For Buffy Neophytes and Fans

[Maureen Therese Anderson]

For those enticed into checking out the show after reading all those
deliciously intriguing interpretions in recent posts: here's an
enthusiastic review of Buffy that a friend wrote a while back for In These
Times.  It gives a helpful lay of the land.  (I'm posting it here with
David's enthusiastic permission--maybe all you isolated Buffy fans should
have a secret handshake or something to identify each other.
Hey--Freemasons!  Now where do *they* fit into this demonic/French
Revolution pantheon??)

--Maureen
***

REBEL WITHOUT A GOD (their title of course)
By David Graeber

Some years ago, an anarchist calling himself J.G. Eccarius wrote a novel,
The Last Days of Jesus Christ, Vampire. Admittedly Buffy the Vampire
Slayer, TV cult sensation, does not aspire to quite this level of
subversiveness. But there are times when it comes close. It's also quite
possibly the best show on television.

Quick background. Hoards of demons menace mankind. They tend to accumulate
in the white-bread suburb of Sunnydale, California, mainly because the
Hellmouth, a kind of font of bad mystic energy, is located directly beneath
Sunnydale High. In Sunnydale, mysterious deaths and disappearances are an
almost daily occurrence.

Arrives one Buffy Summers, recently expelled from school in L.A. for
burning down the gym. In an ordinary world, Buffy would have probably ended
up a slightly less affluent version of Alicia Silverstone's mall habitue in
Clueless; but as it happens, she is the Slayer, reluctant hero
chosen by mysterious powers to lead humanity's war against the vampires. To
her aid comes Giles, her Watcher, who has just transferred from the British
Museum to become Sunnydale High's librarian, filling its shelves (in a kind
of fundamentalist's worst nightmare) with vast leather-bound tomes on
demonology. A band of misfits accumulates around them: class-clown Xander
Harris, timid computer hacker Willow Rosenberg, spoiled Valley Girl
Cordelia and mellow lead guitarist (cum werewolf) Oz--not to mention Angel,
whom Buffy fondly calls her "cradle-robbing, creature of the night
boyfriend"--a vampire of once legendary cruelty, who has spent the last
couple centuries feeling guilty after a Gypsy curse restored his soul. They
are united in shifting webs of mutual love, trust, jealousy, desire and
annoyance--conspiring to save the world on a regular basis as Buffy
desperately tries to maintain a C average and head off efforts to kick her
out of school.

[INDENT]
Buffy: I've had it. Spike is going down.  You can attack me. You can send
assassins
after me. That's fine. But nobody messes with my boyfriend.

There are a lot of obvious things you can say about Buffy.
The overt feminism...  In the show's first season, a student becomes
invisible because no one notices her; in the end, she's whisked away by
the FBI for training as a government assassin. In the second, rich frat
boys turn out to owe their wealth to an evil snake god, to whom they
sacrifice virgins in the frathouse basement (Xander: "I guess the rich
really are different"). Slaying the snake sets off a wave of corporate
bankruptcies across America. And sometimes the supernatural element
is a simply obvious mirror for real life: As when Buffy, having run away
from home, gets a job as a waitress and seems headed for a life of drudgery
--until she discovers a band of demons that have been enslaving teenage
runaways to labor in dark satanic mills beneath the earth, spewing them
out, broken and useless, at about the age of 65. Yet in one  way it is
decidedly unlike real life: Demon bosses, after all, can be beheaded
(though having Buffy lead the rebellion with a hammer in one hand and
sickle in the other was perhaps a tad much). Real ones can't.

The show's anti-authoritarianism runs through everything. If the series has
an ultimate message for the youth of America, it is that whatever
instinctual revulsion you might feel toward those who claim to be your
betters is not only justified--but things are likely to be far worse than
you could possibly imagine. Ever think of your friend's mother, who
constantly pushes her into cheerleading competitions, as a witch? She is.
Ever suspect the swim coach would do anything to win that championship?
You're right. He would. That the traditional family-values guy courting
your divorced mother is some kind of robot, or a crazed sex killer? He's
both. That your sadistic principal is a repressed Nazi child-molester? Well
... we don't have the full story on him yet, but it's probably at least
that bad.

[INDENT]
Giles: It's a reliquary. Used to house items of religious significance.
Most commonly a finger or some other body part from a saint.
Buffy: Note to self. Religion: creepy.

I should note that Buffy is not actually a horror show. It's
really a romantic action-comedy without a laugh track, in which, however,
good people often die. The cast are uniformly charming; the writers (led by
creator Joss Whedon) show a level of wit rarely seen on television. And the
most remarkable thing is that the writers manage to come up with a new
supernatural theme every week without ever (despite the ubiquitous crosses)
even once vaguely implying the possible existence of God.

This is important, because it's not true of most horror.  In overtly
religious  horror - Rosemary's Baby, The Omen... -  God might seem infinitely
distant, Satan and his minions pretty obviously in control, but God is still
necessary for the whole  thing to make sense. The same, I think, is true of
horror of the slasher/Freddy Kreuger/Hellraiser variety. They are normally
stories about transgression-having sex, not reporting a hit-and-run accident,
being a snotty teenager- followed by utterly disproportionate punishment.  The
ultimate morality is still profoundly Judaeo-Christian and sado-masochistic.
Everyone's corrupt. You are too, is the genre's subtext--otherwise, why would
you be enjoying this sadistic crap?

Traditional vampire movies are a variation. In a way, they are ultimately
about the failure of the French Revolution--which was supposed to kill off
all those bloodsucking aristocrats in their castles and usher in a rational
world of liberty, equality, fraternity and enlightened commercial
self-interest. Of course it didn't work. The Count refuses to stay dead.
Because deep inside, the movies suggest, we don't really want him to.
Eroticized cruelty and domination keep resurfacing because they are rooted
in the very nature of our desires. Again, the proof is in the audience.

Yet Buffy not only avoids such sadistic pleasures. It openly mocks the
underlying morality:

[INDENT]
Buffy: (Trying to bluff her way into a Fundamentalist church) You know,
I just ... I woke up and I looked in the mirror and I thought, hey!
What's with all this sin? I need to change! I'm... I'm dirty. I'm ... I'm bad,
with the sex, and the envy and that loud music us kids listen to nowadays.
(Blank stares.)
(Sigh.) Oh, I just suck at undercover. Where's Ken? (Kicks down door.)

In fact, its moral premise is precisely the opposite. Vampire-slaying has
to be kept secret. As a result, almost everyone in Sunnydale believes Buffy
and company are juvenile delinquents: violent, lazy, irresponsible,
disobedient. Bad. In reality, they are almost unimaginably self-sacrificing
and good. In this sense, Buffy is a kind of anti-horror.

The godless cosmology is something that's been developing for a long time,
across anything from superhero comic books to Dungeons and Dragons. What I
really want to draw attention to, however, is the underlying ethic. It
would be hard to imagine a healthier one. People--most people, anyway--mean
well, but being good is difficult (Buffy characters are always fretting
over whether they really did the right thing) and power tends to make you
stupid or insane. It's a difficult ethos to maintain in an adventure
fantasy. After all, the whole point of such fantasies is, usually, to
fabricate a situation where there is an obvious right thing to do--even
more, where that right thing involves sorts of violent behavior that would
otherwise be wrong. Therein lies the pleasure. It's not that Buffy doesn't
do this: We are still talking about a show about teenagers killing demons.
But even the fantasy element has a sort of wistful quality.

If nothing else, Buffy reminds us how much '60s-style youth rebellion was
premised on an assumption of security and prosperity: Why put up with all
this stodginess when life could be so good? Today's rebellious youth,
rather, are reduced to struggling desperately to keep hell from entirely
engulfing the earth. Such, I suppose, is the fate of a generation that has
been robbed of its fundamental right to dream of a better world. The very
notion of being able to take part in a relatively democratically organized
group of comrades, engaged in a struggle to save humanity from its
authoritarian monsters, is now itself a wild utopian fantasy--not just a
means to one. But cynics take note: If the mushrooming success of Buffy
means anything, it's that it's one fantasy which surprising numbers of the
Slacker Generation do have.

David Graeber is a professor of anthropology at Yale.