Slayage: Day 1 recaplet

Although this is the end of the second (full) day of the Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses, I've found a bit of time where I'm finally able to sit down and give a short recap of the fun we had on Day 1.

As I mentioned in the prior blog post, we kicked off with a keynote by Janet K. Halfyard on the music, primarily that of Christophe Beck, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  In a previous-previous post, I made note of how excited I was to see her presentation as I'm a great big film score nerd and I'm a fan of her earlier writing on Danny Elfman.  Personal geekdom aside, Halfyard's keynote was wonderful and illuminating.  If the paper becomes available on Slayage's website, I will definitely post it here and recommend that every single person who reads this to go check it out.  These are some of the highlights that I picked up and scribbled into my notebook:

The music of Buffy, specifically the music written by Christophe Beck, has seven moods, or as Halfyard described it, Buffy's Seven Scoring Dwarves:

• Fighty
• Scary
• Creepy
• Ominous
• Quirky
• Schemey
• Mopey

From here, she goes on to speak about the falling sixth "Buffy-Angel love theme," which is not really a love theme at all, it turns out.  It could be more accurately called the "Buffy-Angel loss theme."  It is music that allows us to experience Buffy's point of view and experience her sense of longing and loss.  A variation of this theme is introduced with Giles and Jenny Calendar in the second season episode "Passion."  It's an aural cue to the audience/listener that this relationship is doomed, beginning with love and ending with loss.  The two themes are so well counterparted that they can be layered and played on top of one another.

Okay, now, this is where it got brilliant.  Halfyard then brought up a new theme introduced in Season 3 aptly named "This Is What Is Left."  It first appears in "Beauty and the Beasts" when Buffy recalls her relationship with Angel.  This four note motif replaces the "loss theme" in regards to Buffy's point of view of Angel.  This is the cool part: "This Is What Is Left" is the "loss theme" minus the second notes in the A/B parts of the theme.  Something is taken away and it becomes something new.  "This is what is left."  At this point, I decided that I was in love with the presentation.  I could go on and on and on about this because I have, like, four pages of notes and an audio recording, but I need to move on to the remainder of the conference.

The first panel I attended was the "Dollhouse I" section.  This had a surprise.  My favorite presentation here was not the one I expected to like the best.  Mike Starr's "Becoming Echo: Deterritorializing the Dollhouse" was a pleasant surprise.  Now, I'm not really big on philosophy.  My worst grades in college?  Philosophy.  I came into this with no idea who this Gilles Deleuze dude was.  So, the reason I  enjoyed this presentation so much was because I really did learn something; I took something away from it that I didn't know before entering that room.  He spoke of the Dolls in the context of "The Body Without Organs" and of "The Body as Assemblage" (the body is a machine and weapons or 'the chair' are peripherals that affect the assemblage).  I'm not even going to be able to coherently summarize this, but that would be another presentation that I'd recommend looking for if these are posted in the future.

I found all three presentations in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer panel very interesting, and of course I was immediately drawn to Neil Lerner's musical comparison of the first and final 150 seconds of the series.  Walter Murphy vs. Robert Duncan.  "Goodness gracious!"  I also enjoyed Vivien Burr's study of "Buffy as Role Model" in which she presented her findings in interviewing five women about their experiences in watching the program and how it made them feel. These women felt on a personal level that Buffy presented a mode of support and validation, and that they admired Buffy's ability to be both femme and powerful -- they felt the two characteristics didn't have to be mutually exclusive.

I wasn't too sure how much I'd enjoy Ensley F. Guffey's "Buffy as General" presentation, as I'm not so much a fan of the military genre.  However, this was another pleasant surprise for me.  He used John Keegan's Five Imperatives of Command (from The Mask of Command) to examine Buffy Summers's success as a military commander: Kinship, prescription, sanction, action, and example.  He also brought in elements of Sun-tzu's The Art of War ("Know the enemy and yourself...").  All in all, it doesn't seem like Buffy, often the front line fighter with a tendency to go off from her 'army,' isn't an ideal general.  However, Guffey concluded, "Buffy may have to learn the hard way, but she does learn."

In the Angel panel, Lilah Morgan's professionalism was compared with that of the 1930s screwball comedy career girl, Angel's zero tolerance policy during his tenure at Wolfram & Hart was scrutinized, and Joss Whedon's direction of "Waiting in the Wings" (and his indulgence of favorite actors) was given a closer look.  Then we explored Dollhouse again, with a panel completely devoted to Memory in the series.  I was especially impressed with "Identity in Dollhouse" by Laura ten Thije Boonkkamp and Katie Whitlock's "Imprinting Gender: The Collision of Memory and Body in Dollhouse."  Whitlock posed the question, "Is there really a blank state when the gendered body exists?"  She also brought up the problematic Kikki/Terry swap from "Belle Chose," when the Kikki imprint gets flip-flopped into Victor's body but without any obvious realization of, "Hey!  My tits are gone and I'm in really dorky clothes now."  Honestly, Kikki would at least notice the dorky clothes.  One of our first scenes with her involves shopping, for goodness (gracious!) sake.  Although the presentation was incomplete, the investigation and discussion of the gendered body in Dollhouse was fascinating.

The evening's entertainment included a hilarious debate by Matthew Pateman and Nikki Stafford on "the tragi-comic/comic-tragic methods of miscommunication in Buffy."  Highlights were academic technobabble, "What the face," and "WIKIPEDIA."  This was followed by a "Once More With Feeling" sing-along which, I'm sure to the chagrin of many, I recorded.  I do, however, wish they did a Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog sing-along instead (but that's just a dorky personal preference).

And there you have it.  My massive and yet totally abridged recaplet of the first full day of the Slayage conference as I experienced it.  I took a huge amount of notes and have audio recordings of most of the presentations, so it was difficult to cut this down to a blog-sized bite.