Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Myth, Metaphor & Morality

by Field, Mark

  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.”

  http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/117637-when-tv-became-art-what-we-owe-to-buffy/

  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 107th 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 b
rings 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 con
firm, 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.

  1. 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.