Klytaimnestra's Review of "Storyteller"

by Klytaimnestra

I'm just not well enough trained in film, or theory, or any of the things I really need to know to be able to do proper justice to this episode. Or even enjoy it as much as it deserves. I think that it's one of the 10 Best Buffy Episodes Ever. It makes me weep to think there may be no Joss AT ALL on next year. I'll cancel my cable if that's true, because there's nothing else worth watching.

But, okay, here goes my inadequate attempt:

The season has done interesting things with Point of View (POV) all year. This episode is from Andrew's POV. By the end of the episode, his attitude - his POV - has changed. In fact it's changed completely. He begins by wanting to make everything he sees into a story, with himself as only the reporter, complicit in no way in the chaos around him, and concerned, deeply, desperately concerned, to avoid the one thing he knows is true: that he is complicit, that he is not just a reporter but the one who started it all. He is desperate not to know what we all know, what he really knows: that he cannot make himself blend in with the scenery, look like an ordinary guy, a reporter, a "guestage", a whatever-her-name-was housekeeper on the Brady Bunch, a Han Solo in training, just by saying that's what he is. That no matter how many stories he tries to tell, ways he tries to convince himself that it's not so, desperate attempts he makes to reinvent himself as one of the good guys (eventually), costumes he pulls on and discards, he is at core the weakling who murdered his best friend, whom he loved ("And that's Jonathan. Isn't he the cutest little thing?" - quick cut away, away, away from that memory.) And he can't hide that fact from himself by hiding himself among good guys any more than he can make the murder weapon into an ordinary steak knife by washing it and stashing it in the cutlery drawer.

In short, it's the story of Denial!Andrew, brought to face himself at last by, of all people, Buffy. This is the one place I would have said "takes one to know one" doesn't work, but I guess I was wrong, because her final speech, nicely judged to attack both his cowardice and his denial, was dead on target. As if she knew exactly what to say to make someone look in the mirror, for once, and describe what they really see there.

Goodness. Hers, I mean. And at the end of the episode, oddly enough, Andrew's. He has at least gathered enough courage to say what he is, and that he's probably going to die and that's probably right. He has desperately wanted a redemption story and has been trying to pretend that was his "arc". Well, he was right. But he only gets the redemption arc when he lets it go, admits he doesn't deserve it, and faces what he's done that needs redeeming. To get the real thing he has to leave the self-justifying stories behind.

So, remorse, confession, repentance, and he's not trying to save his own skin anymore, by pretending he's someone else. Looks like redemption to me.

I thought one of the most touching scenes was the scene with Andrew and Jonathan in bed. (One bed, but wearing clothes, so we can believe whatever we like.) They have both had a genuinely terrifying recurring nightmare. And they calm themselves down by making up a self-aggrandizing fiction to renders their rather tawdry difficulties mythic, casts them in the role of dark anti-heros, and allows them to forget their genuine fear.

But of course it's precisely that rather touching and amusing pleasure in fiction that makes Andrew easy pickings for the First. He'd rather believe he'll be a god - and free from pain and fear - if he kills his friend, than face the truth. That life is full of fear and pain, and heroes deal with it and carry on; with their friends.

Even his fantasies are lame, I need hardly point out. Comically so, but lame. He's not even a good storyteller, poor little jerk.

***

That was part one: the Andrew arc. A subsidiary story now: the Anya/Xander arc. Andrew sees them as potentially still in love, potentially still lovers. Under his eye - and he replays the scene over to himself later because he loves it so much - they reaffirm their continued mutual love. Andrew, obviously, believes that's the end of the story - curtain, credits, into the sunset -replays it, tears in his eyes.

But while Andrew and his camera are away, the audience sees the real end of the story. Being Anya (and Xander), naturally they then retire to bed. And although it was not absolutely clear, it seemed to me that they were feeling their way to figuring out what it meant, and what they finally agreed - that this was one last time, and they really were over now - was the truth. Anya may have said it as a pre-emptive strike; Xander may have agreed because he was hurt; but that wasn't their tone of voice by the end of the conversation. They needed to do this, and now they were over it and could go on.

Which suddenly explains all of Anya's inappropriate offering of sex to other men who don't want her. It wasn't just her high sex drive or her desire to get a story line, find a plot, and she couldn't imagine that she could have one that didn't involve being someone's partner (though those things probably factored in). But mostly, it was a displaced desire for reassurance. She just wanted to go back to bed with Xander, the poor sweetheart. Be reassured that he hadn't left her because he didn't love her, didn't find her attractive, thought there was something horrible about her. I'd be very surprised if she makes the same kind of sexual approach to anyone again as she has been so far; her desire for connection - with Xander - has been satisfied now, and she doesn't have to go there again.

All that said, I'm not absolutely sure they will move on; but I think probably. Anya's body language after the fact was rigid, confused, unwelcoming. She didn't feel as if she'd come home, clearly; in fact if I had to put her attitude in one line it would be, what am I doing here?

Of course Xander has reclaimed his pride by having her on Spike's bed (one point of the scene.) The other was, of course, the line that tells us that Buffy has taken Spike's chains down. Does she trust him? Let me think...

***

But Andrew's misreading of the Xander/Anya scene tells us something about his reading of everything he sees - that he's a romantic doofus. And that that's the wrong way to read this season. He's into every ship, including a couple I hadn't thought of. Willow/Kennedy? He's glad to tell us they're back on board. Spike/Buffy? Wonderful shirtless Spike scene as he tells us about the sparks of sexual tension between them. Spike/Wood? He sees seething sexual tension there too. Andrew is a fanfic writer, and not a very good one. He sees relationships that aren't there (Spike/Wood, slash intended?) and misreads those (like Xander/Anya) that are.

Meanwhile, as Buffy is at pains to tell us, the real action is somewhere else entirely. Possibly romantically - as she gently smoothes the, ahem, "flesh-coloured" bandaid over Principal Wood's forehead, and that has got to be a reference to Pulp Fiction (I mean, there are transparent bandaids out there now; there are multicoloured bandaids; there are bandaids with little pictures of Blue from Blue's Clues, with matching paw-print stickers. Why did Joss use a pink one? Probably several reasons at once, but someone else will have to unpack it for me because I'm coming up dry. I mean, comedy yes; to show that he sticks out like a sore thumb around Sunnydale, yes; to show Buffy persistently not seeing his true colours, perhaps, though I'm beginning to think she's on top of it; nothing is really ringing the bell for me here.)

But romance, and the sparks with Wood, aside - what Buffy is telling us is, that's ASIDE. It's all an aside to the real action. Which is, and we're all as tired as Andrew is of this speech (and I loved his sneaking out), big battle; good people are going to die; possibly including Buffy; probably including Andrew; no amount of romantic storytelling, either of the 'shipper or the heroic variety, is going to alter the truth. He, and we, have to get a grip.

And Buffy is not, of course, only speaking to Andrew; because Andrew is us. The point is plain. We may think that the important story is who's sleeping with whom and have Willow and Kennedy made up their differences. Or we may be enjoying what a high level of craft is going into this story ("wow, will you look at that window! You can hardly see the join - it looks totally new!"). But it's not. That's all an aside. People are going to be sleeping with whoever they're sleeping with, or alone, when the time comes, and it's not going to make a particle of difference, because the Four Horsemen will kick through that window just the same, and the real story, for the hero, is always going to be the good fight. If we want to see what's really going on, what story is really being told, we can't be distracted by the 'ships either.

Which is why Buffy uses whatever warriors show up offering to help, without differentiating. "Spike, Wood, with me." It's not because it's a deep romantic triangle and she's Conflicted. It's because she'll take all the help she can get.

***

But there's another layer, and here is where I'm coming up particularly short. Andrew is, of course, also Joss. (And so is Buffy, in this episode.) But then because Joss is making Andrew look so lame, Andrew is the anti-Joss. Andrew does badly what Joss does very well: make myths. And what this episode is supremely about is how dangerous it is to actually believe myths, and allow them to substitute for the truth. Andrew's myths are so thin, so derivative and paltry, that it's easy to spot them for the self-justifying claptrap they are, the miserable attempts to shore up a whinging loser's lack of self-esteem. And they're rather touchingly pathetic - until they turn him into a murderer, and a betrayer, because he'd rather be a murderer than admit that he's a loser. But the better the myth, the better the teller, the easier it is for the hearer to fall in and get lost. Andrew was a pathetic myth-maker himself; but the First was much better.

So what is this about? I'm not sure. Andrew-as-(anti)-Joss seems to me to be saying that myth can be entertaining, instructive and harmless - right up to the moment it makes you murder your friends and open the Hellmouth. And then it can turn good, weak men into murderously bad ones. (And I've cut here some commentary on the incendiary Wild West political rhetoric we're all awash in these days.)

And that the cure is the truth, and remorse.

***

What does it mean for the rest of the season? That if we're watching for the 'ships, we're going to miss the real story.

***

Favourite lines:

"Isn't he the cutest little thing?"

" ... and I'm -"

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Klytaimnestra