I missed Buffy the first time around; I've never even seen an episode on television. I rarely watch tv to begin with, so I just never caught it, despite having a lot of friends who loved the show. I resisted. But, I bought the first season on sale last fall and was hooked. Since then, I've been methodically catching up. One of the consequences of the show being out there in the world, even though I wasn't watching, I knew by osmosis many of the major turning points/episodes in a general way: I knew what "Hush" was all about; I knew "Once More With Feeling" is a musical and I look forward to it; I knew about Buffy's deaths. That said, I sure as hell had no idea what "The Body" was about.
I'd heard of it, of course, that it was one of the great, classic episodes. But somehow I never heard what happened in it.
I'm not saying here, so I don't spoil it for anyone else.
The episode is too self-consciously structured to give each of the gang a showy moment of high acting; you can practically feel the stark rhythms of the episode changed up, see Willow, Xander, Anya, et al, step forward into a script spotlight and begin to emote. It feels both appropriate and contrived at once and that bothered me. That said, it's just a pulverizing episode in which I spent most of the time choked up. I had no idea.
About Me
- Paul
- Paul Guest is the author of four volumes of poetry and a memoir. His debut, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, was awarded the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. His second collection, Notes for My Body Double, was awarded the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His third collection, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, was published by Ecco Press/HarperCollins in 2008. His fourth collection, Because Everything Is Terrible, was published by Diode Editions. His poems have appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, was published by Ecco in May 2010 and selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2007 Whiting Writers' Award, Guest lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
6 comments:
If you you back and watch the camera set-ups and pay close attention to the way he's working with sound, you can see how the entire episode is a physical de-centering of the normal Buffy film grammar.
I remember I'd read articles about how great Buffy was (somebody at Salon thought it was the cat's pjs). But whenever we'd tune it it just seemed ... not quite. The wisecracks were cute but they seemed to fall flat.
After all the Buffy Dies hoopla and the switching networks we decided to give it a few episodes. And got hooked. What really did it for me was the rough sex between Buffy and Spike -- are they really doing that?! And the writing really is good.
Sometime I'll get the first season and we can DVD it from the beginning.
BTW, congrats on the teaching gig.
cheers,
GI
I second the rough sex. Hear, hear.
*getting the vapors*
;)
I had the same experience with watching Buffy. Had never seen an episode before deciding to watch it through Netflix, starting with the first season. By the end of season five, I stopped waiting for the mail and bought six and seven. Great stuff ahead of you.
Gina
Stop making me laugh, Paul. Damn it. I'm trying to be sad.
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