AtS-vid: Cordelia - My Skin (remastered)
Artist/Song Title: Natalie Merchant - My Skin
Subject: AtS, Cordelia PoV, Cordelia/Angel
Original Date: 2003-04-23
Remastered: 2008-05-22
Summary: ‘Well, contempt loves the silence - It thrives in the dark with fine winding tendrils that strangle the heart. They say that promises sweeten the blow. But I don't need them.’ Cordelia has been through a lot - The vision pain made her slowly untouchable and Angel realizing the truths and changes much too late to save her.
Format: 720x400 - 56 MB AVI or watch on BAM
Yay for resolutions and new hard drives. The original vid is five years old and it shows in all the wrong places. There were a lot of unnecessary talking heads, good shots I avoided because they were in every single C/A-vid at that time. So the remaster was more elaborate compared to ‘Watch the Sky’ which was basically plain clip replacing with DVD source.
Reasons to vid ‘My Skin’ back then? Well, to be honest I was bitter. And pretty disappointed by season 4 and how the big arcs played out. The source of my frustration wasn’t even that Cordelia’s body got hijacked and all hell broke loose. It was the way they handled Cordelia/Angel since season 3 toying with the possibility and not committing to anything, which for me sucked the fun right out of it. They were so entertaining before and had an unlikely friendship and trust in each other established and then all of the sudden the complex layers got ripped off, when Angel realized that he could be in love with her. Duh! Or should I go dun-dun-dun?
I mean Cordelia’s heart was always as big as her smile and in the right place - It made Angel look dumb and Cordelia look dumber for creating not intentionally an Angel clone with Groo. Would have telling Angel straight to the face that he has a curse and she has a life and just one of these two things has an expiring date hurt the sainthood they were aiming for at the end of season 3? Doubtless, but I didn’t like the road they were travelling at that point anyway and it would have been more fun than the clumsy denial dance.
I was frustrated by the writers and their poor handling of that relationship. They didn’t seem to grasp why people were shipping these two since the beginning. Or notice that these two had an easy and charming chemistry when romantic love wasn’t forced on them. That they worked in their established patters and that the conventional way of romance wasn’t something a fan of the series was interested. Or maybe that was just me, but c’mon Lilah/Wesley, Darla/Angel or Faith/Wesley compared to the sugar-coated Fred/Gunn, Fred/Wesley of Cordelia/Groo? I didn’t want to see fairy tales - I wanted some inner conflict and not outside forces tearing up the tru luv or keeping them apart by all means. For me this seemed always a lazy way to tell a story. I still think so and the darkness they applied to them in season 4 was once again an outside force and so it was dissatisfying for me. Because I loved their dark undertones beneath the family dynamic of AI and that Cordelia could always be a bitch and Angel could sometimes be an asshole and they still made it work at the end of the night. But -
This is still my favourite Buffyverse ship and canon has plenty of remarkable couples. But this is the one that inspires most of my fics and I tried to capture with ‘My Skin’ what I love about them and why these two fascinated me from the pilot without knowing anything about BtVS or even their history. They just work for me in their endless possibilities and changes. Partly because I prefer friends to lovers and their dynamic is appealing. Cordelia/Angel are the only pairing I can write at any point on the timeline and they still make perfect sense for me.
So indeed very flawed, funny, flirty, fierce and furious and therefore inspiring.
So back to the video - My announcement back then was that this was my goodbye to my favourite ship and this time around I had ‘You’re welcome’ to include which in itself was a beautiful exit and reminder what Cordelia added to the whole team. I think all seasons are equally represented in this vid and like I said, I can find something interesting about these two at any time. Probably one reason why I didn’t cut off the song at the four minute mark and let it have its run with almost five and half minutes. This is as xandra_ptv mildly put it ‘a very long vid’ for someone who hates this pairing with passion and she is right. But she will be the only one who had no choice and was blackmailed in watching the vid.
Lyrical interpretation: I don’t even know how I found ‘My Skin’ - It was before the song was used in Alias and I really have no clue how I stumbled upon this gem. I just know that my mind immediately declared it as fucking perfect song for the emotions I wanted to express about these two. You can’t beat, ‘Angel, sweet love of my life’, if you are doing a shipper vid.
So this is my take on Cordelia/Angel and the lyrics are beautiful and so painfully right, I don’t think they need explaining. So we can skip to the next step on my posting formula:
The Journey? I got a new hard drive back in April and started ripping AtS/BtVS the same evening. I wanted to do several remasters of my old vids for some time now and ‘My Skin’ was on top of that particular list for the reasons mentioned above. It was the one most dearly to me and in so profound need of redoing, so once everything was set for vidding I started straight away and pretty much did the first four minutes of timeline in one week, before I went back to finish ‘Clear the Area’ and getting awfully distracted by Stephen King’s ‘Dark Tower’ and real life once again. So last week I grabbed the final audio quotes I wanted to use and redid some of the final minute and I think now everything holds tightly together in the way I imagined it back then and couldn’t pull off at that time.
Technical notes worth mentioning? I chose simple editing to tell this story and pretty much let my cutting freak run free in the last minute to avoid the audience dozing off. I think that the audio overlays focus the fast-floating images even when some people disapprove of (extensive) audio overlay. The quotes hold the end together here like in the original vid. Again the colouring was done with Avisynth and in my opinion it adds to the overall mood.
Final note: I won’t give into the temptation of remastering every single AtS-vid - I hope, but there might be more remasters in store. It is fun, it is faster than doing a new one and I had some years to think about slight changes for these vids. Even when I fear that ‘Haunted’ will kick my ass in that department. I’m not even sure I will be able to find every Spike scene I used there. Damn. It’s the same reason I was backing away of remastering ‘Hey Pretty’… for the time being. I dearly hope everybody enjoys this new version and now I will be a good little girl and finally do the replies for ‘Clear the Area’, because I sucked so hard at online communication for the past weeks…