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Once More With Squeeing...
I've finally got started on my analysis of OMWF, cut to save space. The more I think about that episode, the more brilliant I realise it is, and I have a dreadful fear that I will need up needing 20 chapters or so say everything I want to. Oh well, think of it as a WIP
The Germans have a word for it, Lobgesang, which, despite its appearance, isn’t a Tibetan monk but a hymn of praise. This is my Lobgesang to Once More With Feeling, the episode that drew me into Buffy and which is quite possibly the best hour or so of television ever. I’m going to have to write it in several parts, because there’s so much to say that no-one could possibly want to read it all in one sitting (and I don’t want to skimp on anything; I’m determined to do it full justice).
Perhaps the hardest part of this is knowing where to start. OMWF is so tightly constructed that everything links in to everything else, every tiny moment has layers and layers of meaning depending on what you relate it to, every line is multifunctional, every camera angle tells multiple stories. Where to start? Perhaps with the meta...
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read praise for Joss for overcoming the obstacle that apparently prevents many people from enjoying musicals, namely the difficulty they have in suspending disbelief when characters suddenly burst into song in the middle of the street. Chicago deals with this problem by having the musical numbers all take place in the characters’ imaginations; Joss deals with it by providing a logical explanation - it’s all part of a spell (as Giles says: ‘That would explain the huge backing orchestra I couldn't see and the synchronized dancing from the room service chaps’). But I think Joss is doing more here than simply providing a plot-driven justification for those members of the audience who can handle the existence of vampires but can’t stomach the genre conventions of musicals. He’s not merely pandering to the lowest common denominator, he’s actually using the musical form to examine what a musical is. OMWF a musical about musicals. Anya raises the matter explicitly when she tells Giles ‘It was like we were being watched [...] Like there was a wall missing- [...] -in our apartment [..] Like there were only three walls and not a fourth wall.’ ‘The fourth wall’ is, of course, a term used in theatre to describe the convention whereby the actors pretend that the audience is not present, that the side of the stage where the audience is sitting is in fact a wall, completing the fake, three-sided room that makes up the stage set in conventionally realistic drama. A little earlier on we’ve been given a concrete example of this, when Xander opens the fridge door and the audience looks in on him, from behind the missing back of his fridge. Of course, whereas in (conventional forms of) theatre the actors pretend the audience isn’t there, in film the audience really isn’t there at the same time as the actors, and Joss plays with this, too. The whole of Xander and Anya’s duet is played directly to the camera as if the audience were physically present, right up to Anya shoving Xander out of the way so she can take centre stage (it’s hard to write about these things without resorting to theatre terminology!) and him protesting ‘This is my verse, hello!’ as if the scene were live, as if it were being performed right in front of our eyes. Similarly in ‘Something to Sing About’ Buffy breaks the fourth wall by addressing the camera directly, telling the audience ‘and you can sing along,’ whilst Willow’s complaint to Giles ‘I think this line’s mostly filler’ draws overt attention to the fact that there is a writer behind the words, that the whole episode is a construct.
But this isn’t the end of the theatrical references. The credit sequence restructures a familiar, known part of Buffy according to a new set of genre conventions. The familiar music is replaced with a jolly, upbeat setting of ‘I’m Under Your Spell’ and instead of the usual sequence of clips we’re treated to a montage of a typical day in Buffy’s current life, plus the individual actors’ faces ringed by a cheesy full moon. The opening number, the scene which ‘sets the stage’ for everything that is to come, has Buffy wandering through the graveyard singing about her depression in terms of a role that she has to play: ‘I’ve been making shows of trading blows/Just hoping no-one knows/ That I’m just going through the motions/Walking through the part’. Buffy already feels as if her life is a play, a sham, a performance put on for other people, ‘nothing here is real’. (And I know it might seem a bit of a stretch, but given the pre-occupation with theatre that runs through the episode, ‘strange estrangement’ makes me, at least, think of Brecht, whose estrangement effects, designed to keep an audience conscious of the fact that they were watching a play, and preventing them from losing themselves in the moment, involved exactly such techniques as unexpectedly breaking the fourth wall, or getting characters to sing about what they were feeling instead of using dialogue). The image of life as a play is picked up again in Buffy’s final solo, when she sings ‘Life’s a show and we all play our parts [...] Life’s a song you don’t get to rehearse’. Of course, for a character in a TV show, life really is a show, and no wonder it all doesn’t seem quite real.
But these are generic theatrical references and OMWF is a very specific sub-genre of theatre/film. Joss, of course, doesn’t ignore the musical aspects in his ludic references to form. Once again it’s Anya who turns structure into a theme, thanks to her obsession with the types of song everyone is singing - her disgruntlement that ‘clearly our number is a retro pastiche that's never going to be a breakaway pop hit’, and her question to Spike, on the revelation that he, too, ‘sang a widdle song’: ‘Would you say it was a breakaway pop hit or more of a book number?’ Of course, it isn’t just the dialogue which draws our attention to different types of song. Each of the musical numbers has its own style and draws recognisably on established conventions. Buffy’s dusting of a vampire in ‘Going Through the Motions’ is shot like a Disney cartoon, with her face appearing through a cloud of sparkly dust as she hits the climactic long note; Xander and Anya’s duet could have come from a 30s Hollywood musical starring Fred and Ginger (where she does ‘everything that he does, but backwards and in high heels’ – take a look at Anya’s fluffy slippers...); Spike’s bad-boy rock number has him jumping on top of a coffin, head fling dramatically backwards in rock god fashion; Giles’s song turns, just as Buffy had feared, into a ‘training montage from an 80s movie’. Each of these sub-genres suits the characters, and the roles they play in each other’s lives, but their very variety is in itself a comment on the range available within the form of the musical.
The references to theatre and to musicals reach their climax with the appearance of Sweet, the dancing demon. When the first tap-dancing victim burns up he quotes the old Hollywood slogan ‘That’s entertainment!’ and when Buffy bursts into the Bronze he exclaims ‘Showtime!’ adding ‘I love a good entrance’, to which Buffy responds ‘How are you at death scenes?’ After she has nearly danced herself to death he congratulates her with the words ‘That was a show-stopping number’. But more than just referring to events in terms of musicals, he actually turns the Bronze into a stage, with himself as the audience (plus, of course, the Scoobies, who are watching from the wings, as well as the physically absent TV viewers) for whom Buffy must perform. And perform she does, finally opening up her heart, just as her song promises, while Tara and Anya join her on stage to provide a different kind of ‘back-up’ than usual. This scene is the heart of Joss’s reflection on musicals: a musical about a character who is forced to sing and dance for an audience, and who gives away, in what she sings and the way she dances, information that is vital for the subsequent plot development. A musical about what makes up a musical, in fact.
And after Sweet has gone, we get another variation on the theme of actors and audience, when we’re treated to the weird spectacle of a musical without an audience. Spike and Buffy leave ‘the big group sing’ but the sound of the performers and their unseen backing orchestra can still be heard in the background, as the Scoobies continue to sing away in the warehouse without any audience at all, not even the camera.
The ending of the episode neatly completes the imagery that was started up in the credit sequence. The Scoobies foreshadow it as they sing ‘The curtains close on a kiss’, and sure enough a pair of painted curtains falls across the final shot of Spike and Buffy, locked in a passionate kiss. It isn’t subtle, but it’s awfully cute, and, of course, it also isn’t an ending. Quite the opposite, in fact. ‘Where Do we Go From Here?’ is an excellent question under the circumstances. The truth is out, but nothing has been resolved, and for all that the episode has all the trappings of a happy ending, with the hero who saved the heroine rewarded with a kiss, ‘There’s not a one/Who can say this ended well.’ Instead, this is the beginning of the downward spiral for Spike and Buffy, the beginning of the end for Willow and Tara. Once again, Joss has taken a theatrical convention and subverted it for his own artistic purposes.
The Germans have a word for it, Lobgesang, which, despite its appearance, isn’t a Tibetan monk but a hymn of praise. This is my Lobgesang to Once More With Feeling, the episode that drew me into Buffy and which is quite possibly the best hour or so of television ever. I’m going to have to write it in several parts, because there’s so much to say that no-one could possibly want to read it all in one sitting (and I don’t want to skimp on anything; I’m determined to do it full justice).
Perhaps the hardest part of this is knowing where to start. OMWF is so tightly constructed that everything links in to everything else, every tiny moment has layers and layers of meaning depending on what you relate it to, every line is multifunctional, every camera angle tells multiple stories. Where to start? Perhaps with the meta...
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read praise for Joss for overcoming the obstacle that apparently prevents many people from enjoying musicals, namely the difficulty they have in suspending disbelief when characters suddenly burst into song in the middle of the street. Chicago deals with this problem by having the musical numbers all take place in the characters’ imaginations; Joss deals with it by providing a logical explanation - it’s all part of a spell (as Giles says: ‘That would explain the huge backing orchestra I couldn't see and the synchronized dancing from the room service chaps’). But I think Joss is doing more here than simply providing a plot-driven justification for those members of the audience who can handle the existence of vampires but can’t stomach the genre conventions of musicals. He’s not merely pandering to the lowest common denominator, he’s actually using the musical form to examine what a musical is. OMWF a musical about musicals. Anya raises the matter explicitly when she tells Giles ‘It was like we were being watched [...] Like there was a wall missing- [...] -in our apartment [..] Like there were only three walls and not a fourth wall.’ ‘The fourth wall’ is, of course, a term used in theatre to describe the convention whereby the actors pretend that the audience is not present, that the side of the stage where the audience is sitting is in fact a wall, completing the fake, three-sided room that makes up the stage set in conventionally realistic drama. A little earlier on we’ve been given a concrete example of this, when Xander opens the fridge door and the audience looks in on him, from behind the missing back of his fridge. Of course, whereas in (conventional forms of) theatre the actors pretend the audience isn’t there, in film the audience really isn’t there at the same time as the actors, and Joss plays with this, too. The whole of Xander and Anya’s duet is played directly to the camera as if the audience were physically present, right up to Anya shoving Xander out of the way so she can take centre stage (it’s hard to write about these things without resorting to theatre terminology!) and him protesting ‘This is my verse, hello!’ as if the scene were live, as if it were being performed right in front of our eyes. Similarly in ‘Something to Sing About’ Buffy breaks the fourth wall by addressing the camera directly, telling the audience ‘and you can sing along,’ whilst Willow’s complaint to Giles ‘I think this line’s mostly filler’ draws overt attention to the fact that there is a writer behind the words, that the whole episode is a construct.
But this isn’t the end of the theatrical references. The credit sequence restructures a familiar, known part of Buffy according to a new set of genre conventions. The familiar music is replaced with a jolly, upbeat setting of ‘I’m Under Your Spell’ and instead of the usual sequence of clips we’re treated to a montage of a typical day in Buffy’s current life, plus the individual actors’ faces ringed by a cheesy full moon. The opening number, the scene which ‘sets the stage’ for everything that is to come, has Buffy wandering through the graveyard singing about her depression in terms of a role that she has to play: ‘I’ve been making shows of trading blows/Just hoping no-one knows/ That I’m just going through the motions/Walking through the part’. Buffy already feels as if her life is a play, a sham, a performance put on for other people, ‘nothing here is real’. (And I know it might seem a bit of a stretch, but given the pre-occupation with theatre that runs through the episode, ‘strange estrangement’ makes me, at least, think of Brecht, whose estrangement effects, designed to keep an audience conscious of the fact that they were watching a play, and preventing them from losing themselves in the moment, involved exactly such techniques as unexpectedly breaking the fourth wall, or getting characters to sing about what they were feeling instead of using dialogue). The image of life as a play is picked up again in Buffy’s final solo, when she sings ‘Life’s a show and we all play our parts [...] Life’s a song you don’t get to rehearse’. Of course, for a character in a TV show, life really is a show, and no wonder it all doesn’t seem quite real.
But these are generic theatrical references and OMWF is a very specific sub-genre of theatre/film. Joss, of course, doesn’t ignore the musical aspects in his ludic references to form. Once again it’s Anya who turns structure into a theme, thanks to her obsession with the types of song everyone is singing - her disgruntlement that ‘clearly our number is a retro pastiche that's never going to be a breakaway pop hit’, and her question to Spike, on the revelation that he, too, ‘sang a widdle song’: ‘Would you say it was a breakaway pop hit or more of a book number?’ Of course, it isn’t just the dialogue which draws our attention to different types of song. Each of the musical numbers has its own style and draws recognisably on established conventions. Buffy’s dusting of a vampire in ‘Going Through the Motions’ is shot like a Disney cartoon, with her face appearing through a cloud of sparkly dust as she hits the climactic long note; Xander and Anya’s duet could have come from a 30s Hollywood musical starring Fred and Ginger (where she does ‘everything that he does, but backwards and in high heels’ – take a look at Anya’s fluffy slippers...); Spike’s bad-boy rock number has him jumping on top of a coffin, head fling dramatically backwards in rock god fashion; Giles’s song turns, just as Buffy had feared, into a ‘training montage from an 80s movie’. Each of these sub-genres suits the characters, and the roles they play in each other’s lives, but their very variety is in itself a comment on the range available within the form of the musical.
The references to theatre and to musicals reach their climax with the appearance of Sweet, the dancing demon. When the first tap-dancing victim burns up he quotes the old Hollywood slogan ‘That’s entertainment!’ and when Buffy bursts into the Bronze he exclaims ‘Showtime!’ adding ‘I love a good entrance’, to which Buffy responds ‘How are you at death scenes?’ After she has nearly danced herself to death he congratulates her with the words ‘That was a show-stopping number’. But more than just referring to events in terms of musicals, he actually turns the Bronze into a stage, with himself as the audience (plus, of course, the Scoobies, who are watching from the wings, as well as the physically absent TV viewers) for whom Buffy must perform. And perform she does, finally opening up her heart, just as her song promises, while Tara and Anya join her on stage to provide a different kind of ‘back-up’ than usual. This scene is the heart of Joss’s reflection on musicals: a musical about a character who is forced to sing and dance for an audience, and who gives away, in what she sings and the way she dances, information that is vital for the subsequent plot development. A musical about what makes up a musical, in fact.
And after Sweet has gone, we get another variation on the theme of actors and audience, when we’re treated to the weird spectacle of a musical without an audience. Spike and Buffy leave ‘the big group sing’ but the sound of the performers and their unseen backing orchestra can still be heard in the background, as the Scoobies continue to sing away in the warehouse without any audience at all, not even the camera.
The ending of the episode neatly completes the imagery that was started up in the credit sequence. The Scoobies foreshadow it as they sing ‘The curtains close on a kiss’, and sure enough a pair of painted curtains falls across the final shot of Spike and Buffy, locked in a passionate kiss. It isn’t subtle, but it’s awfully cute, and, of course, it also isn’t an ending. Quite the opposite, in fact. ‘Where Do we Go From Here?’ is an excellent question under the circumstances. The truth is out, but nothing has been resolved, and for all that the episode has all the trappings of a happy ending, with the hero who saved the heroine rewarded with a kiss, ‘There’s not a one/Who can say this ended well.’ Instead, this is the beginning of the downward spiral for Spike and Buffy, the beginning of the end for Willow and Tara. Once again, Joss has taken a theatrical convention and subverted it for his own artistic purposes.