"Buffy," a MUSICAL!

In this blog, I wanted to continue to discuss the point that I brought up in class regarding the effectiveness of the musical medium. We talked about how this episode is really climactic, in that it occurs at a time in which tensions for all of the characters are mounting. Buffy has just been pulled out of heaven, Giles is wondering if his position as Buffy's watcher is impeding her growth, Tara and Willow are having relationship problems, Anya and Xander are engaged, yet they clearly have a lot of underlying issues that they haven't discussed, and Dawn is chock full of teen angst-angst, especially after the death of her mother. I think that Whendon was shrewd to use a musical medium here because as viewers, most of us are familiar with the tropes part and parcel of musicals. We expect dramatic pauses, monologues, and melodrama galore. Because of all the abounding tensions in this episode that inevitably need to be dispelled, it makes sense having a very open, self-exposing medium to quickly allow the underlying tensions to escape into the open. It would soon become boring if Whedon had to allocate five or so episodes to addressing all of these problems individually. However, use one musical episode, and all the problems quickly expose themselves. But what was truly so intelligent about the use of musical was how self-aware it was, both in its evocation of the typical musical tropes and how it still managed to maintain a light-gothic feel. I have made the argument before that what makes "Buffy" such an successful show is its self-awareness, often through parodying the gothic form. Whedon engages the same self-awareness in "Once More with Feeling." Not only does self-awareness lend itself to a parody of the musical genre, but it demonstrates that this musical medium is not being used just so that Whedon could add a musical to his repertoire, but because its tropes are a perfect way to let this episode have all of the "melodrama" it requires, without seeming melodramatic, if you know what I mean. Once again, form and function complement one another perfectly.