"Welcome to the Hellmouth" / "Bring on The Night"

[red_satin_doll]

"You're standing at the mouth of Hell. And it's about to open up." *

***
"I'm beyond tired. I'm beyond scared.
I'm standing on the mouth of Hell and it's going to swallow me whole. And it'll choke on me." **

* Joss Whedon
** Marti Noxon & Douglas Petrie

Comments

[red-satin-doll.livejournal.com]

Heh I thought her season 4 wardrobe was a bit too frumpy with the long skirts and shawls,

I actually used to enjoy wearing long skirts with combat boots and peasant blouses in college because I was enjoying playing with clothes as costumes. (And because I had almost no money and combat boots from the Army surplus store were super cheap and durable.) So there are some rather bizarre choices in S4 but I can identify. Maybe it's part of the "Buffy is trying to find her identity as an adult" idea that I was going through. (Or maybe just some bad choices by the costumers.)

but I loved the way she started dressing in seasons 5-7. It felt like it was the first time Buffy started working what I call "regular clothes", jeans, regular tops, and sweaters that you would actually see in real life, as opposed to many of the bizarre outfits they would put her in early on.

I love her costumes in that period as well. So simple and spartan. (Let's face it - the house scene in Smashes is a 1000x hotter because she's entirely covered up, not despite it. And I love how in that scene and in OMWF, she and Spike are actually colored-matched to one another, and yet it somehow doesn't come off as matchy-matchy.)

I think there is something to this thematically as well, though - it's the period when Buffy has to grow up in a hurry; be a surrogate parent to Dawn, leave college and work, etc; it's her period of downward economic mobility. I also associate this as a contrast to Joyce in the early seasons; it used to annoy me that we rarely saw Joyce work, she was always put-together, the house immaculate, etc; nor did we see her at the gallery. She was as idealized as June Cleaver with her pearls in the 1950's; and maybe it was a blind spot on Joss & ME's part, but in hindsight it actually works very well thematically, at least for me; when I was a kid I certainly had a skewed notion of how hard my mom worked or what her life was actually like, even though we are much lower on the economic ladder than Joyce. It wasn't until I moved out of the house - indeed, until I had to drop out of college - that I really appreciated how hard she worked. And once I had to leave college, the era of clothes as "play" disappeared for the most part. I wear jeans and sweatshirts and the skirts and pretty things rarely come out to play.

Of course Buffy has a much nicer wardrobe than I do, but I think there's something similar here? Playtime is over. (There's also the fact that in S6 after Smashed her clothes are very conservative - she uses clothes to hide rather than reveal her body.)

you didn't see Buffy wearing jeans even once during the high school years

I haven't done enough of a rewatch to double-check that; she does wear a rather utilitarian pair of trousers at the end of Ted (like a more fashionable version of cargo pants); and the overalls and dungarees in Ted, Becoming, Anne, Helpless are more symbolic than anything. (Although I think fandom oversimplifies just what they symbolize.)