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. . . Buffy the Vampire Slayer |
. . . 1999-07-17 |
Things that don't scare me, a very special episode: Ray Harryhausen dinosaurs. As Hotsy-Totsyite Juliet Clark commented while watching the inexplicably controversial season finale of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "I can picture the Mayor guy ruling the world. I can't picture a computer-generated lizard ruling the world."
. . . 1999-11-01 |
You know you'll never write anything for GettingIt when... you realize that you watch "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" for the sake of its script.
. . . 2000-05-12 |
. . . 2000-05-30 |
Another poor shmuck discovers that doing a good job only protects you from office politics so long as you stay out of office politics, 'cause once that happens you've made office politics part of your job and it's probably not a part you'll be good at. The difference if you were doing a good job on Buffy the Vampire Slayer is that you get to spill backstage gossip after you're fired, like these quotes:
The thing I do like about her [Eliza Dushku] is that she came over to my place and practiced "action acting" with me. That means putting extra body movement and facial expressions into your shots. It edits with the stunt double better that way and adds to the illusion. It's hard for Sarah to do that though because it feels like overacting to a lot of actors. Some pick it up right away.Which reasonably explains why I didn't start watching the show till Eliza Dushku showed up....
. . . 2001-02-02 |
TV Comment: "The Replacement" - Buffy the Vampire Slayer
There's a type of male bonding that begins with Calibanism and ends in narcissism: The sheer blatancy of the overlap between our faults brings on mutual hostility (possibly due to a mutual fear of disclosure), whereas continued exposure reassures us that these faults are often found not only forgivable but charming. Which is a delightful thing to learn. For a while, anyway; in my experience, this particular type of friendship doesn't have much staying power.
. . . 2001-10-02 |
In the nick of time, tireless indexer Juliet Clark sends the following:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Alternate Season Episode Guide, 2000-2001
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. . . 2001-12-29 |
Invidious comparisons
Eagle-eyed Juliet Clark plucks this juicy hank o' middlebrow from Lewis Lapham's column in the September 2001 Harper's:
"Because the schools serve a spiritual and political purpose instead of an intellectual idea, they cannot afford to make invidious comparisons between the smart kids and the dumb kids, between the kids who read Shakespeare's plays and those who watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer."Elsewhere, another professional pundit does his dirty job of turning a short paragraph into a full column. (And I regret to say that my weblog compeers, those gay betrayers, are not linking to the original....)
. . . 2002-10-14 |
Only a void in a guilty cage
The Gospel According to Buffy (via AKMA) rightly points to the revelation of Buffy's post-resurrection nostalgia as one of the most affecting moments of last season. Rightly, but misleadingly, since its "heaven" was more a leap off the wheel of suffering, and Buffy returned less as comicbook Christ than as comicbook bodhisattva.
Oddly, another effective episode-closer much more evocative of Christianity goes unmentioned: the confession. Although not exactly endorsed by canonical law, hysterical refusal of atonement is common enough in Christian melodrama from the ascetics through Graham Greene.*
TARA: Do you love him? I-It's okay if you do. He's done a lot of good, and, and he does love you. A-and Buffy, it's okay if you don't. You're going through a really hard time, and you're...Could be, though, that the emotional power of both scenes has less to do with deep-rooted theological instincts than with the narrative medium.BUFFY: What? Using him? What's okay about that?
TARA: It's not that simple.
BUFFY: It is! It's wrong. I'm wrong. Tell me that I'm wrong, please... Please don't forgive me, please... (sobbing) Please don't... Please don't forgive me...
In a television series, we can be sure that the regulars will return, no matter how much crap they're dragged through, and we can be sure that they'll stay together, no matter how dreadfully they may have behaved towards each other.
Previously on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," our hero suffered death, betrayal by her first love immediately upon her loss of virginity, killing her first love, betrayal by a fellow slayer, betrayal by the second guy she ever slept with, being left by the third guy she ever slept with, the death of her mother, at least six apocalypses, and death again. Frankly, she was in a rut. Life hadn't much new to offer -- as is being proved redundantly by the current season -- and the only possible reason to be strapped into another cycle of pain was contractual obligation. Given Sarah Michelle Geller's movie-star ambitions, she could really put her heart into lines like "I was finished. Complete."
Similarly, it's not all that hard in real life to achieve non-forgiveness: people refuse to forgive each other all the time. Only on a TV show would Murray Slaughter and Ted Baxter survive in the same office for seven years. Only on a TV show would a character murder, torture, attempt to destroy the universe, and then work his way back into the gang by dint of heavy squinting. Trapped in such an obvious facade, one can understand straining against genre constraints toward some sense of reality.
In both cases, a narrative construct attempts to escape her defining narrative. For viewers who have willingly surrendered their empathy to the fiction while maintaining knowledge of its absurdity, this technique intensifies our identification with (and investment in) the character while reinforcing our own (shared) doubts. Simultaneously threatened and reassured, it's no wonder we feel our chains yanked.
As support for that secular explanation, I offer the third most affecting episode of last season,** in which the show's wobbly plotline was explained as the junk-culture-sodden megalomaniacal fantasy of a nearly catatonic young woman who'd been institutionalized since 1996: as direct an attack on suspension of disbelief as one could imagine.
Of course, it's possible that "deep-rooted theological instincts" are also a matter of "a narrative construct attempting to escape her defining narrative" -- but investigating such a synthesis might well lead us outside "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" proper.
* Adolescent panic when facing the moral relativism of adult life may be less culturally specific.
** But my favorite single scene of last year -- the fourth episode confrontation between bristling mentor Giles and waveringly "nice" Willow -- was just well-executed genre stuff.
Copyright to contributed work and quoted correspondence remains with the original authors.
Public domain work remains in the public domain.
All other material: Copyright 2015 Ray Davis.