Buffy Sing-Along Fun and Some Midnight Movie Meta
Last night I had the good fortune to attend the Buffy Sing-Along at IFC with a bunch of New York fans -- executrix, alizarin_nyc, raqs, and amybnnyc -- plus traveling fan diva femmenerd. We got second-row seats, which scored us all panties to wave during Marti Noxon's parking ticket scene. I also became seriously entangled in red crepe paper streamers in the "Walk Through the Fire" sequence.
At first I was actually a little put off by the apparent lack of spontaneity about the whole thing. While I appreciate that the organizers have put in tons of hard work to make it happen, I felt that there was a slightly forced quality to it. The IFC is the former Waverly Cinema in Greenwich Village, where the midnight shows of Rocky Horror first got going in the 1970s. When I went to my first Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1977, the induction was basically "watch and learn," perhaps prompted by a more experienced friend who may have known the words and brought a few props. Nowadays, when media properties need to make a big splash on their first weekend of distribution and there's little chance for anything to grow up from the underground, it's logical that the producers had to flog it a bit from the start. Maybe in time it will grow in a more organic way as fans become regulars and learn the routines, adding in their own dialogue and getting into role.
One aspect of the Rocky Horror phenomenon that can never be recreated, though, is the group learning experience. In the 1970s, the only way to see the film was in the theater, so you learned the film through immersion in the group viewings. Since Buffy was originally a TV property, and is now available on DVD, many people come to the theater with various levels of familiarity with the source already under their belts. I lamely sang along with some of the numbers, using the closed captioning as a guide, but there were people around me who had clearly memorized the score just from repeated viewings and belted it out with gusto. They've already created their own experience of the source material, so there is less opportunity for that knowledge to be shaped by the community viewing.
And the camp level is extremely different. While the Buffy musical, Once More, With Feeling, is fairly campy, the overall tone of the show is not. Again, some of this is a generational difference. Buffy is high on irony, but that isn't really the same thing. One clear consequence of this difference is costuming. The re-enactors on stage mimicked some of the costumes in the film, but aside from Spike's distinctive bottle-blond hair and long black duster, there isn't much about the show's costuming that the audience can dress up in. Buffy looks like a pony-tailed college girl in jeans, tank top, leather jacket, and a really big cross. Not a lot to work with there. Where it really showed, though, was in the "Buffy-oke" sessions prior to the main film showing. Random audience members were chosen to act along with clips from the show, obviously inviting parody. But the chosen clip was a scene between Buffy and Angel from "Amends," a seasonally appropriate Christmas ep. The original is pretty angsty, but I remember being seriously moved by it on first viewing, and was still touched when they replayed it before the re-enactment. But if you play anything earnest more than a few times, of course it gets silly, and this is no different. It was fun to spoof the over-acting and the characters' intensities, but it doesn't come as naturally when the source material is fundamentally really good, compared to Rocky Horror's deliberate winking humor.
Once the program really got rolling, though, I was totally immersed in the experience. I'd forgotten how many critical plot points actually occurred during this episode in the midst of all the fun and music. Spike's "Rest in Peace" number manages to be sexy and hilarious at the same time, and Giles' power ballad allowed him to voice some serious emotions. The hottest number, hands-down, remains Tara's love song to Willow, "Under Your Spell." It reminded me again of how much hotter sex scenes can be when they are implied rather than explicit. Tara and Willow's romance had the veiled urgency of Hitchcock films' eroticism, and for the same reasons. "Under Your Spell" is girly, romantic, and very sexy all at once. The eventual revelation of the spell is made that much more horrifying. Ultimately, Buffy's climactic revelation in "Something to Sing About" brought the whole season into a sharp focus when she revealed that she had been in Heaven, not Hell, before they resurrected her. Lots of territory to cover in a single episode, with or without songs.
The whole experience has renewed a lot of my interest in BtVS. I think I may go dig up some fic soon, but not until after Christmas.
Lastly, mad props to executrix, who seems to have broken her restaurant curse with the discovery of Flor's Kitchen. I had never eaten Venezuelan food before, and I enjoyed the variations on familiar Caribbean themes. The arepas, in particular, were much lighter and breadier than the Salvadoran style I am used to, and there was a delightful creamy avocado sauce with an interesting tang. Multiple styles of bananas, fishy rice casseroles, and sangria with lots of fruity bits made it a great dinner at a reasonable price. Yum!
At first I was actually a little put off by the apparent lack of spontaneity about the whole thing. While I appreciate that the organizers have put in tons of hard work to make it happen, I felt that there was a slightly forced quality to it. The IFC is the former Waverly Cinema in Greenwich Village, where the midnight shows of Rocky Horror first got going in the 1970s. When I went to my first Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1977, the induction was basically "watch and learn," perhaps prompted by a more experienced friend who may have known the words and brought a few props. Nowadays, when media properties need to make a big splash on their first weekend of distribution and there's little chance for anything to grow up from the underground, it's logical that the producers had to flog it a bit from the start. Maybe in time it will grow in a more organic way as fans become regulars and learn the routines, adding in their own dialogue and getting into role.
One aspect of the Rocky Horror phenomenon that can never be recreated, though, is the group learning experience. In the 1970s, the only way to see the film was in the theater, so you learned the film through immersion in the group viewings. Since Buffy was originally a TV property, and is now available on DVD, many people come to the theater with various levels of familiarity with the source already under their belts. I lamely sang along with some of the numbers, using the closed captioning as a guide, but there were people around me who had clearly memorized the score just from repeated viewings and belted it out with gusto. They've already created their own experience of the source material, so there is less opportunity for that knowledge to be shaped by the community viewing.
And the camp level is extremely different. While the Buffy musical, Once More, With Feeling, is fairly campy, the overall tone of the show is not. Again, some of this is a generational difference. Buffy is high on irony, but that isn't really the same thing. One clear consequence of this difference is costuming. The re-enactors on stage mimicked some of the costumes in the film, but aside from Spike's distinctive bottle-blond hair and long black duster, there isn't much about the show's costuming that the audience can dress up in. Buffy looks like a pony-tailed college girl in jeans, tank top, leather jacket, and a really big cross. Not a lot to work with there. Where it really showed, though, was in the "Buffy-oke" sessions prior to the main film showing. Random audience members were chosen to act along with clips from the show, obviously inviting parody. But the chosen clip was a scene between Buffy and Angel from "Amends," a seasonally appropriate Christmas ep. The original is pretty angsty, but I remember being seriously moved by it on first viewing, and was still touched when they replayed it before the re-enactment. But if you play anything earnest more than a few times, of course it gets silly, and this is no different. It was fun to spoof the over-acting and the characters' intensities, but it doesn't come as naturally when the source material is fundamentally really good, compared to Rocky Horror's deliberate winking humor.
Once the program really got rolling, though, I was totally immersed in the experience. I'd forgotten how many critical plot points actually occurred during this episode in the midst of all the fun and music. Spike's "Rest in Peace" number manages to be sexy and hilarious at the same time, and Giles' power ballad allowed him to voice some serious emotions. The hottest number, hands-down, remains Tara's love song to Willow, "Under Your Spell." It reminded me again of how much hotter sex scenes can be when they are implied rather than explicit. Tara and Willow's romance had the veiled urgency of Hitchcock films' eroticism, and for the same reasons. "Under Your Spell" is girly, romantic, and very sexy all at once. The eventual revelation of the spell is made that much more horrifying. Ultimately, Buffy's climactic revelation in "Something to Sing About" brought the whole season into a sharp focus when she revealed that she had been in Heaven, not Hell, before they resurrected her. Lots of territory to cover in a single episode, with or without songs.
The whole experience has renewed a lot of my interest in BtVS. I think I may go dig up some fic soon, but not until after Christmas.
Lastly, mad props to executrix, who seems to have broken her restaurant curse with the discovery of Flor's Kitchen. I had never eaten Venezuelan food before, and I enjoyed the variations on familiar Caribbean themes. The arepas, in particular, were much lighter and breadier than the Salvadoran style I am used to, and there was a delightful creamy avocado sauce with an interesting tang. Multiple styles of bananas, fishy rice casseroles, and sangria with lots of fruity bits made it a great dinner at a reasonable price. Yum!