More thoughts on the Dark Age

Chris’s comment made me think about the episode the Dark Age some more, and also reread my post which was totally crappy, as well as full of typos (which I fixed — not all of them, just some of them).   This post was one of those instances — much like when I work on my dissertation — where I’m brilliant in my mind but then in actuality, when I go to type up my insights find I only have about a sentence and it’s not all that smart — rather pedestrian actually. Anyway, Chris mentioned that he didn’t like the relationship dynamic between Buffy and Giles that this episode evinces that the whole “do as I say not as I do” thing rubbed him the wrong way.  At the end of the episode Buffy summarizes the whole interpersonal discoveries by saying something like “well, I found out that in addition to being a grown up, you’re also a person and that’s kind of okay).    One of the things i wanted to explore in this blog series was why the later episodes — to my mind — failed so miserably, that is, what did they lack that the early seasons had?  and I think that this relationship between kids and adults and the horror world being something that belongs only to kids and a few priveleged adults is part of that.  Stephen King writes about this explicitly in the novel IT.  If you don’t know already IT is a monster that takes on the guise of the thing that the person confronting it fears most (kind of like a boggart, only it’s actually powerful and will eat you) — or else a clown, which is fine because clowns ARE the actual scariest things in real life.  King has one of its characters comment that IT preys on kids because their fears are finite, concrete, and easy to take form — werewolves, vampires, mummy’s, giant statues coming to life (did you know there actually IS a giant Paul Bunyan statue in Bangor, Maine?  I didn’t know that until about a month ago) whereas adults fear things like “taxes” “failure” or “stage 3 cancer”.  Hard to personify.   So, to return to the point about Buffy.  The creators of the Buffyverse pretty quickly found out that the best way to threaten Buffy emotionally was with things she couldn’t fight — adult fears — so in the first seasons, that happens the most when her friends and family and especially Angel are put in danger.  After Buffy confronts and faces her own death, that fear is just not going to scare her or us again.   But aside from this, in the 2nd and 3rd season, there are two or three episodes that threaten the “kids fight real monster while the adults keep the world running” theme of the show — The Dark Ages, where Giles is not the stable father figure to anchor Buffy’s world as she fights.  Gingerbread, (an episode I loathe) where the adults want to fight the monster world themselves, and Band Candy, where the adults revert to teenage irresponsibility so a monster can take a terrible tribute.  I’m sure there are others, please mention them in the comments. I think that the theme I mentioned earlier is an important theme of all horror movies that involve teenagers, and especially highschool — the idea is that the kids fight real monsters (which personify the highschool experience) and that they have to keep those monsters a secret from adults because adults (except a few who can be trusted to enter the secret world without blowing the cover) have to fight in the real world with its metaphorical monsters like taxes, death of loved ones, and fear of failure running and stable.  It is important that in the Buffyverse at least in the highschool years, the real monsters — vampires, zombies, and creatures from the black lagoon — were all personifications or some other English lit term for real fears and monsters that teenagers confront on a day to day basis — like peer pressure, jealousy, what have you.    I have one more thought about 60s and 70s live action Disney movies and this dynamic, but this post is already too long, so I’ll save it for next time.