Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
|
|
| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
|
|
Saturday, May 03, 2003 The Pitch: It's like Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Best In Show meets Buffy The Vampire Slayer! The Best In Show angle: Edi's dog-sitting this weekend, so I get to go home and hang out with a dog. This is a very, very cool thing for me.The Raiders angle: I was reading this long, enjoyable interview with Alan Moore in this interesting free-mag Arthur, and in it, regarding the difference between magic and religion, the interviewer says, "Of course, the other aspect of magic that separates it from most religions is that it's not based on faith, is it?" To which Moore replies: Oh, no. No. Faith is for sissies who daren't go and look for themselves. That's my basic position. Magic is based upon gnosis. Direct knowledge. It's a kind of "I'm from Missouri. Show me" approach, if you like. Which I guess may be the reason why I will continue to circle around magic and never do anything about it. Faith is this super-big aspect to Christianity--the point that supersedes all others, it seems to me, considering you have to worship a God whose name you can't say, whose image you can't see, and whose emissary made a point of leaving behind no body after death. So, yeah, you've got a real difference there--you're not supposed to look, even though you can. Which is precisely how the climax or Raiders is set up: Indy and Marion can both look at the opening of the Ark but don't and that illustrates the distance Indy has come from being a guy who doesn't believe in "mumbo-jumbo." And there is something kind of interesting and perverse about a climax to a blockbuster that is centered around the concept of not looking--no wonder Spielberg blew it. The moment itself, how it hooks into Indy's character arc, even the expository set-up, all of it blown because Spielberg, like Moore, can't fathom not being able to look. Which brings me to the Buffy angle: It's down to the last three episodes and this last one was awful, just really fucking bad. I don't know if you've been following the season, but I don't think I could do it much justice so you might want to check out Television Without Pity's recaps to get the gist of it. In fact, this might be an excellent idea because it was a recap by Ace of the episode Dirty Girls that started me thinking about various Buffy things. Ace points out how the subtext of Dirty Girls is "seeing, and objectification and fantasy" (which culminates with a rather nasty climax to the episode's big action scene that may also be a rather bloody meditation on the male gaze). This is pretty much the subtext of the whole season, more or less, with the villain, the First, being an entity that can see everything (and take the form of anyone who's died), but apparently cannot touch or be touched. Anyway, what was interesting to me about the last fucking awful episode is that it manages to do everything that the recappers of Television Without Pity would like to see happen (people tell off Buffy, pretty much, and then she's kicked out of her own house) and yet in a way that makes almost no sense within the show (the season has been pretty shitty overall, because it's had lots and lots of padding, and lots and lots of characters doing things out of character because the story needs them to). There's an odd speech where Buffy is getting told off by Anya who says something like, it's not like you're better than us, you're just luckier than us. Which in the context of the story refers to Buffy being given the powers of the Slayer, but in the meta-context of the show(as pointed out by the Poster Pack on the comments section to Peter David's blog) might refer to Sarah Michelle Gellar being the lead of the show and how her decision to leave will put all these actors, writers, and directors out of a job. Add to this, the fact that the First appears mainly only as Buffy (since her character has died twice) and it can make you wonder: Who is The First? Is it Sarah Michelle Gellar (the star of the show, and therefore "the first" consideration?), the one who will finally do what no villain could, and kill the show for good? Or is the audience--today's audience, with their message boards and recaps and email petitions--The First? Separate from everything happening, and yet the source of it, too. Untouchable, but with a corrupting voice, that wishes violence upon a figure with whom it once identified (which is why it still appears, maybe, as Buffy?) and which is being given everything it might want (a Buffy/Spike romance, a Xander/Anya separation, more Giles) by its faithful servants but in a way that still won't please it. The audience comes first, as the saying goes, and maybe the last few episodes of Buffy are being deliberately staged to give us everything we might want, in a way that will never satisfy us, as a way to teach us a lesson. What that lesson might be, I wouldn't know but maybe it's something along the lines of: You don't always have to look. posted by Jeff Lester | 6:04 PM | |
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
