Why Buffy Matters

The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Rhonda Wilcox

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780857730381
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Televisión

Hugely enjoyable, long awaited book by top world authority on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". Buffy is still on screens and on DVD in home television libraries of a wide array of TV watchers and fans. This is also the student text for TV and cultural studies at colleges and universities where Buffy is widely taught. Rhonda Wilcox is a world authority on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", who has been writing and lecturing about the show since its arrival on our screens. This book is the distillation of this remarkable body of work and thought, a celebration of the series that she proposes is an aesthetic test case for television. Buffy is enduring as art, she argues, by exploring its own possibilities for long-term construction as well as producing individual episodes that are powerful in their own right. She examines therefore the larger patterns that extend through many episodes: the hero myth, the imagery of light, naming symbolism, Spike, sex and redemption, Buffy Summers compared and contrasted with Harry Potter. She then moves in to focus on individual episodes, such as the "Buffy musical Once More, with Feeling", the largely silent Hush and the dream episode "Restless" (T.S.
Eliot comes to television). She also examines Buffy's ways of making meaning - from literary narrative and symbolism to visual imagery and sound. Combining great intelligence and wit, written for the wide Buffy readership, this is the worthy companion to the show that has claimed and kept the minds and hearts of watchers worldwide.

Part I

Panorama

Chapter 1

There Will
Never Be
A “Very Special”
Buffy

Symbol and Language¹

Buffy:	I told one lie. I had one drink.
Giles:	Yes, and you were very nearly devoured by a giant demon snake. The words “let that be a lesson” seem a tad redundant.

“Reptile Boy” (2.5)

I have often said, “There will never be a ‘Very Special Episode’ of Buffy.”

Joss Whedon²

From the start, it was different. In the comment above—made in 1997, the year the show began—Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, repudiates those television series which aim for redeeming social value by focusing episodes on unmediated presentations of social topics such as AIDS or alcoholism: sending Hallmark cards of virtue. Whedon specifically mentions Beverly Hills 90210, but one could add the names of many series—The Wonder Years, Party of Five, Seventh Heaven—to the list of those which over the years have advertised those “very special” episodes. Whedon expected more mental action from his audience. The opening seasons set the template. In Buffy’s world, the problems teenagers face become literal monsters. Internet predators are demons; drink-doctoring frat boys have sold their souls for success in the business world; a girl who has sex with even the nicest-seeming male discovers that he afterwards becomes a monster. From the earliest episodes, it was apparent to attentive viewers that Buffy operated on a symbolic level. Furthermore, some of the symbols began to extend. For example, underlying the various threats is a repeated one: the horror of becoming a vampire often correlates with the dread of becoming an adult. Yet even in the face of all these monstrosities, the context of dialogue and interaction makes the characters believable.

In fact, Buffy’s dialogue establishes a second level of significance directly related to the symbolic social monsters. Language is always a matter of delight in Buffy; and the larger language patterns are themselves symbolic. The striking differentiation of the teen language in Buffy has often been commented on. The language of the teens starkly contrasts with that of the adults. This linguistic separateness emphasizes the lack of communication between the generations, as does the series’ use of the symbolism of monsters to represent social problems. The teen attitude towards parents’ inability to deal with real-world horrors is suggested through Buffy’s concerned but naive mother, who throughout two seasons never truly sees the monsters or knows her daughter is the Slayer. The symbolism recreates the need to bridge generational division which is suggested by the language patterns. Viewers must understand both the language and the symbolism to see the reality of teen life. Life and language are not so simple as problem-of-the-week TV would suggest, and Buffy acknowledges that fact.

The situation and relationships in Buffy are on the surface mundane. As the series starts, sixteen-year-old Buffy Summers, a high school sophomore, has moved from LA to the small California town of Sunnydale with her divorced mother, after having been expelled from her earlier high school. Her looks and conversation at first win her an entrée with high school social queen Cordelia Chase. However, she refuses Cordelia’s advice to avoid Willow Rosenberg and Xander Harris, who are stigmatized as, respectively, a brain and a geek. Buffy’s refusal to scorn the two—in itself a bit of heroism in the teen social world—combined with the discovery of her past expulsion leads to her being consigned to “loser” status.

The other side of Buffy’s life, however, roots her even more firmly in loser territory. As soon as she enters the school library, librarian Rupert Giles informs her that he knows she is the Slayer: Into every generation a single girl is born—the one chosen to fight the vampires, the demons, the powers of darkness. Giles has moved from a job as curator of a British museum (“or the British Museum”) to be Sunnydale High’s librarian expressly in order to be Buffy’s Watcher—her adult advisor and trainer. While Buffy has exercised social heroism, she has absolutely no desire to be a superhero. “A Watcher,” says Giles, “prepares [the Slayer] …” “Prepares me for what?” asks Buffy. “For getting kicked out of school? For losing all my friends? For having to spend all my time fighting for my life and never getting to tell anyone because I might endanger them? Go ahead—prepare me” (“Welcome to the Hellmouth,” 1.1). Buffy Summers’ life is considerably more difficult than Clark Kent’s.

Her romantic life is even more problematic. Charming but hapless Xander falls for Buffy literally from the moment he crashes his skateboard at first sight of her outside school. Since Willow has been romantically fixed on Xander since their childhood, this is an inconvenience only made worse by the fact that Buffy’s affections lie elsewhere. Angel, a dark, handsome, mysterious stranger occasionally appears to warn Buffy of threats from the vampire world. He cites his being older as the reason he is resisting a relationship, but when, inevitably, they kiss, he “sprouts fangs” (McDonald 20). In the Buffy variation on vampire lore,³ vampires have the memories and personalities of humans, but the human soul has been replaced by a demon. The single exception—the single trustworthy vampire to be found as we enter the world of Buffy—is Angel, who was cursed by gypsies after he killed one of their teenagers, and who himself appears much younger than the standard first-season vampire in Buffy. Rather than stake him, the gypsies decided to expel the demon and restore Angel’s human soul so that he would feel the pain of the knowledge of his misdeeds. The gypsies want him to exist only to suffer, and indeed, Angel, who no longer feeds off humans, is a tormented creature who is as much an outsider of the vampire community as Buffy is an outcast in the high school world. The fact that these two fall in love with each other only makes their lives more difficult. As Giles says, “A vampire in love with a slayer. It’s rather poetic, really—in a maudlin sort of way” (“Out of Mind, Out of Sight,” 1.11).

It might come as a surprise to some that when the magazine George published its September 1998 list of “20 Most Fascinating Women in Politics,” Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy was the second in the list (right after Elizabeth Dole, but with a much bigger picture). George contrasts Buffy’s healthy strength with the teenage girls discussed in Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia, and notes “... what she’s really taking on is the regular assortment of challenges that threaten to suck the lifeblood out of teenage girls, like a suffocating high school hierarchy and a sexual double standard” (Stoller 113). Kathleen Tracy’s 1998 guide to the series includes, with every episode synopsis, a brief description of the “Real Horror” to which the plot correlates. In Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach provides a larger symbolic context when she notes that “every age embraces the vampire it needs” (145)—or, one might add, the slayer it needs. And while Auerbach’s use of the term “age” refers to cultural period, her statement could be extended to apply to a stage of life—in this case, adolescence. Instead of a patriarchal Van Helsing, Buffy provides a short, slight, teenage girl. It is nothing new for the science fiction and fantasy category of television series to symbolically represent teen difficulties: Harvey Greenberg’s essay “In Search of Spock” explains how in the 1960s Star Trek represented teens’ alienation in the famous half-Vulcan character. Buffy is especially successful at that symbolic representation.

The first episode, “Welcome to the Hellmouth,” establishes the series’ mapping of the high school social minefield and the series’ satirical stance. The show starts with a role reversal: a series of shots of the darkened high school explore the building after hours, and we are then shown two teens breaking in—a pretty, stammering, demure little blonde named Darla following a teenage boy who clearly hopes to “take advantage” of her. When she gets his assurance that they really are alone, her face changes to the demonic feeding visage of the undead. It is the little pleat-skirted cutie who will eat the boy alive. Their images descend from the frame, leaving only a school trash can in the distance of the shot. This is the teaser.

After the credits and theme song, enter Buffy—in nightmares, dreaming of the demons she has to fight. (It was her fighting of vampires at her old school that resulted in her expulsion.) She is awakened by her mom to tackle instead the difficulties of her first day at a new school. The seemingly un-Shakespearean Cordelia⁴ warns her, “You want to fit in here, the first rule is know your losers. Once you can identify them all by sight they’re a lot easier to avoid.” At this stage, Xander and Willow have another friend, Jesse, a slightly taller, geekier version of Xander who internalizes the high school code. At the local teen hangout, the Bronze, Jesse is humiliated by Cordelia’s rejection. Chatting with her girlfriends, she later classes him among “children” and says he’s like a “puppy dog—you just want to put him to sleep.” In fact, Jesse is put into the sleep of death when he is taken by the vampires. When the vampire Jesse shows up at the Bronze, he is immediately able to make Cordelia dance with him; dismayingly, he embraces the change. Confronted by his old friend, Jesse says, “I feel good, Xander; I feel strong” and later, again speaking of himself, adds, “Jesse was an excruciating loser who couldn’t get a date.”

Harvey Greenberg, in his psychoanalytic discussion of teens and Spock, suggests that Spock’s half-alien body reflects the physical changes adolescents sense taking place in themselves. The physical changes in this series’ vampires’ faces, along with their greater bodily strength, might be said to perform the same function (not to mention the fact that they stay up late). In the first season, the series focuses on confronting adulthood through confronting distinctly older vampires. “The Old Ones,” both Giles and the vampire Master call them—and both their physical traits and their language (of which, more later) suggest adulthood. And as Brian Aldiss says, aside from its sexual qualities, the typical vampire’s most notable characteristic is that “It is ancient” (x). Of course, vampire feeding has long been paralleled to sexual activity,⁵ a rite of passage to adulthood which none of the teen protagonists of Buffy have undergone (in the first season, at least). When Jesse becomes a vampire, his sexual maturation is clearly suggested. But it is his rejection of “loser” status that really damns Jesse—his willingness to do whatever it takes to be accepted in high school, whether it is embracing vampirism or losing his virginity. At the moment he makes his declaration—“I’m a new man!”—he is destroyed, staked, turned to dust, the stake held in the unwilling hand of his best friend Xander (“Welcome to the Hellmouth”).

It is a distinct element of the heroism of Buffy’s teen protagonists that they will not go to any lengths to avoid “loser” status. Buffy, Willow, and Xander endure regular mockery, but pursue what they see as right. Buffy and Xander, both of whom are considered irresponsible by adults, take responsibility for their friends time and again. Auerbach notes that early, pre-Stoker, nineteenth-century incarnations of vampires seemed to stress, in their relationships with chosen humans, the intimacy of friendship (14). In Buffy, the most notable bond of friendship is among the teenage vampire-fighters.⁶ “Jesse’s my responsibility,” says Buffy, and, as they skip school to go looking for him, Xander says, “Jesse’s my bud, OK? If I can help him out, that’s what I gotta do. It’s that or chem class” (“Welcome to the Hellmouth”). For her part, Willow declares, “I’m not anxious to go into a dark place full of monsters—but I do want to help. I need to.” The result of this heroism is not praise, but the painfully realistic irritation of those whom it inconveniences. When Buffy’s mom gets a call from the principal about her skipping class, the mother grounds the Slayer just as she is about to go out to face the demons. “Mom, this is really, really important,” Buffy pleads. And mother answers, “I know—if you don’t go out it’ll be the end of the world.” In fact, it may be exactly that; according to Giles the Watcher, hundreds of vampires are making a concerted attempt to release the vampire Master, open the mouth of hell, and end the world as we know it—unless the reluctant Slayer saves the day. As the mom says, “Everything is life or death when you’re a sixteen-year-old girl.”

Buffy does succeed in her life and death struggle; though she, Willow, and Xander can’t save Jesse, they do save the world; they do make it possible for life to go on. And so Xander says, the morning after the vampire battle has been witnessed by a nightclub full of teens, “One thing’s for sure; nothing’s ever gonna be the same.” Perhaps the most important moment of the first episode, and one of the most important in the series, comes in the sunshine of the next morning at Sunnydale High, when absolutely nothing has changed. Almost all the adults and the vast majority of teens have managed to deny what they saw. “The dead rose,” says Xander; “we should’ve at least had an assembly.” But, led by Cordelia, the students have decided it was “rival gangs.” Giles, the Watcher, one of those rare adults who really sees what is going on, explains: “People have a tendency to rationalize what they can and forget what they can’t.” And of course his words apply to the social problems of the real world just as emphatically as they do to monsters.

Even the socially heroic are sometimes vulnerable to peer pressure. The first-season episode “The Pack” (1.6) is ostensibly about Masai stories of possession by animal spirits—in this case, unusually vicious hyenas imported to the local zoo. But the humans the laughing hyenas possess are a clique of mocking high school students who take Xander into their fold. The episode opens with the four students teasing Buffy for having been kicked out of her earlier school. When they shift to weaker prey, the timid young man ironically named Lance, Xander pursues them into the off-limits hyena house to protect Lance, and so happens to be present when the possession takes place. In many episodes, Xander’s lines are often jokes; but in this episode, after he is possessed, for the first time his jokes pass over into cruelty. Buffy can’t believe that Xander would act this way, and so she consults Giles about possible supernatural explanations. “Xander’s taken to teasing the less fortunate?” asks Giles. “Uh huh,” says Buffy. “And there’s a noticeable change in both clothing and demeanor?” “Yes!” “And—well—otherwise all his spare time is spent lounging about with imbeciles?” Buffy says, “It’s bad, isn’t it?” and Giles replies, “Devastating. He’s turned into a sixteen-year-old boy. Of course you’ll have to kill him.”

Since this is the world of Buffy, it is not merely hormones at work, but possession. The result is different only in degree, however, not in kind. Xander finds it impossible to study; is cruelly rude to the adoring Willow; and lustfully leaps on Buffy. The latter activity is rather fortunate than not, since, while Buffy subdues Xander, he is separated from the pack for long enough to miss their attack on kindly Principal Flutie. In some schools, a teacher or administrator may be stabbed or shot by students. In Buffy’s school, the students eat him. In the end, with the help of Giles and Willow, Buffy is able to return Xander to himself—and the instant after he comes to himself, he saves Willow from the knife-wielding, animal-worshipping bad-guy zookeeper who arranged the possession. But the upshot of the whole episode is that Xander is left deeply embarrassed by his own animalistic/adolescent behavior. “Shoot me, stuff me, mount me,” he says to Giles, the only other male regular in the first season.

Some episodes of Buffy deal with more specific external threats. In “I Robot, You Jane” (1.8) shy, sweet Willow is drawn into the clutches of an internet predator. When Buffy notices that Willow, an outstanding student, is missing classes, she is concerned to find that her friend is skipping school to chat online with the mysterious Malcolm. Willow, who is attractive but far from glamorous and even farther from popular, is indignant at Buffy’s concern over her online relationship. “Why does everything have to be about looks?” she wonders. And Buffy replies, “Not everything, but some stuff is. What if you guys get really intense and then you find out he has a hairy back?” From worrying about the fact that Willow has not met Malcolm, Buffy and Xander soon move to worrying that she will meet him. As Xander says, “Sure he can say he’s a high school student … I can … say I’m an elderly Dutchwoman. Get me? And who’s to say I’m not if I’m in the Elderly Dutch Chat Room?” As Buffy observes in alarm, “This guy could be anybody. He could be weird, or crazy, or old …” The series implicitly calls attention to generational conflict and the horror of facing adults/adulthood as well as the particular horror of the internet predator. As viewers would have known since the beginning of the episode, Malcolm is downright ancient: he is in fact the demon Moloch, the corrupter. Once again, the friends put themselves on the line, and this time it is Willow who is saved—from one of the diabolical corrupters who are indeed out there on the internet.

In the second-season episode “Reptile Boy,” Cordelia, who is only gradually and unwillingly drawn into the circle of friends with knowledge of the supernatural (read: adult) world, puts herself and Buffy in jeopardy when they go to a college fraternity party. One of the frat boys has decided he wants the good-looking Buffy to come, and to Cordelia’s irritation her invitation is conditional on her bringing Buffy along. Buffy and Angel have been fighting over his reluctance to enter into a relationship with her; as he says, “This isn’t some fairy tale. When I kiss you, you don’t wake up from a deep sleep and live happily ever after.” “No,” says Buffy to her vampire, “When I kiss you I want to die,” the death/sex metaphor echoing through the scene. As a result of their argument and Giles’s insistently overworking her, Buffy decides—to the dismay of Xander and Willow—to lie to Giles and attend the party with Cordelia. Buffy and Cordelia end up easy prey at the party: “God, I love high school ...