Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Myth, Metaphor & Morality
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Myth, Metaphor & Morality
Preface
This eBook collects a series of posts I wrote at http://unpaidsophistry.blogspot.com/. If you don’t want to shell out the money to buy this book, you can read the contents for free at that site. I plan to leave it up for a while.
Each chapter consists of a separate post. The chapters will differ slightly from the original posts – I’ve made a few minor edits for clarity and caught some typos. I also added a few points that occurred to me after I posted them. More important is the fact that in the course of posting the individual essays, I got some excellent comments and corrections from readers, to whom I owe a collective “Thank You”. I’ve incorporated their comments into the book at various places. If you read this book and want to contribute to the dialogue, feel free to post your thoughts to the relevant episode page at the site. I get notice of those comments and I’ll respond there.
If you’re a reader who likes to sample chapters in advance, feel free (within the limits of what Amazon permits). The Introduction, which is long, outlines my theory of the series. If you’ve seen the show and can’t be spoiled, I’d suggest sampling Some Assembly Required, Lie to Me, Amends (also long), Gingerbread, Choices, Graduation Day, The Initiative, Goodbye Iowa, or The Gift. Those chapters probably have the most intrinsic interest and give you a good idea of how I see the show.
I also owe a great deal of thanks to my daughter Allison. She’s the one who asked me to watch this new show with her, and she kept me watching until I became obsessed on my own. Additional “thank yous” go to all the posters at All Things Philosophical on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc. (http://www.voy.com/14567/). They taught me more about the show than I had dreamed of watching it on my own. There are too many to thank individually, but they know who they are.
Introduction
I originally created the 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.
Now, imagine that someone tried to explain every witticism in any TV show or other text, particularly one noted for its sophisticated word play (as BtVS is). The annotations would be infinite. Well, at least they’d be extensive; by the count of Emily Dial-Driver and Jesse Stallings there are over 4000 allusions made during the course of the show. I can’t even be sure I caught them all.
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.”
Robert Moore, http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/137783-why-a-spotlight-on-joss-whedon/ [Note: PopMatters has taken down its essays from which I’ve quoted and has reissued them as a book. The links were correct originally but aren’t any more.]
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.