Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Date Posted: 15:14:42 11/02/03 Sun Author: OnM Subject: Some Thoughts on The Matrix and the Buffyverse - or - What Bends Reality Comes Around Full Circle In reply to: undeadenglishpatient ’s message, "Fred’s Physics and the Matrix" <24.html> on 08:27:17 11/02/03 Sun

One of the longest-running magazine subscriptions that I engage in is with the venerable Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Back a few decades ago, I also subscribed to Analog, another granddaddy in the field. The editorial direction of the two ’zines were generally different in one critical respect, which was the degree of acceptance that was made for fiction that did not contain significant amounts of ’hard science’ as a backdrop to the story. F&SF, as its name implies, was willing to cover a very broad range of material, including ’straight’ SF (the hard science kind, that is), fantasy, horror, purely magical realms, ’magical reality’, etc. etc.

Analog took almost exclusively the ’straight’ SF route. This never bothered me for a long time, even though I really enjoyed the greater thematic range of stories that F&SF published, until one day one of the regular authors that appeared in the pages of Analog made a very snippy and condescending comment in his column about the general lack of ’integrity’ of the non-hard-science writers. Paraphrasing, it was sort of along the lines of "Yeah, they can often write well and all, but what kind of twit is seriously interested in stories about magic and elves and unicorns and such, which after all don’t exist. The SF stories that will stand the test of time are those based on extensions of what scientific knowledge we understand today, and don’t knowingly violate the laws of nature."

In other words, there is reality and then there isn’t, and reality is where it’s at.

Sometime after that, I allowed the sub to run out, occasionally buying a copy of Analog at the newsstand once in a while if there was a story by an author that I was fond of contained within. Prior to this incident with the opinionated writer, it had never really occurred to me that Analog did have a certain ’attitude’ that bordered on literary bigotry and that it wasn’t one that I shared.

Of course, magazine editors and the folks they associate with change over time, and so do attitudes, but to me a good story is a good story, regardless of genre. For example, in my CMotW column, I have mentioned on several occasions that in general I am not a big fan of ’Westerns’, but when one does come along that is done well, I both enjoy it and recommend it to other movie fans. The same is true with the horror field— I really don’t care for 95% of the gory ’splatter’ flicks or their literary equivalents, but if the tale is well-crafted, intelligent or maybe even just innovatively stylish, I’ll gladly make with the positively extended opposable digit.

Fantasy, by its very definition, allows for a lot of reality bending. The hard SF-ers would call it ’breakage’, but in between their POV and the absolutely-anything-goes crowd is a middle ground that a lot of genre fans embrace, and one where I personally find a lot of satisfying philosophical/scientific/theological stuff embedded within. There is little question though, that the language that is used to describe the fantasy scenario is as strong a point of contention as the degree of ’reality’ that need be mixed in.

One of the other reasons that I gradually grew away from most hard SF is that I found the ’technobabble’ aspect of many of the stories increasingly annoying. This may come as a surprise to those who know I practice a technical art professionally, but for me the technology has always been a means to an end, not the end in an of itself. When I was younger, I often enjoyed ’babbling’ with other audiophiles of my acquaintance about THD and amplifier wattage-vs-current and speaker dispersion characteristics and ported-vs-sealed enclosures and yadda yadda bing. But after a while it grew tiresome to cover the same old ground over and over again, especially when it occasionally involved those individuals for whom the phrase ’a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ applied to in spades. Just within the last week, I had to struggle mightily not to just abruptly hang up on a caller to our store who insisted on rambling on idiotically at length about technology matters that he obviously (to me) had pathetically little real grasp of, but was of course blissfully unaware of this fact himself.

As to the Trek universe, I accept that the ’Treknobabble’ is one part and occasional parcel of Roddenberry’s overall vision, which was that humanity will inevitably reach for the stars in order to have exciting adventures, play with cool toys and meet Space Babes. While the appearance of TB often causes a decline in interest to occur as I watch the show, as long as the basic story is good I let it pass. The same is true when Fred starts spouting some pseudo-scientific gobbledegook on AtS— doing so is part of what her character is expected to do, and in all fairness I suspect that none of the writers working on the show would consider themsleves to be truly scientificially literate. They are working towards making Fred interesting, not trying to teach the general viewership math or physics.

There is one situation where I am wholeheartedly willing to entertain or even encourage the use of TB. This instance occurs when the intent is one that involves trying to describe a scientific or philosophical conundrum for which no alternate language exists. That is, the words to descibe the principle in mind have not been invented yet, or even outrightly defy said invention. In this case, there is no real alternative but to use a sort of ’negative linguistic space’ that tries to define a concept by describing the space around it. Over time, more direct terminology made be developed, or the subject matter may remain descriptively elusive. This brings me to the subject of The Matrix.

In a few short days from now, the third (and reputedly final) installment of the Wachowski Bros. amazing filmic creation will appear on the world’s theater screens, and I make no attempt to hide the fact that I am looking forward to it big time. I am a fan of the series, and was one of those who was not disappointed in the second outing of the trilogy. Beside the overall ’coolness’ factor— and no, I don’t apologize for liking that part of the totality either— The Matrix really does dig into some of the great questions of the ages, including the really big shoe, the nature of God and/or if in fact God does exist.

Joss Whedon is another serious Matrix man, and has admitted as such in many interviews over the last several years. His fandom re: same makes regular appearances in his work with the Buffyverse, whether by specific commentary (such as the demon Skip copping to the fact that "I love that movie!!") or by the way the layers of his fantasy universe stack up in the sense of the ’real-world’ physics of it all.

Take Buffy herself. Those on the board who have read my natterings over a long period of time are aware that I consider Buffy to be an iconic figure that represents the intent of a god or god-like positive force in the universe. As I mentioned just a few paragraphs ago, locating words to define this concept are often difficult. Is Buffy a god in training, moving one step at a time, perhaps over the course of many lifetimes until her ultimate destiny becomes manifest? Is Buffy a Bodisattva? Is Buffy destined not to become a god but instead be a bearer of part of the divine essence of the universe, an essence (that I usually refer to as ’grace’) that influences others around her in a positive way? Or is God just a really top-level programmer? Is Buffy a rogue program that eventually alters the running of the billions of other programs that make up the Buffyverse (and by inference, our realverse) as we know it?

If we grant even the modest possibility of the above theories, then it’s not a facile question in the least to ponder—

Is Buffy Neo? Or is Neo Buffy?

To my observations, the answer to that last query is undoubtably yes, because to my way of thinking one of the things that metaphysically seperates Buffy from most of her human companions is that Buffy can bend reality by force of will alone. What initially distinguishes Neo from those humans who inhabit the Matrix, unaware that what they think of as reality is an externally generated program being funneled into their cerebral cortex? An undefinable suspicion haunts him that all the world is not quite as it seems, although he cannot define why. When he finally meets Morpheus, Neo becomes (painfully) aware of the reality of the Matrix.

But Morpheus is convinced that Neo is not just another human to be rescued from the clutches of the machines and their insidious programs, Morpheus is certain that Neo is "The One", a saviour of the enslaved humankind predicted by prophecy. Neo greatly doubts this, and after paying a visit to a woman named ’The Oracle’, seems actually reassured when she tells him that he is not the prophesied being. Of course, as the story progress, it becomes clear that Neo is in fact "The One", and that the ’erronious’ proclamation by the Oracle was a deliberate mislead so that Neo could become self-aware of his destiny, rather than have it imposed upon him by external forces. By the end of the first film, Neo has died (literally, in physical body) but is resurrected by his lover Trinity. Upon returning to life (to the amazement and consternation of the machines and their avatar Agent Smith), Neo finds himself raised to a yet higher understanding and level of power. Already able to alter the course of small local events within the Matrix program (such as in the fights against the Agents or the ability to leap wide spaces between buildings, or dodge bullets), Neo now finds that he can bend the reality of the Matrix so effortlessly and readily that he easily defeats (and apparently destroys) Smith and issues an ultimatum to the machines that he will go on to free other humans and eventually destroy this ’artificial’ reality the machines have imposed.

Now, doesn’t this sound really familiar? Well, it should.

We meet a 16 year old girl, one Buffy Summers, who has just moved from Los Angeles to a small California town named Sunnydale. Buffy is a special human, "The Chosen One", a Slayer. She is trying rather hard to not be one, but then meets a fellow named Giles in the library of her new high school. Giles is a Watcher, and Buffy knows what that means— she’s had a Watcher before. The school year progresses, various vampires and other fiends appear, get vanquished, and eventually Buffy ends up dead, resurrected, and "feels strong" upon returning to the land of the living. She destroys the Master, an ancient vampire and heads out to party with her friends. Things look bad for future creatures of the night and the gods they rode in on.

The first Matrix flick was released in 1999. BtVS appeared on network television in 1997. If there is some thematic copying going on, it seems like Joss was on base way first, although I think most fans would tend to agree that BtVS got philosophically ’heavy’ only after late S2 / early S3 rolled around. But I don’t think that Joss is necessarily mirroring the Wachowski’s vision or vice versa— the themes involved go back long, long before Buffy and Neo were household names.

The short story I am about to describe was one that I read so long ago (like over three decades) that I remember neither the title nor the author’s name, but I do remember the gist of the riff involved. It is a post-apocalypse world, a biopocalypse if memory serves. Literally all but a handful of humanity is dead and gone, the last several hundred from some particular country fleeing by boat, trying desperately to escape the pestilence but to no avail. Adrift, far out at sea, six or seven survivors whose inherent DNA has provided them with a natural immunity to the virus are drifting in a lifeboat, and a very peculair thing is happening to them, or more precisely to the world around them.

It’s disappearing, literally. As they watch in astonishment, the sea surrounding their tiny raft is gradually vanishing into a white, formless void from the horizon on all sides and moving in towards them. No clouds, no sky, no birds, no water— just abject emptiness. They don’t just see it, they feel it. One of the denizens of the raft offers an explanation.

"One theory pertaining to the existence of the universe that we live within is that it was not created externally by an all-powerful deity, but instead grew out of the collective unconscious of living, sentient entities, entities that existed as intelligent energy but without corporeal form. As such, the universe was very simple aeons ago, but as the numbers of sentients grew, the universe became more complex and also more solidly defined— the immaterial was made material, and eventually all of the collective reality was ’solid’ and mostly predicable. In the current age, the ’laws’ of physics are so ingrained that the collective unconscious does not permit altering the reality that was created, but time was when each being could greatly affect the nature of the new corporeal ’reality’ by force of will alone— you think it is real, and it becomes so."

The speaker goes on to relate that with almost all of humanity destroyed, the ’universe’ is collapsing back into the ’void’ that it once was. Without minds to create it, it is uncreating itself— metaphysical entropy in action. This news is not well received by the other ’survivors’, but the speaker presents a solution. If all of them can only concentrate fully on creating a new reality, one can be established. The void can be pushed back. The disappearance of the old reality should be sufficient proof of the truth of the theory. They need only truly believe in themselves and the world can be made to start anew.

And this is exactly what they do. By the time they link their mental efforts and begin the process, the void has closed in around the raft, but as they begin to imagine the ocean reappearing, it does, gradually pushing the void away. As they imagine land appearing, it beings to form. They begin to paddle the raft towards the land, on which trees and other flora are beginning to appear. A seabird suddenly flies across the sky between themselves and the land, which is drawing closer now. They reach the shore— and it appears solid. They climb up the sandy beach and head inland.

Please be aware that I am heavily parphrasing all of the above, I don’t actually recall the story down to a sentence level of detail, but this is mainly to show that the concept of the universe as a ’metaprogram’ that is both inhabited by and occasionally made malleable by other programs ’running’ within the construct is not a new idea. It was, and still is, an idea that I find fascinating, and do to this day. The Matrix and BtVS (and by extension, the Angelverse) draw on this basic concept at regular intervals, the most recent significant instance being the events of Chosen. I’ll crib a small part of the text from my ’thoughts on’ for the ep to illustrate:

Buffy/First: Ooh! Ow! Mommy! This mortal wound is all... itchy!

( The FE leans in, smiles, almost betraying something approaching real sympathy)

Buffy/First: You pulled a neat trick. Hey, you came pretty close to smacking me down. What more do you want?

Once again, bad move on the part of the First. Buffy now looks more enraged than hurt, and as the First stares back, smile quickly shifting to a look of sheer disbelief, Buffy begins slowly pushing herself back up towards a standing position, absolute indomitable fury in her eyes.

Buffy: I want you... to get out of my face.

The First looks suddenly worried, as well the hell it should. The camera shifts down to slo-mo as Buffy rises. She is sweaty and bleeding, her hair is dusty and in her face, and I instantly flash back to the image of ’Cave Slayer Buffy’ in the 4th season’s Beer Bad.

The First should have taken the advice that Xander gave back then— "Don’t make Cave-Slayer angry". If it had just kept quiet, didn’t put in that final personal appearance, didn’t decide to go with the big gloat... but it’s too late now. When Buffy gets upset, mayhem generally follows. When Buffy is angry, hell should run for cover. When Buffy is at a point where even Gandhi would be pissed off, reality bends.

The FE is nowhere in sight as Buffy literally does her very best Neo and rises from the (near) dead one more time. Even more incredibly, she brings everyone else back with her. Rona sees Buffy back on her feet and immediately throws her the Scythe. Buffy catches it and stands up a little straighter. She screams, and swings the Scythe like it’s a bat, knocking a whole cluster of Turok-han back and over the edge of the cliff in one single blow. Faith suddenly flips off the entire pile of ubers that were holding her to he ground, and the rest of the Slayers shift into something beyond overdrive as suddenly limitless positive energy seems to pour back into the space from somewhere, filling the women with new and even more powerful strength.

***

From another part of my Chosen review, a related concept as to the nature of ’reality’:

Part of the key to understanding the First Evil is to realize that it only exists as the negation of something real. Joss’ choice to make the FE incorporeal isn’t just a handy plot device— it’s making the point that if you stop feeding energy to the FE, it weakens and drifts away, like the sun rising in the morning drives back the darkness— darkness which in physical reality is simply the absence of the sun. Another way of stating this precept: You can feed air into a vacuum, but the vacuum doesn’t give anything back— it just takes in. It’s all about power, and while we can talk about ’sides’, there is often only one real side, and the apparent other is only the vacuum of its absence.

***

Bringing all this stuff back to the use of ’babble’ to ’explain’ what is happening to the characters in a story or the nature of the universe that they inhabit, I’ll reiterate that said babble can be a good thing if it attempts to describe a difficult concept, or if it used to depict a certain character trait. As in all cases, the artfullness of the artist is best conveyed when such devices are used judiciously, although what constitutes such use is often a matter of opinion by the reader or viewer.

I do not believe that the writers of either the Buffyverse or the world of The Matrix are trying to convey a realistic version of the laws of physics as we know them, but what they are trying to do is further the concept that the world is what we make it, whether literally or figuratively. I have no spoiler knowledge of the third film in the Matrix series beyond what I and thousands of others have seen in the trailers, but my own personal guess is that like Buffy, Neo will find that his destiny lies not as an individual saviour who single-handedly beats back the machines (the evil gods of his universe), but as someone who gifts his power to others. I suspect that the denizens of Zion will be granted at least some decent degree of the reality-altering power that Neo now possesses, and so collectively will triumph.

As to season 5 Angel, it is my belief that Spike is now, for lack of a better term, one of Buffy’s ’disciples’, even though I doubt he thinks of himself that way. Angel was in despair at the time of Amends, and Buffy acted to save him then. The conventional wisdom is that the PTB caused the snow to appear, but I have my doubts— I think Buffy caused the snowfall. Like Neo in the latter portion of the first film, who dodges bullets, saves Morpheus from the clutches of Agent Smith, and then saves Trinity from the damaged helicopter, all in ways that should not be possible, it is action done without conscious thought— reality bends because the character needs it to, a matter of practical necessity at a critical moment.

Angel is in despair again. Traumatized by the previous events involving his son and some serious questions involving the true motives of the ’Powers That Be’, he has entered a Faustian bargain with Wolfram and Hart to at least give his son a ’normal’ life. He consciously hopes that he can make the best of the deal and bring about some good, but subconsciously fears that he has crossed a line that he can now never retreat back beyond. Just as in each season of BtVS, where Buffy advances in terms of personal strength and power only to fall back a ways and then eventually advance again, the lessons are ones that must be relearned. Knowledge and awareness just don’t get granted to one and then all gets to be happy hearts and puppies. The universe is being driven by a whole lot of other minds, and it is always easier to just go with the flow than to buck the current.

While it is very likely that the network brass insisted on the adherence to certain characteristics that they feel will enhance the viewership of, and thus the monetary value of AtS S5, it seems to me that Joss and company are still mining the same basic vein of metaphorical thought that they— and many others before and around them— have done and are continuing to do. Have another look at the current AtS characters and see if they fit the patterns I’ve alluded to. Comments, as always, are very welcome.

This little program will now go run in the background again.

(There is no spoon.)