De gustibus non disputandum est
I’ve always marvelled at the high esteem in which Virginia Postrel is held by so many people apparently possessed of good common sense and above-average intelligence. Today we have two pieces of La Postrel news: Jeff Jarvis notes that she appeared on CNN waving designer toilet-bowl brushes, and in her old rag Reason she praises the hateful and one-dimensional
“The characters are one-dimensional”
Its audience is teenagers. It’s about vampires. Come on. You were expecting depth ? :) People once swore by M.A.S.H. being full of depth and character development, too. It’s tv, not film for crying out loud.
“teenaged girls in America who need to think their absent daddies are bastards”
Name any drama show on TV that doesn’t have as its characters’ motivations a link to their parents. Again, no news there.
I think your review of Buffy is more about how you feel about Postrel than how you feel about the show, and how you feel about Postrel says more about you than it does about her.
Jeff Jarvis is like all the other nerds around here, just trying to get lucky. Here in “The Valley of Despair,” as Richard calls it, young men outnumber young women about five to one. Even not very attractive women here are treated like goddesses.
I didn’t review Buffy, Bryan, I reviewed Postrel’s fawning comments on it. I should have made that more clear, but the idea that anyone can consider Buffy “great art” was too laughable for words.
That seems a little unfair Mr. Bennett. I noticed that when you were installing the aquarium you didn’t settle for a glass box on a TV table. Isn’t that a question of style?
Mainly it’s a question of function, Ms. Gore. To keep a Tang, you need at least 50 gallons, and a tv table can’t handle that.
But the question re: Buffy is whether it’s great art (or even great style,) rather than crude and hateful propaganda. This is where La Postrel and I differ.
I was objecting to your broadside against Ms. Postrel. I know nothing about “Buffy”, have never seen an episode. But surely there is no reason to bend a veneer around furniture when you can do with a lot of two-by-fours?
I was objecting to your broadside against Ms. Postrel. I know nothing about “Buffy”, have never seen an episode. But surely there is no reason to bend a veneer around furniture when you can do with a lot of two-by-fours?
Actually TV shows like Buffy, (Charmed is another one)that show young women using violence to solve all their problems are neither art nor (as I’ve seen mentioned elsewhere) “empowering.”
Why is it OK to beat up your boyfriend, even “accidentally” as Buffy always seemed to do?
Because that’s the fashion these days. It seems women can do anything they jolly well please, including assault and even murder, and they’ve got all this popular culture backing them up. Sheesh!
Actually TV shows like Buffy, (Charmed is another one)that show young women using violence to solve all their problems are neither art nor (as I’ve seen mentioned elsewhere) “empowering.”
Why is it OK to beat up your boyfriend, even “accidentally” as Buffy always seemed to do?
Because that’s the fashion these days. It seems women can do anything they jolly well please, including assault and even murder, and they’ve got all this popular culture backing them up. Sheesh!
Richard,
If you watched reruns for one summer, I don’t think you managed to get the continuity of all nine seasons. Yes, when the show started out, the characters were one-dimensional. But they grew, and grew apart in different ways. Willow got evil, Buffy became a single-mom, sort of. Zander went from puppy boy to surrogate father to a bunch of teenage runaways.
Buffy was never high art, as Postrel seems to imply, but it is certainly a fine example of pop culture and what it can produce.
FX showed two episodes a day five days a week, which is a complete season every two weeks, so I got a pretty good overview of the series starting with “Welcome to the Hell Mouth” continuing to the final season (seven). There was a little zig-zagging in the characters, but I wouldn’t call it development; Willow got evil for a little while ’cause she got hooked on magic, but she shook it off and went back to being a geek. She was gay for a while, too, but not really committed to it. And that whole Dawn thing where she just shows up out of thin air and everybody has complete memories of her so the monks could hide the Key in her was bizarre, as were the recurring evil robots.
So nope, I didn’t see characters develop, they just got older, with the possible exception of Cordelia, but you had to watch Angel to see that. The Giles character was a hate crime against the English, for god sakes.
It was an abysmal show, even by TV standards.