Furnishing Buffy's House: The Buffyverse and my place in it.
- Leonie Cooper (University of Melbourne)
Space - a personal place
The Bed - a place to dream
Path through spatial form of series using furniture as a clue.
"This Year's Girl" - Buffy and Faith make the bed.
Multi-dimensional Buffyverse where spatial form is 3D
- Not merely engaged by watching the series.
Sunnydale - virtual topography of portals and the Hellmouth.
Slayer as navigator - patrolling boundaries between everyday space and outside space
(Cemeteries as well as borders to other dimensions.)
How do we orient ourselves to the Buffyverse?
Dislocation today.
How do we find a place and therefore an identity in a virtual space?
"Normal Again" - Bed in mental institute - she resists.
Where does Buffy belong?
Increased evidence of her personal space and architecture when Dawn introduced.
Recognition of media to know your place.
Spike shapes thespace of the vampire narrative according to his tastes.
Until - Angelus appears and Spike is restricted to a wheelchair.
Then his crypt - Buffy barges in whenever she wants.
Chip in his head - what is his place in the world?
- needs cash
- shops
- wants romantic attachment
- watches Passions
The viewer as affectively attached to or conceptually mobile through this space.
I found this to be a disappointing and unfocussed lecture with too many metaphors and a lack of a clear point.