Buffy:The Vampire Slayer
A
lthough most of the good titles have already been taken—Fighting the Forces:What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer(Wilcox and Lavery 2002), “What Makes Buffy Slay?” (Udovitch 2000), “‘You Slay Me!’ Buffy as Jurisprudence of Desire” (MacNeil 2007), “Fans with a Lot at Stake” (Bloustein 2002), and even from the series itself, “Being A Vampire Sucks” (4003, “The Harsh Light of Day,”1 I have come up with a title that captures what will be a predominately Lacanian reading of the series. This chapter and the next were first written in 2003 when the series ended, and they were meant to be included in the Youth Fantasies (2004) book, but never made the “light of day.” At that time I had watched all seven seasons and had the Buffyverse quite well in hand (somewhat “backwards”
I must add, beginning with the first season after I had found a way into the series for myself, as shall be revealed). It seems apropos to revive them now, some five years later, recognizing that the scholarship on Buffy: The Vampire Slayerhas not waned. Footnotes will update some of the discussion. In these two chapters, I have retained my idiosyncratic approach to youth by retaining the signifiers gurl/girl/grrl that I developed in Music in Youth Cultureto address the question concerning the specificity of postfeminism. The exploration ofBuffy: The Vampire Slayeris placed in the middle ofTelevision and Youth Culture as an enfolded space that reaches out to the other two books, making the trilogy complete. Theoretically, chapter 1—“Madness and Paranoia”—addresses the postgothic of Buffy, as it does that ofRoswellandSmallvillethat follow.
Buffy: The Vampire Slayer(cited as Buffy) began in 1997, a historic moment when the disgruntled concerns of the third-wave feminist daughters that had been percolating since the early 1990s began to see the light of day as a confrontation with their second-wave feminist mothers (de La Rosa 2000). Buffy took a page from Kevin Williamson’s Scream series and hyperbolized girl-power through its fighting sequences. Buffy’s mother, Joyce, is totally oblivious to her daughter’s struggles until the end of the second season—the start of the new millennium.
Parental authority, as I show, is suspended throughout the series. In 1997, Sarah Michelle Gellar, who was 20 at the time, took on the role of Buffy, a 16-year-old who is destined to fulfill her Call: “As long as there have been demons, there has
been the Slayer. One girl in the world, a Chosen One, born with the strength and skill to hunt vampires and other deadly creatures . . . to stop the spread of evil.
When one Slayer dies, the next is called and trained by the Watcher.” Over the next seven years Buffy grew up. Besides Joss Whedon, the series’ creator, other writers—most notably Marti Nixon since season five—began writing episodes;
the narrative obviously underwent a number of changes.
In the first three seasons, Buffy and the Scooby Gang were students at Sunnydale High School. At the beginning of season four, Buffy and the Scooby Gang became freshmen at Sunnydale University. She was now 19. Season five marked a shift in the series as Buffy turned 20 and was “reborn,” not quite herself. By season seven, Buffy, now in her early twenties, returned to Sunnydale High School as a coun- selor, completing the cycle. Joss Whedon, who is openly gay, established a campy, self-referential, witty pun(k) style to capture Buffy and the Scooby Gang’s strug- gle with their psyches—first in high school, then in college, and finally in the case of Buffy as a counselor mentoring a younger generation. Whedon managed to find a narrative structure that cleverly explored in a humorous way the fears and anxieties that impact youth today.
The Usual (Objectionable) Suspects
Buffy has become a huge enterprise. It is easy to become a fan(addict) of the series.2Theologians and academics3alike have bitten into Buffy’s apple as both a poison and a cure. Not only did it last seven seasons—spin-offs include Angel, an animated Buffy,and a BBC spin-off featuring Giles, the librarian—but the series has also generated an elaborate cyberspace following: Websites (two in particu- lar deserve to be noted: Buffy.com and PlanetX.com), chat rooms, and the usual slash fanfics where erotic relationships between the characters are developed, played with, and pushed even further (Stengel 2000; Graham 2001). There are also sophisticated discussions by academics (hopefully, including this one) on the moral and ethical dilemmas of the series, its plot structures, its marketing schemes, and so on.Slayer: On-Line International Journal of Buffy Studiesboasts a sophistication that now makes even the X-Files series pale by comparison.
“Everything Philosophical About Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” a former website, also treated the series with equal sophistication. Let me first dispense with some obvious interpretations and objections before proceeding to my own, hopefully, unique thesis.
Buffy, first of all, can be read as a perpetual “final girl” of the horror genre as developed by Carol Clover (1992; see also Barbaccia 2000). Her gurl performativ- ity of kicking, fistfighting, and stabbing—that is, “slaying”—is an obvious link with “girl-power,” while her grrrl roots will be discussed later.4Kevin Williamson’s Screamseries of teen horror flicks in the late 1990s revitalized the slasher genre in one parodic swoop, and disarmed Clover’s “Chainsaw thesis” into the “Final gurl”
laughing. There is the usual complaint that Buffyis just too Anglo-American cen- tric, but as Geraldine Bloustein (2002) shows, it is a series that has an amazing appeal in numerous countries, indicating the profound psychic resonances that it
has managed to strike. Buffy websites can be found in the United Kingdom (UK), the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Israel, Germany, Brazil, France, and Singapore. “It is screened in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, [Canada], Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden” (Topping 2001, 54), and Austria, where this chapter was written. No question that there are other countries that belong on this list. Some critics and fans were unhappy with Buffy’s heteronormative relation- ships, but that, too, ended with a lesbian subplot that began in season five between Willow and Tara. That was just a question of time, given that gay romances had become increasingly successful commercially on prime-time shows by the end of the twentieth century. From what had been slash fanfics, characterized by a “best friends” fantasy among girls during the first three seasons when Buffy had a pre- dominately teenage girl audience, began to change, especially in the fifth season when the spin-off Angel was launched. Spike/Angel and Xander/Angel slash fanfics began appearing; as did “BadFics,” where sexual pairings were between monsters and the Slayerettes (Graham 2001, 25).
There is also the typical complaint of tough-minded critics on the Left that Buffyis a shameless display of commodity fetishism. Isn’t everything?5Filmed in Southern California, both near and in Los Angeles, Buffy is Sassyincarnate, wear- ing Delia’s-style slip dresses and spaghetti-strapped tank tops—one might say a Spice Girl in disguise. She is a retail industry, like the crossmarketing of Buffy paraphernalia from the Warner Brothers (WB) network and clothing retailer Hot Topic.6 True. But there is an undeniable integrity displayed behind Gellar’s actions that makes one a believer. Sassy gurl Sarah Michelle Gellar had the net- work executives at United Paramount Network (UPN) by the . . . (you know what) when she (at first) refused to move from the WB network. She made Teen Peoplemagazine visit the Dominican Republic for an interview (she was on loca- tion working for Habitat for Humanity). Gellar also left the Rolling Stonemaga- zine photo shoot when things became too “uncomfortable” for her. As for her parodic appearance in the horror film I Know What You Did Last Summer, she ironically quipped that she prefers to call it “I Know What Your Breasts Did Last Summer.” Gellar is fully aware of the contradictions of the series and uses them effectively for positive ends.
Then there is the complaint about what I have called Buffy’s “romanticized transgressivity” (jagodzinski 2003b). This criticism is generally leveled at cultural critics such as John Fiske, who argued in a seminal book, Television Culture (1987), that such a stance is the best that is possible within a capitalism system.
Thejouissanceof youth’s pleasures is able to rupture the stranglehold of ideology.
As Rob Latham succinctly put it in his brilliant book Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption(2002), “the choice is between Marx’s parasitic vampire-rat [capitalism], a verminous beast deserving only of extermi- nation, and Fiske’s mischievous mallrats [youth], rebellious creatures avidly indulging their cravings and caprices” (36).Buffydoes not escape either position, but masterfully negotiates in the space between them by setting up what might be referred to as a walled narrativewhen it comes to its consumption. This concept is not unlike a walled-city (or cyberspace cities like Neocron), but its effects are
much different, since its walls are fortified by the very nature of its narrative.Buffy is another video game “of sorts,” but the stakes (I couldn’t avoid that one) are much, much higher—adolescent psyches.Buffy was their cult secret that they could whisper among themselves in school. To escape into its fantasy porthole and be enclosed by its protective shell, however, requires work (especially by adults7), since its episodes appear like “fluff,” just trivial nonsense: a bunch of kids running around putting stakes through demons and the like. What nonsense, and that is precisely its “wall.” You have to somehow climb over it, or find a way through it.
I admit that I thought at first it was just fluff.
The Heroine with a Call
Before I try to unravel the secret of its fortifications, I must say a word about Buffy herself. Buffy, for the most part, follows a heroic monomyth as classically described by Joseph Campbell (1973).8She accepts the challenge to be the ONE;
Giles is her guide; she faces her first test—the Hellmouth Master; dies in the whale’s belly; is resurrected and comes back to fight him; defeats him and contin- ues on her journey. But this monomyth is completely inverted. There is no jump- ing from one world to the next as is usual in a heroic quest—as an endless puzzle adventure if need be that is the stuff of many video games. Buffy stays put. It is an inner psychic journey that she is on, first at Sunnydale high school and then at Sunnydale University, with minor sojourns to Los Angeles. This heroine’s guides are all inept. As adults, the Watchers fail miserably in their “guidance.” The ONE Buffy also splits into two other slayers (Kendra and Faith), as I shall discuss later.
Death and resurrections are common fare in the Buffyverse, as sacrifices are made for the sake of the Cause that have ethical consequences, but raise the question that just maybe the Cause itself is a myth. This heroine turns out to be part demon herself! Does Buffy suffer from a multiple personality disorder? Is this heroine delusional? I shall discuss this as well.
Buffystages a world that doesn’t exist in the classically heroic sense. It is its missing piece, the X that the classic hero avoids, but which structures his journey in the first place. This is the world of his inner demons and “pure” desires, where he journeys either away—from or toward—in his quest.Buffyis not a narrative of heroic desire, but of uncontrollable drives: Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delightsfound in the unconscious virtual Real that is structured by an ethics of radical Evil, and the struggle with the will-to-jouissance. This is her self-refleXive move, the one I develop in the next chapter. Paradoxically, the Buffyverse is not a fantasy—it’s Sunnydale’s Hell, a place of perdition where Beinginsists on its suf- fering. Vampires and sexuality are closely associated in Dracula’s Victorian gothic genre (Callander 1999). Vamping (sexual intercourse) turns ordinary women into sexually voracious predators—virgin/slut dichotomies abound. Buffy, however, is able to keep these roles in deconstructive play in such a way that, as I try to show, the gothic genre itself is inverted. Is being “vamped” then a fall into the Sadeian world of sadomasaochism (s/m) associated with liberated female sexuality? That is to say, the woman is an equal partner in the pleasures of the flesh. Some have
argued this about the Buffyverse, especially in the figure of Spike. Vampires are monsters in human drag, while Buffy defies demonic miscegenation (“excessive exogamy”). She is a slayer coming together with a vampire (Angel), crossing the boundary of their difference. What the teratological imagination of postmodern- gothic explores, however, is much broader than this. I argue in this chapter and the next that the Buffyverse is much more. It addresses the anxiety of youth lead- ing up to what was to become an event—9/11.
Opening Up a Porthole: Scratching the Tain of the Mirror
When I first stumbled across the Buffyseries—the episode (I was to learn later) was entitled “Normal Again” (6017) and aired on March 12, 2002—a scene stayed with me that pried the wall open for my approach to Buffy. The episode begins with Buffy walking down a moonlit Sunnydale avenue scouting out a demon hideout.9 When she gets too close to the hideout, a demon jumps out and attacks Buffy and manages to skewer her with a claw. We cut next to a featureless room where Buffy is being held down by two orderlies, dressed appropriately in white. As she strug- gles to free herself, one of them jabs her with a hypodermic needle. The camera pulls away to reveal a bed with constraints, a reinforced locked door. Patients are being herded down the hallway outside. We are in a mental hospital. Immediately, Buffy is back in front of the demon’s hideout a bit confused. The “cuts” she incurs during the Sunnydale scrap and at the mental hospital cause a rupture of her skin- ego—the force of the skewer and the hypodermic needle. The next flashback to the hospital occurs when Buffy’s manager barks at her at the Doublemeat Palace, the fast-food place where she is working. This time a nurse is telling her it’s time for her drugs, reminiscent of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Almost immediately, we are back at the Doublemeat Palacewith Buffy looking at her bemused manager. His threat had caused a brief flashback, a momentary dis- avowal of his existence.
In the next incident, Buffy collapses when Xander gets into a quarrel with Spike, a vampire who has Buffy as a love interest (it’s a long story . . . later). This time, the scene is more dramatic. A kind, soft-spoken doctor is talking to her.
He tells her that Sunnydale is not real. The mental institution is where she has been for the last six years (seasons). There is a quick cut to Buffy walking in the cemetery (as if she is now hallucinating this memory withinthe context of the mental institution), and then we are immediately back to the mental institution where the doctor tells Buffy that she has visitors: Joyce and Hank Summers; her parents are here for a visit! (Hank is divorced from Joyce and does not enter into the Buffyverse. He makes a rare guest appearance when Buffy visits him in the second season. Effectively he does not exist.) They are somewhat surprised that she recognizes them, and Joyce strangely says, “stay with us.” But Buffy curls up into a fetal position. With the shock of seeing her parents, Buffy is back with Willow, Xander, and Spike who are gathered around looking at her lying on the ground in a fetal position. Buffy tells them that she has been having hallucina- tions, that Sunnydale is not real. As Willow tries to reason with her, Buffy is
again back in the hospital. This time the incident is even moredramatic. Joyce and Hank are talking to their other daughter, Dawn, telling her that they hope that Buffy will come back to them. The doctor tells them like it is. Buffy has been living in an imaginary world of her own construction. She has written her own delusions of escape, which include imagining that she has a sister, Dawn, but now these delusions have taken on an opposite effect: Sunnydale has become too ugly a place to stay. Buffy is suddenly back again in Sunnyvale talking to Willow and looking at a picture of the Summers family that does not include Dawn, as if the shock of seeing Dawn at the mental hospital has transported her back to Sunnydale.
For regular watchers of the series, Dawn “magically” shows up in season five, as if she came from nowhere. This hallucinatory episode could be interpreted as if there is now something wrong with the hallucination of the hallucination.
Willow tells Buffy that there is nothing to worry about, that she has never been in an institution. On the contrary, Buffy explains, she was placed in an institution when she first told her parents about vampires. If she stopped talking about vam- pires, she was not given her daily dose of Thorazine. In a couple of weeks she was discharged. Her parents put the incident behind them, as did she. Buffy tells Willow that she is not sure if she ever left the mental hospital, that maybe she is still there! After a brief scene with Spike and Xander, Dawn (age 15) is miracu- lously back, bringing her sister tea. Buffy tries to convince Dawn that she’s OK now, and that as sisters they have to learn to get along better. That conversation is rudely interrupted as Buffy’s mother bluntly says, “You don’t have a sister, Buffy.”
Buffy is on the bed in her cell and repeats her mother’s statement. Joyce encour- ages her to say it again—which she does. Hank insists that her memories of Dawn aren’t real, while Joyce then encourages Buffy to “stay with them.” They will take care of her. Wanting to believe her mother, Buffy reaches out only to find a hurt look on her sister’s face. Buffy is back in Sunnydale. Dawn has heard the rejection (Buffy’s repetition of her mother’s words) and leaves.
Willow works out a magic potion to make the hallucinations go away. After a lucid incident with Spike, who tells her in no uncertain terms to get off her
“hero” trip and to tell her friends about their romance, the shock caused by Spike’s directness prompts Buffy to take Willow’s cup of potion to her mouth to end the hallucinations. She closes her eyes and then abruptly pours the potion into a bedside wastebasket. She is immediately back at the institution telling her parents that she doesn’t want to “go back there.” “What must she do?” Joyce and Hank are overjoyed. The doctor explains that she has to destroy the things that are holding her in Sunnydale—her friends. Buffy is suddenly back in Sunnydale and begins to turn on her friends: first Willow and then Xander. Willow is hog- tied and gagged with duct tape; Buffy then goes after Dawn, to get her in the basement so that she can become “well” again. Dawn pleads for Buffy to recog- nize her existence in Sunnydale and wake up from her hallucination. Buffy approaches Dawn reeling off the improbabilities of the existence of vampires and demons, the whole absurd concept of being a Slayer, and the unlikelihood of her ever sleeping with a vampire like Spike. Dawn is gagged and put in the basement.