Irving the Vampire Slayer

[scarfman]

Irving Thalberg, the creative and business genius behind MGM Studios when the Marx Brothers were first there, had this analogy for screenwriting to a football game. A good story is like a football game when the home team slugs away at their opponents for most of four quarters and winds up six points down, without possession, on their own twenty-five yard line, at the two-minute warning; and then intercepts for a ninety-yard touchdown run and an extra point scored with a kick just before the gun. Joss Whedon seems to believe in the same plan, and it got on my nerves.

The fourth-season premiere of BVS was when I identified the trope: Buffy gets smacked down by the world and her friends in act one, Buffy gets smacked down by the world and her friends in act two, Buffy gets smacked down by the world and her friends in act three, Buffy gets ready to throw in the towel in act four, Buffy gets mad and kicks ass in act five. People argued with me about the episode; "That's what it's like when you go off to college. In high school you're used to having been top of the pecking order and Somebody Special, and then you go off to college and you're nobody." That's true, I remember it¹; but the episode still represented a formula I'd gotten my fill of². Notable later instances of this formula include the one when Giles got turned into a demon, and the one when the Watchers' Council came to test Buffy whether she was worthy to learn what they knew about Glory³.

I recently concluded that where season seven of BVS fails for me is that it's the same formula dragged out across the whole season.

¹ It may be why I only lasted at Northwestern a year.

² Same as I despised The Matrix because, and only because, I'd hit my tolerance point for adventure films where all the cast wears black leather. I've channel-flipped past The Matrix once or twice since then and I think I'd quite like it now if I saw it straight through.

³ One of those, though now I forget which, was even such a good execution of the formula that I enjoyed the episode before I noticed the formula was back.

Comments

[ladyrutile.livejournal.com]

I like BVS, overall, but I haven't been able to watch more than part of an episode since I watched it once with someone who kept pointing out how much the characters whine. And they do, all of them.

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

Wheedon writes soap opera- plain and simple.

I've never been able to stand -any- of his material.

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

Lois McMaster Bujold has a similar formula, thus:

* The protagonist's life is destroyed- often by his or her own doing.

* The protagonist seeks to rebuild.

* The protagonist falls into a strange and incredibly dangerous situation and rises to the occasion, accomplishing miraculous things and ending a stronger person for the experience.

This doesn't completely parallel what you cite, but it has my attention for two reasons: first, Bujold likes to REALLY smash her leads down before rebuilding; second, the pattern fits a LOT of her works.

[scarfman]

That's a little more Campbellian than what I saw on BVS, I think. Or at least a little more balanced. In the Whedon formula, the character abuse comes from outside sources, i.e. despite the hero(ine)'s actions rather than as a consequence as you observe (sometimes) of Bujold. And it goes on for the majority of the screentime, before the hero(ine) gets fed up or inspired and seriously starts punching back. A friend of mine obsrved of the Sandra Bullock movie The Net that ordinarily he likes stories about the little guy who gets victimized until she gets mad and clever and turns the tables around on the bullies, but in this one she took too long to turn the tables. At least as you describe it, the Bujold formula has a better ratio of losing to fighting than the Whedon formula.