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

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

I'm not in any real* sense an expert on californian girlteen fashion but my read, from quite early on -- I think an ep where buffy wore tan vinyl pants and a violet or mauve top -- was that she was being costumed to have subtly ropey fashion sense... like a former cheerleader who's lost the touch (or the need) to get this right any more. So she can dress to her figure, which is small and honed, and she has utter confidence, except it's kind of totally distracted and misplaced. I don't recall her ever dressing well when she's dressed ordinarily (ie excluding prom dresses and the conventional like); I think her outfits would often count as Hott Yet Ugly; an actual affront to Cordelia's sensibilities and priorities. And I think this ugliness is deliberate, though very held back.

Part of the Cordy story is I think this: Charisma Carpenter was originally to be Buffy, and the Buffy character was to be more of a tension between a Cordy-style popular fashion-bitch and slayer. In the event they went with a more subtle contradiction for SMG, but I think it leaves Cordelia without a niche to evolve towards, except the useful "tactlessly speaks her mind" role.

*Or indeed unreal

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Also there's the cool-to-dorkiness hierarchy of Cordelia -> Buffy ->>>> Willow (whose intarsia jumpers are a thing of wonder until c. series 4 when she gets all cliched Medieval damsel), with Buffy being just on the threshold of JESUS WOMAN WHAT ARE YOU WEARING most of the time, but inevitably getting away with it because her clothes are actually fairly practical for the whole demon-slaying business.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

haha yes but isn't willow rocking the indie ubertwee thing = a brainy cutie unprepared to recognise she is quite sexy? hence GIANTSIZE KITAN THICK-KNIT CRIMSON PULLIE most of the time (also of course they are actually engaged in growing up)

her dorkiness is a kind of self-protective camouflage, until she learns who she is and what she can do

i think the way it is we don't hugely spot, at least to make a thing of, buffy's dreadful fashion sense is a. her (quite misplaced) self-confidence* and b. yes, practicality... she needs to be limber and unencumbered for kicking

*which i guess boys mostly don't have anyway, re girls' clothes -- i watched a lot of it frst time round with vick, whose own fashionsense, besides being tomboyish-nay-dykey, is quite eccentric; she would sometimes laugh out loud at something buffy was wearing

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

by which i mean fearlessly eccentric obv, hurrah

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

You can also download every Buffy ep here:

http://www.katzforums.com/showthread.php?t=590516

Seasons 4 through 7 were taken down and then reuploaded in the last comment of the thread, but Season 3 should be fine if Hulu isn't working. (Hulu stops after season 3 anyway, which is when Emily and I started getting them from Netflix.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Each ep is approx. 150 MB, fairly good quality throughout, and you can basically just download as you go since they don't seem to be getting taken down (I've been doing this on and off for three months now.)

[koganbot]

I don't think Carpenter had actually been cast as Buffy (and I'm not going to look because such research always puts me in the way of spoilers), though she had auditioned for it. But I'm pretty sure that Gellar not only had tried for the part of Cordelia but had gotten it, and then was asked to try out for Buffy. But this probably means that Carpenter, like Gellar, has martial arts training, though I don't recall their making use of it yet.*

(I've also not seen the movie, which Whedon scripted but didn't direct and which probably contains Whedon's initial - or earlier, at any rate - conception of Buffy, unless the director rethought the character.)

Maybe the show hasn't yet pushed the envelope with Buffy's outfits, but I'd say that her confidence is not at all misplaced, since she invariably looks sexy. Invariably. As you say, she dresses to her figure. Of course, that's my male perspective, but my guess is that that perspective is shared by every boy in Sunnydale High School, e.g. the entire swim team in ep. 20. Even the gay boys would know that Buffy's got it. Even the reptiles i.e. principal Snyder notice. But then girls dress more for girls then boys anyway, as far as Fashion goes. But Buffy dresses to Buffiness and to looking good, not to anonymity. She's willing to be a magnet and a sexual force. So Ugly Yet Hott doesn't quite seem to be it, since I don't think it registers as "ugly," so far. "Sideways," maybe. But then, fashion-retard me didn't even notice her as "off," just not blatantly "on" in the way that Cordelia is. But what does "dressing well" mean in the context of Sunnydale High? (Obv. not a rhetorical question, and Whedon didn't have the financial resources or the format (since he's limited to TV episodes broken into four quarters of approximately twelve minutes each) to create a high school social world, but I think in the first two seasons he never got around to conceiving even a sketch of that world, and maybe he should have, though maybe working it out as he goes along will work out.)

This leads to another issue I have with the show. Obv. I can set aside stuff like "Why don't the vampires just shoot her?" and "How come the cops don't show up?" And I haven't made up my mind yet about the fact that the teen characters are in their essence more responsible and self-possessed than any teen would actually be. But nothing convinces me of Buffy's "I want at least something of a normal life" routines, and the show would be better and the character more interesting if those routines were convincing. Which is to say that 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; and though Gellar can make the scenes absolutely convincing where it matters to Buffy what her mother thinks, those scenes don't resonate beyond the moment either. The stuff about wanting to date (e.g., to date Angel) is in a different category, since dating and romance and sex aren't normal life for teens - they come wrapped socially in a package of specialness - even if the peer pressure in that direction is totally normal. At least, the romance stuff isn't normal life for these teens.

*Unless it stars someone absolutely charismatically riveting in his motion like Bruce Lee, martial arts on TV and in films goes in one of my eyes and out the other. I was fascinated in the '90s by Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damme films, but for the characterizations and social themes much more than for the dancing fighting.

[koganbot]

What Buffy's been robbed of isn't the chance to be "normal" in the sense of caring about grades and gossiping about boys, the conventional sense of "normal" that maybe prevailed in the '50s. I've never watched much Oprah, and not for years, but surely "normal" now has to do with Having Issues And Trying To Surmount Them. In any event, what Buffy has been robbed of is her chance to not know herself, her chance to thrash around and be uncertain and get it wrong and get it wrong again. The Kendra episode, which for me was dominated by the Xander-Cordy** thing, was actually most important for Kendra's insight into Buffy; Kendra do-it-by-the-book Vampire Slayer is the one who sees deeply that Buffy is totally committed to her role, to her craft, at least as much as Kendra Super Slayer is. Buffy is the central adult in the room***, in effect already grown, not superior to the others in deep wisdom but in her commitment to what has to be done.****

If as the show goes forward it finds a way for Buffy to grow, that would be a good achievement. Whedon et al. may be able to pull this off, since - impressively - it is Buffy's crisis, her devastating hurt and loss and guilt and anger etc., that is the emotional and dramatic engine for the last third of Season Two, which is the closest the show has come to the full power and complexity you guys see in it.***** Xander and Willow have the need and the potential for growth written into them from the get-go, and that will surely be interesting and probably superb, and Cordy can get this potential if the show ever figures out how to make her consistently believable, allows her to grow rather than just giving her characteristics and throwing changes at her. But Buffy's purposefulness is what pulls everyone together, and they can grow around that. But can she? And need she?

**The Xander-Cordy payoff, their true emotional getting together, has to wait six episodes for the backfiring witch's spell, which in backfiring unexpectedly has its intended result.

***Giles, the other adult, can't really resort to action, knows that the real power to act isn't his, so, though he has a quasi-parenting role, he's not the central adult of the story.

****Not that real-life adults (e.g. me) necessarily get there, and not that they don't - or shouldn't - lose or change their sense of what needs to be done.

*****Correctly, I'll wager, though I'm still not quite in all the way.

[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).

[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]

but sexy isn't what women's fashion is for, exactly -- certainly it's not all it's for, as it's so much more aimed (for finetuning purposes) at women, and (to a great extent in the non-buffy world) effected by gay men

i think the issue is control over what her peers think of her: she is in fact bothered by this, but hardly floored by it -- her near-absolute confidence in her craft gives her a poise that means that her fashion-sense works ANYWAY, but the poise comes from her not how she dresses; which is a pretty radically grrrl-power non-normal non-californian line to take -- and in fact she doesn't take it, i don't think... it's as if she's trusting herself to get this stuff right bcz she no longer has time, and the effect she gets proves to herself she IS getting it right, hence her confidence, but her confidence is misplaced, bcz it's NOT the clothes doing the work here (they're often subtly not fit to purpose in a way that dismays and disorientates the cordies of the world; the fact of this disorientation actually the proof of the unfitness) it's her own sense of capability in her given task

"normal" in this context = something like the right to be normally emo about normal teen stuff; to just still be a stupid kid now and then; as the slayer she doesn't have that luxury; as her job is saving the world

dave's excellent idea of "between the worlds" actually also functions also in the territory you're interested in: whedon's extreme self-consciousness as a writer and director means he can't stop stepping away and showng you the nuts and bolts of drama, often by plunging well-made and pasteboard right in among one another -- so that he gets some of his strongest effects right after a moment of maximum witty or cheesy "alienation" (in the brechtian sense: deliberately estranging you from immersion in the manipulation, to let you be judge of how well it's working)

[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)

[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.

[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]

the fact of this disorientation actually the proof of the unfitness

I don't know about that. Really. But that's something I've got to work out in a different post, probably over time and several more seasons (and maybe for Whedon to work out over time). It wouldn't have been proof in Storrs, Connecticut, 1966 through 1972, of course, but also I don't think that it's proof in the Buffyverse. But then, the show may not know, and may have - accidentally - chosen not knowing; that is, the Buffy world itself doesn't know whether or not the clothes are unfit. But you know Buffy world way better than I do.

"normal" in this context = something like the right to be normally emo about normal teen stuff; to just still be a stupid kid now and then

Yeah, that's stated very well.

whedon's extreme self-consciousness as a writer and director means he can't stop stepping away and showng you the nuts and bolts of drama, often by plunging well-made and pasteboard right in among one another

Relevant to Cordelia, possibly. I originally wrote that Cordelia's short speech on that hospital walkway was the writers hedging their bets, trying and mostly succeeding in having their cake and eating it too - letting us know that they're aware that they're overstating the theme, but in stating it through Cordelia they get the other characters to resist it a bit, not refuting the theme but bringing it down to size, which is what the between-worlds space does when it's working well: gets the theme stated but refuses to cede control to the theme, to say that the theme is altogether right; so the theme is just a potential that enriches the story(but still, maybe there's a better way to to do this, a way to make Cordy believable rather than just useful, though I think she's OK in this scene, and she's often believable in her moments, some of them, it's just that I have trouble connecting the elements). I took out that passage when I posted because the same thing comes up in the next episode, and this was one point too many for the post.