Paul Henry Rosenberg wrote:
>
> James Baird wrote:
>
> > Hows this for postmodernism?
> >
> > The current issues of both "In These Times" and "The Weekly Standard"
> > both have articles praising "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". The best thing
> > is, both authors love Buffy, but give completly opposite reasons!
> >
> > To the guy from ITT (Title of the piece: "Buffy the Anarchosyndicalist")
> > Buffy and her collective are teenage anarchists, smashing the
> > authorities (parents, teachers, coaches) who are literal monsters. He
> > pointed out something that I had completly missed: in this season's
> > premiere, a church offering help to teenage runaways turns out to be a
> > group of demons who take the kids to an alternate dimension, to slave in
> > dark satanic mills until they are too old. Buffy leads a rebellion -
> > and this is what I missed - with a hammer in one hand and a sickle in
> > the other. (!)
> >
> > The Standard, on the other hand, sees Buffy as heralding a return to
> > good old fashioned "morality" on the part of its teenage fans. He
> > apparently sees Buff and crew as struggling against the relativism of
> > their Boomer parents, reestablishing a god-centered moral universe of
> > absolute good and evil.
> >
> > Now, the point is not that ITT is right and TWS is wrong. (That goes
> > without saying, no matter what the topic...) The point is, here is a
> > show that can appeal to polar opposites, who find "messages" in it that
> > are not only different, but completly contradict each other!
> >
> > That, my friends, is Art.
>
> Indeed, my friend, indeed.
>
> What's really amusing, though, is just how wrong TWS got it. The real
> moral point of Buffy is that just because there's absolute evil out
> there doesn't mean the end of moral struggle with more perplexing and
> ambiguous human problems.
>
> This is one of the most refreshing things about the show -- it
> completely subverts the usual move of the horror genre -- the conflation
> of otherness and evil, thus obliterating, in fact downright mocking the
> need for subtle moral distinctions.
> Buffy manages to encompass that POV -- there are the usual scenes where
> the grown-ups quibble while mortal danger is about to pounce -- without
> succumbing to it. It's part of the story -- but only part. Her
> frienships--even her relationship with her mother--mean something very
> important to her, they are just wooden signifiers of good, but are
> themselves the subjects of serious moral deliberation. This broader
> vision, encompassing, rather than succumbing to the conventional horror
> POV is, to my mind, far more subversive than the Anne Rice
> romanticization (which, BTW, Buffy took a wonderful swipe at in one
> delicious episode last season.)
>
> --
> Paul Rosenberg
> Reason and Democracy
> rad at gte.net
>
> "Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"