BtVS S8.12 Wolves at the Gate
Mar. 9th, 2008 01:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelkHappy Birthday ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shadowkat67!
Comedy is hard. Hard to pin down, to dissect, to explain. Hard to do but all too easy to know when it’s done right. March is screwball season at the NFT, The Lady Eve, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday. It’s almost impossible to think about those movies without slipping into "why they can’t make them like that these days.”
Except when they can. Goddard and Jeanty do screwball, matching verbal pyrotechnics with speechless French farce. It’s all in the timing. Comedy is like sex, comedy is about sex, sex death and pain. Interestingly one of the reasons often given for the unscrewiness of modern romance is that without a Hayes code to mother comic invention the screwing part is all too easy. Media and fandom responses to Buffy/Satsu make it all too clear that we’re really nothing like as enlightened as we like to think. There’s the blatant homophobia (in a few cases) but more widely the rush to judgement of any sexual interaction that doesn’t categorise neatly into true love or exploitative lust. Classic screwball relationships were never that simple. In The Lady Eve a conwoman seduces a mark, falls for him confesses, gets rejected, takes revenge and picks up all over again. In Bringing Up Baby a naïve paleontologist is lured away from his innocent fiancé by a self-styled force of nature and I’m not even going to try dissecting the layers of relationship dysfunctionality in His Girl Friday. But who roots for the fiancé or the Ralph Bellamy character when watching either film? Bellamy maybe in retrospect but only then. Comedy makes its audience complicit with all manner of dubious behaviour because it’s funny but also because it’s true. It is more complicated.
So we begin with Renee and Xander finally getting to the point of her asking him to put the question in sweetly traditional fashion. These Sergeant Furys may talk the Nick and Nora, it’s a flirtation founded on assassination and celts with clubs, but both are sober throughout. Then with no more prep than a simple “who’d want to be alone on a night like this” there’s Buffy with Satsu. Naked in bed and I didn’t see that coming (operative word) although with hindsight Buffy mentioning Satsu’s scentfulness in the previous issue should have been a giveaway. Sex smells good in the works of Whedon. So set up and we knew Satsu loved her and we knew Buffy knew and Satsu knew she knew and knew she didn’t and yet they still went there. It happens. More interesting is the other set up, not just that Buffy is lonely and Buffy is horny (and sex is connection, slot A in slot A) but that Buffy really cares about Satsu (enough to go back and heal with her). These girls aren’t mortal enemies but friends and close colleagues, if it’s Buffy/Spike re-visited it’s once more with affection. Love aside (and romantic love is both a self-sacrificing and a uniquely selfish emotion) there’s a whole Old Pretender/Young Pretender, Margot Channing/Eve Harrington aspect to the affair, which makes who has the power here fascinatingly fluid. Satsu hero-worships Buffy but from Buffy’s point of view it’s only a matter of time before her protégé surpasses her.
Enter Dracula and is the Sunset Boulevard connection a Twilight thing? Dracula was the vampire movie star back in season five now he’s reduced to tottering around the mansion like Norma Desmond on cabbage leaves and rubbing alcohol. Pictures got smaller until Xander returned heart (grossly) in hand. The Buffy parallels have got to be intentional, after all Goddard had an earlier story that made the comparison explicitly (you almost wonder if there’s something of how he sees Joss in there). If true it also links the new Goth gang to Simone and her gun totting acolytes and that’s another development that just begs for follow up.
shadowkat67!Comedy is hard. Hard to pin down, to dissect, to explain. Hard to do but all too easy to know when it’s done right. March is screwball season at the NFT, The Lady Eve, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday. It’s almost impossible to think about those movies without slipping into "why they can’t make them like that these days.”
Except when they can. Goddard and Jeanty do screwball, matching verbal pyrotechnics with speechless French farce. It’s all in the timing. Comedy is like sex, comedy is about sex, sex death and pain. Interestingly one of the reasons often given for the unscrewiness of modern romance is that without a Hayes code to mother comic invention the screwing part is all too easy. Media and fandom responses to Buffy/Satsu make it all too clear that we’re really nothing like as enlightened as we like to think. There’s the blatant homophobia (in a few cases) but more widely the rush to judgement of any sexual interaction that doesn’t categorise neatly into true love or exploitative lust. Classic screwball relationships were never that simple. In The Lady Eve a conwoman seduces a mark, falls for him confesses, gets rejected, takes revenge and picks up all over again. In Bringing Up Baby a naïve paleontologist is lured away from his innocent fiancé by a self-styled force of nature and I’m not even going to try dissecting the layers of relationship dysfunctionality in His Girl Friday. But who roots for the fiancé or the Ralph Bellamy character when watching either film? Bellamy maybe in retrospect but only then. Comedy makes its audience complicit with all manner of dubious behaviour because it’s funny but also because it’s true. It is more complicated.
So we begin with Renee and Xander finally getting to the point of her asking him to put the question in sweetly traditional fashion. These Sergeant Furys may talk the Nick and Nora, it’s a flirtation founded on assassination and celts with clubs, but both are sober throughout. Then with no more prep than a simple “who’d want to be alone on a night like this” there’s Buffy with Satsu. Naked in bed and I didn’t see that coming (operative word) although with hindsight Buffy mentioning Satsu’s scentfulness in the previous issue should have been a giveaway. Sex smells good in the works of Whedon. So set up and we knew Satsu loved her and we knew Buffy knew and Satsu knew she knew and knew she didn’t and yet they still went there. It happens. More interesting is the other set up, not just that Buffy is lonely and Buffy is horny (and sex is connection, slot A in slot A) but that Buffy really cares about Satsu (enough to go back and heal with her). These girls aren’t mortal enemies but friends and close colleagues, if it’s Buffy/Spike re-visited it’s once more with affection. Love aside (and romantic love is both a self-sacrificing and a uniquely selfish emotion) there’s a whole Old Pretender/Young Pretender, Margot Channing/Eve Harrington aspect to the affair, which makes who has the power here fascinatingly fluid. Satsu hero-worships Buffy but from Buffy’s point of view it’s only a matter of time before her protégé surpasses her.
Enter Dracula and is the Sunset Boulevard connection a Twilight thing? Dracula was the vampire movie star back in season five now he’s reduced to tottering around the mansion like Norma Desmond on cabbage leaves and rubbing alcohol. Pictures got smaller until Xander returned heart (grossly) in hand. The Buffy parallels have got to be intentional, after all Goddard had an earlier story that made the comparison explicitly (you almost wonder if there’s something of how he sees Joss in there). If true it also links the new Goth gang to Simone and her gun totting acolytes and that’s another development that just begs for follow up.
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Date: 2008-03-09 10:14 pm (UTC)And now for something completely different
Date: 2008-03-26 09:59 am (UTC)~H
Re: And now for something completely different
Date: 2008-03-26 04:45 pm (UTC)Damn, I miss beta-ing. I've turned down so many requests this year. ):
Try
Re: And now for something completely different
Date: 2008-03-26 07:00 pm (UTC)