Season 5
Episode 16
THE BODY:
Tell me no lies
by Spring Summers – 10-OCT-04
- The power of death – The reality of
death – Wobbly steps – Hearing
and speech – Slow re-entry – Time
barriers - Reconnecting -
Death is the most powerful thing I’ve ever
experienced. In the single instant that ended my husband’s
life, Death stomped all over my best laid plans, it overcame my years of
effort, and it shattered my painstakingly constructed fortress walls as if they
were made of a whisper. Love didn’t stop
Death, and luck didn’t stop it, and prayers and curses didn’t stop it. The needs of a desperate young family were
irrelevant, and the medicines and the doctors were no obstacle. They – we, he - all lay down like sheep, in
the end.
Death is senseless
and insensate: It has no eyes to see
your suffering, or ears to hear your begging, or mouth to ask your
permission. It does not need permission; it respects no
boundaries; it does not answer to man’s logic or laws. Death steamrolled me. It laid me so flat and so thin that it
squeezed everything out of me, including my breath. I’ve never tried to write about it directly,
until now. And until I saw Joss Whedon’s
Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
episode 5.16, I’d never really seen
my experience clearly and unflinchingly portrayed in fiction.
I’d never seen my experience clearly and
unflinchingly.
SeeingThe Body on FX reruns hooked me on Whedon’s
series, it mesmerized me - and it gutted me.
Approximately 15 years after my loved one’s death, it provided a long
overdue catharsis. I cried so hard, I
still cry so hard every time I see it, because of the relief of feeling finally
connected. No – not to my grief. I made that link years ago. My tears aren’t about the release of
repressed sorrow. They are about the
relief of feeling understood and validated.
When I first saw The Body, I
didn’t even know Joss Whedon’s name. But
I do now, and I love Joss for this episode, and I will always love him for this
episode.
So, S’cubies – analyzing
this one is a special challenge, and I’m not sure how I’m going to hold up, or
measure up. But as my late mother used
to say, “Coraggio!”:
In Checkpoint we learned it was all about
the power. Buffy tested the limits
of her power and found them luxuriously lengthy. But in this episode we see just where that
power ends.
SPIKE
(to Buffy, in Fool For Love): “Death is your art. You make it with your hands, day after day.”
Now we learn that
Buffy is not so much Death’s painter, as its paintbrush. The powerlessness of all human beings (even
The Chosen One), in the face of Death, is seen in many images throughout the
episode. Some examples are below:
I mentioned above that Death doesn’t answer
to the laws of man – but it is a slave to the laws of physics. When the temperature and length of exposure
combine in a particular manner, when the force applied exceeds the resistance, and
when the pressure is just so - the pie burns, the ribs crack, and the blood
vessel bursts. When physical conditions
specify, Death must arrive.
We’re looking at
human vulnerability to, and powerlessness against, a relentless, impersonal
environment. Though it is Death which
has the ultimate power to end our lives, every moment of our lives is affected
by all of the immutable physical laws of our Universe. As Joss mentions in his DVD commentary, this
is a continual theme in The Body, and
he deliberately uses coarse words and images that remind us of physical
realities –including less personal deaths - that are part of our everyday
existence:
So Buffy, who’d
rather not hear about barf at the dinner table (“Xander!”), has to deal now
with her mother’s dead body. Our first
up-close-and-personal encounter with Death forces us outside, out of the sheltered
wombs where we worry about whether our underclothes show, or what cute boys think
of us, or where we politely wish strangers good luck. It squeezes us out, squalling, into raw
reality. And when Death pushes us out
into the real world for the first time, it, paradoxically, feels like a
birth. It’s a fast forced trip down a
long dark hallway. And we are – OK, let
me go for it, I was – I was stunned speechless by the harsh and horrible
light. Surprise! The world was so very, very, much different
than I had previously realized. It took awhile,
to catch my first breath - to find my legs and my voice again, to learn to walk
and to talk.
So for the second time in her life, Buffy
is cut loose from her mother.
The contra-indicated birth-like aspect of the experience of Death is
represented in several ways:
But the shock fades,
and the reality slowly seeps in - inexorably, like vomit onto a paper towel. Our senses inform us, they provide the means
through which the cold truth enters. Even
our own words serve as knives.
911
OPERATOR: “Are you alone in the house?”
BUFFY: “Yes.”
She already knows her mother is dead, but
she isn’t listening to herself. Then
later:
BUFFY
(to Giles): “We’re not supposed to move the
body!”
This time, she hears.
The crucial role
of words – their use as transitional vehicles for the movement of outer reality
into our inner worlds – is noted in the frequent use of the word “call,” most
notably here:
PARAMEDIC
#1: “She’s cold, man.”
PARAMEDIC
#2: “Call it.”
Their words make it official, their words bring
the message formally to those who remain:
Joyce is dead.
The importance of
words in realizing reality is further noted in the distortion of the speech and
hearing of Buffy and The Scoobies, as they suffer through the detachment and
isolation born of shock:
Xander looks at
Willow with such wonder in his face after that exchange that - call me crazy
out loud - it seems to me that shock has slowed down his senses enough that
he’s actually noted, and been amazed by, the phrasing that has just rolled off both
of their tongues. I think Xander has
noticed what I noticed, i.e. the other truth these words convey: XANDER: “I can’t ever have sex with you.”
In the throes of
devastating grief, our inner clocks slow, our vision clouds, our hearing dims, and
our words form strangely and sluggishly.
The inability to look Death straight in the face is represented by the
constant, off-center camera work, the words that don’t quite hit the mark (“Mom
had an accident.”), and the talk of negative space. We all want to look at everything and
anything but the body. We define
Death by the empty space it leaves behind. Life is the thing; death is the lack of it. Death itself is unknowable, unthinkable,
unfathomable:
ANYA: “I don’t understand how this all
happens. How we go through this. I mean, I knew her, and then she’s – there’s
just a body. And I don’t understand why
she just can’t get back in it and not be dead anymore. It’s stupid.
It’s mortal and stupid. And
Xander’s crying and not talking, and I was having fruit punch, and I thought,
well, Joyce will never have any more fruit punch, ever. And she’ll never have eggs, or yawn, or brush
her hair, not ever. And no one will
explain to me why.”
We don’t know why. But outside, life goes on. While
Buffy is throwing up, somewhere else in the neighborhood, someone is practicing
music. The paramedics have to respond to
another call, Xander gets a ticket, Anya and
Dawn mentions, to
her classmate Kevin, that she once caused herself physical pain in order to
distract herself from emotional pain. We
see Xander use the same technique when he smashes his hand through
XANDER: “For a second there.”
And we note how the
need to help Xander, the identification of something they can competently
address, also momentarily distracts Anya and
Time seems to stand still for Buffy at
first; but it doesn’t, not really. It can’t.
Earlier I mentioned inescapable physical laws, and in the images of the
continuing demands of life, we get a particular look at the most significant law
of all: Time marches ever, and only, forward.
JOYCE
(in Buffy’s dream of a happy ending): “Buffy,
thank God you found me in time.”
And that’s exactly
where Joyce is now – lost in Time. She’s
a thing of the past. Buffy can remember
her mother in Time Past, but she can’t actually find her there. No matter how she might dream otherwise, she
can only move forward through Time.
Death is
final. We have no choice but to leave
the dead behind in the past. They are
forever physically inaccessible to us.
They do not follow us forward in Time; we cannot spend another second
with our beloved. We cannot spend
another microsecond. He or she is forever
unavailable for further interaction - and oh, God, how that hurts. But our loved ones can continue in our
memories, and in our thoughts, for all our days. Their personal effects remain – to quote
“In the time that it takes for their light
to reach us, they’ve died.”
The connection
that is severed in our physical life remains in our private, spiritual life,
and in our inner, emotional life. The existence of that remaining link is
represented in this episode by the way Joyce’s body remains so clearly nearby. It is right down the hall:
911
OPERATOR: “They’re very nearby.”
XANDER
(later in the conversation): “In my
defense, some crappy wallmanship.”
XANDER: “Who did the drywall in this place?”
DAWN: “Where’d she go?”
Here, I flashback
to Joyce, behind the wall in Restless. She’s very nearby. She’s in the same place that Xander’s hand
went - just behind that flimsy wall of unknown origin. I notice that
Everyone deals differently with their grief:
Dawn feels better
when Kevin commiserates with her; Xander is relieved when
Death takes our
loved ones away from us. They can not get
back in their bodies, and we can not force them, with the power of our minds or
anything else, back into those bodies. One
way or another, Death ultimately wins those battles - every time. But the living can go on living. The living can accept love and comfort from
others; the living can reestablish connections.
Death can take
your parent, your spouse, even your child – and in doing so, it can deaden you
so thoroughly that, like Buffy, you don’t even know if “you’re here.” That’s the feeling: That you can’t be here; that there is no
here; that you’re uncertain, even, which one of you has died. At first.
But then, eventually, you notice that your heart is still beating. And as long as your heart is beating, you have
the power. You don’t have to let Death
take you, not just yet. Not while
your heart is still beating.
DAWN: “That’s such a lie! I got cut.
By accident. One time. Now Kevin thinks I’m a -”
FRIEND: “Well, that was when you were wigging out
about your family. And of course,
Kirsty’s gotta turn everything into a story.
She was telling people you were adopted.”
In my analysis of I Was Made to Love You, I noted Joyce’s
death, and I bemoaned the fact that I had ever invited Joss into my home. But now, I see that he has returned the
favor. In his DVD commentary, he
mentions that the grief that is so vividly and faithfully portrayed in The Body is based primarily on his own
experience with his mother’s death. So,
at some cost, he has offered me entry into a piece of himself. Thank you, Joss, for the invite. I accept with wonder and admiration for your most
amazing, courageous (and ever-so-rare) feat:
Turning everything into a story, without turning anything into a lie.
***
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