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

In this essay I ultimately involve to address the musical fortune of Buffy the vampire Slayer, Once More with emotional state (season 6, episode 7). However, I do not want to look at this episode in isolation from the remainder of the Buffy franchise but kinda argue that it exemplifies a certain entertainment strategy that courses through the Buffyverse. presently it seems to me that entertainment is either too often denigrated as a special(prenominal) 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 in presentntly fruitful and even oppositional. Alternatively I want to concentrate 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 devote to contain them (Jameson, 1990 25). In order to analyse this mechanism I impart 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 following therefore is the manner in which Joss Whedon, Marti Noxon and the other writers/directors working on Buffy for ordinal Century Fox target affect and fans by constructing scenarios that feed into and crown 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 risk of arousing utopian fantasies that cannot be contained. Before bout to the musical episode in particular I believe our expounding would benefit from a brief survey of critical approaches to the Buffyverse. The critic al textile 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 incur 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 ar definitely triggered by Buffy and I will briefly make deferred payment to two critical examples. Brian Wall and Michael Zyrd adopt a Marxist arrive at frame of analysis to determine the world historical content of Buffy.