The Body

[Updated May 1, 2013]

There’s a lot of television I’ve never seen, so I can’t say The Body is the very best episode of any show ever. I can’t even say that it’s the very best episode of Buffy, because it has close competition (IMO) from Passion and OMWF. It’s a real tribute to the show, in fact, that an episode as incredibly good as The Body can have competition for “best” and that still others are nearly as good. What I can say is that The Body has to be on a very short list among the greatest television episodes of all time.

It’s also among the hardest to re-watch – viscerally painful and raw. No matter how often I see it, I find myself tearing up during at least 4 scenes (“Mom. Mommy?”; “We’re not supposed to move the body.”; Dawn’s meltdown; Anya’s monologue). The complete absence of background music heightens the effect. So does the absence of metaphor. In a show devoted to metaphor, the very lack of it here emphasizes the realism and makes the events that much harsher. From Joss’s commentary:

“And so what appears to many people as a formal exercise, no music, scenes that take up almost the entire act, without end, is all done for a very specific purpose, which is to put you in the moment, that moment of dumbfoundedness, that airlessness of losing somebody.”

The Body is so powerful and so well done that there isn’t much to offer by way of commentary. I’ll just make a couple of points.

I’ve said many times before that I believe the school lessons always relate to the episode in some way. The art lesson was to draw “negative space”:

TEACHER: Okay. Remember, we're not ... drawing the object.

TEACHER: We're drawing ... the negative space ... around the object.

I think Joss uses Joyce’s body as the object and draws the negative space around it throughout the episode. He notes in his commentary that every act begins with Joyce’s body as the focus of the camera. We then see the way the events surrounding it serve to define it. The scene in which Dawn breaks down is a smaller example of drawing negative space within a single scene.

Groovypants made a great point in comments: “The one thing that really hit me that I never noticed before is that the first thing Anya says to Buffy is "I *wish* that Joyce hadn't died." It's like, for a thousand years, wishes had made things happen for Anya and now that she doesn't have that anymore, she has no way to actually deal with anything serious, but she says the wish anyway because it’s the literally only thing she knows.”

Also in comments, deidre asked whether I thought the vampire in the morgue was distracting. Here’s my response:

“I remember thinking on first watch that it was kind of distracting. Joss explains it in his commentary like this:

"But the idea of the vampire is that it is an intrusion, it does belong here the way Tara finds herself the only one sitting with Buffy and not feeling like she belonged. But she actually she had something to offer. But life goes on, and on BtVS, that means horrible things happen.

And this fight was done differently than any other fight I've done before. I made it as much of a gross wrestling match as I could, you know, hands in the face, and of course, pulling the sheet off of Joyce, in the worst way possible. But rather than a great cool kickboxy fight I made this like a genuine struggle. I wanted to stress the reality of it."

I get what he's saying, even though the scene did pull me out of the moment, so to speak, at first. Now I accept it as part of the episode. It's kind of like sitting down to deal with the bills after your mother dies -- a grinding reminder that life doesn't stand still.”

I should add that my metaphorical reading of the series, Buffy slays vampires in the course of growing up. Dealing with her mother's death is, of course, a major step in forcing her to adopt an adult role.

The very last scene – Dawn with her finger poised like that of God in the Sistine Chapel – had some fans speculating that her “keyness” would enable her to bring Joyce back to life. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that this is not the case. Here’s Joss’s comment:

“The fact of death being physically real and physically unreal is expressed here in the last shot after Dawn says those words, words that cannot be answered by anybody, and reaches out to touch her mother in a show that's all about physicality. This girl needs to know, to understand. But never touches her. And that was done very specifically. And some people were like "oh that means next week Dawn's going to heal her with her key powers!" and I was like what show were you watching? It meant - we want to touch it, but it isn't there. And to go out just before she touches it was just to express that, to express what I've been talking about the whole way. There is no resolution there is no ending, there is no lesson, there's just death.”

Trivia notes: (1) Joss had Joyce’s death planned far in advance. He told Kristine Sutherland before S4 began that he would kill her character in S5. (2) Joyce died of an aneurysm. Compare this line from the opening episode of S4, The Freshman, which Joss wrote: “Buffy: Can't wait till mom gets the bill for these books, I hope it's a funny aneurysm.” (3) Joss will work again with the “negative space” theme in the Firefly episode Objects in Space.  (4) This episode is the first time we’re shown Willow and Tara kissing. Joss fought a long battle with the censors over this issue, and even threatened to quit if they cut this scene. (5) The sentence “strong like an Amazon” comes from the song “Amazons” by Phranc. Joss liked the song. (6) Xander mentioned Glory’s threat to come after Buffy’s friends and family, which Glory made in Checkpoint. (7) Joss’s fascination with the Avengers appears again in Xander’s line “the Avengers gotta get with the assembling”.  (8) Myles McNutt had a terrific review of the episode which you can read at http://cultural-learnings.com/2010/08/06/cultural-catchup-project-the-body-buffy-the-vampire-slayer/  (9) If you’re interested in technical stuff, this description by Joss of the scene when Buffy tries to resuscitate her mother may interest you:

“Now this shot this is one long take and it bears watching exactly how long it is especially because Alan Houston the camera man had his camera on his shoulder the whole time and was running around. It wasn't a steady cam. He had no harness because I wanted the urgency of handheld. So he kept recreating frames, recreating frames. This is a very difficult thing to do, kneeling down, getting up. It was an extraordinary piece of camera work, and of course, an extraordinary piece of acting from Sarah, where I made her do this about seven times. To go from the extremity of first finding her, the helplessness of not knowing what to do, all of the things that Sarah had to go through in this, she had to go through many many times. And you know, every take was extraordinary.”