Buffy Season Two Episode Twenty
Nov. 6th, 2009 01:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotAh, this is a refreshing change of pace, a thoroughly mediocre episode. There was a nice exchange, though:
"You you you. What about me? It's one thing to be dating the lame unpopular guy. It's another to be dating the creature from the blue lagoon."
"Black lagoon. The creature from the blue lagoon was Brooke Shields."
This actually created a nice little subplot, Xander thinking that Cordy was self-centeredly refusing to support him in a time of difficulty, whereas what actually was going on in Cordelia was just the opposite, her feeling committed to him no matter the social consequences to herself, even if he turns into a slimy sea creature. This is revealed to us in a comic way, she walking the bleachers by the pool and seeing a sea monster swimming along and thinking that Xander has been transformed, and giving the mistakenly identified Xander Sea Monster a heartfelt statement of loyalty. The scriptwriters were wise to do that bit as comedy, since if it carried any more weight it would have tilted the emotions of the episode away from the main plot, which didn't have much to do with Cordy. And since Whedon et al. have yet to make Cordy a full-on emotional character, they pretty much couldn't do much else but keep these interchanges small and funny.
(By the way, if you didn't see it, I added in some extra Cordelia commentary to my write-up for Episode Nineteen.)
The rest of the episode involved so-what monster transformations, a boring villain with obvious motivation you could see miles away, and some correct but boringly done swipes at jock privilege and date rape, almost no emotional resonance. Felt like hack TV, really. But it did get me thinking even more about the Cordy role, which is the most problematic, and about the show's neglecting to give the school an underlying social fabric. Buffy The Vampire Slayer isn't about the school's social fabric, so the neglect isn't debilitating, but I wish Whedon and his colleagues had nonetheless given the fabric more thought, worked out a deep social background they could draw on. So under the cut we go for speculations and wishful thinking.
By dating Xander, Cordelia really has stepped into what for her is the unknown, No Person's Land, and the show should show her losing her bearings - perhaps losing them creatively and profitably, but with some loss nonetheless. Unfortunately, the show can't really do this, since Cordy has been the only representative of her social set that we've gotten to know. So her social movement doesn't really show up as movement, since there's no social backdrop for her to move across.
What I really want Cordy to be is not just a pleasure center and a reality principle, but an artist of style. She's not merely a girl with an eye to fashion, but a girl with her own individual look. Irl that would be required in her social set anyway, that people represent their own style as well as the group's. In her great speech where she declares herself not a sheep, she's not only standing up to her friends, she's reflecting their values. But nonetheless, in declaring those values she really is declaring her own mind, her determination to judge for herself. As pleasure principle and reality principle and Artist Of Style she's setting her own standards, no matter how typical of her class. And in representing a pleasure principle she stands for her own sense of fun. (Yes, this would give her coherence that the show doesn't yet know how to.) Maybe some of this has already been going on in her dress and her body language and I've not consciously noticed it, being poor at such consciousness. Could I have taken some of this in subliminally?
Still, we need to give her a world, a social canvas. Amongst the girls, we've got the popular crowd (Cordy's old group), some second-level failed populars like Amy, presumably, and then, well, everyone else, with a tough girl tossed in once when the plot wanted her. Oh yes, and then there's Buffy and her friends. And then among the guys there are briefly discerned jocks and normal popular guys, who appear in token half-scenes here and there, and nerdboys off to the side who only show up when the plot beckons them; and there's Oz, who's kind of a one-man band, really: indie boy and cool boy and brain and gentle loner at once, and guitar player. And there's Xander, who's with Buffy and her friends. What the show hasn't shown us is any locus of popularity beyond the designated popular kids. Any actual school would have such loci, at the very least some skaters and stoners who put themselves in opposition to the rah-rah but have their own central figures, and some students who represent cool, a critical attitude, a potentially threatening detachment and contempt. The vampires take on some of these oppositional characteristics, occupying such roles psychologically, but they're no part of the school structure. Although the show wouldn't have the budget, cast, or screen-time to give us much of a school structure, it should have sketched it in, quickly and deftly, added some skaters and a goth or two to the late '90s scenery, had some skaters and cool boys and hip-hop fans in conversation with Xander now and then, snippets of dialogue in which they clearly respect his intelligence, and so forth. Maybe people ducking out for a smoke here and there (though that might not be something TV will allow).
Of course, there actually is someone with a cool critical attitude, a potentially threatening detachment and contempt, and it's Xander. The show could still do something with this - it's got a year left of school, right? They could set this up, make Buffy and her friends especially Xander the focus of a potential cool crowd that can't take on coolness too strongly since Buffy and friends have to remain enough under the radar so as not to draw penetrating attention to themselves. And that could be an interesting dilemma, if it gets sketched in. Without taking the overt cool role, Buffy and friends nonetheless should carry social force, though so far Principal Snyder (that comic little rodent) is the only person to detect it in any of them, sensing it from Buffy.
So, to bring this back to Cordy: Xander, the most potentially dangerous and potentially cool member of the Buffy crowd, is hardly a style disaster, doesn't look dorky or nerdy or sexless or like a goody-goody, isn't ill-fitted in his shirts and T-shirts, even if he emphatically doesn't dress up. And he walks with grace and force and he's darkly handsome. So, though his social markers might put him at odds with Cordy, his demeanor doesn't. In fact there's an added social logic beyond the physical to their attraction: the Queen Of Style going out with the coolest guy in the school, even if she doesn't verbally or consciously designate him as such. By "lamest" she could actually mean coolest. If the show had sketched in a social scene, that could have been what was happening, and the attraction could have come from Xander's and Cordy's characters and social life; what Whedon did instead was to pull them together as a way of playing with a dramatic, generic convention: bickering partners, opposites attracting. He could have done that anyway, poked around with the generic element, while nonetheless giving the relation more of a personal and social logic, so that we'd feel the relationship more.
"You you you. What about me? It's one thing to be dating the lame unpopular guy. It's another to be dating the creature from the blue lagoon."
"Black lagoon. The creature from the blue lagoon was Brooke Shields."
This actually created a nice little subplot, Xander thinking that Cordy was self-centeredly refusing to support him in a time of difficulty, whereas what actually was going on in Cordelia was just the opposite, her feeling committed to him no matter the social consequences to herself, even if he turns into a slimy sea creature. This is revealed to us in a comic way, she walking the bleachers by the pool and seeing a sea monster swimming along and thinking that Xander has been transformed, and giving the mistakenly identified Xander Sea Monster a heartfelt statement of loyalty. The scriptwriters were wise to do that bit as comedy, since if it carried any more weight it would have tilted the emotions of the episode away from the main plot, which didn't have much to do with Cordy. And since Whedon et al. have yet to make Cordy a full-on emotional character, they pretty much couldn't do much else but keep these interchanges small and funny.
(By the way, if you didn't see it, I added in some extra Cordelia commentary to my write-up for Episode Nineteen.)
The rest of the episode involved so-what monster transformations, a boring villain with obvious motivation you could see miles away, and some correct but boringly done swipes at jock privilege and date rape, almost no emotional resonance. Felt like hack TV, really. But it did get me thinking even more about the Cordy role, which is the most problematic, and about the show's neglecting to give the school an underlying social fabric. Buffy The Vampire Slayer isn't about the school's social fabric, so the neglect isn't debilitating, but I wish Whedon and his colleagues had nonetheless given the fabric more thought, worked out a deep social background they could draw on. So under the cut we go for speculations and wishful thinking.
By dating Xander, Cordelia really has stepped into what for her is the unknown, No Person's Land, and the show should show her losing her bearings - perhaps losing them creatively and profitably, but with some loss nonetheless. Unfortunately, the show can't really do this, since Cordy has been the only representative of her social set that we've gotten to know. So her social movement doesn't really show up as movement, since there's no social backdrop for her to move across.
What I really want Cordy to be is not just a pleasure center and a reality principle, but an artist of style. She's not merely a girl with an eye to fashion, but a girl with her own individual look. Irl that would be required in her social set anyway, that people represent their own style as well as the group's. In her great speech where she declares herself not a sheep, she's not only standing up to her friends, she's reflecting their values. But nonetheless, in declaring those values she really is declaring her own mind, her determination to judge for herself. As pleasure principle and reality principle and Artist Of Style she's setting her own standards, no matter how typical of her class. And in representing a pleasure principle she stands for her own sense of fun. (Yes, this would give her coherence that the show doesn't yet know how to.) Maybe some of this has already been going on in her dress and her body language and I've not consciously noticed it, being poor at such consciousness. Could I have taken some of this in subliminally?
Still, we need to give her a world, a social canvas. Amongst the girls, we've got the popular crowd (Cordy's old group), some second-level failed populars like Amy, presumably, and then, well, everyone else, with a tough girl tossed in once when the plot wanted her. Oh yes, and then there's Buffy and her friends. And then among the guys there are briefly discerned jocks and normal popular guys, who appear in token half-scenes here and there, and nerdboys off to the side who only show up when the plot beckons them; and there's Oz, who's kind of a one-man band, really: indie boy and cool boy and brain and gentle loner at once, and guitar player. And there's Xander, who's with Buffy and her friends. What the show hasn't shown us is any locus of popularity beyond the designated popular kids. Any actual school would have such loci, at the very least some skaters and stoners who put themselves in opposition to the rah-rah but have their own central figures, and some students who represent cool, a critical attitude, a potentially threatening detachment and contempt. The vampires take on some of these oppositional characteristics, occupying such roles psychologically, but they're no part of the school structure. Although the show wouldn't have the budget, cast, or screen-time to give us much of a school structure, it should have sketched it in, quickly and deftly, added some skaters and a goth or two to the late '90s scenery, had some skaters and cool boys and hip-hop fans in conversation with Xander now and then, snippets of dialogue in which they clearly respect his intelligence, and so forth. Maybe people ducking out for a smoke here and there (though that might not be something TV will allow).
Of course, there actually is someone with a cool critical attitude, a potentially threatening detachment and contempt, and it's Xander. The show could still do something with this - it's got a year left of school, right? They could set this up, make Buffy and her friends especially Xander the focus of a potential cool crowd that can't take on coolness too strongly since Buffy and friends have to remain enough under the radar so as not to draw penetrating attention to themselves. And that could be an interesting dilemma, if it gets sketched in. Without taking the overt cool role, Buffy and friends nonetheless should carry social force, though so far Principal Snyder (that comic little rodent) is the only person to detect it in any of them, sensing it from Buffy.
So, to bring this back to Cordy: Xander, the most potentially dangerous and potentially cool member of the Buffy crowd, is hardly a style disaster, doesn't look dorky or nerdy or sexless or like a goody-goody, isn't ill-fitted in his shirts and T-shirts, even if he emphatically doesn't dress up. And he walks with grace and force and he's darkly handsome. So, though his social markers might put him at odds with Cordy, his demeanor doesn't. In fact there's an added social logic beyond the physical to their attraction: the Queen Of Style going out with the coolest guy in the school, even if she doesn't verbally or consciously designate him as such. By "lamest" she could actually mean coolest. If the show had sketched in a social scene, that could have been what was happening, and the attraction could have come from Xander's and Cordy's characters and social life; what Whedon did instead was to pull them together as a way of playing with a dramatic, generic convention: bickering partners, opposites attracting. He could have done that anyway, poked around with the generic element, while nonetheless giving the relation more of a personal and social logic, so that we'd feel the relationship more.
