Buffy Season Two Episode Eighteen

[koganbot]

"Fear is for the weak! That's my motto. Either that or live in the now. I haven't decided yet."

The DVD* was due back at the library today, so I watched five episodes in two days. I took notes as I was running through, so I'll be recounting my thoughts and speculations in the order they occurred, more or less.

For this one, the hospital episode, I initially went, "Oh no, they're back to monster of the week. Probably just killing time until they can resolve the Angel business in the final couple of episodes" - which may be true, but this story had me from the first second. Not that it was a clutch-your-throat thriller. More a hazy "What's going on here?" mystery, though they quite wisely kept many scenes in the sharp skeptical daylight. Sort of a division of labor, where in the day you apply thought at a distance, which prepares you for the night where you need to combine this with the insight of delirium.

The pattern of a Buffy episode will often be: a number of things are going on, high-school life and demon life, always with something unexplained, and then there will be a turning-point scene that may or may not be plot-related but in which the episode locks into what it's emotionally about, at least for me. (There may also be more such scenes later in the episode, or at the end, to give you different angles.) These scenes will usually be conversations among two or more of the young friends, though occasionally they'll be between Buffy and her mom or Buffy and Giles. In the Kendra episode, the crucial scene - the one I remember as crucial, anyway - occurs when Kendra disparages feelings and Buffy therefore deliberately gets Kendra mad at her, comes on smug, telling Kendra why despite Kendra's superior technique she would have whipped her in a fight. She gets Kendra mad and tells Kendra that that's a feeling, that's anger, that a slayer needs anger to push her through to victory. And Kendra gets it, that Buffy is helping her, and she feels grateful, and this is conveyed in a couple of seconds, in looks, and the two girls bond.

The turning point in the hospital episode is early, on the hospital grounds outside the building, where the gang and Giles are helping sick Buffy along. It's a bright day and the crowd of them are coming at us from a distance, come to a stop as the conversation gets more significant. To my surprise, when I re-watched the scene, I decided that the dialogue and the acting were clumsy; but it's the idea, and maybe also the staging, out there in the day's brilliance, that carries it. Buffy is saying that she saw Death, and Willow immediately makes a wisecrack, giving a couple of possibilities about what Death dresses up as, and Xander advises Buffy not to challenge Death to a game of chess, the two not yet acting as if they take her seriously; and Cordy jumps in with a Psych 101 explanation, putting into words what they've been thinking, about Buffy not having been able to save her cousin from dying of fever when they were kids, and now Buffy wanting to personify germs as monsters, since she knows how to fight monsters. But Buffy insists, no, "This little boy Ryan is afraid of something, something real; as long as I'm forced to stay here I'm going to find out what." And the effect of Cordy's disparagement is to push the others onto Buffy's side, the point being no matter how feverish Buffy is, you have to take her intuition seriously. So they're with her (and Cordy still isn't totally part of the group).

This is an example of how the show locates itself in that middle space Dave was talking about, neither real life nor vampire fiction, where the supernatural is a representation of the characters' struggles, but the supernatural is real as well, you see it on the screen and the characters deal with it. Yet the supernatural nonetheless belongs to the characters. This is neither inner nor outer territory, but one that feels psychologically right, hence profound. It's not that the ideas are profound; or, anyway, they're not profound in the abstract, laid out as ideas, but as struggles made visual.

The scene that moves me most is when Buffy and Willow, working their minds, work out that if Buffy wants to see the killer again, see him clearly enough to protect the kids from him, she's got to reinfect herself, bring back her fever. She has to fight sickness by getting sick, see the killer by going to the killer's hunting ground, the land of the ill.

Jumping ahead to my notes to Episode 21, I wrote, "So basically they make the show work by turning the heat up on Buffy." The series catches fire (so to speak) in Episode 14, when Buffy takes on the guilt of having killed the Angel she knew by loving him, the feeling of having lost him by sleeping with him, just the feeling of being wrong. And here in Episode 18 she literally turns up her heat.

A couple of random notes:

(1) Buffy never bruises. This is one of those credibility problems that the show deals with by making a point of it; one of its consequences is that it makes the police skeptical of her, whenever she tries to explain that she was attacked, and was defending herself.

(2) I wish someone, like katstevens or petronia or anyone who remembers, would comment on the clothing, since that's what I tend to be conscious of least, and what I'm least knowledgeable of. I'm good at plot shapes and intentions and themes. And what I see before my eyes makes me feel, but I'm not good at noticing. I do remember in the final scene of Episode 16, the scene where Cordelia stands against her gang; she's wearing a bright girly sunny summer preppy thing, primary colors, it jumping to the eye as especially pretty in a thoroughly mainstream way (my mind said "The Gap," but that's probably a decade or so out of date), this linking her especially to her crew, and differentiating her especially from Xander, which makes her beautiful distress when they run into Xander feel especially intense.

*I still haven't tried Hulu; I suspect that my DSL won't be able to handle it; my modem sometimes clogs up even on YouTube or MySpace, and I wouldn't be surprised if EarthLink were deliberately slowing things at times. Some ISPs do that, to users who stream a lot.

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

the Buffy we've seen can't be bothered to care about grades any more than she can be made to care about the fashion girls' opinions, but the show wants us to believe that she does

Without getting into spoilers, one unfortunate aspect of the show, I think, is the fact that they never resolve this, but as the world becomes better defined you realize that this isn't the crux of what the show is really about. I don't know if I could say what the show is really about, actually -- it's about itself, I suppose, it creates its own vacuum world that only infrequently respects hard-n-fast fantasy rules OR connects back to real life; most of the frustrations come from it really wanting to grab on to either pole, either for convenience (plots more often than not get in the way of the show unfolding, and the most plot-driven shows/seasons are by far the weakest ones) or for phony, and usually jarring, resonance.

Something happens as Joss Whedon's personal responsibilities start to exapnd on other shows and projects, though, and you start getting a "house style" that can make for some really magical ideas and episodes, even season arcs -- though my understanding is that Whedon skethces just about all of these out far in advance -- that understand, perhaps better than Whedon (who seems to have a nasty soft spot for both Emotional Resonance and Big Plot Gotchas that more often than not fall flat, or cant' stick the landing) how to let the energy ride.

Whedon becomes something like a freelancer on his own show, saving his strongest ideas for concentrated Special Episodes that, having no room to waffle, tend to hit really hard. (Actually, sometimes a little too hard -- they have a hint of the White Elephant to them, but it being television it's not a particularly massive elephant, and the overreaching is more charming than annoying.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

This is one reason why dubdob's early note of "the Xander" as code for emotional identification is important, though I would say that this identification basically extends to everyone who isn't Buffy, Buffy instead being a self-conscious centerpiece that in itself becomes very interesting as the show goes on. As though Buffy herself slowly becomes aware that she is what allows there to be a show, but in being so crucial also isn't quite allowed to give us the smaller emotional discoveries that the others have. Many shows function this way, actually -- off the top of my head, shows that do this, some with lead character in the title: "Roseanne" (Roseanne vs. rest of family) "Arrested Development" (Jason Bateman vs. rest of family) "The Sopranos" (Tony vs. rest of "family") "Mad Men" (Don vs. everyone ever) "How I Met Your Mother" (Ted [the "I" in the title] vs. Robin).

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

(not my idea actually -- though its author is militantly anti-LJ so wll not be contributing)

(and yes, there's a xander in lots of other shows)

[koganbot]

Seen almost none of those except Roseanne.

I wish I had Robin Wood's monograph on Howard Hawks. I don't remember most of it, but one thing that's stuck with me is his analysis of the two consecutive songs in Rio Bravo, one with Dean Martin on lead and the other with Ricky Nelson, which seem to take an unnecessary few minutes away from the film. But what the scene shows us is that the central character is the outsider in this scene, the man outside the communal music. (I recall Peckinpah using a musical scene similarly in Major Dundee.) I mentioned this before, here. I still think that To Have And Have Not and Rio Bravo might be the two most Buffy-relevant films (though I have no idea if Whedon saw them; he probably saw The Thing (1950s version), which Hawks produced though didn't direct). Those are by no means the best Bogart film (which would be In A Lonely Place or Casablanca) or the best of Hawks's Bogart films (that would be The Big Sleep) or the best Wayne film (The Searchers) or the best of Hawks's Wayne films (that would be Red River), but they're the ones that have a central character around whom coalesces a band of oddballs. Each of those two movies has an obvious capital-C Choice that the main character has to make, and you know how he'll choose, but what's interesting is the way that the group helps him to choose, even though they don't know that this is what they're doing.

(Both those films are co-written by Jules Furthman, about whom I don't know a lot, even though he's written plenty that I've seen. Richard Corliss tags Furthman as a chameleon, someone who is subsumed by his projects.)

[koganbot]

What shows has Whedon had other than Buffy? I know there's Angel (and that the fact that it exists is a spoiler in itself, though maybe less than I think). And I know there was a recent one that got canceled after the original thirteen episodes, though I forget its title. (And as I said, I'm staying away from Wiki, owing to spoilers.)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Firefly and Dollhouse are his other seres to date. Firefly was cancelled; Dollhouse is -- I think -- in the middle of the second series.