Insanity FTW ("Normal Again")

The gothic convention of “man vs. self” is a scary one that various texts express in different ways. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and “Transformation” attempt to discuss this battle by creating antagonists distinct from the polarized individuals. The Turn of the Screw tackles this convention differently, by placing the conflict solely in the mind of the governess. However, this text is so wrought with ambiguity that the argument for her insanity comes in conjunction with other inconclusive explanations for the supernatural. “Normal Again” enriches this discussion by providing yet another textual example in which questionable (in)sanity conflates reality and the paranormal in an unsettling manner. However, it is more successful at addressing this struggle in modern gothic terms because it approaches the problem head-on from a logical and self-aware point of view.

“Normal Again” creates a convincing case for Buffy’s insanity by highlighting weak logistical facets of the show as evidence for her mental illness. The most poignant example of this reasoning focuses on Dawn’s character. Within the trajectory of the series Dawn appears as Buffy’s sister out of the blue in the fifth season. Her sudden inclusion is jarring and a tad suspicious for viewers, but true Buffy fans go with the flow and accept Dawn as a new character. “Normal Again” brings attention back to this logistical issue by proposing that Dawn is merely a delusion of Buffy’s schizophrenia. The asylum doctor expresses this inversion when he says, “Buffy inserted Dawn into her delusion, actually rewriting the entire history of it to accommodate her need for a familial bond.” This argument seems extremely sensible to Buffy and viewers alike, who both begin to seriously question the validity of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a trustworthy text.

Simultaneously, the episode attacks the logical content of this already precariously organized text. It questions the plausibility of Sunnydale, the Scooby gang, and the existence of a slayer by proposing an alternate reality in which Buffy is simply a sick girl in a mental institution. The doctor explains, “In her mind, she’s the central figure in a fantastic world beyond imagination. She’s surrounded herself with friends – most with their own super powers – who are as real to her as you or me… Together they face overblown, grand conflicts against an assortment of monsters, both imaginary and rooted in actual myth.” This explanation is compelling because it shatters Buffy and the viewers’ suspension of disbelief in the supernatural. When it comes down to it, schizophrenia sounds like a much more rational portrayal of reality.

The fact that Buffy herself concludes that she is sick brings this internal battle to a frightening place. Given the aforementioned evidence for insanity, it is nearly impossible to come to any other conclusion. Buffy affirms this logic while chasing Dawn: “Cause what’s more real? A sick girl in an institution or some type of supergirl, chosen to fight demons and save the world? That’s ridiculous.” The audience must agree with this reasoning as viewers and as rational people. This dividing of the spectators’ self is a risky move on Whedon’s behalf, yet it enables the episode to be so touchingly effective. We go through the same realization as Buffy, and we come to find that the threat of being crazy is a truly frightening possibility compared to the possibility of encountering vampires. Thus, this episode is chilling on a comparable level to a psychological thriller or non-fiction serial killer movie as opposed to a gory alien film in which the danger is so far removed from actuality.

“Normal Again” ultimately makes the mind an unfamiliar and hostile environment in which the gothic convention of “man vs. self” takes place. The audience mimics the conflict in Buffy’s psyche between slayer and schizophrenic on a personal level where the dichotomy of self is between gothic enthusiast and rational modern thinker. By approaching this convention straight on, the episode forces the possibility of insanity to the forefront of gothic interpretation. Moreover, by restricting this conflict solely to the mind, the episode makes this gothic threat a real and tangible possibility. After all, if, according to Aristotle, “rational faculty” distinguishes humans from other living things then are we any different from monsters if we lose this ability? The evidence used to prove Buffy’s insanity is consistent with modern logic and thus subverts the purpose of gothic texts to provide alternate means of explanation through the supernatural. However, this inversion is only temporary because Buffy ultimately chooses to inhabit the Sunnydale reality, even if it is just a construct of her mind. This choice shows how certain grandiose questions like, “how can we really know or trust what we see?”, do not have answers in contemporary society or vampire-land so we might as well chose the one with more leather jumpsuits and awesome friends.

I guess I'm not as scared of hokey music as the rest of you...

So, maybe it's because I have seen this episode ten zillion times and can recite it in my sleep, but I was not made uncomfortable at all by "Once More With Feeling." I get that there is a lack of talent and that its goofy, but I just didn't feel the discomfort. What it almost reminded me of was watching a home made movie, where you have to laugh at it no matter how serious some of the content is, because it is just silly watching your friends and these people that you have really gotten to know get up and do silly dances. But again, maybe I'm biased because I have seen the movie literally hundreds of times.

So I wanted to use my blog post to talk about the use of sound in conveying serious themes. We see in "The Body" how a lack of music makes scary and horrifying moments seem so real and personal, and how the silence moves us. We also saw in "Hush" how music can set a tone without saying any words. "Hush" also demonstrated how theme music can be established within an episode or series, and so certain songs start to trigger certain responses from an audience. Even if we look at the music from the ballet of "The Nutcracker" we see an issue with sound, where we as an audience attribute those melodies to triumph of good, family, and christmas, and so when we try to hear them in a darker context along with a darker story, it doesn't settle with us.

"Once More With Feeling" shows how music hyperbolizes emotion, and how things can get explosive if everyone wears their thoughts and hearts on their sleeves. All the tension that was building in season 6 comes to a climax in this episode, and what better way to make it explode than with music? I don't think Joss made this episode just to make a musical, and I don't think he wrote music to fit the episode plot line that he had in mind. Rather, I think he saw that musical expression was the only way to bring everything out into the open at once without giving the characters a chance to reflect on things, and so the only way for the season or the series as a whole to progress was to have each person sing out what they have been thinking for episodes and episodes on end.

Inception Blog Post Style: A Musical Post within A Musical

Firstly, I’m glad I now know where the inspiration for Grey’s Anatomy the musical came from...yikes!

Secondly, Joss Whedon was clearly a musical theatre nerd in high school. This episode was chock full of musical tropes (my personal favorite, the striking resemblance that “Walk Through the Fire” bares to “Tonight” from West Side Story).

Thirdly, I’m going to write this post in a kind of song by song manner, and then analyze them as a unit for the “grand finale” (see what I did there...yeah I agree not my best but hey it’s finals week). Without further ado, please silence your cellphones, sit back, relax, and enjoy “Once More With Feeling.”

“Going Through the Motions”- This song felt like a combination of the opening song in Legally Blonde (Hoku’s “Perfect Day”) and “Happy Working Song” from Enchanted, however the birds fluttering around in this one would be scary-ass crows.

“Under Your Spell”-Poor Tara, she has no idea. Also, this made me hate Willow even more than watching her wipe her girlfriend’s memory in “Tabula Rasa,” because this whole song (despite being performed by one of the few decent singers in the cast) is a happy oblivion and we as viewers know that Tara’s world will ultimately come falling down around her, as she crashes back down onto her bed. Doesn’t everybody float?

“I’ll Never Tell”- A twisted version of Singing in the Rain’s “Good Morning.” I loved how Anya and Xander dance around each other and the truth.

"Something to Sing About"- This was actually the first time in a long string of episodes where I haven’t found Buffy to be too whiney or mopey. In fact, it seemed rather genuinine. Also, from a musical standpoint, those descending half steps, I wish she had stayed in heaven so I didn’t have to hear those.

Okay, so here’s my 11:00PM, or rather 2:30 AM number for you (in musicals, 11:00pm is usually when the big show-stopper happens). This episode, in my limited and ever changing definition, seemed the least Gothic of all of those we have watched. For me, Gothic is a sense ignorance, that nagging feeling in the back of my mind that says there is something going on here that I don’t quite understand. And while had I been watching the series in order (we really needed spoiler alerts in this class) I would not have know about the whole getting pulled from heaven not hell thing, every other plot point or problem was so clearly laid out. Not only that, but it was sung about in simple rhyme and choreographed to boot.

As a closing note, I really wanted to like this episode. Really. I love musicals! Just ask a certain roommate of mine who want want to slay me just about every waking hour because I never stop singing #sorryimnotsorrybex! But for some reason I just could not get behind it.

And scene.

Exits...pursued by a bear(load of finals work).

"Once More With Feeling" #surprisewin

As I mentioned in class, I find this episode horrifying. Yet, this response is strangely fitting given that “Once More With Feeling” is not simply a musical, but also a serious gothic representation. Tara’s line, “everything is turning out so dark,” embodies the sentiment from which my uneasiness derives. In truth, I was not expecting this episode to be fraught with so much tension and angst. When Janelle admonished us against “singing along,” I envisioned some campy silly songs about everyone smiling while people were dying. Clearly, I was wrong.

However, once I move past this visceral response and beyond the uncomfortable dearth of musical talent, I find that this episode is satisfyingly gothic because it functions like a cracked mirror through which the characters, and the viewers, can see how to deal with worldly struggles through supernatural occurrences. For example, Tara learns that she can’t function in a relationship without trust after she finds out that Willow has been casting memory spells on her. Thus, Xander’s desire to gain understanding through magical song and dance is fulfilled. However, along with this understanding, the characters also discover uncertainty and inner conflict.

The fact that the demon is not killed at the end of the episode amplifies this emotional turmoil because it shows how reality is worse than the devil himself. As Dawn so eloquently declares, “the hardest thing in this world is to live in it!” Moreover, this atypical Buffy ending also reveals the underpinnings of gothic convention because it emphasizes how the demon is merely a literary device; when the devil says, “big smiles everyone, you beat the bad guy,” he might as well sing, “look! I just subverted the heroic trajectory of the episode to show how the gothic is a self-aware mechanism that obfuscates genre clarity to highlight human dysfunction!” Therefore, the unconventionality of “Once More With Feeling” as a musical number and as a Buffy episode mimics the grey uncertainty present in actual humanity and the characters’ relationships with each other.

To my surprise, I actually think “Once More With Feeling” may be my favorite Buffy episode because it operates more like a self-sufficient gothic text than a brief chapter in a larger gothic series. Undoubtedly all Buffy episodes mix supernatural and worldly dilemmas, such as learning to live with a roommate and slaying demons, but this particular episode does this to a more pervasive and ambiguous extent.

... And it all comes back to fashion!

Back when we had to choose an article about Buffy, I chose one exploring the show’s use of fashion and color. I’d like to refer back to that article, entitled “Real Vampires Don’t Wear Shorts: The Aesthetics of Fashion in Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and written by Leigh Clemons, for my final blog.

Clemons discusses the final song in “Once More, With Feeling” in which each of the characters is wearing an outfit based around a different color of the rainbow. When reading the article I had trouble picturing this, as it had been a while wince I’d seen this episode. I was expecting each character in bright, blatantly colorful ensembles, but this is about the only subtle moment in the episode. Nevertheless, I think it is an effective image. The moment serves accentuate the different directions each character will soon be taking (or have already started down) after this climactic episode that can be seen as a turning point for the series.

The two best examples of this are Buffy in red and Willow in purple. Willow is seen in purple from the start of the season, as her decent into darkness begins. She has already abandoned the brighter, warmer colors she wore through most of season five, and the shade of violet she wears during “Where Do We Go From Here” is about as bright as she gets until the episode “Seeing Red”, when her white shirt is splattered by Tara’s blood. Red is a warm color that also has dark connotations of lust and devil-like behaviors. Buffy in red represents her feeling that, since being dragged out of heaven by her friends, her life is really hell. Spike is also dressed in red, so Buffy’s red top also reflects the beginning of her fling with him. Besides these two (or three, if you count Spike) obvious color choices, the rest of the characters are less obvious. It seems that the others were dressed not to represent a specific emotion, but to show contrast between two characters by dressing them in contrasting colors. In each contrasting pair, one is about to leave the other: Giles, in green to contrast Buffy’s red, is about to withdraw support from her fight; Tara’s bright yellow stands out against Willow’s purple; and Xander’s orange foreshadows that he will be leaving his bride-to-be, dressed in something blue, at the alter.

I’ll end this post by addressing the question raised in class: why was this episode chosen to be a musical? I think the reason was to unsettle us. We hear rising music and see coordinating dancing and expect happy endings. But there were no happy endings to be found, which leaves us with a feeling of dissatisfaction. Buffy’s entire purpose is really to modernize the gothic genre, and make fun of it at times. It seems fitting that the last episode we watched in class brings another genre, that of musical theater, into the work to alter to suite the purpose of the series.

Clemons, Leigh. "Real Vampires Don’t Wear Shorts: The Aesthetics of Fashion in Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. Web. 12 Dec. 11. .

A Little Song, A Little Dance...

Obviously, best episode ever.

I found it interesting that the show violated the standards of most musicals, enabling everyone to hear others’ revelations through song, whereas most characters in real musicals do not realize the conclusions that are come to (although, while Anya and Xander hear each other, Buffy doesn’t hear Giles, so I guess Whedon only lets them hear when it suits him).

It made me kind of disappointed that musical forced the show’s characters to communicate about the issues they are having, like Whedon was kind of undermining the character growth by throwing everything out there before the Scoobies were ready. But then again, this also forced them to deal with their problems, escalating the tensions between the characters, and bringing the storyline to a head, as we see in Tabula Rasa. These tensions were somehow lessened, however, by the melodrama of the episode – the revelations were comical, despite their somber nature. Xander and Anya confess their doubts about each other through song and dance, which later results in him leaving her at the altar. Buffy confesses that she’d been in heaven in the same manner, something that she had been concealing from her friends for a long while. For such dramatic issues to be revealed in such a way robs them of some of their impact.

Another thing I appreciated within the episode is the demon’s “Life is but a song,” a probable reference to “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players,” from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. I found this appropriate, considering the themes of exile (like Buffy’s from heaven, and the feelings of exile and solitude in her own life), woman power (Buffy, like Rosalind, is a badass), and disguise (like how Buffy has to conceal her identity from the world). It’s also telling that the play is a comedy – even though things might seem dark, they all turn out okay in the end.

And finally, to tie this in to The Nutcracker:

Obviously, The Nutcracker isn’t simply a happy-go-lucky Christmas tale full of pretty dolls and toy soldiers and sugarplums – why else would we read it in a class about gothic literature? The Nutcracker is all about subtext – the creepiness of Godpapa Drosselmeier’s interactions with the children, and Marie’s child marriage, for example. “Once More With Feeling” follows a similar pattern – though, on the surface, a musical world seems harmless, it’s made sinister by the fact that it’s caused by a demon, and can cause one to burst into flame. It also takes a page out of the child marriage handbook with Dawn and the demon. Innocence is a façade for something much more macabre.

It’s been a blast. Good luck with finals!

<3 Lisa

Beneath the Surface of "Once More, With Feeling" and "The Nutcracker"

One thing that immediately struck me about “Once More, With Feeling” was the reversal of the meaning behind platitudes, and how generally positive statements were shown to be dark. When Buffy sings, “What can’t we face if we’re together?” it’s not quite as uplifting as it sounds. Because Buffy is stuck feeling hopeless and numb, this lyric represents the monotony of her life rather than an appreciation for the community she’s in. Similarly, Tara’s “I’m under your spell” is at first a happy lyric, and then becomes dark when she realizes the implications of the fact that she is literally under Willow’s spell.

I had not thought much about the connections between “Once More, With Feeling” and The Nutcracker until I started reading other blog posts, but this phenomenon is equally present in The Nutcracker. We discussed at length the differences between the “happy and cute” Christmas ballet and the darker themes of the Hoffman version, and the same dissonance we see in “Once More, With Feeling” is clear here. The story is presented to us as if Marie gets everything she ever wanted, but the audience is left with a lot of questions about how to interpret the actual resolution. An eight-year-old getting married hardly seems like a dream come true, especially given the land that she’s entering. As dreamlike as Marie made Toyland out to be, I thought that the hints of darkness (such as the “pastrycook” scene, as well as the giant with the sweet tooth who demolished a tower of the castle) made it seem like it was teetering on the edge of nightmare.

So what comes next? After reading Katherine’s post, I started thinking about the resolutions of both the episode and the story. The oppositions in both serve to increase the tension, and make us feel uncomfortable about what should happen next (in the case of “Buffy”) or what is actually happening at all (in the case of The Nutcracker). The only difference is that “Buffy” continues and the characters get to work through the issues that “Once More, With Feeling” is about, while The Nutcracker ends without any real sense of resolution. The fact that we get no real sense of what happened in The Nutcracker is the main reason that it is creepy, especially because it is told in such sugary sweet language about how happy and wonderful the ending is.

This is all beside the fact that taking secrets and Buffy’s lack of feeling and broadcasting them in the most emotive and public way possible is just an awesome way for the Scooby gang to realize that they have to deal with their issues.