Buffy Season One Episode Five

[koganbot]

Saw this three days ago. What I remember most is that Sarah Michelle Gellar came through as an actress. She was required to be all flustered when the handsome brooding boy asked her out for a date, and she was required to ache convincingly when demon fighting interfered with her love life. In fact, I thought the conflict was written rather clumsily

Comments

[koganbot]

"Realistic settings" isn't what I mean. Vampire comedies are inherently unrealistic. I'll accept what the show presents me if it does present it to me, but so far it hasn't created its own rules and its own world, and most crucially it hasn't created a strong sense of the relationships among the main characters. There's more telling than showing. But then again, it has a special set of difficult tasks. As you said, My So-Called Life is something different. But there are points of comparison. Buffy is new to the school, plus she's in a vampire comedy, whereas Angela was already at the school and was in a series of ongoing relationships. But actually what My So-Called Life did that was very canny was to start the series at a point where Angela is changing the relationships in her life, meanwhile loner Brian is tentatively creating new friendships, and Angela's restless dad doesn't know quite what he wants out of his job or marriage (or does he want out of the marriage?), and an English teacher quits and a couple other teachers try out in that position, etc., so the show gives itself an excuse to, as it were, introduce not just us but the characters to an unfolding world, the second being a natural way to do the first.

Whereas Buffy wants to introduce us to action and vampire slaying real fast. But at the same time it does want to give us warm rich relations among the main characters, Buffy and mom, Buffy and friends, and the school as a setting where social life and personality is on stage. Hard to do both at once, and it doesn't have the freedom of something like Rocky and Bullwinkle, a latter-day version of which could have taken care of the library in two seconds. "We need a place where we won't be interrupted or overheard so that we can plan in secret." "I know! We'll use the school library! It has books in it so no one goes there!" The problem with the Buffy library is it's inconsistent. The plot needs someone to overhear Buffy without her knowing it, so it puts that person in the stacks, like a regular student in the library. Then it needs the library as a planning center for anti-demon activities, so no random students bother to come in. Then the plot needs Buffy to meet a handsome inappropriate guy, so it walks him into the library to look for a book.

Where the show is totally assured so far is with Angel. It's clear on what it knows and what we don't, what it's going to tell us and what it's going to conceal, and how it's going to make us care.

The series is setting us up for something potentially rich: Buffy as a force whom other people care about and whose action gives them something to do where otherwise they'd be at a loss, but Buffy being mostly unaware of the caring or the role she's having in pulling people together (in both senses of "pulling people together"; pulling someone's behavior together, and connecting people to one another). I think the script could have done this faster and more deftly. But I've never been any good at developing stories myself, so I couldn't tell you how. (By copying Howard Hawks movies, perhaps.) And as you guys are saying, Whedon has seven years to teach himself how.

[dubdobdee]

since you've already gone there, the rocky and bullwinkle library dodge does emerge at some point, but it's an afterthought (a joke about the slightly silly plot conventions they're living in)

i think the characters do start off quite schematic -- and i've actually always argued that it's a help that SMG is quite a wooden actress -- bcz a lot of the emotional rub is within and against imposed roles (normal or supernatural), and a very smart way of signalling this is for the characters to be moodily aware of the genre conventions they seem to be unable not to mimic

(not for a while yet, but they start to call themselves the scoobies, after the gang of kids in scoobydoo who every week unmask another disgrunted employer pretending to be a ghost at a haunted funfair: "are we in a play?" is a classic absurdist device for looking at free will versus destiny

(i assume whedon gets it from comics rather than ionesco: the tension between the artist-author and character in comics and cartoons has -- for some format-related reason -- long been more overtly meta-conflicted than in other art-forms)

[koganbot]

The library