mother's death". In the same scene, Dawn is shot with a hand-held camera that drifts, giving her a slightly unreal moment as she struggles to believe, unlike what Buffy already knows, that her mother's body is down the hall on a steel table. The scene with Buffy and Tara sitting in the waiting room was noted by Rhonda Wilcox for its reality in showing Gellar as ragged and distinctly unglamorous, particularly because she had been presented in a specific way to attract male viewers and was a spokeswoman for Maybelline while Buffy aired. Buffy sits with circles under her eyes, unflattering hair, and slumped posture next to Tara, who had been criticized for being too heavy, despite her body type being more typical of women her age. Foremost of the disorienting effects, to critics and scholars, is Whedon's use of sound and silence. While Buffy performs CPR, she cracks one of Joyce's ribs with a startling snap. After Buffy vomits on the floor, she stands in the back doorway listening to life carrying on: children playing, someone practicing a trumpet, and birds singing. Long pauses between dialogue create gaps that turn awkward as the characters try to think of what to say, made especially notable in a series famous for its rapid banter. The transition between the Christmas dinner scene and the living room scene is abrupt, and the sound of Buffy and Joyce shouting because they dropped a pie on the floor carries over into the silence of Joyce's lifeless face and Buffy standing alone in the living room. This effect is also used when shifting between Buffy's alternate version of her mother being "good as new" in the hospital and the paramedics trying to revive her. In the car on the way to Willow's dormitory, Anya is shot by a camera mounted on the front bumper, separated from the audience by the windshield. Xander, driving, faces the other way; neither of them speak and only the sound of the car can be heard. Joyce Millman at Salon.com writes of the sound issues, "The effect was almost Bergmanesque in its starkness. The spooky stillness and the long, spacey pauses in conversation as characters struggled to articulate their feelings exaggerated the sense of time elongating and standing still." Katy Stevens notes that the dialogue in "The Body" was recorded with microphones very close to the actors, making variations in their