Dirty Girls Come Clean A big day for feminist entertainment: "Spirited Away" is released on DVD and "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer" airs the first of it's finale-arc episodes. Inevitable comparisons follow. In Hayao Miyazaki's brilliant Oscar-winning animated epic, "Spirited Away", out on DVD today, a bored ten year old girl finds herself in a world where she must confront horrific and wondrous creatures and in doing so, finds her own inner power and and joy for the world. In Joss Whedon's seven-year long show, "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer", which begins its five part finale tonight, a spirited young girl finds herself in a world where she must confront horrific and morally ambiguous evils and in doing so, finds her inner power and loses her soul. These two heroine's, Chihiro and Buffy, both represent a neo-feminist vision of girl power, where women are warriors without being Amazons, but they achieve their ends through wildly different means. Both begin their journeys as typical girls, more or less, but while "Spirited Away"'s Chihiro succeeds because she opens her eyes to the magic and beauty around her and rises to her challenges with silent determination, Buffy has railed against her calling for five years and then when she finally resigned herself to her fate (and rising from the dead), she abandoned her lust for life in the process. I've been wishing that Buffy would die (for good) for a while now. She has become bitter and caustic and sees saving the world as a real chore. Though series creator Whedon has long been tauted up as a feminist, it seems that the later-day Buffy, after suffering death, abandonment, near rape and betrayal has more in common with hard-drinking 40 year old divorce's than with Chihiro's soft-spoken dreamer. Buffy is a hero, but inhuman, while Chihiro is a hero because of her humanity. Chihiro is driven by her love for her parents, Buffy is driven by- god, will somebody please tell me? This isn't to disparage "Buffy". It remains a show that is a cut above the average television fare, but with five episodes to go, it seems that the once sweet and wisecracking girl who gave her one-true-love a tear-stained kiss right before she was forced to kill him is unlikely to return. Perhaps "Buffy" is the truer vision: People, when confronted with the incomprehensible, tend to cauterize their emotions, but give me Chihiro's kindness to No-Face any day. Any girl who can ask a monster that just tried to eat her to join her for an enchanted train ride is fine in my book. Chihiro wins us over through the purity of her heart, Buffy just knows how to stake them.

posted by Japhy at 4/15/2003 12:54:00 AM || #