"Normal Again" reminded me of our Turn of the Screw debate in that it makes you rethink everything that you are so sure of. I had read Turn of the Screw before and had read it as a story of maternal hysteria, but when we had our debate, the idea that it was a murder mystery with Mrs. Grose at its helm was terribly intriguing to me. In "Normal Again," Joss asks the viewer to reevaluate everything that we had believed up until that point. He had sculpted this fantastic world for us, but now was providing an explanation that made a lot of sense, though we never thought of it before.
"Normal Again" has always left me unsettled as a die hard Buffy fanatic. Even though it is just one episode in the grand scheme of a fabulous show, every time I watch an episode, no matter what season, in the back of my head is, but it's all just some concoction in a mad girl's mind. None of this is real, that is why she always wins, that is why she was in heaven that time, it sounds so right, and yet I have trained my mind to believe that the world of vampire slaying is so right. Because my mind grew so accustomed to believing in the abnormal, it becomes abnormal to believe in something that more closely resembles the world that we as viewers live in.
Turn of the Screw similarly has something in the back of our minds: the entire tale of the governess is told through a third party voice listening to a man reading the memoir of the governess. We as readers are so disconnected from the story, but strangely, because the characters in the opening scene treat the story as if it is real to them, it so becomes real to us. To be more clear, I mean that even though there are ghosts and such in the story, it does not seem as supernatural as some of the other things we are reading or nearly as far fetched. Perhaps this is because a great majority of us read this book as if we were watching Normal Again from the other lens, where we interpreted the Governess as insane from the start, and when it is suggested that she isn't, it strikes up a curiousity within us.
I know exactly how you feel! I have the same problem with normal again. It gave me a permanent voice in the back of my head... which was kind of mean of Joss. :'-(
ReplyDeleteAs someone who has never watched Buffy before, I was completely shocked by the turn of events in "Normal Again". I felt very similar to both of you in the sense that I honestly wasn't sure if Buffy was the girl in the mental institution or the slayer in Sunnydale. What I would like to know is why Joss Whedon put this episode in season 6 of the series, and not at the very end?
ReplyDeleteI think he put it in Season 6 because season 6 deals with the concept of Heaven. It is discussed that in Buffy world, Heaven might be just another dimension, but I think Joss wanted to maybe provide viewers with another explanation, that our own world truly is heaven, and that stepping away from the demon filled Sunnydale for a summer and stepping into our own world is to be in Heaven. It also helped for viewers who were against the idea of dimensions as opposed to a godly afterlife and resting place by giving those viewers a chance to say, see, there, when you die you go to heaven or whatever, and she just wasn't really dead.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think the real and most important reason this was in the 6th and not the 7th Season is because mortality is a big theme of Season 7, and the idea that the world of Sunnydale, slayers, etc is coming apart is made even more dramatic when viewers already have it planted in their heads that maybe all this isn't real and it's not actually worth the fight after all. If you watch all of the episodes after Normal Again, I think you will find that Normal Again really adds to the anxiety of the episodes (and even going back and watching previous episodes again, Normal Again changes your perception of them).
Even as a non-Buffy-die-hard-fanatic, I had the same impression after watching "Normal Again." I particularly like your concluding discussion about the ways in which we orient ourselves to different texts. Interestingly enough, I did not go into The Turn of the Screw anticipating the insanity of the governess. Instead, I had a similar reaction to the governess' madness as I did to Buffy's in this episode, only to a much lesser degree. I think that the governess' possible insanity is way less compelling because it is so confounded by other supernatural hypotheses, such as the one regarding Mrs. Grose. I guess my follow up question is, what factors influence our expectational orientations towards different gothic texts?
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