Faith says.
>
>This is nothing new, folks. When McCarthyism almost totally shut down
>substantive political discourse, there was a veritable explosion in pop
>culture--some of it due to blacklisted writers under psuedonyms, to be
>sure, but certainly not all.
>
>I wouldn't exactly compare "Buffy" to "The Twilight Zone", but then,
>Sterling never did succede with anything that took a lot of time and
>careful crafting, as a series does. Both shows have a surface
>appearance that belies their seriousness, just as the politics of the
>world around them had a surface appearance that belied their absurdity
>and tragic silliness.
>
>(Snitchens DEFINITELY included.)
>
>--
>Paul Rosenberg
>Reason and Democracy
>rad at gte.net
>
>"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"



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