In Which There May Never Be Another Buffy

Full Time

by JESSICA FERRI

Buffy The Vampire Slayer
creator Joss Whedon

Stop for a moment and think about the one person you can completely trust. It could be your partner, it could be your best friend, or a sibling, but most of the time, it’s Mom. Mom coming home from work and going straight to fridge to making something for you to eat, Mom consoling you after you get dumped by a jerk. Mom sending you some extra money when you’re unemployed, or you just can’t quite afford that plane ticket to take a much-needed vacation. Mom. She’s practically a superhero.

We were raised by supermoms. Women who had full-time high powered careers and still made time to get married and have kids. The nineties were a reflection of just how inspiring these women were, and there was influx of art and culture about girl power. We wanted to be as powerful as our moms. A dude named Joss Whedon eventually stepped up to the plate to say that he, too, had been inspired by girl power. 'The very first mission statement of the show was the joy of female power: having it, using it, sharing it." The show was Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

We needed a superhero we could relate to. Mom’s problems are a little different than ours. So Buffy’s more like us. Her problems might be bigger than ours, but that’s intentional. She’s the slayer, the chosen one. But she’s also a regular girl. She’s a high school student. She wants to be popular, she wants a driver’s license, a new outfit, and a date to the Prom. But you can’t always get what you want. You can stake as many vampires as you want, but there will always be more. Which is why you’ve got to have a damn good sense of humor.

It's not just the vamps, either. Your mom thinks you're a delinquent when really you've just been saving the world. Then she shacks up with this sketchy guy who turns out to be a homicidal robot you have to throw down the stairs. Your best male friend is a walking penis and somehow manages to become the sex slave of a giant praying mantis. You lose it to your boyfriend who told you he’d love you forever and then when you wake up the next day he’s turned into a total jerk. Anyone can relate to the fact that being a teenage girl just plain sucks.

Thanks to Buffy’s sidekicks, Xander, Willow, and Cordelia, the show’s a downright riot instead of a complete downer. In one episode, where doppelgangers from a different universe invade Sunnydale, Willow gets a load of her vampire alter ego. "That’s me as a vampire? I’m so evil, and skanky . . . and I think I'm kinda gay!" Buffy herself gets some zingers in there, too. See, one of her superpowers is her razor sharp wit. It catches the vamps off-guard right before she stakes them.

When she has to kill The Master in Season 1, he takes a bite out of her and leaves her for dead. Xander revives her just in time, and the Master, in surprise says, “You’re supposed to be dead!” Her response: "I may be dead, but I'm still pretty. Which is more than I can say for you . . . Ew! You have Fruit Punch mouth!" Then she kills him.

Buffy's cult status is largely reliant on it having its own lexicon. Buffy and her buddies practically speak their own language based on Valley-girl talk. Her stake is "Mr. Pointy" the suffix "-age," can be attached to any word, i.e. "spark-age," excitement is defined in saying "it gave me a happy," awkward-after sex encounters are described as "afterness," creepy things give one "the wiggins," and kisses are "smoochies." I could go on.

A countless number of dissertations and linguistic papers exist on Buffy jargon. The language on the show creates an intimacy between the characters and the fans, like a scared secret, or an ironic knowledge, we’re in on the joke. The quality of the writing on Buffy, especially in terms of character and dialogue, equals that of, say, Seinfeld. Except this isn't a show about nothing. It’s a show about power.

For all its silly creepy-crawlies and funny social situations, Buffy at heart is a primer on survival. Everything and anything can go wrong, and it does every single episode. (There are 144 episodes, so that amounts to a lot of shit going down.) Joss Whedon knows exactly when and how to break our hearts. Friends, family, and lovers can disappoint us. Worse than that, they can die, leaving us to fend for ourselves. In the end, you have to be able to count on yourself, to pick yourself up and just keep moving. It's like Mom. When her marriage fell apart, she kept going. She kept food on the table and she took care of us, no matter what. Wonder Woman doesn't give up.

But she does cry — plenty of that over the course of the show. During the last episode of the fifth season, I felt as if someone had drained all the blood from my body because I was so emotionally destroyed. There are moments in this show that will tear your heart out. And the only way you will appreciate them is by watching the entire series, from beginning to end. Buffy’s about building a relationship with its viewers: one built on trust. When Buffy was on the air (1997-2003), I thought it was about time we had a female Christ. Since she’s disappeared, I keep looking for her to be resurrected. Tarantino, with Kill Bill, and most recently, with Shoshanna in Inglourious Basterds, comes close. But ultimately, there’s no one to take her place. I have come to terms with that.

Jessica Ferri is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She blogs here, and you can find her website here.

"Not Giving Up On Love" - Armin Van Buuren ft. Sophie Ellis Baxter (mp3)

"Party Talk" - Craft Spells (mp3)

"Realize" - Colbie Caillat (mp3)

 

In Which Girl Power Found A More Pliable Metaphor

  Mom Coming Home

by JESSICA FERRI

Stop for a moment and think about the one person you can completely trust. It could be your partner, it could be your best friend, or a sibling, but most of the time, it’s Mom. Mom coming home from work and going straight to fridge to making something for you to eat, Mom consoling you after you get dumped by a jerk. Mom sending you some extra money when you’re unemployed, or you just can’t quite afford that plane ticket to take a much-needed vacation. Mom. She’s practically a superhero.

We were raised by supermoms. Women who had full-time high powered careers and still made time to get married and have kids. The nineties were a reflection of just how inspiring these women were, and there was influx of art and culture about girl power. We wanted to be as powerful as our moms. A dude named Joss Whedon eventually stepped up to the plate to say that he, too, had been inspired by girl power. 'The very first mission statement of the show was the joy of female power: having it, using it, sharing it." The show was Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

We needed a superhero we could relate to. Mom’s problems are a little different than ours. So Buffy’s more like us. Her problems might be bigger than ours, but that’s intentional. She’s the slayer, the chosen one. But she’s also a regular girl.

She’s a high school student. She wants to be popular, she wants a driver’s license, a new outfit, and a date to the Prom. But you can’t always get what you want. You can stake as many vampires as you want, but there will always be more. Which is why you’ve got to have a damn good sense of humor.

It's not just the vamps, either. Your mom thinks you're a delinquent when really you've just been saving the world. Then she shacks up with this sketchy guy who turns out to be a homicidal robot you have to throw down the stairs. Your best male friend is a walking penis and somehow manages to become the sex slave of a giant praying mantis. You lose it to your boyfriend who told you he’d love you forever and then when you wake up the next day he’s turned into a total jerk. Anyone can relate to the fact that being a teenage girl just plain sucks.

Thanks to Buffy’s sidekicks, Xander, Willow, and Cordelia, the show’s a downright riot instead of a complete downer. In one episode, where doppelgangers from a different universe invade Sunnydale, Willow gets a load of her vampire alter ego. "That’s me as a vampire? I’m so evil, and skanky . . . and I think I'm kinda gay!" Buffy herself gets some zingers in there, too. See, one of her superpowers is her razor sharp wit. It catches the vamps off-guard right before she stakes them.

When she has to kill The Master in Season 1, he takes a bite out of her and leaves her for dead. Xander revives her just in time, and the Master, in surprise says, “You’re supposed to be dead!” Her response: "I may be dead, but I’m still pretty. Which is more than I can say for you . . . Ew! You have Fruit Punch mouth!" Then she kills him.

Buffy's cult status is largely reliant on it having its own lexicon. Buffy and her buddies practically speak their own language based on Valley-girl talk. Her stake is "Mr. Pointy" the suffix "-age," can be attached to any word, i.e. “spark-age,” excitement is defined in saying "it gave me a happy," awkward-after sex encounters are described as “afterness,” creepy things give one "the wiggins," and kisses are “smoochies.” I could go on.

A countless number of dissertations and linguistic papers exist on Buffy jargon. The language on the show creates an intimacy between the characters and the fans, like a scared secret, or an ironic knowledge, we’re in on the joke. The quality of the writing on Buffy, especially in terms of character and dialogue, equals that of, say, Seinfeld. Except this isn’t a show about nothing. It’s a show about power.

For all its silly creepy-crawlies and funny social situations, Buffy at heart is a primer on survival. Everything and anything can go wrong, and it does every single episode. (There are 144 episodes, so that’s a lot of shit going down.) Joss Whedon knows exactly when and how to break our hearts. Friends, family, and lovers can disappoint us. Worse than that, they can die, leaving us to fend for ourselves. In the end, you have to be able to count on yourself, to pick yourself up and just keep moving. It’s like Mom. When her marriage fell apart, she kept going. She kept food on the table and she took care of us, no matter what. Wonder Woman doesn’t give up.

But she does cry — plenty of that over the course of the show. During the last episode of the fifth season, I felt as if someone had drained all the blood from my body because I was so emotionally destroyed. There are moments in this show that will tear your heart out. And the only way you will appreciate them is by watching the entire series, from beginning to end. This isn’t Lost, don’t worry—Buffy’s about building a relationship with its viewers: one that’s built on trust.

When Buffy was on the air (1997-2003), I thought it was about time we had a female Christ. Since she’s disappeared, I keep looking for her to be resurrected. Tarantino, with Kill Bill, and most recently, with Shoshanna in Inglourious Basterds, comes close. But ultimately, there’s no one to take her place. I’ve come to terms with that. Buffy’s plight, which is about coming to the realization that you can take care of yourself in the face of adversity, continues to inspire me on a daily basis. Life is a battle and only you can find the power inside yourself to fight it. Amen.

Jessica Ferri is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She blogs here.

"Fading Light" — Silk Lung (mp3)

"Random Thoughts" — Silk Lung (mp3)

"I'll Hold On" — Silk Lung (mp3) highly recommended

In Which We Lied We're Already Married

This Is All I Wanted To Bring Home With Me

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Our cinematic present is a rambling brush of signs thick with (or entirely lacking) the proper signifiers. Nothing is subtle, nothing is The Manchurian Candidate, and I'm not referring to the piece of shit remake that consigned Denzel Washington to a future as a subway traffic controller.

There is, however, a film I keep returning to again and again. It is a kind of Rosetta Stone of filmmaking. It would be like making Citizen Kane if you were handed the script of Armageddon. It is an achievement nonpareil.

That film is Simply Irresistible, the irrepressible story of a girl who couldn't cook, but then figured out how. It stars Sarah Michelle Gellar, a young actress currently going through a tough time as she becames too unattractive for her previous roles, and yet not grave enough for anything more serious than The Grudge. She should consider radical plastic surgery to become Christian Bale, because he is in every movie in theaters and is a worse actor than she is in every conceivable way.

Gellar plays Amanda, the inheritor of a small New York restaurant, a failing New York restaurant but a charming New York restaurant. Her mother was a terrific cook, a better than terrific cook, but she is not. This is a premise more inherent to our time than the time the film was released: the golden 1996-1997 period that I pray each day I will be transported back to.

Amanda's life is a sad one. She doesn't even have a phallus to roll around in her, she most likely doesn't even know what a vibrator is. Her best friend is a young African-American sous chef who is notable for causing the decline of the American banking system by borrowing more than he could afford.

Amanda is not in an enviable place. She is a sad story, and she doesn't even have Obama to complain to. Perhaps he could he employ her as part of his plan to make us like socialist Europe and ruin what was great about this country. But it's 1996, and he's selling drugs to community members in Chicago, and Amanda is in a tough spot.

Beyond mere economic troubles, Amanda's character has more problems. Although she has more personality than Jenna Fischer, she's not quite as successful with men who have jobs. Frequently she comes on too strong, talks too much, and frightens away potential suitors.

Then she meets Tom (Sean Patrick Flanery). He's the uber-successful head of a multimillion company, back when there was such a thing. The fate of Tom's entire department store hinges on the opening of a spectacular new restaurant on the top floor of the building, and despite impressive management techniques and really cute outfits, he's not much of a people motivator. It is really a sad thing that Jude Law was not available for this role. Remake?

Tom is taken when we meet him, integrated (via Bluetooth) with a coldblooded woman (Amanda Peet). (This tribute to Saving Silverman is all the more impressive because it occurred before Silverman was even conceived by Lord Satan as an idea for a motion picture.) One night Tom and Amanda find the little restaurant that Amanda works at, and they eat.

Here the adventure takes a fortunate turn, since there is not much that is devoted to food on film. After all, you can't taste it. Sure Nora Ephron might occasionally ruin the life story of Julia Child, but it's altogether more likely that writers and directors doesn't understand the meaning of food.

Not everyone does: just really fat people, and the impoverished third world.

Through the magic of lobster or poverty, Amanda's food comes alive that night. It fills every sense, it consummates love and every other emotion in its texture, smell, and composition. It makes people love her and each other more.

Tom is instantly in love with this vivacious woman, who not only cooks like he's never eaten before, but also in view of the evidence seems capable of bearing his children. And although Tom is your typically strong, oversexed male, or perhaps because he is, he runs from that love.

We must run from love, we think. We don't deserve it, so it must find us in the most roundabout way possible. And for men that fact is never more clear than when a woman is making herself available...and her soup has you floating, literally, on the ceiling.

Yes this is magic food. Amanda is the progeny of a magic lobster, a shellfish Cupid if you will. He believes that she can be in love just as much as she does. In the film's primary subplot, Patricia Clarkson gets her meaty hands all over a fellow executive because he's so smitten with Amanda's macaroons. It's just like how Moses had magic matzoh, but more gentile and less Biblical.

Here comes opening night for Tom's restaurant. He's somehow bullied into taking on Amanda as the chef, and he gets a crisis of confidence. Bucking conventional wisdom in these matters, advised by her bankrupt African-American sidekick, she shows up at Tom's department stores in a super-cute jacket, and makes polite conversation. He is stricken. She is coming on too strong!

On the night of the event, Amanda faces a chef determined to undermine her. She struggles to control her kitchen, can't just be confident in her cooking. You'd think the magic lobster who gave her culinary talent would alert her to his existence, but it's up to her to find her own way. More than nationalist allegory, this is actually the Biblical moment for Amanda, at least through the first course. This is creation, pure and simple.

Tom is so nervous about putting his fate in the one he cares for that he can't eat or watch. When he finally looks, everyone's sobbing into their dinner plates. One of Amanda's vampire-killing tears made its way into the soup, and the collected diners are overcome with the meaning of everything, the fragility of existence. How sad everything looks in this light.

By the time dessert comes around, she has won them over and Tom in the process. He can't imagine not wanting her, the feeling of her hair on his chest, her rising smell, the pitter patter of her feet in the kitchen. Man is a corruptible organism; woman is more pure, prone to the accelaration and decelaration, carving beauty without knowing it.

What in film has ever touched on all these things, and so truly?

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.

"Love Doesn't Last Too Long" — The Weepies (mp3)

"Not Your Year" — The Weepies (mp3)

"Gotta Have You" — The Weepies (mp3)