'Hush' is universally considered to be one of 'Buffy'’s greatest achievements
if not the greatest.
Music, theme, design and cinematography all inform each other, and weave together in a perfect pitch.
And 'Hush' owns the distinction of being the only episode of the show
to be nominated for an Emmy in Writing.
Which is an irony, considering only 17 of its 44 minutes contain any dialogue.
The show is known for subverting tropes and ideas,
but here, in a way similar to
'The Zeppo',
the show is subverting itself.
'Hush' a classic episode of not just 'Buffy', but television as a whole.
['Danse Macabre']
Buffy is called to the front of the room by Professor Walsh
to demonstrate the difference between communication and language.
When she does, Riley is made to kiss her in front of everyone
and we realize she’s in a dream.
Just a quick bit of trivia.
Whedon crammed every actor he could into the scene
and if you watch carefully, you see the first appearance of Andy Hallet in the Buffyverse.
If you don’t know who that is, then I have to ask...
...why haven’t you watched 'Angel' yet?
Buffy steps out into the hallway to see a young girl chanting over a box
and is frightened by a terrifying floating corpse with a rictus grin.
After she awakens in class,
Willow, Riley and she attempt to deconstruct her dream.
Willow excuses herself to Wicca group and Riley and Buffy almost have their first kiss
...except for the fact that they can’t stop awkwardly talking through it.
At Casa de Giles, Spike is now free to roam and is becoming adorably domestic.
“We’re out of Wheetabix.”
"We are out of Wheetabix because you ate it all--"
Xander and Anya stop by mid-argument over where their relationship is going.
Giles says he has a friend coming over and asks Xander to take Spike for a night.
At Wicca group, Willow is underwhelmed by the level of magic she is surrounded by.
“Also, who left their scented candles dripping all over my woman power shrine.”
She attempts to entice the group with the suggestion of spells and is quickly shot down.
And we see a quiet timid...
"I am you know."
"Yours."
"I don't think this is gonna work."
"Strong like an Amazon, right?"
"Can't you just be kissing me now?"
"You are using too much magic."
"I got so lost."
"Your shirt."
Willow vents to Buffy about the group
and Buffy explains her frustration over how she and Riley are stuck.
Riley is also trying to work out his side of things with Buffy.
Only problem is, all he has to talk to is Forrest
...and Forrest kinda sucks.
I started wondering,
is that the only reason Forrest is in this season?
To make Riley...look good?
Over in Xander’s parent’s basement, Xander is tying Spike to a chair for the evening.
“Like I’d bite you anyway.”
And as everyone goes to sleep, somewhere in town,
ghostly fingers open a box and every voice in town is stolen.
The next morning, Buffy wakes
and begins the first of one my favorite scenes in the episode.
The long buildup to the moment she realizes something is amiss.
She goes to the bathroom,
brushes her teeth.
In the hallway, a crying girl passes.
She returns to the room,
Willow stands to say hello,
...and they realize something is wrong.
The whole scene reminds me of the famous
'bomb under the table' Hitchcock quote
about how to build tension in storytelling.
The rote and tedious underpinnings of Buffy’s morning routine
might not make particularly interesting fodder in a normal episode,
but one in which we the audience have seen what we’ve seen
it becomes vital emotional buildup to Willow and Buffy’s realization.
The two of them walk the streets of Sunnydale’s commercial district, taking in the chaos.
And again, I love the visual storytelling.
Painting emotion rather than speaking it,
Even if it is painting with a broad brush
...it’s still a lot of fun.
Giles and Professor Walsh say they’ll need to patrol tonight to keep the peace.
On patrol that night, Riley and Buffy run into each other
and, unable to speak, finally…
[smooch]
And at the watchtower from earlier, a door opens and out come...
...the Gentleman.
Giles gathers the group in an auditorium and leads them through some of his trademark exposition.
Lacking his voice to lend the whole thing the same sort of gravitas,
he instead plays the 'Danse Macabre'.
In order to kill them, Buffy must get her voice back and scream,
though he doesn’t know how she’s supposed to do that.
The scene ends with a cool little shot of Buffy through one of Giles' transparencies,
visually implying her indelible connection to darkness as the Slayer.
Out on patrol, Riley and Buffy discover each other fighting in the Gentleman’s tower
and Riley learns there is more to Buffy than he realized.
Meanwhile, Tara goes to find Willow to see if they can resolve the madness.
Pursued by the Gentleman, she eventually finds her way to Willow's door.
Interesting emotional byproduct for me of this shot.
The Gentleman have muted Willow’s ability to express her insecurity.
And without that I just kind of see...
...a warrior.
Maybe I’m projecting from the future.
They escape to the basement laundry room.
Willow can’t block the door on her own without being able to speak.
But together she and Tara combined manage to block the door.
[Lesbian subtext bell]
Buffy and Riley fight towards the box,
Riley shatters it
and Buffy ends the Gentleman’s scourge with her restored voice.
And the episode ends with Riley and Buffy, their voices restored,
...not being able to talk.
Hard to sum up my feelings for 'Hush' completely except to say that it is
...SUCH a joyful treat.
This is probably the most cinematic of any of the episodes so far.
As I’ve mentioned previously, Whedon has joked in interviews
that he partly considered 'Buffy' his medium for training himself to be a director.
And, approaching 'Hush', he felt like he was becoming more of a hack dependent on dialogue.
2 shot, 2 shot,
...2 shot.
'Hush' was his attempt to force himself into new modes of thinking and storytelling.
As I said, 'Buffy' is a show about subverting expectations and clichés
and, with 'Hush', Whedon is subverting himself.
And, compared to the long static scenes in the library from 'Season 3',
'Hush', at times, almost feels like a different show.
The camera is so often alive and in motion,
conveying with movement what the characters cannot speak.
The push in on Riley at the frat house for instance, as all hell breaks loose.
The camera movement charges the scene with a sense of peril and imperative that would’ve been impossible without.
And I love the long slow buildup to Buffy and Willow realizing they can’t speak.
The ambient sound.
The toilet flushing.
As we wait for Hitchcock’s bomb under the table to go off.
[dropped glass bottle]
The fact that the glass breaking in the student common area is so jarring
speaks to the effectiveness of the episode's aesthetics.
So much said, with silence.
And without a lot of dialogue to cover, Christophe Beck’s score blossoms.
Feeling contemporary and somehow like a fairy tale throwback all at once.
But Whedon and Beck know when to lay it on,
and when to be silent.
As in the scene with Tara picking up her things.
There is nothing but ambient audio and in the background we see, the Gentlemen coming towards her.
It is SO frightening and well done.
Lore-wise, the groundwork for this 'fairy tales becoming real' thing was in 'Gingerbread'.
I consider this episode 'Gingerbread''s most redeeming feature.
But this is a fairy tale 'Buffy' style.
Buffy is the princess, yes,
but it’s the evil men that live in the tower she must break into to win the day.
And rather than being rescued by her prince,
she is the one swinging Robin Hood from the rafters saving him.
Perhaps self-evidently, the entire episode is about communication.
Walsh lays out the theme in Buffy’s opening dream
"So this is what it is..."
“talking about communication..."
"...talking about language"
"...not the same thing."
Each character is suffering a sort of, communication crisis.
Xander can’t express himself to Anya
and Anya can’t speak with anything other than
...anvil language.
“--all you care about is lots of orgasms.”
Every time Riley and Buffy seem on the verge of something happening
...they block it with too much talking.
And all Giles seems to want is for the talking to go away.
I like the commentary on how an over-abundance of talk can actually be a barrier to real intimate communication.
A defense mechanism.
And sometimes, there can be more communicated in a look or the interlacing of fingers
than an entire hour of talking.
Two people together accomplishing more than they can alone.
Whedon says in the DVD commentary,
“[l]anguage can interfere with communication".
"As soon as you say something,
"you’ve eliminated every other possibility of what [you’re] talking about.”
As ever, 'Hush' is laden with sexual symbolism,
much of it indicated by Buffy’s original dream.
As I talked about in the previous episode,
Buffy is dealing with feelings about men and relationships.
The man that she’s trying to let go is Angel,
who turned evil post-sex
and broke up with her on Prom night.
Then you have Parker, the sexual manipulator.
And then Spike for half a day, at the end of which Buffy tells Willow,
"And the bad boy thing"
"-over it."
"Okay, I totally get it."
And in the opening dream, Walsh says to Riley:
“Be a good boy.”
Riley says to Buffy, their kiss will make the sun go down,
and sure enough, their moment of intimacy brings in the dream.
[surprise]
Buffy’s dreams are precognitive,
but there’s nothing to say that here she hasn’t layered them with her own subconscious trepidation and anxiety.
Though...maybe not entirely, as we’ll get to.
The Gentleman work as a patriarchal symbol, as well as an ugly sexual one,
In an interview, Whedon described them as Victorian, representing a certain class.
They are all prim, proper, and polite while terrorizing the towns they come to.
They live in a big giant phallus.
They are all white and, as the name suggests, men.
And in the episode,
they invade the personal spaces of their victims,
penetrate their bodies,
and float away with their hearts.
And notice, Buffy turned Riley into one of them in her dream.
Their sexual symbolism is restated in Giles’ exposition keynote,
when he puts up the slide asking,
“What do they want?”
*mouthing* "Boobies?"
And again, when Buffy suggests how to kill them.
The Gentleman are a small insulated group,
and by virtue of their terrifying smiles and polite mannerisms,
seemingly oblivious to the terror and mayhem they bring on a town.
In effect, the Gentleman form a sort of institution,
something the show takes a very negative perspective on,
as we saw with the Watchers Council
and the school board earlier.
There are two institutions of note in this episode.
The Gentleman being the first,
and the Wicca group being the other.
One, all male, is terrifying.
The other, all female, is played for laughs,
which Rhona Wilcox suggests in her book 'Why Buffy Matters', might speak to the differences in their power.
Giving a bit away here, throughout the next two seasons
there will be two primary relationships existing in parallel to each other.
Buffy and Riley alongside
the new friendship of Willow and Tara.
Notice how the relationships play out over the course of the episode.
In their fight with the Gentlemen, Willow and Tara pair together
to move the soda machine with power and authority, banning the white male Gentlemen intruders.
Buffy and Riley fight in the same space but alone and independent from each other.
Their fighting is dissonant, and solitary.
Their communication marred with mistakes.
And at the end of the episode, when Willow and Tara can’t stop talking with each other
Buffy and Riley can’t find the words.
The episode has such a wonderful harmony of elements, visual, thematic, and musical.
I do love how it suggests that language can become an impediment to love’s expression.
We’ve mentioned before that one of the weird byproducts of Whedon episodes
is that they feel SO entirely a cut above the rest.
Sharper.
Better looking.
More alive.
Certainly that’s because Whedon has a singular nature
but in the DVD commentary for 'Hush', he mentioned a more practical reason that I hadn’t considered.
Buffy was HIS show and he was the showrunner ultimately responsible for the final decisions on everything.
Which empowered him to take more risks than any of the other writers and directors on the show.
Consequently his episodes feel more experimental.
More ambitious.
And have rockets.
I love the episode,
and can understand anyone who counts it as one of their favorites in the series.
But when I watch 'Buffy' I do so from two simultaneous perspectives,
my head
and my heart.
'Hush' is an aesthetic treasure,
but it’s not one of the episodes that comes back to me when I’m begging my friends to watch the show.
When I do that, I’m thinking about
'Prophecy Girl',
and 'Becoming (Part 2)'
and 'The Prom'.
'Hush' is stylish, high concept art
and I love it,
but honestly there are SO many episodes that mean more to me as a fan,
including in this season.
And a wonderful exercise in style like 'Hush',
can still be capable of punctuating dramatic resonance.
As the show itself will prove, in just under two seasons.
['Danse Macabre']