Cordelia’s Arc
May 28th, 2003
In the midst of some (spoiler-filled for UK terrestrial TV viewers) comments on recent developments in the Buffyverse, this remark from Joss Whedon casts Cordelia Chase’s character arc in Buffy and Angel in a whole new light:
I once said that I finally got to tell the story of Buffy that I tried to tell in the movie, and I did it with Cordelia. Which was the story of someone who was completely ditzy and self-involved becoming kind of heroic. But the way the series was different from the movie was that I didn’t know where you go from there.
I don’t think the correlation is quite as neat as all that, since part of Buffy’s burden from day one was that she had to deal with being a superhero. Cordelia’s first few years were essentially a story about a perfectly normal young woman living in a very strange town and falling in with some odd friends, and it was only halfway through her story that she got some powers of her own to deal with. Which is not to say that Cordelia-as-movie-Buffy isn’t an interesting way to think about the character’s development.
Just think, in a parallel universe where Sarah Michelle Gellar got the part she originally auditioned for, it’d be her performance as Cordelia Chase we’d be talking about now. But then, in that universe we might not have had Alyson Hannigan as Willow, and that would have been a terrible pity…
[Via Dark Horizons News - see entry for Tuesday 27 May 2003]
May 29th, 2003 at 9:58 pm
I read those comments too. Like the full screen Season 4 Buffy being the right way to watch the series, it sounds like another justification to me. If the average shelf life of a character is about seven years, how come we don’t see Angel hanging up his fangs anytime soon. The sad story of UStv is that the producers can rarely talk about the actual politics of the show. We’ll only really know the truth in a few years when the vested interests aren’t so strong, and the autobiographies are written (possible Charisma title “Don’t you have an elsewhere to be?”)
I liked Cordelia’so character. Yes, she was ditzy and evil in the first few seasons of Buffy, she’d grown into a strong character story wise, and I always assumed we’d be seeing more of her. It’s difficult to see how Spike is going to work as a subsitute, unless Fred is drawn forward even more or another character is brought in.