Joss Whedon: The Biography Page 23

  Joss crafted the episode’s songs over the course of six months, with much of his work taking shape during a month-long vacation at Joss and Kai’s vacation home in Cape Cod. Joss had taken pains to figure out all of his actors’ musical ranges before he and Kai left; he had the foyer set up as a recording studio and used all of the other resources at his disposal. “I was basically his slave,” Kai laughs. “I had nothing creatively to do with it except that he bossed me around because I was the only person who would sing, the only girl, because we were on vacation. He’d come downstairs and say, ‘OK, I need you to do this part,’ and I’d respond, ‘OK, but can I finish the dishes?’ He’s like, ‘No.’”

  At one point, they had dinner plans with Kai’s sister. “We were going to go out, and we couldn’t go until I got this thing right. And I couldn’t get it right. I went out to the carriage house,” Kai recounts. “Because I was kind of shy too. I never sang in school. I’d just sing in the shower. But he needed me, and so it was kind of wonderful to have someone so specifically need you and push you to be better than you ever thought you could be. It was hard, but we had a blast. It was the only thing that we ever really did where he was like the boss of me, and I loved it. I loved it. I was so happy to help him, but I felt … I felt really proud of the work that he did.”

  Once the songs were locked, they created a demo of the two of them singing all the parts. “We listened to that over and over and over. It was so funny—we were obsessed with it. He always says it’s the original soundtrack.” Joss had created songs in a variety of different musical styles. For instance, Buffy’s first number, “Going Through the Motions,” was heavily influenced by “Part of Your World,” The Little Mermaid’s version of the traditional Disney “I want” number, which Joss had rejected as too straightforwardly emotional to include in his earlier project Toy Story. In this episode, however, it seemed perfectly appropriate to start things off with a celebration of the “I want” trope—Buffy fights demons as she sings about the secrets that she’s been keeping: “I can’t even see / If this is really me / And I just want to be / Alive.”

  Joss sent the finished songs out to the cast. Tony Head received a CD in the mail, labeled simply ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING. “I started to listen and went, ‘Oh my God, it’s the musical!’ And [my partner] Sarah said, ‘This is really quite good!’ and I said, ‘It is!’” Head excitedly remembers. “It was like, ‘Bloody hell, this is viable!’”

  Not everyone was as positive. On set, James Marsters found a tape waiting for him instead of the new script that he was expecting. “It’s obvious now that they were good songs but the thing was Joss and his wife Kai, they don’t sing very well. And they don’t play piano very well. The songs sounded really cheesy and horrible. Absolutely horrible,” he said. “I remember coming out of my trailer, blinking in the sunshine and seeing the other cast members coming out of theirs with the same looks on their faces because they had been listening to their cassettes. Everyone was completely confused. There was this period of about four days where everyone realized this was the new episode and we were expected to perform these songs in front of the camera and freaking out.”

  Several of the cast members were so terrified that they tried to get out of the episode. It was a huge artistic risk, and they feared that if it failed, it would ruin their careers. But Joss was firm that the musical was going to happen and they all were going to be in it—they were under contract. “At that point the cast knuckled down and really started to make it work. We stopped complaining and really just married to the material,” Marsters said. “As an artist you want to leap off the cliff and once you leap you better start flapping because there are only two possibilities, you are going to fly or you are going to splat.”

  The latter outcome may have seemed more likely to some of Marsters’s castmates, who unlike him hadn’t done much singing before. Several of them, including Alyson Hannigan, would have greatly reduced singing roles, but as the star, Sarah Michelle Gellar had no choice but to be front and center. At first she wanted a voice double to handle her part, but she changed her mind once she realized how important the songs were to her character’s arc. “I basically started to cry and said, ‘You mean someone else is going to do my big emotional turning point for the season?’” she recalled.

  To get up to speed, Gellar and the rest of the cast trained with voice coaches for three months; Gellar herself had two vocal trainers. “It took something like 19 hours of singing and 17 hours of dancing in between shooting four other episodes,” she said. “I hated every moment of it.” Ultimately, however, she deemed the effort “an incredible experience”: “I’m glad I did it. And I never want to do it again.”

  On the other hand, Head, a veteran of several musicals, would have happily worked on the episode for several more months. “I was rather sad in the recording process,” he recalls. “Knocked mine out relatively quickly then hung around like the saddest ligger while other people came around to do theirs, because I loved being in the studio: ‘Any help? Can I help?’ ‘No thanks, Anthony! That’s enough! You can go!’ ‘Well, I haven’t got anywhere to go, particularly!’”

  During shooting on “Once More, with Feeling,” Joss found himself exasperated by something related to neither music nor dancing. A scene called for Dawn to pour her books out of her bag, and the props department showed up with a Louis Vuitton purse. Joss was appalled at their choice of accessory for the teen.

  Tim Minear explains, “He has exquisite taste, and by that I mean everything from culinary taste to art to music.” And yet, “Joss is a fourteen-year-old girl who wears his heart in his purple clear Hello Kitty backpack. I think he’d be the first to admit it.”

  Joss wants to clear up a popular misconception about his backpack: “It wasn’t Hello Kitty”—though it was purple. He had it for years, and every time it would fall apart again, he’d bring it to the wardrobe department to sew back together. Which is why the bag was in good shape to step in and play Dawn’s own in the episode.

  Worries about the musical started to abate when Joss gave the cast a first look at the footage. He wheeled a television onto the set to show them his first cut of Xander’s number. “At that point we were overjoyed because it was brilliant,” Marsters said. “We went from the depths of despair to the heights of self-pride in eight days.”

  But one question remained: how the audience would respond to it. It was certainly a risk—producing an episode full of all-original songs by someone who’d never written a musical before, married to a storyline that represented a crucial turning point in the ongoing narrative of the season. If it worked, Joss would be praised for his creativity and skill in brand-new fields. If it didn’t, it would be a high-profile failure that gave credence to the WB’s decision to cancel the series.

  Fortunately, the episode was well-received by audiences and critics, with reviews noting that the characters stayed true to themselves even within the musical format. Joss’s careful work to justify the musical conceit had paid off. To Marti Noxon, this was not an unprecedented feat but merely the latest manifestation of the basic principles Joss and his writers relied upon to craft every episode. “Being able to navigate the swing from real to hyperreal, without showing the wires and the pulleys,” she says, “it’s being able to keep a groundedness in this hyperreal world so people feel like, ‘God I’m watching something that’s really that feels emotionally very real to me.’ To me that was always the song we were singing: ‘Monster, monster, monster, joke, joke, joke, now we’re going for the jugular.’ While you’re distracted we’re going to build something that’s actually going to make you feel something.”

  The musical wasn’t without its critics, though. At Salon, Stephanie Zacharek wrote that “the songs were only half-memorable at best, and the singing ability of the show’s regular cast ranged only from the fairly good to the not so great.” And the point on which the episode’s entire plot hinges—the revelation that Xander deliberately summoned the musical
demon to ensure that he and his fiancée, Anya, would have a “happy ending”—was criticized as out of character for a guy who learned in previous episodes that messing with magic leads to bad things like a mob chasing him down and Buffy turning into a rat.

  These few weak points couldn’t solely be blamed when the episode failed to garner Joss a second Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. In yet another snub by the Television Academy, the nomination ballots sent out to Emmy voters mistakenly omitted it from consideration in the writing category, and the academy had to send out follow-up postcards reminding voters of its eligibility. The episode did receive a nomination for Outstanding Music Direction, though it failed to win. It was also nominated for a Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award and a Best Script Nebula Award, both given for excellence in science fiction and fantasy writing.

  Despite the high of Joss’s special episode, many fans found other aspects of Buffy’s sixth season to be problematic—particularly the bleak turn taken in several beloved characters’ storylines. “Once More, with Feeling” ends with a typical musical moment: Buffy and her onetime mortal enemy Spike sharing a passionate kiss as the music swells. But it’s a moment that sends Buffy on a progressive downward spiral. In earlier episodes of the season, Spike served as her confidant of sorts, the only one in whom she could confide that she’d been pulled out of heaven. After their kiss, he becomes a cruel tempter instead, pushing her into acts of debauchery and seeking to widen the growing gulf between her and her friends. Yet Buffy is drawn to him, their connection soon manifesting in over-the-top sex scenes that are quite graphic for a network television series. In one episode, the two have emotionless sex next to the Dumpster outside the fast-food restaurant where Buffy works.

  Many viewers recoiled at these developments, feeling that the writers were making dramatic alterations in the characters without first providing a strong, believable foundation for those changes. They felt similarly about the character of Willow, who over the course of the sixth season becomes increasingly reliant on dark magic. While some were receptive to the idea that Willow might want to escape her shy, awkward past by embracing the power that dark magic gave her, they disagreed with the writers’ choice to frame her obsession instead as a physical addiction to magic, as if she were a drug addict jonesing for a fix.

  Fans knew that Joss was spending much of his time developing his new Fox series, so they laid much of the blame for the failings of the season at the feet of Marti Noxon. “There are websites devoted to how I ruined Buffy in season six,” she says. She had been a strong advocate of darker storylines—including the Spike/Buffy relationship—and she had become more involved in the production aspects of the series that Joss no longer had time for. But the season, she says, followed the creative direction Joss laid out. “The reports of his demise in season six were greatly exaggerated.”

  In fact, not only did she never take over full creative control of the series, she says, “to be honest, I didn’t really want it. It belongs to him, and I’m the last person who wants to, like, ruin it. I wasn’t waiting in the wings for my opportunity. I was like, ‘Thank God Joss is in control.’ I was scared to death.”

  The complaints about the season, however, were not without merit. Even Sarah Michelle Gellar had concerns about the well-being of her alter ego. She was not known to try to control the story direction for her character, so when she did have an opinion it mattered more. Gellar told Noxon that she felt that Buffy was losing her “hero-ness” and losing her way. “It wasn’t who Buffy was, or why people loved her. You don’t want to see that dark heroine; you don’t want to see her punishing herself,” Gellar told Entertainment Weekly. “It didn’t feel like the character that I loved.”

  Gellar singled out the episode “Dead Things” as her least favorite of the series. On a rare night off from all her responsibilities, Buffy joins her friends at the Bronze. She makes her way up to the balcony for a quiet moment alone and is soon joined by Spike, who physically takes her from behind and forces her to watch her friends down below as they have sex.

  “I really thought that was out of character. And I didn’t like what it stood for,” she said. “Joss always explained that season as being about your 20s, where you’re not a kid anymore, but you don’t know what you want to do [with your life]. He always said that I didn’t understand … because I’ve always known what I wanted to do, and I didn’t have that confusion, [that] dark, depressive period. But I think the heart of the show lies in the humor of the drama. I felt like Buffy’s spirit was missing [in the sixth season].”

  Joss’s comment seems dismissive of Gellar, someone who had lived and breathed the television Buffy for almost as long as he had. It is certainly true that Gellar never had to kill her boyfriend, blow up her high school, or return to a miserable life on Earth after being pulled from heaven, but she brought Buffy through all those emotional journeys believably. Once again, it feels as if the writers were so determined to tell a story about a young woman’s descent into extreme depression and self-abuse that they didn’t fully consider the world or the characters they were telling it in.

  In fact, all of “Dead Things” seems like a huge disconnect from the positive and empowering emotional core for which Buffy is known. Its storylines seem to smash away at the morals of the series minute by minute: The Trio, the three nerdy college students who serve as the season’s previously comic Big Bads, develop a “cerebral dampener” that removes its target’s free will. They then go out to pick up women to turn into sex slaves. Buffy beats Spike to a bloody pulp while railing at him for being evil and soulless. And finally Warren, the leader of the Trio, kills his ex-girlfriend when the “dampener” effects begin to fade and she became aware that they’re attempting to rape her. The Trio get away with the murder, although their attempt to pin it on Buffy fails.

  As the season proceeded in this grim fashion, online fandom responded with overwhelming disapproval. “That’s where having feedback from the fans can be really useful—when you start to see a kind of consensus that stays consistent through episodes,” Noxon says. “Certainly there are times when you just have to say, ‘We know you don’t like this, but we’ve got a plan, don’t worry.’ There are often episodes where you’re like, ‘This is the medicine. You’re not going to like it, but it’s good for you.’” But there was enough of a critical groundswell from fans who loved the show and had supported it for six years that, combined with Gellar’s concerns, convinced Joss that they needed to course-correct a bit. “A little less descending,” Noxon says. “A little more ascending.”

  Before it began ascending, however, the show would hit rock bottom in many ways, with “Seeing Red,” the nineteenth episode out of twenty-two. In an infamous scene set in Buffy’s bathroom, Buffy returns from a rough night of patrolling and is looking to relax with a long soak. Spike shows up uninvited, and in a wildly misguided attempt to convince her that she does in fact love him, he overpowers Buffy and attempts to rape her. Though wounded, she fights him off, ending their battle by kicking him through a wall. He is immediately horrified and apologetic, but Buffy insists that the only reason he halted his attack was because she had the physical strength to stop him.

  It is a painful scene to watch—and it was a painful scene to portray. James Marsters has called it the worst day of his professional career, one of the hardest things he ever had to do and something he will never do again. “The truth is the writers on Buffy were being incredibly brave,” Marsters said. “Joss was asking each of them to come up with their most painful day, their most humiliating day, the day that they made the biggest fools of themselves or the day they hurt someone else the most, and then put a patina of fangs and blood over that. Basically that’s why I think the series is so delightful, because of the bravery of the writers on that score.” But even though he understood why the writers did it, “I still think it was a mistake.”

  Several writers have insisted that the attack was crucial to Spike’s e
motional arc. “Spike’s a villain,” Noxon says. “At his core he is bad, let’s not forget.” Jane Espenson saw the attempted rape as the impetus for Spike to look at himself and truly see the demon inside, and then make a choice of what to do—which is to search for a way to restore his own soul and become a man worthy of Buffy.

  To be sure, Spike’s arc needed a vivid climax to push him onto such a dramatic new path. But it’s questionable that it needed to be the attempted rape of the series’ main character. Joss and his writers, ordinarily so devoted to the “Buffy of it,” seemed to have subordinated her role in these events to the needs of a supporting character’s storyline. And in doing so, they reframed the Buffy/Spike relationship, changing the hero of their story from a willing if conflicted participant in their sexual exploration into a mere victim. It comes off as a cheap and narratively inept way to start the next chapter in Spike’s life.

  In seven seasons, “Seeing Red” is one of Buffy’s most controversial episodes, if not the most controversial. It also angered viewers because at the very end, Trio leader Warren shoots and kills Willow’s girlfriend, Tara. Fans were devastated and furious that Joss had allowed such a groundbreaking, beloved example of a happy lesbian couple on television to come to such a brutal end—after they sent him a toaster to thank him for it! Angry viewers claimed that Buffy had fallen into the “dead lesbian cliché,” by which TV series often introduced lesbian characters just so they could be killed off. As with the attempted rape, the writers insisted that Tara’s death was necessary to the larger story—she needed to die so that Willow would be motivated by grief to return to dark magic and go on a murderous rampage, setting her up as an antagonist for Buffy in the final episodes of the season.