Chapter Two: Buffy, Baby and Brett
By Brett Beach
November 11, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
I realized that I might get quite far into this week's sure to be rambling, twisting narrative before I even broached the topic at hand and that would ultimately be to the detriment of my noble intentions. To buy myself some time and alleviate any anxiety on the reader's part, let me start off focused and centered. As stated in a previous column, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my favorite television show of all time. If for no other reason than this, I would look for a reason to squeeze it in here somehow. By luck, coincidence, or perhaps the perfect workings of the universe, Buffy the Vampire Slayer whole-heartedly qualifies as a Chapter Two. It is a direct sequel to the 1992 movie, picking up not much farther along in time from where its forebear left off. Titular heroine Buffy Summers heads to a new town hoping to ditch her recently inherited mantle of vanquishing things that go chomp in the night. What she finds is that she has leapt out of the frying pan and into the Hellmouth (as it were) and that there is no escaping her destiny.
But though it may be correctly categorized as a sequel, it is not my intention to walk through season-by-season or key episode by key episode and regurgitate its greatness. You, the reader, most likely have set opinions on the Buffyverse by this point. If you love it, there's no need for this to turn into self-congratulatory noodling. If you feel that it is simply a ridiculous show with a ridiculous title, have thought so for ten years and aren't in the slightest bit interested in having that opinion swayed, believe me, I sympathize. Based on my reactions to the film - which ranged from deeply disappointed to mildly annoyed - I avoided the show and the new television network it was on (The WB) like the plague. It wasn't until I happened to catch part of an episode that John Ritter guest starred on that I began to soften this stance. It still took another year before I started watching weekly.
Anyway, I promised that I wasn't going to simply tote out high praise and palaver. What I intend to hone in on and discuss is more focused and detailed than a single season or even a single episode. The episode in question, "The Body," is, however, one of the great 45 minutes of serialized entertainment in the history of the televisual medium and a great starting point for those of you already self-identifying as "Buffy never gonna watch-ers" (bad pun intentional). No, there is an image, or more rather, an edit in this episode that, coupled with another image from the last shot of the same episode, may be one of the most replayed loops in my occasionally ADD head. Joss Whedon came up with something basic yet profound to say about death and memory and loss and grieving and a single shot has given me more to reflect on and feel attuned to than most anything else I have seen this decade, in any format. But first . . .
There was at least one ulterior motive in choosing Buffy this week and that was that it didn't entail me watching or re-watching a full-length movie. Time has been of pressing concern to me lately, more than normal. In about 70 days (give or take, as the human body is a wonderfully complex mechanism with its own clockwork structure), I am going to be a father for the first time. And really, I had a lot planned for this, my Christ Year (i.e. year 33 of my life), that I was going to accomplish for the first time. Kind of a bucket list but less maudlin and without any impending sense of doom and/or sense of Hollywood-ized life lessons as taught by stars with $10 million paychecks received for their efforts.
I started the year doing karaoke with a live band (song: "Talk of the Town" by The Pretenders). I saw an opera for the first time (and a few months ago, saw my second, the timeless "La Boheme"), went to the Portland Art Museum for the first time, attended a modern dance performance and even threw on a splendid frock for the annual Red Dress Bash. I did my best to avoid any revealing up skirt shots that might find their way onto OMG! I also flew to NYC simply to see my favorite local band, Point Juncture WA, as they embarked on their first national tour of any great length, opening for the always awesome The Thermals. The Bowery Ballroom in lower Manhattan was a happening, rockin' place to be, that second weekend in May. And as it happened, when I returned that Sunday, Mother's Day as it were, is when my girlfriend found out, and I found out, that we were going to be parents. So needless to say, it wasn't specifically on my to do list, but I was excited and delighted beyond words. I still have not gotten a passport, though. Some things for me remain just to be put off a while longer.
And so I have been in a more contemplative mood and mode for much of the second half of 2009, which might be why this image that I remain elusive about describing (and will for just a little while longer) has been at the forefront of my mind. I have alluded in past columns to the fact that fantasy and sci-fi are not genres that I love unconditionally. Buffy is an exception to that rule, but not for the reasons that you might think. When I reflect on my favorite movies, books, or songs, there is an undeniable theme and consistency to a great number of them. In the movie realm I would name: Once Upon a Time in America, Barry Lyndon and Mulholland Drive. The Hotel New Hampshire, The Great Gatsby, and The Bluest Eye provide ample evidence on the literary front. For tunage, I would cite "Us" by Regina Spektor, "I Was a Lover" by TV on the Radio, and "All Her Favorite Fruit" by college rock godfathers Camper Van Beethoven.
And what do these all have in common? Aside from being what I would humbly claim are all works of art? They are all fairy tales; fairy tales for adults to be precise. And all of them have, as a primary or secondary theme, some feeling for the passing of time, the distortion of our memories by time and a consideration for how we will be remembered or want to be remembered once our era is gone, this epoch has passed or the love story we thought would last forever comes to an end. They all qualify as fairy tales because there is some element of magical realism mixed in with the very emotionally sincere melancholy and regret. In the movies mentioned alone there is De Niro's opium dream/flash forward, Kubrick's fanatical attention to detail while presenting a world gone by as if on a canvas, Watts' would-be starlet masturbating on a bungalow couch and feverishly working to recreate a shattered Hollywood dreamscape. And yes, these are all just my interpretations of films so complex they deserve to be seen and discussed and argued over.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer could certainly be argued as a fairy tale, easily, but in my eyes, it has always been a little too realistic for that. Allow me to clarify. Whedon's show brilliantly works on multiple levels of metaphor, camp, irony, "guilty pleasure", teen drama, and action spectacle. At its heart, as it speaks to me, it's about how high school is hell (no big surprise) but then "real life" turns out to be nothing more than high school writ large. How do I find what it is I really want to do if it feels like my future has already been set in stone? How do I go about forming adult relationships when I still feel like a kid inside? How do I balance romance, a career, and friends, with the unspeakable horrors that go on around me on a daily basis? Buffy could be ridiculous and painful from one shot to the next or all at once, as painful as some of my other favorite, more "realistic" shows like Once and Again, My So-Called Life or Freaks and Geeks. And as someone who retrospectively prefers his time in high school to his time in college, I prefer Whedon's take on the difficult transition into adulthood, without rendering his characters as slackers or any less motivated because of their doubts.
I remember coming home from my evening class at NYU and watching that night's episodes of Buffy and Angel on the evening "The Body" first aired. I don't recall that I actually allowed myself the luxury of sitting on the couch. I believe I sat right in front of the television, the glow of the Triborough Bridge lights tearing into the darkness outside my living room window. The format of the plot is elegantly restrained: using only a single camera, no music cues or score, and a feeling of "real time", Whedon examines the aftermath of Buffy's discovery that her mom has died. Not from a creature of the night, but from a brain aneurysm, months after she had had a medical scare and been in the hospital. The exception to this plot progression is the sequence that takes place directly after what was the return from the first commercial break.
Having been left hanging on the image of a frightened Buffy squeaking out "Mommy?," we are returned not to the scene at hand, but a Thanksgiving dinner at the Summers household, in what must be the most recent Turkey Day, as Tara, Dawn and Anya are all gathered around the table alongside Buffy, Xander, Willow, Giles and Joyce. The scene is most notable for its utter ordinariness: banter, flirting, references to past episodes. And yet, there's something not quite right, something just off about it, a feeling caused in part by wondering, what's up with this scene? Is it a flashback, the final thought that flashed through Joyce's head, a device on Whedon's part to allow Kristine Sutherland to be alive for just a few more minutes?
In Whedon's commentary for the episode, which I just listened to very nervously for the first time five minutes ago, he allows that it is partly the latter but mostly that he needed a three-minute scene to play under the credits, as he did not want the credits to take away from anything involving Joyce's death. What has struck me, haunted me and burrowed its way into my brain is the jagged, beautiful edit from the past to the present. As Buffy prepares to cut a pumpkin pie in the kitchen, the glass plate slips and on the sound of the (off-camera) shattering, Whedon cuts to a close-up of the death mask of Joyce: eyes open, vacant, lifeless.
What this jump from then to now so eloquently declares to me is this: Once someone we love is no longer living, then every memory we have of them - happy, sad, defining, trivial - eventually has to confront the vanishing point of the reality of their absence. Like the shattering of the plate, the knowledge of the loss of a loved one cuts into our memories and leaves them ruptured, a fact that we must ultimately learn to live with. I should stress that I don't find this a particularly morbid thought. Whedon's show has always examined death from all angles and without sentimentality or maudlin mawkishness. In the very last shot of "The Body" we see Dawn's hand tentatively reaching out towards her mother's body as it lies on the table at the morgue. I find it very telling that the shot ends before we see her fingers making contact. Death may be all around the Scooby Gang every day, as it is around all of us, but the loss of a loved one can always cut deeply.
Next time: I finally weigh in on one of the all-time acclaimed Chapter Twos, a sequel that won more Oscars than its predecessor did.