Of Holtz and Wood: A Story Twice Told
Feb. 27th, 2008 05:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakThe debate caused by the vid Origin Stories reminded me of a post I kept meaning to write and postponed, a compare and contrast of Daniel Holtz and Robin Wood on Angel and Buffy respectively, their function in the stories and the way the narrative handles them. Incidentally, said thoughts do not focus on race; if you want more intelligent discussion of the way Robin Wood's arc and his mother's backstory are handled in the very white Buffyverse, check out the posts linked here. No, what I want to focus on are some other aspects.
Their very names are a pun; Holz, spelled without a t, means "Wood" in German. (And even with a t is the most unlikely name ever for a 18th century Yorkshire man, if you ask me, but that's neither here nor there.) The similarities between Daniel Holtz and Robin Wood are immediately obvious. In both cases, you have a human who lost his family to a vampire, who when confronted with said vampire in the present has to deal with the fact the vampire has by now gained a soul, which by the metaphysical rules of the universe he's in is supposed to be an existential difference, who decides that the creature in question is still responsible for the murdered family and should pay accordingly.
The differences are even more glaring. For starters, Holtz is the seasonal antagonist and definitely in the villain department on AtS. He gets his vengeance in a way that has tremendous long term implications on the show, its protagonist and several of the other regulars, despite Holtz' death by the end of the season he showed up in. Principal Wood, on the other hand, is one of the good guys and remains one despite temporal opposition to the lead character, participates in the final battle and survives - but he doesn't get his revenge, and his story has no long-term implications for either the main character or the show. (Okay, the later is a tricky point, considering this was BTVS' last season, whereas AtS still had two more after Holtz died, and no, I'm not counting the comics for long term implications. On screen canon only. Also, I have to wait for the trade. Anyway, I think it's a reasonably safe speculation that even had BTVS had an eighth on screen season, or a movie, Robin Wood would not have made an on screen come-back, though he might have gotten a quick verbal reference, nor would we have gotten a plot based on his presence in season 7.) The difference in impetus is partly due to the fact that Holtz has his backstory with Angel, the main character; it's Angel his revenge is directed against, and though it affects other regulars such as Wesley and by the later results (to wit: teenage Connor) Cordelia in a deep, life-changing manner, they are not is primary objective. This makes for a straightforward protagonist-antagonist dynamic. It is made narratively interesting by the fact Holtz' reason for hating Angel is not a villainous one (as opposed to Angel's more regular opponents, Wolfram and Hart). The narrative takes great care to establish this backstory. Holtz first gets mentioned (but not seen) as a vampire hunter by Darla and Angelus in the season 2 episode The Trial. He first shows up in person, again in a flashback, in the season 3 opening episode, in a confrontation with Angelus who is at his most callous when making a joke about having raped Holtz' wife before he killed her. Mid-season, Holtz shows up in person in the present, and we get more flashbacks emphasizing his determination to hunt Angel(us) and Darla down in the past for the death of his family, but the actual event is not shown until Lullaby, where it is effectively juxtaposed with the present day story of Darla's last day/night and her suicide in order to let her son live. The Lullaby flashbacks, by contrast, are Darla and Angel at their most monstrous, killing Holtz' family because they can and because it's funny to them, and adding one additional bit of cruelty which the narrative hasn't disclosed until now: the fact they turned one of Holtz' children into a vampire instead of "simply" killing the girl, and that Holtz spend the night singing to his undead daughter before exposing her to the sunlight, and thus killing her for good, in the next morning. It's this action, the narrative implies, that turned Holtz into who he became afterwards, and the emotional horror of the flashbacks is so huge that you can understand why.
Robin Wood's backstory, on the other hand, is with Spike, who despite increasing importance in BTVS' later seasons is not the main character; I'd say the comparable person among the AtS regulars in terms of screentime and narrative attention wold be Wesley, but that still makes Robin a part of a subplot from the get-go. The fact he is the son of a Slayer does give him a connection to Buffy, but it is not an antagonistic one, a la Holtz and Angel, or for that matter a romantic one, despite the fact he occasionally flirts with her early in the season (more about that later). So he only gets one flashback episode, and very brief flashbacks they are by comparison to the many flashbacks Holtz gets. They do accomplish the job they're meant to (and also are helped by the fact we already know Nikki Wood via her final fight and death as shown in season 5's Fool For Love), showing Nikki and Robin as mother and son (and Nikki talking - she was silent all through the fight scene from Fool For Love), and incidentally establishing that Spike has stalked Nikki for some time before the subway encounter. Spike isn't shown as monstrous as Darla and Angelus in Holtz' flashbacks - we don't see him kill children or make jokes about rape - but that's a matter of degrees: he's is still a monster (in game face) playing with killing Robin's mother and eventually going through with it. But brief as the Nikki-and-Robin flashbacks are, they intermingle this matter with another by letting Nikki tell Robin that "the mission comes first". This in turn leads to one of the most controversial and debated elements of Lies My Parents Told Me: Spike taunting Robin by claiming his mother, like all Slayers, put the mission first and thus did not love her child. The controversy was less about Spike saying this, since it's ic for Spike to make such a taunt during a fight - a comparable example would be him telling Buffy that Angel said to him Buffy wasn't "worth another go" in Harsh Light of Day, but whether or not we were supposed to think he made an accurate claim here, i.e. did the narrative support this statement? The AtS episode Damage, written by the same scriptwriters as Lies my parents told me, somewhat settled this, because when deranged Slayer Dana accesses the memories of dead Slayers and channels Nikki, Nikki speaks of her love and concern for Robin and wish to live, to return to her son, which basically means Spike's death wish/mission analysis was bullshit. But within Lies my parents told me and information available for the viewers at that time, the accuracy or lack of same of Spike's taunt was debatable. If this was problematic, the follow-up was even more so.
Before I get there, let me point out the parallel to Holtz' first confrontation with Angel in the present, in Quickening. Both Holtz and Robin capture Angel and Spike respectively. (In the Hyperion and in Robin's basement.) Both don't just want the vampire who took their family to die, but to experience pain before. In both cases, the vampire in question in the end gets himself out of the situation. But at no point does Angel imply Holtz doesn't have every right to hate him to begin with, or that what he did to Holtz' family wasn't monstrous. Even in their last confrontation, after Holtz has committed his own share of crimes, including the taking of Connor, Angel acknowledges he committed the initial wrong:
ANGEL: You stole my son.
HOLTZ: I kept your son alive. You murdered mine.
(After a beat Angel slowly backs off and withdraws his hand from Holtz' throat.)
ANGEL: I was different then.
HOLTZ: Yes. So was I. - You feel remorse. You feel remorse yet you can't express it.
ANGEL: You want me to say I'm sorry? How can I? It wouldn't mean a thing.
HOLTZ: It would mean a little. Not much, but it would be something.
ANGEL: Then I'm sorry. For whatever little it might mean. It's all I've got.
By contrast, in Lies my parents told me, we get this:
SPIKE: I'm sorry.
(Cut to past. William/Spike stakes his mother; back to present)
PRINCIPAL WOOD: Sorry? You think sorry's gonna make everything right?
SPIKE: I wasn't talking to you. (Spike starts fighting, and from now he has the upper hand) I don't give a piss about your mum. She was a slayer. I was a vampire. That's the way the game is played.
Which still could be seen as more of a difference between Angel and Spike as individuals than by the way the two stories deal with the human/vampire/revenge plot, were it not for the aftermath and the exchange between Buffy and Robin Wood. As opposed to Spike, Buffy is the protagonist. Neither Buffy nor Angel are always meant to be right in their shows (are they ever - see various plots depending on them being in the wrong), but their word still carries more weight than that of other regulars, more often than not. Consequently, one can postulate the narrative, while not agreeing with Spike, definitely agrees with Buffy's conclusion here:
BUFFY: I lost my mom a couple years ago. I came home and found her dead on the couch.
ROBIN WOOD: I'm sorry.
BUFFY: I understand what you tried to do, but she's dead.
ROBIN WOOD: Because he murdered her.
BUFFY: I'm preparing to fight a war, and you're looking for revenge on a man that doesn't exist anymore.
ROBIN WOOD: Buffy, don't delude yourself... That man still exists.
BUFFY: Spike is the strongest warrior we have. We are gonna need him if we're gonna come out of this thing alive. You try anything again, he'll kill you. More importantly, I'll let him. I have a mission to win this war, to save the world. I don't have time for vendettas. (walks away) The mission is what matters.
While revenge is never a good thing on either show, no matter who wants it, and in this particular situation there is indeed a question of priorities, it's still noticable that Holtz' reason for wishing revenge is getting acknowledged as valid right till the end, no matter how wrong his methods of achieving it are, while Robin's is not. Which grates to this very day. At a guess, at least one reason for this is because neither of the three options available at this point, if the death of Nikki Wood had gotten the same treatment as the deaths of the Holtz family received, could be taken, to wit: Robin Wood could either have continued in his attempts to kill Spike and/or gone other to the First Evil, which would have made him into a villain and as opposed to Daniel Holtz a one dimensional one, or he could have been killed (but that would have made the newly resouled Spike into a murderer again, about five minutes before his redemptive death), or he could have come, on his own, to a point where he was willing to if not forgive than accept Spike's presence in the world. Which in order to be credible would have needed far more narrative attention and space than was available for a subplot, so Buffy's reaction was used for a narrative shortcut. (As this is indeed the end of Robin Wood's vengeance quest.) Which still makes for character subordinate to plot storytelling, and unfortunately, it shows.
But things are never so simple as to be just one thing or the other: i.e. Robin Wood as the victim of the narrative. Let's go back to him and Holtz again, and their similarities. Both men are coded to resemble Watchers. In the second half of season 3, Holtz starts his complicated and in the end horribly effective revenge by finding and training Justine, another character who lost family to vampires. Their initial encounters are deliberately staged and written in a way to parallel Buffy being sought out by her first watcher in both the movie and in the Becoming flashbacks substituting for the movie, and Holtz' training methods for Justine are ones Quentin Travers would approve. (There is also a resemblance to the way Wesley acts towards Faith in s4, but the way Wesley is imprinted by his Watcher heritage is another essay.) Moreover, they illustrate something that the first half of the season, with Holtz' backstory slowly unfolding, had not yet shown; present day Holtz is as manipulative as hell. (Which both Wesley and Giles can be; Travers probably could but is too high-handed to try.) He makes first Justine and then Connor into his weapons, and the way he trains them, the strict focus on the mission, the black and white world view is all downright textbook. Except that killing demons has long ceased to be Holtz' primary objective; it's all about destroying Angel, and his final act, making Justine kill him to ensure Connor would hate Angel for good, is among other things a strict rejection of everything else that used to be important to him and of his own last chance for redemption.
Manipulation isn't alien to Robin Wood, either. His story in season 7 doesn't start and end with the son denied his vengeance on his mother's murderer. It starts with his encountering Buffy in the season opener, with him offering her a job he doesn't regard her as qualified for so he can keep an eye on her while she keeps on on the hellmouth, all without telling her he knows exactly who she is. Robin Wood might be Nikki's heritage, but he's also that of the Watcher who raised him, and it shows. Let's not forget this while discussing the problems in Lies my parents told me: Principal Wood is no saint, and his behaviour towards Buffy is somewhat dodgy in ways that have nothing to do with Spike. They both kept the truth from each other, but while Buffy had no reason to believe the new principal of Sunnydale High should be immediately informed she is the Slayer, Robin knew she was and could have told her who he was. (Just as a reminder, at this point, Spike was skulking in the Sunnydale High basement, not living chez Summers, and busy being driven insane by the First Evil; Robin didn't see him with Buffy until First Date, more than half a season later, so Spike can in no way count as an excuse.) Instead, he kept his secrets, lies to her and manipulates her.
BUFFY: I was, uh, just curious, you know, uh--not that I'm not grateful or anything. But, uh, I guess I was wondering why I--
ROBIN WOOD: Have this job?
BUFFY: I still haven't finished college.
ROBIN WOOD: I know.
BUFFY: Was it my sparkling personality? Or maybe you enjoyed my work at the Doublemeat Palace?
ROBIN WOOD: I'm a vegetarian. These students need someone around here who understands them, and I need someone who understands these students.
When he does come clean, he does so in a somewhat patronizing way:
BUFFY: Right. OK, um, so I'm guessing that you don't work in an office 15 feet above the hell mouth because you enjoy educational administration?
ROBIN WOOD: Well, I actually do enjoy the work, but yeah. Yeah, you're right. I maneuvered myself into that school, that office, just like I maneuvered you there. The hell mouth draws the bad things in close, and now we're headed for something big, Buffy. Really big, and I need to be here when it happens. I want to help.
BUFFY: So, y-you didn't hire me for my counseling skills?
ROBIN WOOD: (laughs, then sees Buffy's hurt look) They're valuable too.
"Like I maneuvred you there." For two thirds of the season, he's Buffy's employer - which makes their occasional semi-flirtation a bit questionable, but he never takes it further than banter -, and again, does not tell her the truth until she finds out. When he then realizes who Spike is, it's Giles he confides in, not Buffy. The arrangement for Spike's death he makes with Giles behind Buffy's back might be motivated by completely understandable reasons, but I'd say it definitely marks Robin as someone comfortable with the traditional Watcher type of behaviour that sees Slayers as the soldiers, not the generals, as it were, to be manoeuvred around and manipulated. (The way he acts with Faith in the finale could be classified as manipulative, too, but in that case I'd say it's more a case of equality; if he knows which buttons to push, it's in return to her own behaviour, and Faith is quite the button pusher as well if she wants to be.) Understand - none of this makes Robin Wood into a villain. It makes him into a three dimensional character who is allied with the patriarchy as well as the victims and the heroes and can't be easily labeled. In the end, when push comes to shove, Robin Wood is able to do what Daniel Holtz did not choose to do: put the mission first, as his mother has done. He's there in Sunnydale High to fight. He doesn't make people who love him into killers, he doesn't make anyone kill for him, he offers his own life as part of the fight instead. And he survives to exit the narrative with the word "surprise".
What all of this leaves me with is the conclusion that Holtz' story was far better written, but also that it was far simpler structured. Robin Wood's story, while worse written, offered a more complicated character. You know what an antagonist is around for in the story; to make the main character's life miserable. An ally, on the other hand, who carries legacies (literary as well as metaphorically) of discarded and often hostile authority (the Watchers) and the wronged past (the Slayers)? He has no such easily defined role, and perhaps this, too, is why the debate about what his story signifies in the overall narrative goes on.
Their very names are a pun; Holz, spelled without a t, means "Wood" in German. (And even with a t is the most unlikely name ever for a 18th century Yorkshire man, if you ask me, but that's neither here nor there.) The similarities between Daniel Holtz and Robin Wood are immediately obvious. In both cases, you have a human who lost his family to a vampire, who when confronted with said vampire in the present has to deal with the fact the vampire has by now gained a soul, which by the metaphysical rules of the universe he's in is supposed to be an existential difference, who decides that the creature in question is still responsible for the murdered family and should pay accordingly.
The differences are even more glaring. For starters, Holtz is the seasonal antagonist and definitely in the villain department on AtS. He gets his vengeance in a way that has tremendous long term implications on the show, its protagonist and several of the other regulars, despite Holtz' death by the end of the season he showed up in. Principal Wood, on the other hand, is one of the good guys and remains one despite temporal opposition to the lead character, participates in the final battle and survives - but he doesn't get his revenge, and his story has no long-term implications for either the main character or the show. (Okay, the later is a tricky point, considering this was BTVS' last season, whereas AtS still had two more after Holtz died, and no, I'm not counting the comics for long term implications. On screen canon only. Also, I have to wait for the trade. Anyway, I think it's a reasonably safe speculation that even had BTVS had an eighth on screen season, or a movie, Robin Wood would not have made an on screen come-back, though he might have gotten a quick verbal reference, nor would we have gotten a plot based on his presence in season 7.) The difference in impetus is partly due to the fact that Holtz has his backstory with Angel, the main character; it's Angel his revenge is directed against, and though it affects other regulars such as Wesley and by the later results (to wit: teenage Connor) Cordelia in a deep, life-changing manner, they are not is primary objective. This makes for a straightforward protagonist-antagonist dynamic. It is made narratively interesting by the fact Holtz' reason for hating Angel is not a villainous one (as opposed to Angel's more regular opponents, Wolfram and Hart). The narrative takes great care to establish this backstory. Holtz first gets mentioned (but not seen) as a vampire hunter by Darla and Angelus in the season 2 episode The Trial. He first shows up in person, again in a flashback, in the season 3 opening episode, in a confrontation with Angelus who is at his most callous when making a joke about having raped Holtz' wife before he killed her. Mid-season, Holtz shows up in person in the present, and we get more flashbacks emphasizing his determination to hunt Angel(us) and Darla down in the past for the death of his family, but the actual event is not shown until Lullaby, where it is effectively juxtaposed with the present day story of Darla's last day/night and her suicide in order to let her son live. The Lullaby flashbacks, by contrast, are Darla and Angel at their most monstrous, killing Holtz' family because they can and because it's funny to them, and adding one additional bit of cruelty which the narrative hasn't disclosed until now: the fact they turned one of Holtz' children into a vampire instead of "simply" killing the girl, and that Holtz spend the night singing to his undead daughter before exposing her to the sunlight, and thus killing her for good, in the next morning. It's this action, the narrative implies, that turned Holtz into who he became afterwards, and the emotional horror of the flashbacks is so huge that you can understand why.
Robin Wood's backstory, on the other hand, is with Spike, who despite increasing importance in BTVS' later seasons is not the main character; I'd say the comparable person among the AtS regulars in terms of screentime and narrative attention wold be Wesley, but that still makes Robin a part of a subplot from the get-go. The fact he is the son of a Slayer does give him a connection to Buffy, but it is not an antagonistic one, a la Holtz and Angel, or for that matter a romantic one, despite the fact he occasionally flirts with her early in the season (more about that later). So he only gets one flashback episode, and very brief flashbacks they are by comparison to the many flashbacks Holtz gets. They do accomplish the job they're meant to (and also are helped by the fact we already know Nikki Wood via her final fight and death as shown in season 5's Fool For Love), showing Nikki and Robin as mother and son (and Nikki talking - she was silent all through the fight scene from Fool For Love), and incidentally establishing that Spike has stalked Nikki for some time before the subway encounter. Spike isn't shown as monstrous as Darla and Angelus in Holtz' flashbacks - we don't see him kill children or make jokes about rape - but that's a matter of degrees: he's is still a monster (in game face) playing with killing Robin's mother and eventually going through with it. But brief as the Nikki-and-Robin flashbacks are, they intermingle this matter with another by letting Nikki tell Robin that "the mission comes first". This in turn leads to one of the most controversial and debated elements of Lies My Parents Told Me: Spike taunting Robin by claiming his mother, like all Slayers, put the mission first and thus did not love her child. The controversy was less about Spike saying this, since it's ic for Spike to make such a taunt during a fight - a comparable example would be him telling Buffy that Angel said to him Buffy wasn't "worth another go" in Harsh Light of Day, but whether or not we were supposed to think he made an accurate claim here, i.e. did the narrative support this statement? The AtS episode Damage, written by the same scriptwriters as Lies my parents told me, somewhat settled this, because when deranged Slayer Dana accesses the memories of dead Slayers and channels Nikki, Nikki speaks of her love and concern for Robin and wish to live, to return to her son, which basically means Spike's death wish/mission analysis was bullshit. But within Lies my parents told me and information available for the viewers at that time, the accuracy or lack of same of Spike's taunt was debatable. If this was problematic, the follow-up was even more so.
Before I get there, let me point out the parallel to Holtz' first confrontation with Angel in the present, in Quickening. Both Holtz and Robin capture Angel and Spike respectively. (In the Hyperion and in Robin's basement.) Both don't just want the vampire who took their family to die, but to experience pain before. In both cases, the vampire in question in the end gets himself out of the situation. But at no point does Angel imply Holtz doesn't have every right to hate him to begin with, or that what he did to Holtz' family wasn't monstrous. Even in their last confrontation, after Holtz has committed his own share of crimes, including the taking of Connor, Angel acknowledges he committed the initial wrong:
ANGEL: You stole my son.
HOLTZ: I kept your son alive. You murdered mine.
(After a beat Angel slowly backs off and withdraws his hand from Holtz' throat.)
ANGEL: I was different then.
HOLTZ: Yes. So was I. - You feel remorse. You feel remorse yet you can't express it.
ANGEL: You want me to say I'm sorry? How can I? It wouldn't mean a thing.
HOLTZ: It would mean a little. Not much, but it would be something.
ANGEL: Then I'm sorry. For whatever little it might mean. It's all I've got.
By contrast, in Lies my parents told me, we get this:
SPIKE: I'm sorry.
(Cut to past. William/Spike stakes his mother; back to present)
PRINCIPAL WOOD: Sorry? You think sorry's gonna make everything right?
SPIKE: I wasn't talking to you. (Spike starts fighting, and from now he has the upper hand) I don't give a piss about your mum. She was a slayer. I was a vampire. That's the way the game is played.
Which still could be seen as more of a difference between Angel and Spike as individuals than by the way the two stories deal with the human/vampire/revenge plot, were it not for the aftermath and the exchange between Buffy and Robin Wood. As opposed to Spike, Buffy is the protagonist. Neither Buffy nor Angel are always meant to be right in their shows (are they ever - see various plots depending on them being in the wrong), but their word still carries more weight than that of other regulars, more often than not. Consequently, one can postulate the narrative, while not agreeing with Spike, definitely agrees with Buffy's conclusion here:
BUFFY: I lost my mom a couple years ago. I came home and found her dead on the couch.
ROBIN WOOD: I'm sorry.
BUFFY: I understand what you tried to do, but she's dead.
ROBIN WOOD: Because he murdered her.
BUFFY: I'm preparing to fight a war, and you're looking for revenge on a man that doesn't exist anymore.
ROBIN WOOD: Buffy, don't delude yourself... That man still exists.
BUFFY: Spike is the strongest warrior we have. We are gonna need him if we're gonna come out of this thing alive. You try anything again, he'll kill you. More importantly, I'll let him. I have a mission to win this war, to save the world. I don't have time for vendettas. (walks away) The mission is what matters.
While revenge is never a good thing on either show, no matter who wants it, and in this particular situation there is indeed a question of priorities, it's still noticable that Holtz' reason for wishing revenge is getting acknowledged as valid right till the end, no matter how wrong his methods of achieving it are, while Robin's is not. Which grates to this very day. At a guess, at least one reason for this is because neither of the three options available at this point, if the death of Nikki Wood had gotten the same treatment as the deaths of the Holtz family received, could be taken, to wit: Robin Wood could either have continued in his attempts to kill Spike and/or gone other to the First Evil, which would have made him into a villain and as opposed to Daniel Holtz a one dimensional one, or he could have been killed (but that would have made the newly resouled Spike into a murderer again, about five minutes before his redemptive death), or he could have come, on his own, to a point where he was willing to if not forgive than accept Spike's presence in the world. Which in order to be credible would have needed far more narrative attention and space than was available for a subplot, so Buffy's reaction was used for a narrative shortcut. (As this is indeed the end of Robin Wood's vengeance quest.) Which still makes for character subordinate to plot storytelling, and unfortunately, it shows.
But things are never so simple as to be just one thing or the other: i.e. Robin Wood as the victim of the narrative. Let's go back to him and Holtz again, and their similarities. Both men are coded to resemble Watchers. In the second half of season 3, Holtz starts his complicated and in the end horribly effective revenge by finding and training Justine, another character who lost family to vampires. Their initial encounters are deliberately staged and written in a way to parallel Buffy being sought out by her first watcher in both the movie and in the Becoming flashbacks substituting for the movie, and Holtz' training methods for Justine are ones Quentin Travers would approve. (There is also a resemblance to the way Wesley acts towards Faith in s4, but the way Wesley is imprinted by his Watcher heritage is another essay.) Moreover, they illustrate something that the first half of the season, with Holtz' backstory slowly unfolding, had not yet shown; present day Holtz is as manipulative as hell. (Which both Wesley and Giles can be; Travers probably could but is too high-handed to try.) He makes first Justine and then Connor into his weapons, and the way he trains them, the strict focus on the mission, the black and white world view is all downright textbook. Except that killing demons has long ceased to be Holtz' primary objective; it's all about destroying Angel, and his final act, making Justine kill him to ensure Connor would hate Angel for good, is among other things a strict rejection of everything else that used to be important to him and of his own last chance for redemption.
Manipulation isn't alien to Robin Wood, either. His story in season 7 doesn't start and end with the son denied his vengeance on his mother's murderer. It starts with his encountering Buffy in the season opener, with him offering her a job he doesn't regard her as qualified for so he can keep an eye on her while she keeps on on the hellmouth, all without telling her he knows exactly who she is. Robin Wood might be Nikki's heritage, but he's also that of the Watcher who raised him, and it shows. Let's not forget this while discussing the problems in Lies my parents told me: Principal Wood is no saint, and his behaviour towards Buffy is somewhat dodgy in ways that have nothing to do with Spike. They both kept the truth from each other, but while Buffy had no reason to believe the new principal of Sunnydale High should be immediately informed she is the Slayer, Robin knew she was and could have told her who he was. (Just as a reminder, at this point, Spike was skulking in the Sunnydale High basement, not living chez Summers, and busy being driven insane by the First Evil; Robin didn't see him with Buffy until First Date, more than half a season later, so Spike can in no way count as an excuse.) Instead, he kept his secrets, lies to her and manipulates her.
BUFFY: I was, uh, just curious, you know, uh--not that I'm not grateful or anything. But, uh, I guess I was wondering why I--
ROBIN WOOD: Have this job?
BUFFY: I still haven't finished college.
ROBIN WOOD: I know.
BUFFY: Was it my sparkling personality? Or maybe you enjoyed my work at the Doublemeat Palace?
ROBIN WOOD: I'm a vegetarian. These students need someone around here who understands them, and I need someone who understands these students.
When he does come clean, he does so in a somewhat patronizing way:
BUFFY: Right. OK, um, so I'm guessing that you don't work in an office 15 feet above the hell mouth because you enjoy educational administration?
ROBIN WOOD: Well, I actually do enjoy the work, but yeah. Yeah, you're right. I maneuvered myself into that school, that office, just like I maneuvered you there. The hell mouth draws the bad things in close, and now we're headed for something big, Buffy. Really big, and I need to be here when it happens. I want to help.
BUFFY: So, y-you didn't hire me for my counseling skills?
ROBIN WOOD: (laughs, then sees Buffy's hurt look) They're valuable too.
"Like I maneuvred you there." For two thirds of the season, he's Buffy's employer - which makes their occasional semi-flirtation a bit questionable, but he never takes it further than banter -, and again, does not tell her the truth until she finds out. When he then realizes who Spike is, it's Giles he confides in, not Buffy. The arrangement for Spike's death he makes with Giles behind Buffy's back might be motivated by completely understandable reasons, but I'd say it definitely marks Robin as someone comfortable with the traditional Watcher type of behaviour that sees Slayers as the soldiers, not the generals, as it were, to be manoeuvred around and manipulated. (The way he acts with Faith in the finale could be classified as manipulative, too, but in that case I'd say it's more a case of equality; if he knows which buttons to push, it's in return to her own behaviour, and Faith is quite the button pusher as well if she wants to be.) Understand - none of this makes Robin Wood into a villain. It makes him into a three dimensional character who is allied with the patriarchy as well as the victims and the heroes and can't be easily labeled. In the end, when push comes to shove, Robin Wood is able to do what Daniel Holtz did not choose to do: put the mission first, as his mother has done. He's there in Sunnydale High to fight. He doesn't make people who love him into killers, he doesn't make anyone kill for him, he offers his own life as part of the fight instead. And he survives to exit the narrative with the word "surprise".
What all of this leaves me with is the conclusion that Holtz' story was far better written, but also that it was far simpler structured. Robin Wood's story, while worse written, offered a more complicated character. You know what an antagonist is around for in the story; to make the main character's life miserable. An ally, on the other hand, who carries legacies (literary as well as metaphorically) of discarded and often hostile authority (the Watchers) and the wronged past (the Slayers)? He has no such easily defined role, and perhaps this, too, is why the debate about what his story signifies in the overall narrative goes on.
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Date: 2008-03-03 05:09 am (UTC)