I assume everyone reading this
knows that Buffy the Vampire Slayer
premiered on March 10, 1997, 20 years ago. I thought it would be
worthwhile to review how I think the show still speaks to us.
This may seem redundant, since I
wrote the essays here and the whole book to demonstrate that the show provides
timeless themes. What I want to do in this post is to distill its core message,
not just for reference, but for inspiration. SPOILERS for all episodes and for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
We begin as individuals: “You are
the center. And within you, there is the core of your being ... of what you
are.” It’s that core from which you draw the strength you need to face the
challenges of the world:
Angelus: So that's
everything, huh? No weapons... No friends... No hope.
Buffy closes her eyes and steels
herself for whatever's coming.
Angelus: Take all that
away... and what's left?
He draws the sword back and
thrusts it directly at her face. With lightning-fast reflexes she swings up
with both arms and catches the blade between the palms of her hands. She opens
her eyes and meets his.
Buffy: Me.
You were not born with that core.
You were not given it by someone else. You created
it by the choices you’ve made in your life. Those choices were never entirely
unrestricted. Our abilities have natural limits and we make choices within
those constraints. Others make choices too, and those may constrain us as well.
Past choices may affect the options available to you now.
Don’t mistake those constraints
as traps. “You have a choice. You don't have a good choice, but you have a
choice!” The choices you make going forward today can reinforce or even
redefine the kind of person you are. I wish there were a pithy quote from the
series to highlight this point, but it’s implicitly shown throughout almost
every episode. Instead I’ll quote from Harry
Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (edited for brevity, my bold):
“Professor Dumbledore….. Riddle
said I’m like him. Strange likenesses, he said.”
“Did he now? And what do you think, Harry?”
“The Sorting Hat told me I’d –
I’d have done well in Slytherin. Everyone thought I was Slytherin’s heir for a while…. The Sorting Hat could see
Slytherin’s power in me, and it – ”
“Put you in Gryffindor. Listen to
me, Harry. You happen to have many of the qualities Salazar Slytherin prized in
his hand-picked students. … resourcefulness – determination – a certain
disregard for rules. Yet the Sorting Hat placed you in Gryffindor. You know why
that was. Think.”
“It only put me in Gryffindor
because I asked not to go in Slytherin.”
“Exactly. Which makes you very
different from Tom Riddle. It is our
choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
Not every choice defines your
life all by itself. Most choices are small ones, though their cumulative impact
may be large. It’s hard to know, though, at any point in time, which choice
will prove to be critical; that’s why we need to make every choice a deliberate
one. “There's moments in your life that make you, that set the course of who
you're gonna be. Sometimes they're little, subtle moments. Sometimes... they're
not.”
Most of the time, though, we
recognize the big moments, maybe not in advance, but when reality slaps us in
the face. “Bottom line
is, even if you see 'em coming, you're not ready for the big moments. No one
asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So what are we,
helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can't help that.
It's what you do afterwards that counts. That's when you find out who you are.”
What is it that you do afterward?
That’s when we remember that we are Buffy:
