BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, 5.16: THE BODY (w/d: Joss Whedon) *****

Reviewed: December 16th, 2003

Spoilers.

Any discerning viewer is wary of Very Special gimmick episodes ("Tonight on February sweeps... the death of Buffy's mother!"), but Joss Whedon's "The Body" eschews traditional melodrama for a quietly heartbreaking look at the absurdity of death. Shrouded in a cloud of haunting silences (most Buffy episodes use over twenty minutes of score, but "The Body" has none), Whedon recognizes that quotidian tragedy is both surreal (like watching something stoned, dreamy shots are held a few beats too long and framings are gently skewed towards off-kilter symmetry) and mundane (e.g. being uncertain what to wear to a morgue or getting a parking ticket after rushing to mourn). Whedon also acknowledges the central paradox of our loved ones' deaths: virtually nothing has changed -- the vast, oblivious world marches on, entirely unsympathetic to your plight (people will still tease you in school; you punch a whole through a drywall, your bloody hand will still get stuck; you double park, you'll still get a ticket; their body still exists, but where's their mind?). Terminally brief flash-forwards to what might have been -- happier, alternative fates now lost forever -- act as punctuation marks, capturing our inevitably doomed longing to transcend death; Anya's ferocious rant (delivered by a searing Emma Caulfield) about how nonsensical -- how stupid -- mortality is, marks one of the most potent summations of what it means to be human that I've ever seen. What television will always have over cinema is history: after spending years with these characters, a simple cut to Xander and Anya, driving in a grief-stricken hush, moved me to tears. This is an episode that breaths in deep gasps and finds poetry in inappropriately naked spaces: palpable unease seems to nullify tangibles, as the crushing weight of a vacuous corpse almost suffocates the living.

Return home.