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

In this essay I at long last want to address the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Once much than than with Feeling (season 6, episode 7). However, I do not want to breast at this episode in isolation from the remainder of the Buffy franchise only rather argue that it exemplifies a certain entertainment strategy that courses through with(predicate) the Buffyverse. Now it seems to me that entertainment is either too often denigrated as a circumstantial ideological formation that produces negative effects of audience passivity as against more overtly challenging texts, or, alternatively, entertainment is celebrated indoors a postmodern theoretical framework that views the multiplicity of pleasures afforded as inherently productive and even oppositional. Alternatively I want to concentrate on entertainment for entertainments sake which is to say as a dialectical subroutine that in Fredric Jamesons terms intermingles wish fulfilment and repression by arousing radica l fantasies in order to contain 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 Century Fox target affect and fans by constructing scenarios that unravel into and exceed audience expectation. I will argue that his blueprint 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 some(prenominal) figuratively and literally run the risk of arousing utopian fantasies that cannot be contained. forwards turning to the musical episode in particular I remember our exposition would benefit from a brief survey of exact approach es to the Buffyverse. The critical material on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in print at to the lowest degree (see here the Slayage online journal), is expanding but currently somewhat limited. However, as a full general rule two tendencies emerge. The first is to treat some self-contained prognosis 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 halt reference to two critical examples. Brian Wall and Michael Zyrd adopt a red master frame of analysis to determine the world historical guinea pig of Buffy.