Notes on Buffy 3.13: The Zeppo

[2maggie2]

Standard disclaimer: I'll often speak of foreshadowing, but that doesn't mean I'm at all committing to the idea that there was some fixed design from the word go -- it's a short hand for talking about the resonances that end up in the text as it unspools.

Standard spoiler warning: The notes are written for folks who have seen all of BtVS and AtS.

Comments

[ceciliaj]

Hehe by Xander brain I just mean that I am empathizing with him, and in pre-season 6 eps, which is rare for me. I totally empathize with drunken failure Xander, but I never realized how much internal consistency he has across the whole series.

Re: OMWF, I guess I was thinking that we could read that as a Xander POV ep, if we figure that he "wanted everything to work out" like in a musical. Of course, in saying this he shows a complete misunderstanding of the relationship between genre cues and the feeling of fun within a musical and the narrative momentum, which, especially in musicals of the non-Andrew Lloyd Weber variety, tends more toward melancholy and powerless nostalgia for lost possibilities than anything else. So, in The Zeppo, he thinks he's having an awesome time because all these fun, zany things are happening, and we have time to see that he has a good sense of humor about the wacky world he lives in, but a good sense of humor does remarkably little to help you figure out what you actually want from yourself and others, which is why he ends up in all these situations that are counter to his interests.

Xander, like many characters in musicals, is undergoing a bout of heterosexual melancholy, where he is lamenting the fact that he can't conceptualize a different kind of trajectory for him and Anya than the one that involves the big, family-approved wedding leading to marriage and kids. But that's OMWF. In The Zeppo, he's lamenting that he can't reconcile his sexual/status desires as he's interpreting them and the social role he'd actually be able to fill and also grow in. Ew, this is starting to sound like more penis metaphors.

/ramble