On the off chance that there is anyone on earth who reads this blog of mine and somehow hasn't seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, or Doctor Who, I must warn you that a.) there be massive spoilers ahead and b.) you may have no idea what is going on for a while...I'm sorry.
I went to a dance on Friday and I met a very nice guy who, in the course of our dance, asked me "Do you keep a blog? If you go home and write about the dance tonight on your blog, what are you going to write?" This question made me smile. While I
do write nauseatingly detailed accounts of the dances I attend, as well as every other possible event (or non-event) in my life, the fact is that I save that sort of thing for the private blog I think of as my journal. Here on my public blog I write dry, uninteresting, philosophical flights of whimsy. I suppose, ultimately, that neither of those two options are particularly ideal for a public blog, now I think about it. And yet, here I am, about to embark on just such a flight as I ponder the human appetite for melancholy and tragedy.
The problem is that it is late and I've been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Yeah. That.
See, here's the thing. I have this problem where, when I get sucked into a TV show, I get
far too attached to the characters. Another good example of this would be the Doctor and Rose:
This is what happens. I start watching a show. Maybe, like with Doctor Who, I fall utterly in love with it. Maybe, like with Buffy, I am only half-heartedly interested. But in both cases there is one or two characters that I get attached too. Very attached. And then heartless, evil writers take that character (Angel, Rose) and brutally tear them from the show and my soul.
Sure, in the case of Buffy, Angel comes back. But I'll tell you what doesn't happen to Angel. He doesn't ever get to live happily ever after with the girl. And Rose? Sure, she might have 10.5, but no matter what you tell me, he isn't the original, and she's stuck in a bloody alternate reality. And even if she has 10.5, 10 doesn't have
her. So it's still a wash.
I was crushed after I watched the season 2 finale of Doctor Who. I am absolutely not kidding. For two weeks I walked around thinking about Rose and the Doctor almost constantly and felt depressed and despondent. That was a few years ago. Then, two nights ago I watched Angel lose his soul and break Buffy's heart, and I thought that was the worst Whedon could dish out to me. Then tonight I watched him regain it back, just in time for Buffy to realize she had her Angel back...and then stab him to death.
Here's the thing--I hate Joss Whedon. And Russell T. Davies too. I hate these men. I hate them for writing these characters, these two people who share a passionate, soul-mate-esque connection, and then writing them be brutally rent apart. I'm not exaggerating. I feel the sort of anger, bitterness, and resentment that should be reserved for cheating ex-fiances or beloved athletes who are caught using performance enhancers. Extreme? Maybe. But you read the bit about me getting obsessively over-attached to these characters, right?
It was just tonight that I watched Angel die. I fired off an irate text to a friend cursing the heavens and Joss Whedon for the cruelty of it all. She texted me back, sympathetic, but insisting that I couldn't really hate Joss Whedon and his genius. Oh
but I can...
But I did have to stop and think. Because I really did love Wash, but when he died I didn't hate Joss Whedon like I do now. And Wash was actually the dead sort of dead that stays dead and doesn't come back next season and get his own hit spin-off. Not to mention, I didn't hate Baz Luhrmann when
Satine died in Christian's arms. I didn't hate the writers of V for Vendetta when
V died in Evie's arms. Or any of the other people responsible for all of the other tragic stories I've watched, heard, and read through my life. On the contrary, I've always had a strange love of melancholy. Really, I've always preferred stories flavored with tragedy rather than comedy.
This is not unique to me. The beauty of sadness is a western tradition. From
Oedipus Rex to
Romeo and Juliet, to
Titanic, western society has always had an obsession with pain and suffering and love being lost.
Interestingly, this is something rather unique to Western culture. In traditional Chinese and Japanese stories the endings are almost exclusively happy. Certainly there are terrible things that the hero or heroine go through, but in the end they triumph; they don't die, or go mad, or lose the most important thing in their life. This begs the question, is our cultural obsession with tragedy something we've somehow learned/conditioned within society or is it actually part of the human condition itself? After all, with the westernization of their society, tragedy is starting to creep into the stories being told in East (at least, that is what I've been told by people who would know). Are we all, then, obsessed with tragedy?
What is it exactly that draws us to sad things? In ancient Greece the first drama was tragic. To be precise, Greek drama was born as a vehicle to achieve
catharsis. They would put on productions of these tragic plays,
Oedipus,
Antigone, or
Achilles, where the protagonist was always subject to one tragic flaw. No matter how noble he (or she) was, this tragic flaw would doom him to destruction. He couldn't escape his fate and he would die, often in horrible circumstances. The audience would watch his destruction; they would pity him and be horrified by the depth of his fall. That was the catharsis. The entire purpose of the play was to inspire those emotions of pity and horror in the audience, and thereby purge them, if only for a time.
I could believe that the draw of tragedy is the cathartic experience. It is the vicarious experience of some of the most intense emotions human beings are capable of; still real, yet removed to a safe distance. It wasn't actually
your lover who was killed, but you watched
her lover get killed and you imagined you were her, how you would feel, and you wept. Except...why would you want to experience that? Why would you seek it out?
I don't think it is simply the experience of the emotions; it is that there seems to be something beautiful in them, in the feeling of them. We seek out these opportunities to feel the most painful emotions we posses because there appears to be some intrinsic worth in doing so. What is it? Think of that scene in Stranger Than Fiction, when Doctor Hilbert has read Harold's death and he tells him he has to die. Unfortunately, I can't find the exact quote right now, but he says something along the lines of "Everyone dies eventually Harold. A heart attack in your bathtub in twenty years, you choke on a piece of chicken tomorrow, everyone dies. But I guarantee, however you go, it won't be as poetic, as beautiful, or as full of meaning as what she has written for you." While Dustin Hoffman has some insensitive moments written for laughs, this is not one of them. Nor do we write it off as a skewed opinion from an out-of-touch professor as we do some of his other callous lines. When Dr. Hilbert says it we mourn for Harold and his newly discovered life but we accept it.
The thing is, all people suffer. But some people suffer with dignity and others suffer without. Suffering without it is something to which we are all susceptible, and which we all fear. People who cannot endure are succumbing to a weakness we all could possess. I think that is what draws us to tragedy and that is where the cathartic experience comes in; we can't condemn the people who cannot rise to the challenge because we might not either. But the stories of triumph are an inspiration. They offer us a hope of what we might be. Suffering with dignity requires depth of character and maturity of mind. People who endure something tragic are exemplifying the best of human abilities. The beauty of sadness is in the exchange between what is and what could have been. Pain brings out the best and worst of a person. It is poignant and melancholy and beautiful to see failure and imagine the success that could have been. It is inspiring, uplifting, and excruciating to see a strong bright soul punished over and over and refuse to break. We watch and film and write and read and hear and tell these stories over and over again to see what humans are capable of. What we think they're capable of, and what we think they aren't. We explore the consequences at the boundaries of the human spirit and search for inspiration and consolation.
Which, I guess, leaves us at a good place to come back to where I started all of this. My heartbreak over two fictional characters from TV shows. I'd be hard pressed to come up with any
real distinction between Rose and Angel and the rest of the tragic pantheon. I can't rationally prove why the ending of their stories made me literally, actively angry at their writers, where other tragic stories convert me to near worship of the genius of their creators. No
rational reason. But irrationally...I love them. For some reason I identify and connect with their stories. Embarrassing as it is to admit, you could easily make the argument that I no longer experience their tragedies as external performance events I sympathize with, but rather as personal losses of my own. It isn't just the Doctor losing Rose, I lost her too. Not only Buffy was powerless to save Angel, so was I. And then the show goes on. The Doctor flies away to find a new companion. Buffy goes on to find a new vampiric lover. Life, essentially, goes on. Next week, same time same channel, the story continues with new characters. In the fictional world of the story the Doctor or Buffy might have had time to mourn, but I didn't. And if I am this crushed over fictional characters, then what hope is there for me in the real world with real loss? Perhaps this is the root of my anger at Whedon and Davies. They force me to admit that I may not be quite as strong as I would like to think I am.
I guess this means I've not yet experienced enough catharsis...
