A. The Purpose of This Site
[Updated April 29, 2013]
I originally created this web site
for two purposes: to comment on and analyze the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer; and to post
the annotations I’ve made to certain specific references in the text of the
transcripts. The second of these goals got modified along the way, mostly
because it proved cumbersome. I actually have transcripts, and I’ve annotated
them via footnotes and hyperlinks as described below. I ended up not posting
them because I don’t own the transcripts I have – I’ve copied them from other
sites and I feel a bit uncomfortable about using them. They’re also long and in
different formats; cleaning them up to be uniform would be a lot of trouble
even if length were no issue.
What I’ve done instead of
providing annotated transcripts is add a series of “trivia notes” at the end of
each episode post. These are the most interesting of the annotations which I
have here on my computer and I’ll refer to them as such below.
Both the essays and the
annotations/trivia notes require some explanation about the choices I made when
I embarked on this project, so I need to begin by describing how and why I
divided the project as I have.
Annotations to any literary work
– and I include television and movies as literary works, just like plays – can take
many forms. In general, the editor is trying to supply information s/he thinks
the reader may need in order to understand the text. The trouble is, the phrase
“understand the text” is vague. Understand what
about the text, specifically? The meaning of words? Cultural references? Jokes?
Metaphors? The author’s intent? How the original audience reacted?
Let me give one example to
underscore the difficulty and the choices annotators have to make. The scene is
just after the credits in Episode 28, Bewitched,
Bothered & Bewildered:
“Sunnydale High School ….
Cordelia walks up the steps from the street. She sees her friends sitting on a
wall and heads over to them. When they see her coming they all stand up and
make their way toward the main entrance, [moving quickly].
Cordelia: Wait up. Hey, wait up! (jogs to catch up)
Excuse me! Where's the fire sale?”
Consider the dialogue here. “Fire
sale” is a reasonably familiar term. It means a sale which takes place after a
business suffers a fire. The merchandise may have suffered some damage, but
there may be good deals to be had as well. Similarly, the idiomatic expression
“where’s the fire?” means that someone is rushing off as if in an emergency.
There’s no direct connection between the two expressions, yet it works in this
dialogue for the simple reason that we, the viewers, know that Cordelia’s
friends are superficial twits; they would never rush off to rescue anyone from
a fire, but would elbow their way through a crowd if they thought they could
get a good deal on some clothing. The line is funny because the context makes
the unique juxtaposition of the phrases appropriate.
Different annotations treat these
issues in different ways. A reader of
Chaucer probably needs
more help with the meaning of words than does a reader of Shakespeare. Both
could probably use some help with cultural references, but the editor has to
make arbitrary decisions in both cases: which words are more likely to be
unfamiliar, and which references no longer resonate? Worse yet, these factors
change over time; an annotation made in 1860 would make different choices than
an annotation in 2013.
Now to the choices. I adopted a
3-part solution to the problem. First, I decided that analysis takes up too
much space to work well with footnotes. The really sophisticated annotations of
classical literature – an example would be
Charles
Singleton’s 6 volume edition of
Dante’s
Divine Comedy – end up longer than the text itself. Most of the
time, people who watch the show don’t want to search through that volume of
analysis to find the specific reference they want. They just want to know, for
example, what Shakespeare play was the source of the Master’s greeting in
The Wish. (He said, “What news on the
Rialto?”; the reference is
to
The Merchant of Venice, Act III,
Scene 1.)
My analysis is contained in the
episode essay. The trivia notes mention information about the cultural
references, whether Shakespeare or Star Wars. I use links much of the time
because they’re less disruptive to the reader. Be aware that the link won’t
necessarily take you to the precise information – you might have to read the
page or make an inference from the information supplied in the link. On rare
occasions, when I think some explanation of the text is necessary or when I
can’t find a good link, I add the explanation in the notes.
Most of the links go to
Wikipedia. That’s not because it’s necessarily the best source, but because
it’s the easiest for the reader. Also, I can count on such links being
available in the future, which isn’t always the case for smaller sites. I tried
to avoid commercial sites for references to specific products – it just seemed
tacky to link there.
I tried to use the trivia notes sparingly.
With the exceptions mentioned above, they serve as cross-references when the
characters refer back to events in an earlier episode. For example, at the
beginning of the episode Angel,
Xander asks Buffy to dance. She responds, “Rain check?” Xander eventually does
get his dance, though not quite the way he expected, in When She Was Bad. These internal references within the show add, I
think, to the literary value of the show, and the writers clearly expected the
audience to remember the original scenes and relate them to the later ones.
I chose not to annotate word
meaning except in cases when I thought an idiom was unusual or peculiarly
American, and in that case I hyperlinked in most cases. I did not annotate the
many English slang terms used by Giles and Spike – in general they express
emotion, so no exact “translation” is necessary to get the idea.
The decision not to annotate
meaning may seem odd given the purpose of this site. “Buffyspeak” has always
struck viewers as one of the most noteworthy features of the show, and was
creative enough to attract the attention of linguists (see
Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Lexicon
and
Neologize Much?). Some of the
dialogue requires a fairly sophisticated understanding of English. Take, for
example, this passage from
The Prom:
“Buffy: Then what? What's with
the dire?
Angel: It's uh, it's nothing.
Buffy: No, you have 'something' face.
Angel: I think we need to talk, but not now and not here.
Buffy: No. No, if you have something to say, then say it. (silence) Angel, drop
the cryptic.”
A footnote wouldn’t really do
justice to this passage. Words like “dire” and “cryptic” aren’t given unusual
definitions, they’re just used in unusual ways (an adjective as a noun). My
judgment is that I can expect native English speakers to understand the
dialogue today. If and when that changes in the future, it may be necessary to
include explanations of meaning.
I’m fully aware that my
distinction between word meaning and cultural reference is artificial. Pretty
much all nouns have a real world referent. The distinction I’m drawing (very
subjectively) is between those which have long usage and those which refer to
more ephemeral things or events which would have been recognized by many
viewers at the time of the original broadcast, but are now dated (or carbon
dated, to use a Buffyism).
I had to make other judgment
calls as well. Take spoilers, for example. If I cross-reference an earlier
episode with a later one, I run the risk of disclosing plot points to people
reading for the first time. I’ve therefore only cited the earlier episode in
the later one and not vice versa. The same holds true in the episode essays
(see below) – no spoilers for future episodes.
Words or phrases with multiple
meanings also pose a judgment call. This tends to be especially true for
titles, where the writers tried to express multiple themes very compactly. What
I generally did was link the most unusual meaning and assume the reader would
understand the others from the context of the episode. In a few cases I noted a
second meaning.
Then there’s the problem of
continuity. BtVS ran 7 seasons and each episode built on the previous ones. The
writers could reasonably expect the audience to keep track of basic plot points
and characterization. For this reason, I’ve noted references to characters or
general events only when at least one episode intervened and tried to use
common sense on what constitutes a “reference” and what is merely continuity.
When the allusion is to a specific statement or event, I note it even if it
occurred in the previous episode, but not if it happened in the current one.
Lastly there’s the perhaps
related problem of multiple usages of terms. Take the word “Scooby”, for
example. It appears in many episodes, often several times in a particular one.
Should I annotate only the first time it appears? Only the first time in each
episode? I’ve compromised somewhat and adopted the former approach. As Buffy
herself would say (and did say), “Life is short.”
Having limited hyperlinks and
footnotes this way leaves plenty of room for my third strategy, namely essays
and comments on each episode and on the season as a whole. It’s in these essays
that I’ll talk about all the other features of BtVS which made it such a powerful and important show. I guess that
means I should now explain what I understand to be those features.
B. The Importance of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
“Buffy remains the most intensely studied television
series by television critics and scholars in the history of television. *** Seven
years after the final episode of Buffy there seems to be no end in sight
of books and essays and academic conferences covering every conceivable aspect
of the series. Even critically acclaimed series like The Sopranos and The
Wire receive only a small percentage of the critical attention that Buffy [has]. The reason, I believe, lies
in this rich subtext undergirding the show. We can say so much about Buffy
because it says so much on so many levels.”
Actor James Marsters says, “
I am not surprised at all that the show in
any form continues to live on. It's a very potent metaphor. I don't want to
oversell this but it's the same theme as Catcher in the Rye, it's the same
theme as Hamlet; how do you get through adolescence? How do you get through the
period from childhood to adulthood when you realize the world is not a perfect
place? How do you care about the world, how do you not give up on the world,
how do you accept the fact that it is a corrupt environment and still engage
it? I think that's an important thing to talk about, I think that artists
should go back there more often, and I'm really glad Joss was able to find a
metaphor to talk about something that is a serious subject with so much humor.”
http://www.411mania.com/movies/columns/228484/411mania-Interviews:-James-Marsters-(Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer,-Angel).htm
We can evaluate the importance of
literature (broadly defined to include theater, movies and television) in many
ways, e.g., by its theme, its social impact, its subtext, or its creative use
of language. I’m going to touch on all these factors in explaining why I wrote
the essays. I’ll begin with perhaps the least significant, namely the social
impact of the show.
1. Social Impact
There’s no rule that says works
of great art or literature need to have any significant impact on the culture
of their own day – there are many famous stories of artists unappreciated in
their own lifetimes – but it’s certainly a consideration. Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a social importance out of proportion
to the number of its viewers.
One reason for that was its
relation to the internet. The show debuted in March 1997, just as the internet
was beginning to come into widespread use. It was, to the best of my knowledge,
the first TV show to set up its own internet site, complete with a posting
board (called, appropriately enough, The Bronze). Fans of the show took full
advantage of the internet access;
Buffy
discussions took on an importance on the net which they probably never had in
everyday life. There’s even
a
book about the show’s internet impact.
In addition, the internet created
new options for the genre of “
fanfic”.
For those of you unfamiliar with the term, an author of “fanfic” takes an
incident from a book, movie, or TV show and explores an issue which never
happened in the original. It might be a character issue, a relationship, or a
plot device. While the term “fanfic” is new, the concept is not. A great deal
of literature consists of “fanfic”. The
Aeneid,
for example, is really just “fanfic” on the
Iliad.
Same with much of Greek tragedy. I don’t mean to suggest that
Buffy fanfic rises to this level, I just
mean that the basic idea has a long pedigree.
What’s important about
Buffy fanfic is the sheer quantity.
There’s a web site,
http://www.fanfiction.net/tv/,
which collects fanfic on every imaginable show. Even today, almost 10 years
after the series finale, there’s more
Buffy fanfic than there is for any other
TV show ever except
Glee and
Supernatural. Other sites can be found
following
this
link and searching the page for the word “fanfic”.
BtVS was also a popular source for
songfic.
Buffy impacted popular culture in other important ways as well. My
saying this will be controversial among some fans, for reasons I’ll explain in
an essay on the episode Seeing Red,
but Buffy was a pioneering show in
how it handled gay relationships. It’s perhaps too early even now to be sure if
the standards it set will be matched by television more generally, but the
potential is there.
While these social impacts make
the show worthy of consideration, they aren’t the focus of my analysis, though
I’ll certainly mention them along the way. I intend to concentrate on literary
and thematic analysis. Before I get to that, I first need to back up a minute
and talk about the general topic of analyzing literary texts.
2. How do we
decide what a TV show is “about”?
I suppose that, by now, it’s a
commonplace that every viewer watches a different show. Each viewer processes
an episode through the lens of his or her previous life experience. That means
a focus on different portions of the episode, a different regard for the
various characters, a different understanding of the metaphors, a different
take on the morality of a character’s actions. It’s impossible to avoid this
problem; I’m not going to pretend that my analysis is “objective”. I am,
though, going to pretend that my analysis is thoughtful. I’ve given it a lot of
thought, anyway, some might say too much thought (quick, which character have I
quoted?). In addition, I’m going to supplement my own analysis with comments
from elsewhere on the internet (again, with attribution) so that each essay
should reflect different points of view.
Why, someone might ask, am I
devoting all this work to a TV show, much less one with the silly title of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Maybe it’s the
title, but lots of people dismissed
Buffy
out of hand without ever watching it (or watching very little). On its surface,
the show might appear to be nothing more than a female
Steven Seagal movie – the
main character uses martial arts to defeat the bad guys. That certainly does
describe the show; it’s just not the
only
way to see it. I don’t insist that my way of seeing the show is the only way,
or even the best way. I do think, though, that it’s an important way, one fully
justified by the text.
You could also watch Hamlet just for the cool sword fights.
That wouldn’t be wrong so much as incomplete. The question with every work of
literature is not “what’s the least
sophisticated way to understand the work?”, it’s “what’s the most sophisticated way?”. Think of it
like this – we don’t judge a composer like Mozart on the basis of his worst
composition, but on his greatest. What separates Mozart from the ordinary
composer is not his weakest pieces, ones an ordinary composer might even write,
but his strongest ones, the ones no other person could have written. That
should be the way we judge literature as well.
So, can Buffy be seen as something more than a story about a pretty girl
who kicks ass? Obviously I think it can. It’s a story about friendship and
family, forgiveness and redemption, and about duty, sacrifice and courage.
There’s humor, including brilliant satire on high school, and there’s tragedy.
If Buffy really is “about” these
themes, and if those themes are handled well, that makes it worth our
attention. Worth our attention in the way a novel or play can be? Yes.
3.
Why Buffy is Important
In my view, the great art form of
the twentieth century was the movie, of which I consider TV a sub-class. This
doesn’t mean that it was the only art
form; obviously, novels and paintings, plays and sculpture, music and
architecture all remained important. It also doesn’t mean that every movie made
was great, any more than every canvas painted during the Renaissance was great
or all music written during the lifetime of J. S. Bach was great. It does mean
that, at their best, movies were artistic masterpieces. If I’m right about
this, that means Los Angeles is an artistic
capital equivalent to Florence or Rome in the 15th
and 16th Centuries. I’m not sure Americans have appreciated the
artistic output of the 20th Century to this extent, but I think we
should.
TV, I’m sorry to say, hasn’t
lived up to standard of the movies. There are, I think, some good reasons for
this. Many of the most popular TV shows have been sit-coms. This genre simply
doesn’t last as long as drama. A great deal of humor derives from the social
context. To illustrate with a well-known example, in Shakespeare’s day the
words “debt” and “death” were pronounced the same. This allowed Shakespeare to
make puns which we no longer hear. Moreover, at that time sexual climax was
referred to as a “little death”. Thus, a “small debt” in Shakespeare’s plays
might refer not to a small amount of money owed, but to something else entirely
(another Buffy reference; recognize it?).
When the cultural context
changes, as it has in the case of the Shakespeare example and as it inevitably
does, the audience loses the ability to “get” the joke; they need it explained,
and then they don’t laugh. In extreme cases, they no longer find it funny even
when it is explained. For a good explanation of this process, read Robert
Darnton’s
The Great Cat Massacre.
I don’t mean to write off all
television shows. Some of them have been well-done, serious efforts. It’s just
that, in general, TV shows have failed to demonstrate the staying power of
movies, and I think one important reason for that is the reluctance of the
producers to treat serious issues in a sophisticated way. To put it in the
language of showbiz, drama, even tragedy, has longer legs than comedy. We can
still appreciate the Greek tragedies 2500 years after they were written because
the issues they raise still seem familiar today. We can understand that
Antigone faces a
serious moral dilemma when she must choose between obeying the law of her city
and carrying out her family obligation. Though we can still appreciate
Shakespeare’s comedies, it’s the tragedies which everyone remembers as his
greatest works. Same reason – the serious issues tend to be those which people
of all eras recognize.
Critic Robert Moore identifies Buffy as the moment in which TV became
art:
“This was the decade in which
television became art. So argues Emily Nussbuam in a recent
New York
Magazine essay,
“When
TV Became Art”. She certainly makes a strong case that 2000-2009 was a
pivotal age for TV and I strongly recommend her essay to anyone interested in
the development of television over the past decade. I agree that this was, all
in all, the finest decade for great television. Others have argued that TV had
arisen as an art form in earlier decades, some (though in dwindling numbers)
arguing for the fifties …. But Nussbaum has numbers on her side; it is
difficult to argue against the sheer quantity of very fine shows that emerged
in the past ten years. The number of truly great series from the past ten years
is so substantial that it might surpass the number of great shows from all
previous decades combined.
Nonetheless, I want to take issue
with Nussbaum. I think that chopping the overall picture up into decade-sized
blocks obscures the reality. I believe that one can point at a precise
point where TV became art, and that point was the debut of Buffy the Vampire
Slayer. No one questions the enormous influence that Joss Whedon’s quirky
series exerted on other shows, but I do not believe that many people realize
the degree to which it altered the TV landscape. TV was not art before Buffy,
but it was afterwards. … To be fair, Nussbaum does mention Buffy
and Joss Whedon frequently in her essay, obviously crediting both the show and
the creator for much of the best that the decade had to offer, but she seems to
imply that TV as art was a work in progress as the decade began and it most
definitely was not.
Although many realize just how
revolutionary Buffy was as a series and the impact that it made on the
medium (many TV creators site it as their favorite show while others
acknowledge its direct influence), not everyone is aware of how groundbreaking
the series was or of the number of concrete changes it wrought on television.
It was not merely a great TV series in its own right, it helped redefine what
TV could do.”
Let’s consider some of the
reasons why Buffy is important.
a.
Minor Factors
A good show, like a good play,
requires good acting and directing; these days, it needs good quality special
effects; and if it includes good music choices, that’s a real plus. I’m not
going to discuss these factors at length, but I’ll say a few words here in this
Introduction and then leave these alone (mostly) in the individual episode
comments. I need to emphasize that I’m not here discussing the interpretive
aspects of these factors, but only the general quality of production values.
i.
Acting
In my personal opinion – and it
can’t be much more than that when it comes to the quality of acting – the
actors on BtVS were very good. I
thought three of the regular cast members (Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alyson
Hannigan, and James Marsters) were outstanding, others very good, and that many
of the guest stars contributed very significantly to the quality of the show.
ii.
Innovation
Many of the episodes were
innovative. The show made use of
unreliable narrators
to great effect. One of the best episodes had no dialogue for 35 of the 42
minutes. Another, one of the finest hours of television ever created,
deliberately dispensed with the background music which provides the expected
emotional cues in order to highlight the struggle of the characters to
understand what had happened. A musical episode – often voted the best of the
series by fans (a remarkable accomplishment for the 107
th episode) –
wasn’t a gimmick, but an integral link in the overall story. The mix of humor
and horror has no competition in American television or cinema.
In addition, “Buffy reinvented what television could do
with genre, breaking down the barriers that separated one form another,
blending them all together, and then employing the elements of each as
needed. The series was a high school drama, a comedy, a horror/fantasy
show, and, in one memorable episode, a musical, all at once. I can’t
think of a series before Buffy that would routinely have you laughing
your guts out one minute, on the edge of your seat the next, and emotionally
devastated soon after within the confines of a ten-minute segment. This
fluidity that Buffy introduced has allowed television a degree of
flexibility not found on shows of the past.” Moore, supra.
iii.
Special Effects
The special effects varied in
quality. BtVS generally had a
relatively small budget and it often showed in the special effects and other
production values, especially in the early years; some fans find Season 1
cheesy, perhaps because it was a mid-season replacement on a shoestring budget,
perhaps because the actors were all still “finding” their characters and
because so many aspects of the show needed to be explained for future purposes.
Some viewers may find the low quality special effects distracting, but for me
at least they don’t affect the intrinsic value of the themes presented.
iv.
Suspension of Disbelief
Mention of special effects
naturally brings up the related issue of the suspension of disbelief. Most
movies or plays require this to some extent. BtVS draws on several existing genres and expects that you’ll
understand the conventions of those genres when it comes to suspending
disbelief. Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy,
explained that the show had its genesis in horror movies:
“Where did the idea [for BtVS] come from? There’s actually an
incredibly specific answer to that question. It came from watching a horror
movie and seeing the typical ditzy blonde walk into a dark alley and getting
killed. I just thought that I would love to see a scene where the ditzy blonde
walks into a dark alley, a monster attacks her and she kicks its ass.”
Horror movies do follow certain conventions. People do stupid things
which put them in danger. That happens on BtVS too, but as the Whedon
quote demonstrates, the show also subverts those conventions. Part of the
sophistication and fun of watching it comes from recognizing that you’ve been
fooled by those conventions into expecting something very different from what
happened. The very first scene in the very first episode subverts your
expectations built upon past experience with the horror genre. It tells you
what the show intends to do.
In a show starring a superhero
like Buffy, which also takes themes from Westerns – she’s the sheriff in town,
of course – the laws of physics and experience will be violated on a regular
basis: how many shots does a six shooter hold? How many punches does it take to
knock that guy out? The truth is, all television (like all movies) uses
stylized conventions which are “unreal” and yet evoke an actual event. Take sex
scenes, for example. Even in most movies, the actors aren’t actually having
sex. We know this, and yet we’re willing to overlook it and say to ourselves
“they’re having sex”. Bullets on TV aren’t real, blood isn’t real, surgery
isn’t real, courtroom scenes aren’t real. I could add literally hundreds of
examples. At some level, we’re willing to suspend our disbelief and allow the
story to take us to the thematic or emotional conclusion.
This factor is even more
prominent in the superhero genre, where heroes like Superman, Batman, or Buffy
regularly do physically impossible things. Characters use witchcraft and super
powers. Those will bother some people; they just can’t get past the “unreality”
of it. (Of course, the same is equally true of the appearance of the ghost in Hamlet or of the gods in the Iliad ….) This reaction can often be
entirely irrational. For example, I’m a lawyer and it drives me crazy to watch
courtroom scenes because I immediately spot the flaws, and that can wreck my
enjoyment of the scene. But why should I be perfectly content to watch Superman
fly – violating the law of gravity – while being angry if he gets the hearsay
rule wrong? It makes no sense.
Anyone who wants to appreciate any show needs to be able to put all
these issues aside, just as they put aside “unreal” scenes in every movie, and
understand that we’re simply to say to ourselves “they’re having sex” or
“that’s magic” or “that’s surgery” even
if it doesn’t look real. Those who can’t do that probably won’t like the show.
There’s also the issue of how
tightly we demand that the writers plot the story. Every narrative leaves out some events. Nobody wants to watch the
characters sleeping for 8 hours straight, eating a full meal, etc. Even the
most tightly constructed plot lines might be criticized for leaving a gap in
the story. This is no less true of Buffy
than it is of any other show, and perhaps it’s more true – Joss Whedon has made
it clear in interviews that he’s prepared to sacrifice strict plotting in order
to reveal an important emotional truth (as all art does). In any case, BtVS does require a willingness to
suspend your disbelief, to lay aside niggling plot concerns for the thematic or
emotional punch. Here’s how one internet poster expressed the attitude
necessary to appreciate not just Buffy,
but most literature:
“I'm not really interested in
filling (or excavating) plot holes here, because
frankly, this show is myth to me, and if I fell into every plot hole in every
myth, I'd never have time for anything else. I willing[ly] suspend my disbelief
in the face of greater revealed truth.”
v.
Plot Structure and Continuity
The writing in any work of
literature depends not just on cleverness of phrase, but on how well the author
develops the themes and characters over time. Buffy meets very high standards on this score. Fans of the show
lament how difficult it is to show a new viewer a single episode to get them
interested – much of the show’s impact depends on having seen all the previous
ones. We may not understand the full import of an episode at the time, because
only later do all the implications become apparent.
Quoting Robert Moore again,
“One of the most important
changes that Buffy brought about was a new understanding of long story
arcs on TV. … For most of the history of television, the format of series
was episodic. On almost all shows (excepting soap operas), no matter what
happened on one episode of a series, the next week would witness a complete
reset….
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
changed TV narrative. Unlike the soaps and the Hill Street Blues-type
series, it established, beginning with the extraordinary second season, an
approach in which a season consisted of a long story arc that had a beginning,
a middle, and an end. Always leery of cancellation, Whedon structured his arcs
in season-long segments, though he also began setting up major events seasons
ahead of time. … Buffy made it possible for television to tell a
story, as opposed to a bunch of stories, a story that came to a conclusion, as
opposed to stories with no end. It still had plenty of standalone
episodes, but even in the middle of those, small scenes would move the central
arc forward, a technique employed by a host of shows today, from Fringe
to Chuck to Dexter. Damon Lindelhof, during the first
season of Lost, had his writing team watch Buffy a model of how
he wanted to the central narrative of the show to proceed. It is
fascinating that a huge number of TV creators and producers have cited Buffy
as either a major influence or actually worked under Whedon on one of his
shows.”
The writers of Buffy (mostly Joss Whedon) understood
this point very consciously and were willing to wait a long time for events to
play out for maximum impact. Just to give one example, the key plot point of
Episode 13, When She Was Bad,
explains Buffy’s actions in Episode 33, Becoming
I – one of the great scenes in television history, which most fans can
probably quote by heart – and to a great extent explain Xander’s behavior at a
key moment in Episode 34, Becoming II.
What Xander did was one of the most controversial actions in the show’s
history, generating countless debates on the internet (which the writers knew).
Nevertheless, the writers waited
4 full seasons, until episode 127, Selfless,
to reference this sequence again. This wasn’t done in any artificial way, with
the writers self-consciously knowing of the prior episode and bringing it up
for no good reason. It was, to the contrary, something which could have been
brought up any number of times in the intervening years, but was held for
maximum impact at exactly the right moment. I personally jumped out of my seat
and shouted at the television when they finally used it.
vi.
Music
Most viewers, I think, considered
the music on the show to be outstanding, sometimes inspired (see
Music,
Sound and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Just for some examples, I can’t
think of another show or movie which would choreograph a fight scene to a live
Aimee Mann performance or
feature “
Tales of
Brave Ulysses” in two different episodes, one hilariously funny, the other
touching and poignant. Or one which would set one of the most shocking and
tragic scenes in the history of television to the duet “O soave fanciulla” from
Puccini’s “
La Boheme”. In addition,
the music produced for the show itself by
Christophe Beck was
consistently outstanding, Beck himself winning an Emmy for his work.
One of the fortunate consequences
of a limited budget was that the show made a concerted (pun intended) effort to
find lesser known bands from the Los
Angeles club and college scene to play at the Bronze.
This led to some very creative and interesting choices in the music. I’ve
heard, though I can’t confirm, that this practice has been very influential for
other shows and for college radio stations. If so, that adds to Buffy’s cultural influence.
Another factor in the show’s use
of music is that the lyrics almost always relate directly to the characters
shown or the episode themes in some way. This requires a good deal of thought
to achieve on a consistent basis.
b.
Major Factors
As you can see from my comments about
the subsidiary factors, I don’t argue that BtVS
is in any sense a perfect show. Nor do the dialogue and metaphor rise to the
level of Shakespeare. Over 7 seasons, BtVS aired 144 episodes. Most were very
good; perhaps 20 or so were not. Even the good episodes sometimes had their
weaker moments, just as even the weaker ones had a good scene or two.
In general, BtVS demonstrated good quality on the basic production values. That
makes it eligible to be treated as
important, but it doesn’t, by itself, make it important. Now let me get back to
those factors which do move the show into that higher category.
- Growing Up
Buffy “brought character development to a new level. Typically on
most previous series, characters never really changed, never realistically retained
memories of traumas that they had suffered, never truly evolved. On Buffy…, characters changed radically.”
Moore, supra.
Glenn Brown described this
process in detail:
“Quality and substance in
storytelling tend to succumb to the weight of their own seriousness, leaving
behind the lighter fare and less morbid cousins of popular culture in order to
continue on in their overly serious need to prove that they do indeed have something
worthwhile to say. Where the seemingly sillier stories are assumed to reside
in that other, more popular world, usually occupied by soap operas and other
shallow vessels of mindless fun, there are exceptions that prove the rule. Joss
Whedon is one of those exceptions. Pain, sacrifice, and the overwhelming need
constantly to grow and change in a way that actually makes us care, are
qualities necessarily of neither style, but which when aligned in the focus of
Joss Whedon, are made to converge into a glorious melding of allegory, emotion,
and maybe even, guilty pleasure.
Regardless of the dynamics of any
particular group of characters in a Joss Whedon story, the freedom afforded
both the characters and the fictional world to draw upon whatever inspiration
makes sense for that character or that moment, and the corresponding ripple
effect it might bring to the rest of the story, is a deeply woven ingredient in
all the works of Joss Whedon, amounting to a deep and scathing disregard for
the status quo. This quality has become one of the most identifiable marks of a
Joss story, and has made his fictional worlds seem as fully destructible as the
one we live in, with nothing and no one immune from change, or able to escape
fully the orbital pull of those around them. His stories exist within a
construct that borrows heavily from real life in the sense that, there is a
consequence to every action, which requires a constant cycle of consequence and
change for people, places, and even, in some cases, objects. This is a theme
which remains consistent throughout his works, not only elevating his stories
beyond the surface pop-culture reference point of which they are so much a part
but also serving to help keep his stories grounded in a reality that reacts and
responds very much like the one we experience every day, as sometimes painful
and heart-wrenching as it is. Partly because of this, the fantastical worlds of
vampires, demons, mind-wiping tech, and post-civil war space adventurers, can
become as real, compelling, and believable, as the world we live in today.
For the simple reason that he had
more time to fully develop his characters and the world they lived in, due to
the seven seasons it was on…, this culture of change is perhaps most
recognizable in the television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As
Buffy progressed from the ordinary teenage high school student that she started
as (her first words to her Watcher after sucking on her lollipop were a
clueless, “Huh?”), to a Vampire Slayer who had no equal (“Apocalypse? We’ve all
been there/The same old trips/Why should we care?”), she watched her world
become increasingly dangerous while fighting, among other things, personal as
well as real demons, transforming herself into almost a completely different
person in response to this. Buffy changed, her friends changed, and the world
around her changed, and the effect was seen in a slow progression over each
season in how she dealt with her enemies and her friends. By the end of the
series, almost nothing was as it had been when the show had started….
It is this permanency which has
helped make Joss’s stories almost infinitely rewatchable. We feel what the
characters are feeling each time through, gaining a deeper understanding of
their motivations, and why they react as they do. When something changes in a
Joss Whedon story, it usually changes for good with no turning back; there is
no magical “reset” button which brings the world or characters back to where
they stood before the episode started…. There is no easy escape; the only way
out is to continue forward, painful step by painful step. What the characters
become as they forge ahead, is a direct response to what it is they are going
through, or have gone through. The consequences are displayed in the
personality and actions of every character, in every way, requiring them and
those around them to change along with it….
Joss Whedon does in fact have
something
serious to say, serious enough that his stories can be picked apart and
debated like any good work of fiction. Through the use of consequence and
change, he has fashioned a style of storytelling that manages to strike that
elusive chord within us where things that matter find a way to resonate in the
same way they do in our own lives. Things like character, story, and most
importantly, the common thread of allowing the consequences of actions and
events to change substantively his stories and characters. This is a theme that
has given his works a foundation that is rare in any medium, and also runs
counter to the less honest and adventurous styles. It’s a theme that, more than
any other, has come to define what a Joss Whedon story is really all about,
even more than his ability with characterization, plotting, or big ideas. And
the consequence of this is that he has produced a legacy of works which have
impacted pop-culture far more than it would seem they should.”
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/138725-consequence-and-change-in-the-works-of-joss-whedon-and-why-it-matter/
We first meet Buffy in her
sophomore year of high school. Buffy gets older, of course. In the seven
seasons, she ages from 16 to 22. That means she grows up. We’d expect to see
real changes in her during that time, and in fact we do see them. Since Buffy’s
the hero of the show – the greatest hero in American literature in my opinion –
we’d also expect her to grow up in the
right way. As I’ll explain in more detail in the individual essays, the
show repeatedly challenges the viewer to think about what it means to “grow
up”, to become an adult. What distinguishes a teenager from an adult? Buffy
gives us some answers to those questions. Even when it doesn’t give direct
answers, it forces us to think about the issues.
In literature, there’s a name for
works which describe the growing up process. A novel which explores this theme
is called by the German word “
bildungsroman”. The
reason it’s a German word is that the term was first applied to some works by
the great German poet and novelist Goethe. The word means, essentially, “coming
of age novel”.
BtVS is a
bildungsroman.
You don’t need to take my word
for the fact that the writers intended to show this progression. Take it
straight from Joss Whedon’s mouth (from an AOL live chat, November 10, 2002):
“"Buffy" is hard [to write] because it is completely grounded in
human experience. Every episode has to be about what, you know, what it feels
like to go through a certain period in your life. In the rite of passage that
is your life. We can never do an episode that is purely fantastical and
exciting because the show is about growing up.” More recently (February 8,
2012) he reiterated this in an interview with USA Today: “"Buffy
was always about the arc of a life, and it wasn't ever going to be one of those
shows where they were perpetually in high school and never asked why,"
Whedon says. "It was about change. So there's never a time when Buffy's
life isn't relevant."
The dialogue tells us many times
that this is happening. Take, for example, this passage from the end of Lie to Me:
“Buffy: Nothing's ever simple anymore. I'm constantly
trying to work it out. Who to love or hate. Who to trust. It's just, like, the
more I know, the more confused I get.
Giles: I believe that's called growing up.”
Growing up involves choices,
making decisions about what kind of person we want to be. Buffy has to make
those choices; pretty much every episode presents Buffy with decisions only she
can make and the consequences of her decisions. The choices she makes (that we
all make) don’t just reveal who she is right now, they shape what she will
become in the future. Not only is Buffy “the Chosen One”, the very last episode
bears the title “Chosen”, intending
both the passive (to be chosen) and active (to choose) meanings of that word. I
can’t, obviously, prove this claim here by describing this process for each of
144 episodes, but that’s part of what I’ll be doing in the individual essays.
- Metaphor
Placing BtVS into a fancy
literary genre doesn’t, by itself, make the show important. The substance of
the discussion makes the show important, and I’ll talk more about that. For
now, let me move on to the way
BtVS
tells its story. The significant factor here is metaphor. The extensive use of
metaphor on Buffy requires a careful reading of the text in order to fully
appreciate the story. “[Creator Joss] Whedon … credits his viewers with a high
degree of intelligence and assumes that they are capable of absorbing a
considerable degree of detail. He assumes a high level of literacy on the part
of viewers, such as making nods to highbrow films and movies.” Robert Moore,
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/137783-why-a-spotlight-on-joss-whedon/P1
A metaphor, in literature, is
when a word (or, in the case of television, an image) which literally looks
like one thing is used to suggest something else instead. In BtVS the use of metaphor is inherent in
the show. Most of the demons Buffy fights are metaphors. If the writers want to
show Buffy struggling with lust, they create a lust demon and have Buffy defeat
it (that’s an example one of the writers actually gave). The demons are demons
of the mind, personal demons that people commonly struggle with.
When I was in college I had a
particular English teacher who overdid metaphor. He carried it so far that everything ended up a metaphor. That
drove me nuts at the time, and it made me forever cautious about claims to see
X as a symbol of Y. Nonetheless, Buffy is a show built on metaphor. Quoting
again from Joss Whedon’s AOL interview, “Buffy is made by a bunch of writers
who think very, very hard about what they are doing in terms of psychology and
methodology. … When somebody says there is a philosophy behind
"Buffy" that is the truth. When they say there is symbolism and
meaning in what we're doing, that's true too.”
I operate on the assumption that
there’s a metaphor in every episode, because that’s the whole point of the show.
That means we need to understand the metaphors in every episode, and for the
show generally, in order to understand what’s happening. In general the
metaphors that I’ll mention are either blatantly obvious or even expressly
mentioned by the writers. There are a few episodes where the writers lost me.
I’ll do my best to identify the metaphor in those episodes, but I’ll be
speculating.
The most important such metaphor
is Buffy herself. She’s the hero of the show; we – the audience – are supposed
to identify with her. When she feels pain, we should also; when she’s sad, we
should feel her sadness. Buffy is us and we are her. That’s what
I call the Central Metaphor for the show. When Buffy faces a dilemma, we learn
from her experience because we are, in some sense, her. We feel (or should
feel) what she feels: joy at her triumphs, grief at her distress, gratitude
towards her friends, anger at those who betray her.
This brings up an important,
related issue. Buffy’s a girl (duh). She faces many of her issues as a girl.
There’s a definite feminist message here – the female as superhero. That
doesn’t make her any less “us” than if she were male. Nobody doubts that we
should identify with male heroes in literature; the fact that Buffy’s “just a
girl” doesn’t change this. The message is universal even if gender can only be
particular.
If Buffy is us, and if the demons
stand as metaphors for our flaws and our fears, then what do vampires
represent? Put another way, why is the show titled Buffy the Vampire Slayer rather than Buffy the Demon Slayer?
To answer this question, we need
to consider one of the most basic facts about vampires in the genre: they never
age. Vampires are frozen in time. In School
Hard, when Angel tells Spike (a vampire) that “things change”, Spike
responds angrily, “Not us! Not demons!”
Or this from Smashed:
“[Vampire]: A man can change. Buffy: You’re not a man.”
Why are they frozen in time?
Because they can’t make moral choices. Within the show, vampires lack a soul.
According to Joss Whedon, the soul as it’s depicted in the show serves as a
“moral compass”. With vampires, that compass is pointing the wrong direction –
their choices are governed by selfish motives, so they can’t develop morally.
Think about what this means –
that vampires can never grow up. But the whole story of Buffy is, as I said
before, about growing up. Being the Slayer allows her to slay demons which are
metaphors for her personal demons that might prevent her from growing up. Thus,
she slays vampires – those who can’t grow up – as a metaphor for her own path
to adulthood.
Vampires also can’t see themselves
in the mirror. The
mirror
test is a measure of self-awareness: “The test gauges self-awareness by
determining whether an animal can recognize its own reflection in a mirror as
an image of itself.” Since vampires can’t see their reflection, that’s a sign
to the viewers that vampires aren’t self-aware. We’re meant to contrast Buffy
with the vampires – she is, or at least is becoming (a key word in the show)
self-aware.
Vampires also bite; that’s been part
of vampire lore since at least
Bram Stoker.
BtVS adopts this lore, along with other
aspects of the tradition (wooden stakes to the heart, holy water, etc.). In
this tradition of vampire literature, the vampire’s bite generally serves as a
metaphor for sexual intercourse. Vampires reproduce by biting. As Buffy
explains in the very first episode,
Welcome
to the Hellmouth, “To make you a vampire they have to suck your blood. And
then you have to suck their blood. It's like a whole big sucking thing.” But a
vampire’s bite is also just a way to kill you. This means you need to be
conscious of which metaphor they’re using. Or, as
Freud said, sometimes a
cigar is just a cigar. But do consider the implications of using a stake…
This brings up an important
point: metaphors are common on BtVS,
but they aren’t universal. Some demons serve no metaphorical purpose (e.g.,
Clem in Seasons 6-7). Don’t make the mistake my former English teacher made of
looking for metaphor in all the wrong damn places (that’s a paraphrase of an S7
character). Do be sensitive, though, to the principal metaphors that I’ve just
described.
Buffy herself and the vampires
and demons don’t exhaust the list of metaphors on the show. Buffy’s friends,
Willow and Xander, and her mentor, Giles, are also metaphors sometimes. Willow is
Buffy’s spirit, Xander her heart, Giles her mind. Often this is obvious in a
particular episode, but in any case the show made the equation explicit in the
episodes Primeval and Restless. As is true with vampires and
sex, this is true sometimes but not all the time; you need to evaluate the
actions of the characters and think about how they play out as both metaphor
and in “real” life.
Using other characters as
metaphors for aspects of Buffy herself raises interesting issues. One that gets
debated on the internet a lot is whether the show is “all about Buffy”, or
whether it’s best seen as an ensemble show with supporting characters who lead
independent lives and have their own story lines. (The writers were aware of
this debate and even refer to it in the dialogue.) I lean towards the “all
about Buffy” side, but really there’s no reason that both can’t be true. To the
extent that other characters do function, at times, as metaphors for aspects of
Buffy, it’s essential that they demonstrate their own characteristics and
develop over time. The best metaphors, after all, work both as metaphor and as
straight story. Thus, we can appreciate Xander’s attraction to demon women as
part of his own life story, but also see in it a reflection of Buffy’s
attraction to “bad boys” (since Xander represents Buffy’s heart). Part of the
sophistication of the show is that it forces us to think about these issues and
reflect on what we see on-screen. That’s what good literature does.
Magic is a metaphor too,
sometimes. Principally so in Seasons 4-5-6, though the metaphor changes during
that time (with not always happy results in my view). So is Buffy’s house.
Other metaphors get used episodically.
When we think of important works
of literature, we expect them to use language in creative ways and to make good
use of metaphor. BtVS qualifies on
both counts. But the real test for literature is that it communicates an
important message. BtVS does that as
well.
- Themes
If I were asked to identify the
single most important message communicated by BtVS, my response would be this:
accept responsibility. This theme appears early in the very first episode, Welcome to the Hellmouth:
“Buffy: Oh, why can't you people just leave me alone?
Giles: Because you are the Slayer. (comes down the
stairs) Into each generation a Slayer is born, one girl in all the world, a
Chosen One, one born with the strength and skill to hunt the vampires...”
If Buffy didn’t accept her
responsibility as The Slayer, there’d be no story to tell. That’s why the
Prologue to every episode in Season 1 recites that “In every generation there
is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the vampires,
the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.” (My emphasis.)
Note that word, “alone” and its
complements, “One” and “the”. That’s responsibility, all right. There’s nobody
who can take her place, no higher power to aid her:
“Buffy: (exhales) You don't have anything useful to
tell me, do you? What are you, just some immortal demon sent down to even the
score between good and evil?
Whistler: (impressed) Wow. Good guess. (grins)
Buffy: (steps up to him) Well, why don't you try
getting off your immortal ass and fighting evil once in a while? 'Cause I'm sick
and tired of doing it myself.” Becoming 2.
Buffy stands for the world.
Consider what this means in the context of the show’s metaphors. Each time
Buffy acts, she’s implicitly telling us how we should act if we face a similar
dilemma. If Buffy is us, then by identifying with her, we put ourselves
in that same position of having to act to save the world. She’s acting in
metaphor; we’re supposed to take that lesson into real life. The show not only
forces us to think about how to grow up, it gives us insight into what adult –
that is, moral – behavior consists
of: We are to act as if the whole world depended on our actions. That’s a
boatload of responsibility all right, even if, unlike Buffy, we don’t face more
apocalypses than birthdays.
Don’t get the impression that
BtVS is an After School Special. Only
rarely do the writers fall into the trap of dropping anvils in order to send a
message (it does happen a few times). The vast majority of the time they
succeed in provoking discussion and reflection, seldom making the mistake of
becoming wearyingly pompous like
Polonius
in
Hamlet. And whenever the show runs
the risk of being melodramatic, some humor undermines the self-importance: “It's
like you've got to have at least one moment that says "No, no, no, no.
We're not taking ourselves that seriously." (Joss,
Lessons DVD commentary.)
Buffy learns by making creative
choices, ones that force the viewer to think. Sometimes she learns by making
the wrong choice, sometimes the choice is so difficult that there simply is no
obvious answer and the internet erupts in screaming debates. The point of the
show is not to drive the message into your head with a railroad spike, it’s to
force you to think about the kinds
of dilemmas we all might face.
Growing up involves making all
sorts of moral decisions. When are we mature enough for sex? Who should our
role models be? What mistakes do adults make which we should recognize so that
we don’t make the same ones? How should we act in ethical dilemmas? I could go
on, but I believe the point is clear. Buffy faces all of these problems and
many more on her road to adulthood. She’s telling us how to think about growing up, even if we’re already “adults”.
As Xander puts it in The Freshman,
“Let me tell you something, when it's dark and I'm all alone and I'm scared or
freaked out or whatever, I always think, 'What would Buffy do?'”
Don’t get me wrong – Buffy has
flaws, some of them significant. She would have been boring without them. Joss
Whedon put it this way: “The idea was,
let’s have a feminist role model for kids. What's interesting is you end up
subverting that. If she's just an ironclad hero - "I'm a woman hear me
constantly roar" - it gets dull. Finding the weakness and the vanity and
the foibles makes it fun.” What fascinates us about the character of Buffy is
that she has to struggle to reach the right decision. Just as we all do.
The case for treating BtVS as important literature rests,
essentially, on these three grounds: it forces us to think about an important
topic and treats important themes via the creative use of language and
metaphor.
C. Episode Essays
Many of the S5-7 commentaries were first
written as comments to the reviews of
Buffy
episodes by Noel Murray of the AV Club (his reviews start at [SPOILERS at link]
http://origin.avclub.com/tvclub/tvshow/buffy-the-vampire-slayer,45/3/),
who not only wrote insightful reviews of every single episode, but tolerated
people like me who used his reviews as an excuse for their own commentary. I’ve
expanded those comments quite a bit. There are no spoilers in my episode
comments unless clearly labeled. I will on occasion quote from the DVD
commentaries. Avoid those if you want to remain unspoiled. Many of the
commentaries were recorded much later, and the writers often mention subsequent
events.
I don’t want you to think that
everything I write is original to me. Of course it’s not. I’ve read a huge
amount of internet commentary on the show and a number of books as well.
Sometimes other people stated more clearly what I already was thinking,
sometimes what they said was new to me but I’ve incorporated it into my viewing
so thoroughly that I can’t separate it any more. It’s more accurate to say that
what I’ve done is synthesize all of that reading.
The majority of discussion I’ve
read comes from the
forum of a site
called
All Things Philosophical on Buffy the
Vampire Slayer and Angel the Series. It’s still a live board, though not
active; I definitely recommend that you read the forum archives and the
annotations on the Board itself. Full disclosure: I was one of the posters on
that Board, using the name Sophist. I don’t always agree with myself, so if I
seem to have changed my mind, that’s because I have.
While I can’t really sort out all
the influences on my current thinking, I do need to say that one poster at ATPO
did influence me more than any other single person. His name was manwitch and
you can read his original posts at the ATPO forum. I don’t always agree with
him, but he was responsible for articulating what I call the Central Metaphor
of the show, namely that Buffy is us. I had always viewed the show through a
Buffy-centric lens, but had never conceptualized it that way until manwitch
pointed it out. Any extensions of his insight are my responsibility, not his,
of course.
