once more, with ambivalence

I am not ashamed to admit it: I am a great big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I previously have acknowledged my identification with the titular Buffy. I have confessed how I have in the past medicated myself with liberal doses of pop culture in those bleak spates of my darkest soul, and Buffy has always topped the list of my pop-pharmacy. Plus the show is just so clever. I am a total sucker for cleverness.

I never saw Buffy when it was actually on air. Everything I’ve come to love in the Buffyverse I’ve come to love from discovering the show on DVD when I was home sick with the flu about six years ago and at the insistent behest of my friend Bee, who refused to rest until I accepted several seasons of DVDs that she pressed to my palms. I now own the first five seasons, which in those bleak times I’ve watched on endless repeat until I got bored with them or the depression lifted, whichever came first.

Buffy was remarkable for a couple of episodes that flew in the face of television convention. One of these unusual episodes was Buffy’s fourth season  “Hush,” which flouted television convention for being completely silent for 27 to 29 minutes, depending on what source you look at. Another is the sixth season’s “Once More, With Feeling,” the musical episode of Buffy. Buffy, Spike, Xander, Giles and the rest, all singing and all dancing.

Only the latter episode, “Once More, With Feeling,” has the kitsch potential for public performance, and a couple of years ago, a Rocky Horroresque midnight show of it has popped up around the country, usually in college towns. The show, complete with a cast acting out the musical and the lyrics on the screen for karaoke-style singing and a little bag of props to be used at plot-appropriate times, draws long lines of Buffanatics, some of whom dress as series characters.

Last night I went to a show here in Gotham with my friend Bee, another friend of mine visiting from Miami and a couple of Bee’s friends, one of whom dressed in Buffy's white prom dress from season one and the other dressed as a generic Faith and both of whom had whittled stakes just for the show. I didn’t dress as anyone. No one wants to see a forty-four year-old woman dress up as a teenager, except maybe her boyfriend.

The line for the show was singularly festive. We all waited fairly patiently in the balmy night, fiddling with our little Buffy goody bags and watching this intense and inscrutable operatic drama unfolding in this clutch of African-American teens of ambiguous sexuality and gender  outside a neighboring coffee joint. And then when the doors to the theatre finally opened, we all scrambled to our seats like pre-teens.

The show opened with a trivia game whose answers largely and comfortingly eluded me. I definitely feel mollified by knowing that I don’t retain as much useless Buffy information as some others. One of our group, the girl dressed as prom Buffy, competed in the trivia challenge and won a chance to be part of the Buffeoke competition, and she did splendidly. I’m pretty sure the guy who won the trivia competition, a tall dude dressed as Xander, was a ringer, but whatever.

After that warm-up, the show began in earnest. The cast acted it out below the screen, and I sang along with Buffy, because hers are the only lyrics I inexplicably remembered and my range and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s are similarly narrow. I watched, tried to remember which props I was supposed to use when, screamed out, “Shut up, Dawn!” when prompted to, and found tears running down my cheeks from the beginning of the show to its end.

Songs in musicals usually act in two ways. Either they act in place of dialogue and advance the plot, or they act like soliloquies in Renaissance dramas and explicitly narrate the character’s emotions. Generally, musicals are happy. Sure, there are exceptions—for example, there is West Side Story, which is a downright deep tragedy, and there is Threepenny Opera, which ends in a parody of a happy ending, and there is Rent, which as it’s based on an opera has to end badly. In general, though, musicals are the province of the unremittingly sunny.

Which is another of the points that differentiates “Once More, With Feeling” from the rest of its genre. If Joss Whedon has a penchant for creating pop art that works against its type—his Buffy empowers the skinny blonde girl who is usually the lowest on the horror food chain; his Firefly treats outer-space like the West in a carpet-bagging post-civil war reconstruction—he certainly took that sensibility and ran with it. This musical nearly writhes in emo agony.

I find season six of Buffy an incredibly painful watch. Buffy has been wrenched back into being after sacrificing herself for the greater good; she isn’t sure who she is or what she’s doing now that she’s spent time dead and at peace. No one else seems really sure where they are either—Giles is readying his return to England; Anya and Xander are prepping for a marriage neither one is certain of; Willow and Tara seem to be torn apart by the magic that brought them together; Spike finds himself impotent and hopelessly in love with Buffy; and Dawn is entering full-blown adolescence. In this season, the Big Bad is, famously, life itself, and life is kicking  Buffy’s ass.

In “Once More, With Feeling,” nearly every one of the characters  sings of his or her own private desolation. Giles sings of his inability to be a proper father to Buffy; Tara sings first of her love for Willow and then of realization she’s been betrayed by her; Anya and Xander sing of their incompatibilities; Spike sings of his preference for death over Buffy’s iciness; and Buffy sings that she wishes she were back in he-aaa-ven, her voice cracking as she does so. (Oddly, Willow doesn't confess anything in this episode, but then she really doesn't sing.) Make no mistake: this is a musical about love, sure, but mostly it's about loss. Loss in all its keening, unutterable, and palpable manifestations.

And the thing is, sitting in the big auditorium, surrounded by a hundred like-minded people who have escaped and escaped again and again not from—but to—Sunnydale, sitting among this group who share with me the inexplicable and mildly embarrassing passion for this television show, I cried and I clandestinely wiped tear after tear off my face. My make-up was a mess. I wanted to be there, and sing along, and be part of this thing that was bigger than me and comforting as a group hug, but I’m not sure it worked.

I’m not sure that, kitschy as it already inherently is, it makes sense to make this episoce super-kitschy, publicly kitschy, kitschy with kazoos and the wave and thrown underwear because this episode that aches with rawness. I’m not sure it works, but I’m not sure it doesn’t either. “What can’t we face if we’re all together?” Buffy sings, and asks the question central to the show as a whole. Nothing Buffy does, does she do exactly by herself, even if she doesn’t do it all exactly with others either.

And this is the aspect that has always comforted me about the show: the idea that I am both alone with my sea of troubles and that at the same time I am not. And I guess that at the end of the show, after Buffy admits that she can’t feel  and Spike offers that he’s dead too, after the two of them kiss with surprising passion for two people who have just avowed lifelessness, after all that and after I have wiped my eyelids free of transient mascara, I suppose the kitsch matters less than the fact that we were all together, unembarrassed and loving the hell out of this long-dead series that lives on, not unlike Buffy herself, who died a lot.

Comments

[Metron]

Very nice. :) My wife got me that cd for my birthday a few years ago. Not the greatest singers in the world, but they bring their feelings and experiences alive in their performances.

Season 8 of Buffy continues in comic book form by Dark Horse comics, and it's written by Joss Whedon.

[MonMouth]

Was there no option to dress as a vampire for that show? I'm just saying, you'd look damn hot with incisors. In heels.

*mwah*

[James]

Heya, just fyi if you didn't know. Joss has started writing another season of the show as a comic book! Only two issues in so far but things are starting to get interesting. I'll leave a comment when the graphic novel version (all the issues combined) comes out. Give it a chance eh?

On another note. Try "Blankets", great graphic novel about a young mans first love and all the bits that go with it.

[Scarlet]

I'm a fellow Buffy fan, and am more than willing to confess that whilst writing my dissertation for my BSc, that OMWF was my escape, to the point where the DVD truly suffered. I can just hope that next time that I'm in Gotham, the show's in town xxxx

[The Man With Secrets]

I've never read you before (Tom Paine sent me over here), but you had me with that first line. One of my not-so-guilty secrets, is Buffy. I think I have a few days reading to come - I hope you don't mind in I link to you.

Thanks.

SLM

[Alana]

HI CG,

I watch "Angel" reruns on cable every morning at six a.m. while having my first cups of coffee and getting ready for work, before I wake the Kiddo. Angel's tortured maleness is right up my alley. Like a guy who upon acheiving utter happiness becomes ultra evil. Now that's . . . depressing. Couple weeks ago, Spike joined the show, and I got to wishing Angel and he would lip-lock or something, haha. Probably just me.

Love,
A

[meg]

of course i love this episode (and the entire season) for many of the reasons you listed here, but also?

i just love the way he rhymes "old and wrinkly" with "david brinkley".

[chelsea girl]

Yeah, the screen before the show begins has a montage of pictures from the musical. A big picture of Buffy singing, small pictures of Anya, Xander, Giles and...David Brinkley. My friend Bee looked at the screen and asked, "What does David Brinkley have to do with Buffy?"

We were clearly out of our league. And we thought we were so down with Sunnydale.

kissykiss,
chelsea g

[Curvaceous Dee]

Horray for Buffy fans! That's something sorely missing in New Zealand - it would be cool to go to something like that :)

xx Dee

[seany]

CG,

You realize that Buffy is more than some quirky chick in a mini who kicks undead ass, right?

She's a bonafide spiritual guide and the series is really a post-modern medieval morality play.

[Leezell]

What an episode. I still have chills run down my spine every time Tara & Giles do their reprise scene in the magic shop. Definitely the best series I have ever watched.