The Entertainment Value of a Buffy the Vampire Episode :: Buffy Vampire Slayer Essays

In this essay I ultimately want to speech communication the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Once more than(prenominal) with Feeling (season 6, episode 7). However, I do not want to look at this episode in isolation from the remainder of the Buffy franchise but rather argue that it exemplifies a certain pastime strategy that courses through the Buffyverse. Now it seems to me that entertainment is either too often denigrated as a specific ideological formation that produces negative effects of audience passivity as against more overtly challenging texts, or, alternatively, entertainment is celebrated within a postmodern theoretical framework that views the multiplicity of pleasures afforded as inherently productive and even oppositional. Alternatively I want to take on entertainment for entertainments sake which is to say as a dialectical operation that in Fredric Jamesons terms intermingles wish fulfilment and repression by arousing radical fantasies in order to con tain them (Jameson, 1990 25). In order to analyse this mechanism I will concentrate less on consumers and ideology (that assumes unilateral transmission) and more on fans and affect (that inscribes a dialectical procedure into reception). What seems to me to be of specific interest therefore is the manner in which Joss Whedon, Marti Noxon and the other writers/directors working on Buffy for Twentieth ampere-second Fox target affect and fans by constructing scenarios that feed into and exceed audience expectation. I will argue that his formula culminates in the episode Once More With Feeling that ventures beyond Jamesons dialectical formula in that it appears to wilfully play with wish fulfilment/invocation that both figuratively and literally run the attempt of arousing utopian fantasies that cannot be contained. Before turning to the musical episode in particular I believe our exposition would benefit from a brief keep up of critical approaches to the Buffyverse. The critical ma terial on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in print at least (see here the Slayage online journal), is expanding but currently somewhat limited. However, as a general rule two tendencies emerge. The first is to treat some self-contained aspect of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as an ideological work. Such analyses concentrate upon the encoded more or less implicitly pre-determined messages that the text transmits. Certainly some ideological responses are definitely triggered by Buffy and I will briefly make citation to two critical examples. Brian Wall and Michael Zyrd adopt a Marxist master frame of analysis to determine the world historical content of Buffy.