Tuesday, October 14, 2003
Buffy: Once More With Squealing
Originally presented as a paper for 'Lounge Critic' at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Federation Square, on Tuesday 14 October 2003.
I want to take the chance- with seven seasons of Buffy in the bag – to look back and assess what Buffy meant to me, to its fans, and to television. But before I begin, a disclaimer. I love Buffy. I have a Sarah Michelle and Freddy Prinze Jr t-shirt. But I will not know every moment of every episode of every series. So please, if I make a small error, forgive it, and if I make a big one, feel free to howl me down or, even better, send me an email tomorrow.
Another disclaimer: I have done a little bit of academic work on Buffy, but I am not an academic, and so I won’t have the theoretical depth of my colleagues here, Sue and Katy. I am is someone who loved the show, but who thinks it lost many of the things that made it great in the now-famous season 6, and thus abandoned season 7 altogether. For those of you who cannot countenance such infidelity, believe me when I say I will go back and watch it, don’t panic.
Okay, opening remarks aside. Tonight I want to look back at Buffy and talk about the way it worked, the way its team of extremely clever writers knew and used every trick in the television book, and some outside of it, but never lost sight of the fact that the tricks mean nothing if we don’t learn something new about the characters.
I want to look at the way the writers knew exactly how to tug at our heartstrings and put on the screen some of the best, and let’s face it, some of the soppiest melodrama we’ve seen in years – more of that later. One of my aims for tonight it to get tears out of someone – and that someone may be me.
So I’m going to look at season 4. A season that Katy has called the “bastard child” season. But I prefer to think of it as the season where we really discovered what Buffy was all about. It was the season Buffy, among other things, began college, had wonderful sex, not with a dreamboat lovely boy, but the slimy, predatory Parker. There were other changes as well: a relationship we’d counted on, Oz and Willow, underwent an irrevocable shift. And we met the Initiative, the covert government operation which created Adam, the season’s big bad, and also gave us Riley, the wholesome Iowa farm boy who, it can be argued, showed Buffy what love is.
Okay, the summaries have been taken care of, and you all know where we are. We’re in a time when Angel and Cordelia had gone to another city, another tv show, and eventually another network; Buffy and Willow were now at college and the threat of the group breaking up was a very real one; and Sunnydale High was destroyed, leaving Giles, in many ways our lynchpin, unemployed
Buffy is about constantly pushing itself; about seeing what it can do both with its characters and with its form. Take, as a comparison, Law & Order, which is story-driven and with static characters and with little if any generic or formulaic variation. But the conceptual world of Buffy – an inherently magical one - allowed for such variation.
This had been done before of course; Chicago Hope comes to mind as a tv show that experimented with a musical episode, and a Hitchcock episode – but they were deliberate conventional breaks for an effect. In Buffy, you didn’t need to have a very special episode; magic of a spell, or a curse opened up a whole new world of narrative and generic possibilities.
And I think Season 4 sums this constant change up.
In season 4 what we took for granted was constantly challenged – Whedon and his team were determined not to allow the show or its characters to stagnate. This could be for faintly comic effect: Xander takes the lead and fights solo against Harmony in an alll-slappin’, all-hair-pulling bitch-fight.
Or Giles, with no job, has to explore other pursuits: his Girlfriend (or, as Anya calls her, his ‘orgasm friend’) – Olivia; he is changed into a demon – and we have to re-evaluate, through the characters, how we see him; he is ‘out-adulted’, a rare occurrence in the first 3 seasons, by Professor Walsh – the Head of the Initiative – who suggests that perhaps Buffy suffers because of the absence of a male role-model (to which Giles later replies, after a few pints, ‘absent, my arse’); and Giles’ secret “acoustic rock-god” career is revealed, and we see it not once, not twice, but three times. And I think the reaction of the Scoobies mirrors ours.
Similarly, Spike’s very reason of living – or not living – (to kill) is taken from him when the Initiative puts a behaviour modification chip in his head. The initial realisation played for laughs – as an impotence scene – Spike can’t get it up with Willow, who does her best to reassure him: ‘maybe you were nervous’, ‘maybe you were trying too hard’, ‘I’m sure it happens to all vampires’, to which Spike replies ‘not to me!’ I wanted to show that clip but was determined to get away from Spike – the other two will give you your fix, Spike-heads that they are.
But these changes, to Giles and Spike, are imbued with far more than a throwaway laugh line; though they have humour in them, the variation and play always reveals something important about the characters. Both Giles and Spike are struggling with the fact that their lives have changed and they are not sure who they are anymore – a common dilemma if ever there was one
The idea of change perpetuates season 4 – and dealing with this change is a dilemma that all the Scoobies must face. Xander is struggling with his direction, now that the girls are at college – he tries a number of fruitless jobs: as the barman at the pub at UC Sunnydale; working in an ice-cream truck; and flogging Boost bars. But as we see in his dream in the final episode, ‘Restless’, all these paths end up back in his basement
And probably the two main things we took for granted change - Willow and Oz - Buffy and Angel. We have to rethink these cores of the show because they don’t exist anymore
Willow, when Oz leaves and Tara comes along, changes –she comes to terms a little more with her powers as a witch, and realises that her sexuality is more fluid than perhaps she, and we, had thought.
And finally, Riley. A lot of people here probably wanted to carry out Willow’s threat to Riley early on: ‘if you hurt her I will beat you to death with a shovel. A vague disclaimer’s nobody’s friend’. And I knew I’d get abuse for saying how much I liked him, but he is a very important character precisely because he made us question so much about the show. Most importantly, is Angel really the one for Buffy? Riley makes us question something we had taken as given for three seasons.
Maybe what Buffy needs is not ‘Mr billowy-coat king of pain’, as Riley calls Angel in ‘The Yoko Factor’, but a good, kind, loving, supportive – he is all of these things – corn-fed Iowa boy with a nerdy haircut who takes her on picnics. Who says things like ‘I’ve never courted a girl like Buffy before’ and when Angel asks if he thinks he can stop him replies ‘I surely do’.
And the character himself questions the narrative we trust: ‘do these spells really work?’, ‘who’s Faith?’, and he is outraged that Buffy would protect Spike – Hostile 17 – he doesn’t understand the history that the characters, and us viewers, have shared – he sees the world in black and white, not in the shades of grey that we are attuned to after 3 seasons. Unlike the other characters, Riley is not witty, he can’t banter, he often doesn’t get jokes – but he is kind and genuine.
Whatever you think about the character, and regardless of what he goes on to in season 5, there’s no question that he loves Buffy and Buffy loves him – I believe him when he says ‘I love you so much I can’t think straight’. And love Riley or hate him, he made us think about those questions, he made us reconsider what the show means – and I think that’s pretty important
I want to show a clip from ‘Who Are You?’ – when Buffy and Faith have switched bodies, and Buffy, looking like Faith, comes to Giles to convince him that she is Buffy. So just as Buffy has to convince Giles, Eliza Dushku has to convince us that she can play Buffy as well. It sums up the way season 4 constantly made us rethink the characters – how we see them, how they see each other. I reckon Buffy does a pretty good job of convincing here. I think, unfortunately, Eliza Dushku does a far better job playing Buffy than SMG does playing Faith. Remember her turn as “naughty Buffy” in ‘Who Are You’.
As well as constantly revising the way we view its characters and its world, Buffy is also about generic and formulaic variation – playing with the very idea of a television show – and I think again, season 4 shows us this.
Season 4 contains several episodes that challenge the very rules of a television series. There is’ Hush’, an episode largely without dialogue (Xander, when he realises he can’t speak, goes straight for the phone of course).
And ‘Superstar’, where the logic of the Buffyverse was turned upside-down; all of a sudden it was Jonathan who was the hero, not Buffy. Jonathan saved the day, he made the plans, he even came up with the puns – Buffy unusually stuck for a witticism, calling Spike a ‘big, bleached, stupid guy’. We even, if we’re paying enough attention to pick up a sly reference to season 3, realise that it was Jonathan, not Buffy, who was presented with the class protector award, an award that we all remember Buffy getting (remember the little umbrella). Superstar deliberately messes with not just one episode, but our entire knowledge up to that point.
And ‘Restless’, a four-part dream sequence which not only referenced, among other things, Apocalypse Now and – well it’s supposed to be Death of a Salesman – but who knows what this is getting at? Please note the passed out guy on the floor next to Harmony – what is he doing there? But the episode departed from standard television narrative techniques by all but ignoring the imperative of narrative itself
In ‘This Year’s Girl’ and ‘Who Are You?’ characters’ bodies were swapped. And who can forget the magical moment in ‘Something Blue’, where, for an all-too-short time, Buffy and Spike were engaged to be married. Buffy, for those who may have forgotten, wanted ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ for the first dance at their wedding.
Often, as in ‘Hush’, for example, these generic or structural variations, these ‘spells’, as they usually are, reveal more about the characters than would be otherwise possible. Anya finally finds out how much Xander cares for her. And we get Riley and Buffy’s first kiss. This is testament to Joss Whedon’s idea that, when we stop talking, we start communicating.
Whedon and his team, in season 4, by continuing the play and variation of character and form, challenged us constantly to rethink how we saw the characters and the show; even television itself.
That’s quite an achievement, to create that sort of freedom to change and challenge that Whedon and his team do. What makes it, I think, even more remarkable, is that they did it without sacrificing any of the potency of the show’s melodrama. Buffy does all the old tricks of series television, and even soap opera, just as well.
And I reluctantly bring up Dawson’s Creek here, a show that I have a love/hate relationship with. It is also very aware of itself, and its trademark has become I suppose, its wordy, all-knowing dialogue. This is fun, but Dawson’s is often so incredibly dramatic that some of its genuine drama – and it is there – can be a little bit, well, underwhelming.
Buffy avoids this by saving its genuine dramatic moments for when they are really necessary. There will be no throwaway drama in Buffy – Whedon has declared that ‘there will never be a “very special” Buffy’ – an episode created solely to provoke an emotional response. If there are to be tears over Buffy, they will not be borne of cheap tricks, nor a mastery of style over substance, they will be real – and as we know, they will hurt.
The clip I am going to show you is perhaps the most heartbreaking moment of season 4, or of all Buffy, when Oz leaves Willow. It’s telling that often in Buffy the most dramatic and emotional moments come without a magical impetus. This scene is just a good old-fashioned heartbreak
I will leave it there, hopefully with a few tears, and hopefully having demonstrated, as we look back on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, what I think made the show great. The way it played with character and form, and that that variation gave us so much. That it could also bring us to tears just as easily as it made us laugh. And that we loved every minute of it.