Since we didn't have any reading assignments this week, I thought I would post in response to the Buffy episode, "The Body." I wanted to focus more on the narrative and structural elements of the episode and how they worked for me rather than responding directly to the content of the episode itself. One of the things that stands out immediately is the use of cuts, how scenes go from one to the next. It works remarkably well as a reflection of the disjointed point of view of someone dealing with loss. There is a certain stop/start to memories, the film in our heads (so to speak), the constant sense that we could have done this or that differently and that might have been the deciding factor between keeping a loved one alive. And beyond that, just the sense of life moving on around us and being caught in this mental lockdown. Everything moves too swiftly, and too slowly, all at once. It's difficult to describe, harder to portray, but "The Body" expressed it perfectly. I thought the episode depicted this feeling most vividly and most honestly when it followed Buffy's first scenes. It was less effective for me when we saw Dawn break down on the floor, because that felt classically cinematic, a bit of unearned melodrama, whereas the very strength of the opening scenes was in the realistic stop/start breaks in Buffy's bewildered point of view. The way the breaks work between, for instance, the dinner scene and the following cut to Joyce's face reminded me of some of the great works of fiction, how the scenes have breaks between descriptive text and dialogue. In the same way, the camera angles and silent shots worked like minimalist writing, giving everything to the viewer/reader in the space around the stillness. It can seem out of place or jarring but that is the point and purpose, I think, and when the overall work is taken into context, the disjointedness becomes as much a part of the emotional glue as the dialogue and descriptions themselves. It is expressing the emotional content in ways other than words. Showing, not telling.
I think this is why I find some television shows deal with grief better than others. I've always considered "The Body" to be one of the very best, whereas the episode dealing with Fred's death (and Cordelia's, to a lesser extent) in Angel were less effective because it was telling me how they felt, rather than showing me how it felt to feel what they felt. (If that makes sense…) In another genre series, I thought Supernatural's "Everybody Loves a Clown," though convoluted by the plot of the week, dealt with grief more realistically than it did with the many deaths (and returns) later in the same season and continuing on throughout the rest of the series. (Perhaps that's the reason why it stopped being effective. Too much of a good thing dilutes it, and too much of a diluted thing makes for a lot of big fat nothing.) From a genre point of view, "The Body" works particularly well because we kept expecting something else to happen, something more, something miraculous or magical or even evil. We didn't expect anyone connected to Buffy to die a normal death. We didn't expect anyone like Buffy to have to deal with losing a loved one, not to an enemy she could fight, but simply to disease. Professor Ellison mentioned it in class, the "horror" of normal life. I think that's why Joyce's death ultimately works better as a reflection of the human experience and lingers deeper in the consciousness than the deaths of Wesley, Fred, Cordelia, John Winchester, Kara, etc. It just happened. That's all. In genre writing, there always seems to be some search for the ulterior motive or nefarious plan behind this or that hero's sidekick or lover or parent dying. If there isn't, it's almost see as a letdown. "The Body" showed that not only are bells and whistles unnecessary, but sometimes they cheapen the impact of the death itself. Buffy fighting the vampire at the end showed that up clearly for me. Fighting bad guys is not where the dramatic impact is for a character story or episode, whether it's genre or not. That's window dressing and should be delegated as such. A lot of shows and novels consistently get that wrong. It's an important lesson to keep in mind when dealing with emotionally weighty topics in writing, whether it's poetry or prose. It calls back another lesson Professor Ellison taught us, how to dial back the language in a poem when the content is immense. Spare writing, like spare directing, can be the difference between rewarding emotional investment and diluting it.
(I'll probably forget all of this the moment I try to write a short story with an actual plot. Argh, plot!)
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