Grey days

[itsallovernow]

So it's been raining off and on here in L.A., which always throws me off. It looks like winter, smells like winter, but it's still not winter. Instead it's damp, everything damp and mildewy and slick. It's curl up in the house kind of weather, highjack the cat, give him some dope so that he'll be purry little heater, laying on my knees while I read.

The other one, the full Siamese, is too much of a freak to be a fun staying at home with kind of cat. But he's beautiful, gorgeous and difficult, and clearly on his first or second life:)

Broke open the Firefly DVD's and can finally share the outrage at Fox (the outrage was there before, but as kind of a secondary collective:) For one thing, had they shown Serenity first, I'd have been a constant fan. And well in the fan of Malcom Reynolds club. The storytelling was rich and slow, and I'm such a sucker for rebellions and freedom fighters:)

I'm retaining the distance to it that Joss Whedon's language tends to provoke in me, but I'm very, very fond of some of the characters. I doubt that I'll ever feel much affection for Inara, or Simon, and River is up for grabs, but Mal, and Jayne. "Pain is scary," Jayne, and Zoe have me charmed for certain. And Kaylee. Once I get past her speech patterns, also charms me with her innocence and love of Serenity.

Language, and the use of it, are so specific for me that I've often felt distanced from the Jossverse characters because of the way it's used. In Buffy, some of the distance came from the fact that the characters are adolescents, and in Angel, the way the characters speak and interact is just to stylized for me. It was one of the reasons that I liked Cordelia in the first few seasons. Her speech patterns were more, I don't know if normal is the right word, but less patterny.

A huge part of my Farscape, X-Files, and West Wing love has to do with how the characters speak, the way their dialogue is expressed and how much they say in Farscape without words, and those moments in X-Files where the dialogue between Mulder and Scully was so rich with undertones, so symbolic and loving without ever saying anything outright. And West Wing, of course, is all about how language is a tool, a thing to be wielded. It defines my Toby and President Bartlet love, my CJ love, it's why, frequently after the first season, Josh annoys me more than endears himself to me. The overstylization of his speech patterns.

The layering of dialects in Firefly works for me. I love the Mandarin, the ease of it, and I think it should have been a clue to the writers that the Chinese worked better than some of the Old West phrasing and created words. I'm not against created words, but they don't sound quite natural in the characters mouths yet, and neither does the "aw shucks, we're just folks" phrasing. For me, at least, it doesn't work. And I'd be very, very happy if Inara didn't talk for the rest of the serious. She's an absurdly beautiful women, but there isn't anything there when she talks, and maybe that was a stylistic choice, but I'm not sure:)

Comments

[stlscape.livejournal.com]

It's interesting to hear you speak of Whedon this way. I'd not been caught up in the Jossverse until after Firefly was cancelled. (I'd only seen bits and pieces of Buffy and Angel, and the last 5 minutes of 2 Firefly episodes plus the second hour of Serenity.)

I (finally) bought the Firefly DVDs, and am now enjoying the show - at a distance. I just can't really warm up to Mal or Zoe (or Simon) because, for me, they don't project a solid enough character while Book, Jayne, Wash, and (to a lesser extent) Kaylee and Inara all do. (River's in a class by herself.) I feel that if I rounded a corner and bumped into Book, I'd stagger back a step or two; if I bumped into Mal or Zoe, I'd walk halfway through them.

I've been trying to figure out why I feel this way about Mal and Zoe, because I expected just the reverse. Guess I'll just have to go back and watch the episodes again from a linguistic point of view. What a chore! ;-)

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

For me, I've always enjoyed the storytelling, the emotions and themes of Joss Whedon's shows, but I've never cared about the characters with the same intensity as other shows I've loved. I'll watch them, like them, love certain episodes, but I never completely adore the characters. I think the language is part of it, but it's probably not the whole reason:)