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

[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