Buffy’s Biggest Fans Are A Pain In The Neck
Richard Jenkyns refuses to fall under the spell of the vampire slayer from Sunydale.
The Australia Financial Review, Friday 8 March 2002
Reviewers often exaggerate how much they know about the subjects of the books they discuss, but you would have to be a bit sad to be a real expert on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and I hasten to assure readers that I don’t know a great deal about it. But it seems I should be getting out less. Roz Kareney declares that this is the first television show to have seduced her completely, and admits admits to being obsessed with it. She is not alone. Writers and intellectuals, she adds, discuss Buffy over dinner. Her collaborators in Reading the Vampire Slayer* are also fully paid-up fans (except for an expert on east Asian martial arts movies, who breaks ranks by concluding that the fights in Buffy are indifferently executed). Some praise the show for wit, others for symbolic force. Kaveney likes the dialogue’s snappiness and offers examples: “What is your childhood trauma?”; “I’m loves bitch, but at least I’m man enough to admit it.”
When I have sampled Buffy, I have found the characterisation cardboard, the plot lines repetitious, the pacing and development of the narrative poor, the monsters feeble and the action scenes perfunctory and unexciting. But there is a lot of Buffy. Kaveney offers a brief synopsis of 100 episodes of Buffy itself and more than 40 episodes of the darker spin-off series, Angel – and it must be hard to keep the standard up. Maybe it has been my bad luck that any time I switch on I seem yo catch Giles the librarian advising Buffy about the latest supernatural perils in those concerned tones that children put on when they are playing at being grown-ups. Plenty of people, it is true, find Buffy charming. Certainly, pop-culture television can be worth serious attention: the egghead praise heaped upon The Simpsons, for example, is fully deserved, and the Fawlty Towers is one of the finest works of art produced in the past 30 years.
Although Buffy may be better than I think, many of these contributors are too indulgent. The joy of fandom is that everything can be made to appear meaningful. Kaveney is impressed that the characters in the story age in something like real time. That, of course, is because the actors are aging in real time and even in Hollywood and actor nearing 30 can’t go on playing a schoolkid. Kaveney also reveals that “the five seasons of Buffy …share a structural pattern as coherent as the statement, development, second statement, recapitulations and coda of sonata form” – a fancy way of saying that the storylines are all the same. Anne Millard Daugherty deduces that Buffy is represented as affluent because in five series she has never worn the same outfit twice. But isn’t she supposed to be an object of teenage lust? “Even for a Hollywood series, the cast are for the most part staggeringly beautiful,” pants Kaveney, lowering her brow for just a moment.
For Boyd Tonkin, Buffy exemplifies the contrast between the endless sunshine of the southern California and “the deep darkness and perpetual turbulence of the region’s supposed moral climate”. But this is a British view. Americans laugh at the idea of southern California as a hedonist’s paradise, a lotus-land of warmth and pleasure. With a dash of envy, this dream becomes a fantasy of darkness beneath the bright surface. The theme goes back to Aldous Huxley’s diatribe in Jesting Pilate against LA as the “City of Dreadful Joy”, written years before he capitulated and made California his home.
Alsion Lurie’s novel The Nowhere City studies this syndrome from the viewpoint of east coast America, where some people catch the disease in a milder form. But the reality of LA is that it contains a larger area of pleasant, middle-class suburbs than anywhere else in the world. Buffy is set in So Cal because So Cal is where the people who make it live and work: for them it is perfectly everyday, and the basic, quite amusing conceit of the show is that Hellmouth and the cosmic conflict should be centred on a bog-standard high school – Drcacula meets Beverly Hills 90210. The point of Sunnydale is its ordinariness.
The Englishman, Giles, is perhaps the most interesting character in the story. American Anglophilia is reflected in Giles’s role as the source of learning and Buffy’s wise preceptor. But at the same time he is a kind of subordinate, and it may be significant that he is usually addressed by his surname (he is Rupert Giles in full) and his feelings for Buffy have to be restricted to an ineffectual tenderness (it being well known that Englishmen are not supplied with sexual organs). Half of Giles is Obi-Wan Kenobi: half is Gielgub as the English butler.
Kaveney’s authors are not afraid of being pretentious. One contribution speaks of “Buffy’s forth season” as as though it were Beethoven’s third period and reveals that the show is really about globalisation and the relation between capital and nation. Another contributor, in pan-feminist mode, takes us through Sumerian myth, the Eleusinian Mystery, gnosticism and much more. There is surely less here than meets the eye. When I see the death and resurrection of Buffy Summers compared to that of Jesus Christ, I do not think that this adds value to the series but rather that it cheapens things which are truly profound. It must be possible to write about pop culture seriously while preserving a sense of proportion.
*Reading the Vampire Slayer. Edited by Roz Kaveney. Palgrave. $37.
Richard Jenkyns is professor of classics at Oxford Univerity.
Photo: Typical shot of SMG with a stake.
Caption: In the beginning: ‘Pepper spray is just so passé.’
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Maj - (Creator of Willow's Room)
SFX: Where would you like to see Willow go in the sixth season?
Alyson: "I hope Willow gets taller, and she gets a tan."
- SFX Magazine, December 2001
and a big 
for him
