Buffy Season Two Episode Nineteen
Nov. 3rd, 2009 07:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotThis entry will be hurried and sloppy because I want to get my thoughts down before my memory of the episode fades utterly, and I have to be somewhere in an hour, so corrections and additions will come when I get back, but HOLY AMAZING COW! How did they pull this off? I was sure at the start that (1) this episode was yet more time-killing while the series waited to take care of Angel in the season finale; (2) so, like the previous episode, it wouldn't have much to do with the story arc that we've been intermittently getting since Episode Thirteen; (3) ghost of a dead boy from the Fifties is almost guaranteed hokum; and (4) in fact, My So-Called Life, the gold standard for teens on TV as far as I'm concerned, had already fumbled and flubbed their attempt at Ghost Boy From The '50s several years earlier. So anyway, as this was going along, I was saying to myself, "OK, they haven't made any wrong moves yet, I'm actually taken by the mystery here, but still, it seems wrong that they've forgotten their ongoing task." And then, man, did they pull one on me, not just relating the story to the arc but nailing it to the themes and to poor Buffy's emotions, or nailing Buffy's emotions to this story, leading us by the nose and whomping us with the connection but, owing to strong dialogue and acting, getting me to absolutely buy into and feel as profound a tale that fundamentally was constructed out of a spare and worked-over melodramatic scene with sentimental paperback psychology layered on top of it. I guess people's lives as they're told often are melodrama and sentiment, even if as lived they're much deeper, but smart drama can suggest a world of thoughts and feelings beyond the simplicities of the story. This episode is about whether Buffy Can Find A Way To Forgive Herself. Also, I don't actually get the plot logic of the conclusion, though that's no matter since we're pushing for emotional "logic" here anyway, but now we go down under the cut.
How does suicide-boy James get his happy ending (EDIT: slight rewrite, with the word "whom" added)? Every other time he'd re-enacted the story, finding some guy to possess, and some woman to be his lover, Miss Newman, the movie keeps moving as planned, the shots fired, the show over. So how come the result is different when he inhabits Buffy and - somehow - the beloved Miss Newman inhabits Angel? This isn't explained at all. I suppose that since Angel, a vampire, can't be killed by gunshots, Angel/Miss Newman (Grace Newman) isn't cut down by the shots, so, even though it is poltergeist James who is reenacting the story, Miss Newman gets to continue on, make her way back to James (Angel making his way back to Buffy), tell him her truth, that with her dying breath she'd still loved him; she knows he hadn't intended to kill her (and Angel - the Angel whom Buffy loved, that is - knows that Buffy hadn't intended to destroy him). And this revelation, which is no more than what we the viewers already feel towards Buffy, nonetheless rewrites the episode for us; when Buffy had earlier been so unforgiving of poltergeist James, the inference was that she was being unforgiving of Angel and the pain that he'd caused. But now Buffy's earlier harshness and anger are seen to be anger - hatred - directed towards herself. And this also adds a whole other layer to the last few episodes, to Buffy's feeling that her moment of love and passion and joy had polluted everything. This hadn't quite seeped into us (or into me, anyway) in the way it does now.
EDIT Gellar as actress (slightly rewritten): Can't say that acting is something I understand, or that I can tell the difference between whether it's an actor that moves me or whether it's the lighting or the background music. But I don't think Mark's right in calling Gellar wooden. If anything, she's too easily buoyant, but that is also the character as written. This story arc, especially this episode and Episode Fourteen (the Morning After episode) [the two best in the series so far, I'd say], is utterly dependent on Buffy's pain being convincing and on our feeling that it is coming to us - we are perceiving it - unfettered. Buffy hurt, Buffy confused, Buffy shell-shocked, Buffy angry; Buffy going from pain to numbness to humbled to coldly angry. A lot of this is defined by the words and by what we know of the situation, but the actress has to give it all a convincing look, so that the emotions seem to inhabit her body. Gellar has to make the guilt not only credible but beautiful. There's a dark stillness to her in crucial scenes in fourteen and nineteen, Buffy physically closed-in on herself but her pain palpably dominating the scene. Camera movements are important in creating this, but so too is body language.
Gellar made the guilt credible, and made it beautiful. So we believe in Buffy's feelings even if we don't believe she had anything to feel guilty about. But Buffy's story would be even more involving if she'd done something that we did feel was at least somewhat wrong (though understandable), rather than her being utterly blameless.
EDIT Cordelia watch: Cordelia as potential pleasure principle and potential link to everyday reality. OK, my final addition (unless I think of some other): If they ever do pull their conception of Cordelia together, this is how I'd want them to do it: First, as I've said, they've got to motivate Cordy's moments of self-centeredness. They can't simply have her as someone who for the moment cares more about her hair than about the fate of the world, since they've already established that she cares more about the fate of the world and that she admires Xander and Buffy et al. for being courageous and rescuing others. It's simply not credible that a bored, pleasure-seeking Cordelia is e.g. going to be distracting Giles while Giles is doing the research that will potentially save a little boy's life, etc., and whenever the scripts pull something like this it just registers to me as "the script is pulling something like this." But this episode hints at something better: Cordelia as the innocent pleasure principle. The school is totally haunted by insects or bats or whatever, a seat of destruction, and the kids and Giles are off in Buffy's living room trying to figure out what to do about it, and Cordelia pipes up, brightly, "Hey, if Sunnydale High School shuts down forever, do we automatically graduate?" Here she almost feels like common sense, in comparison to everyone else's over-the-top world-saving concerns. Why it works this time is that she isn't opposing her concerns to the world-saving stuff, she's adding them. Just because we're saving the world doesn't mean the rest of life stops (this is a principle of the show, as Mark says down in the comments). The scene is powerful, Buffy separate from the others, leaning against the wall, shattered and depressed, being the one who intones her dark truth, while the others are wondering what's with the poltergeist. He wants forgiveness, she tells the others, her voice dead, affectless. He wants forgiveness, wants to be forgiven for killing the one he loved, but he doesn't deserve to be forgiven, and it makes no difference that he didn't know what he was doing and that he couldn't help himself. So Buffy prosecutes herself, and wanders desolately into another room, while Cordy remarks that there seems to be a bit of overidentification going on - which is the show hedging its bets, telling us it knows that it's laying things on real thick. And here Cordy is reality talking; the remark would have worked totally if the show had previously done a good job along the way of having her embody the pleasure principle and be a link to everyday reality. As it is, it jars a little: bet-hedging when this is a bet the episode is committed to.
(There's more to say about Cordy as the potential artist of style and artist of the everyday, but I'll hold off.)
The Flamingos track didn't come out until 1959, by the way. I wonder why the show chose 1955 as the flashback date.
How does suicide-boy James get his happy ending (EDIT: slight rewrite, with the word "whom" added)? Every other time he'd re-enacted the story, finding some guy to possess, and some woman to be his lover, Miss Newman, the movie keeps moving as planned, the shots fired, the show over. So how come the result is different when he inhabits Buffy and - somehow - the beloved Miss Newman inhabits Angel? This isn't explained at all. I suppose that since Angel, a vampire, can't be killed by gunshots, Angel/Miss Newman (Grace Newman) isn't cut down by the shots, so, even though it is poltergeist James who is reenacting the story, Miss Newman gets to continue on, make her way back to James (Angel making his way back to Buffy), tell him her truth, that with her dying breath she'd still loved him; she knows he hadn't intended to kill her (and Angel - the Angel whom Buffy loved, that is - knows that Buffy hadn't intended to destroy him). And this revelation, which is no more than what we the viewers already feel towards Buffy, nonetheless rewrites the episode for us; when Buffy had earlier been so unforgiving of poltergeist James, the inference was that she was being unforgiving of Angel and the pain that he'd caused. But now Buffy's earlier harshness and anger are seen to be anger - hatred - directed towards herself. And this also adds a whole other layer to the last few episodes, to Buffy's feeling that her moment of love and passion and joy had polluted everything. This hadn't quite seeped into us (or into me, anyway) in the way it does now.
EDIT Gellar as actress (slightly rewritten): Can't say that acting is something I understand, or that I can tell the difference between whether it's an actor that moves me or whether it's the lighting or the background music. But I don't think Mark's right in calling Gellar wooden. If anything, she's too easily buoyant, but that is also the character as written. This story arc, especially this episode and Episode Fourteen (the Morning After episode) [the two best in the series so far, I'd say], is utterly dependent on Buffy's pain being convincing and on our feeling that it is coming to us - we are perceiving it - unfettered. Buffy hurt, Buffy confused, Buffy shell-shocked, Buffy angry; Buffy going from pain to numbness to humbled to coldly angry. A lot of this is defined by the words and by what we know of the situation, but the actress has to give it all a convincing look, so that the emotions seem to inhabit her body. Gellar has to make the guilt not only credible but beautiful. There's a dark stillness to her in crucial scenes in fourteen and nineteen, Buffy physically closed-in on herself but her pain palpably dominating the scene. Camera movements are important in creating this, but so too is body language.
Gellar made the guilt credible, and made it beautiful. So we believe in Buffy's feelings even if we don't believe she had anything to feel guilty about. But Buffy's story would be even more involving if she'd done something that we did feel was at least somewhat wrong (though understandable), rather than her being utterly blameless.
EDIT Cordelia watch: Cordelia as potential pleasure principle and potential link to everyday reality. OK, my final addition (unless I think of some other): If they ever do pull their conception of Cordelia together, this is how I'd want them to do it: First, as I've said, they've got to motivate Cordy's moments of self-centeredness. They can't simply have her as someone who for the moment cares more about her hair than about the fate of the world, since they've already established that she cares more about the fate of the world and that she admires Xander and Buffy et al. for being courageous and rescuing others. It's simply not credible that a bored, pleasure-seeking Cordelia is e.g. going to be distracting Giles while Giles is doing the research that will potentially save a little boy's life, etc., and whenever the scripts pull something like this it just registers to me as "the script is pulling something like this." But this episode hints at something better: Cordelia as the innocent pleasure principle. The school is totally haunted by insects or bats or whatever, a seat of destruction, and the kids and Giles are off in Buffy's living room trying to figure out what to do about it, and Cordelia pipes up, brightly, "Hey, if Sunnydale High School shuts down forever, do we automatically graduate?" Here she almost feels like common sense, in comparison to everyone else's over-the-top world-saving concerns. Why it works this time is that she isn't opposing her concerns to the world-saving stuff, she's adding them. Just because we're saving the world doesn't mean the rest of life stops (this is a principle of the show, as Mark says down in the comments). The scene is powerful, Buffy separate from the others, leaning against the wall, shattered and depressed, being the one who intones her dark truth, while the others are wondering what's with the poltergeist. He wants forgiveness, she tells the others, her voice dead, affectless. He wants forgiveness, wants to be forgiven for killing the one he loved, but he doesn't deserve to be forgiven, and it makes no difference that he didn't know what he was doing and that he couldn't help himself. So Buffy prosecutes herself, and wanders desolately into another room, while Cordy remarks that there seems to be a bit of overidentification going on - which is the show hedging its bets, telling us it knows that it's laying things on real thick. And here Cordy is reality talking; the remark would have worked totally if the show had previously done a good job along the way of having her embody the pleasure principle and be a link to everyday reality. As it is, it jars a little: bet-hedging when this is a bet the episode is committed to.
(There's more to say about Cordy as the potential artist of style and artist of the everyday, but I'll hold off.)
The Flamingos track didn't come out until 1959, by the way. I wonder why the show chose 1955 as the flashback date.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-04 05:20 pm (UTC)Yes, absolutely, but for this to work the main ball has to be totally on, or else there's too much weight on the jokes and diversions, and they're no longer diversions. By "killing time" I'm specifically referring to "monster of the week" episodes killing time before we get to Buffy finishing business with Angel. The love potion/witchcraft episode works because in effect it pulls a complete reversal: the monster or demon-witchcraft spell isn't the main ball here - the main ball is Xander and Cordy's serious love for each other, the episode teaching them that yes, they really want each other, and want each other as is, not as someone else. But that main ball isn't going to roll for more than five nonconsecutive minutes total before losing us, powerful though it is for those five, and the show knows this, so the "monster" - all of womankind other than Cordy (show probably thought it would be one theme too far to bring Larry back for this episode) - is wild raucous comedy, a full-scale diversion that allows those five minutes to germinate and blossom. The other killing-time episode (that is, before we get to the next killing-time episode) is the Death Man terrorizing children; that episode gets across just because it's a strong story in itself. But too many more of such episodes will start to feel like bullshit, if the show seems unwilling to take care of its main business.