Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Creative writing teachers are fond of sweeping generalizations:

“Never use adverbs.”

“Never begin a story with the word the.”

“There’s only one plot: the shift from innocence to experience.”

A friend of mine in Louisiana had a writing teacher who enjoyed proclaiming, “The king dies and the queen dies. That’s not a story. The king dies and the queen dies of grief. Now that’s a story.” I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean, nor what any of these sayings are supposed to do for young writers. Probably make all but the most dedicated break down and get a real job.

But recently I heard a good one: “There are only two plots: a stranger comes to town and someone goes on a journey.” This aphorism helped distill an idea I’ve developed over years of reading and writing science fiction and fantasy, resulting in my own sweeping generalization: “There are only two kinds of fantastic story: the Alternate World and the Trespass.”

What do I mean by this? Allow me to define my terms.

In “Alternate World” stories, the reader goes on a journey to another era, another planet, a world that follows different rules. Alternative histories, stories of the far future, and tales of elves and magic fall into this category. In their own way, Lord of the Rings, 1984, and Star Wars are all Alternate World stories.

In “Trespass” stories, a stranger comes to town. Something fantastic—whether The X-Files’ aliens or Anne Rice’s vampires—invades our familiar world of credit cards and disposable razors. Reality is shown to have cracks and fissures we haven’t seen before.

I must admit, before becoming a Buffyphile I had a deep prejudice against Trespass tales. The techniques that bring Alternate Worlds to life are those that originally drew me to read and write science fiction: the top-to-bottom world building, the ubiquitous and yet subtle exposition, the filtering of a strange reality through a viewpoint character who finds that reality commonplace. This kind of tale was what I considered to be speculative fiction at its most literary, sophisticated, textured, and, most important, subversive. SF allowed me to visit and create worlds that had completely different rules from our own, and that called everything in our “normal” world into question.

On the other hand, Trespass stories felt rather more comfortable, designed for readers who prefer to start with something familiar. And there seemed to be a conservative principle at work in most, a tendency for the alien invader to evaporate at the end of the tale. We’ve all seen this plot, which I call the Elastic Trespass story:

1. “Monsters! I can’t believe this is happening!”

2. “It’s true, there are monsters! Let’s kill them.”

3. “Oh, no! When you burned down the house to kill the monsters all the evidence was destroyed. No one will ever believe us now!”

In the Elastic Trespass, as in a sitcom, everything goes “back to normal” at the end of the episode. A return to an unperturbed, normal, daylight world is always effected. E.T. goes home. It’s as if there’s some sort of natural law at work, a principle of conservation of normality, that makes all the evidence disappear by the story’s denouement. Either all marks of the alien are erased by happenstance, or the characters engage in a frantic cover-up, apparently unwilling to take credit for saving the world.

(A close cousin to the Elastic Trespass is the Elastic Time Travel story, that old chestnut in which time-travelers wind up on the Titanic and no matter whom they tell about the iceberg all they get is “But this ship is unsinkable!” and the ship sinks anyway. History had to happen that way.)

The elastic form of the Trespass story is inherently conservative, saying as it does that the stranger who comes to town is fundamentally unknowable. We can’t incorporate the alien into our normal world, because that would imply that the world can change. So when the Other pops up, our heroes stomp it into the ground, obliterating all evidence of its passage. Like history, middle-class normality is fixed and unalterable, no matter how many fantastic creatures, ancient curses, and mystical portals might exist in the margins.

This principle is especially strong in stories with young protagonists, partly because no one ever believes kids anyway. It’s as if the young adult Elastic Trespass tale is a training ground for adult conformity. Children in these stories always hide E.T. in the closet, repress their own memories, and find themselves unable to break the conspiracy of silence that is the adult world. In C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, at least one of the kids, George, grows up to “remember” that his trips to Narnia were all a game. He manages to enter adulthood only by repressing the fantasies of childhood. Only they weren’t fantasies; they were alien realities! (Naturally, he’s the one who winds up with the best-paying job.)

When I watched the first few episodes of Buffy with an uncritical eye, the show seemed destined to be trapped in this mold. The vamps conveniently turned to dust when staked, leaving no evidence. The protagonists were marginalized kids, and their adult mentor a mere high-school librarian (and a bit of a toff), a marginal adult without real-world credibility. Buffy hid her calling from her mother and from the adult world at large. Despite her extraordinary powers, she and her friends (and her viewers) instinctively knew the rules of young adult powerlessness: “They won’t believe us anyway,” and “We better leave everything as we found it, or we’ll be in big trouble.” It’s okay to save the world, but not to change it.

But something about Buffy kept me watching. From the first episode, the show was playing with the conventions of the Elastic Trespass tale, subverting the genre traditions in subtle (and sometimes obvious) ways. In Joss Whedon’s hands, the elastic of middle-class reality wound up stretching and twisting into new and unexpected forms.

One of the ironclad rituals of the Trespass is the Passage of Disbelief, the moment where the protagonist says, “This can’t be happening!” Now, we’ve all read and watched a million versions of this scene.

And not only main characters have to come to believe that the Trespass is real, but often they must convince their friends and parents, the police, newspaper reporters, government officials, and whoever else they need help from. But it’s a waste of the viewers’ time, because we’ve seen the movie trailers or read the back of the book, and we already know the vampires or aliens or killer tomatoes are real. We just want to skip to the part where everyone’s on board, especially to avoid dialog like “There must be a rational explanation for all this!” or that most embarrassing line in any science fiction movie: “This is like something out of a science fiction movie!”

Thankfully, the writers of Buffy employ a number of strategies to subvert this little ritual, using humor and understatement to breeze past the usual protestations of disbelief.

Buffy herself, of course, has had a movie prequel to adjust to her place in the fantastic scheme of things. In the pilot (“Welcome to the Hellmouth,” 1-1), she takes over Giles’s recitation of a Slayer’s duties with, “‘. . . the strength and skill to hunt the vampires, to stop the spread of their evil’ blah, blah, blah. I’ve heard it, okay? . . . I’ve both been there, and done that.” For the Slayer herself, at least, no time is wasted in disbelief.1

At the end of this scene, Xander emerges from the library stacks, having overheard Giles’s exposition, and condenses his initial Passage of Disbelief to a simple “What?”

After Willow and Xander are saved from the Master’s henchmen in the pilot’s conclusion (“The Harvest,” 1-2), they receive a full briefing from Giles. But it is Buffy who mockingly provides the ritual litany of “rational” explanations.

XANDER: “Okay, this is where I have a problem. See, because we’re talking about vampires. We’re having a talk with vampires in it.”

WILLOW: “Isn’t that what we saw last night?”

BUFFY: “No, no, those weren’t vampires. They were just guys in thunder need of a facial. Or maybe they had rabies. It could have been rabies. And that guy turning to dust? Just a trick of light . . .”

WILLOW: “Oh, I—I need to sit down.”

BUFFY: “You are sitting down.”

WILLOW: “Oh. Good for me.”

And thus the original Scoobies’ Passages of Disbelief are dealt with, once and for all. Five minutes of screen time later, Xander is ready for action, uttering a line that could be from any Buffy episode of any season: “So what’s the plan? We saddle up, right?”

Done and done.

In most Trespass stories, the demarcation between those who know the secret and those who are blissfully unaware is carefully maintained. Initiation is an important ritual. But in Buffy, that border is shown to be delightfully fuzzy. When Jenny Calendar is recruited into the Scooby Gang (“I Robot, You Jane,” 1-8), Giles attempts to break the existence of demonic forces to her gently.

GILES: “I need your help, but before that I need you to believe something that you may not want to. Uh, there’s, um . . . Something’s got into the um, inside, um . . . There’s a demon in the Internet.”

JENNY: “I know.”

End of scene.

In the standard Elastic Trespass tale, Jenny would have sputtered in disbelief, requiring hard proof of Giles’s extraordinary claim. But instead it is Giles who winds up sputtering. When in the next scene he asks if Jenny is a witch, she answers, “Technopagan is the term. There are more of us than you think.”

That last line could be the motto for Sunnydale’s Trespass-aware citizens. While guarding supposed non-initiates from the dark truths of the Hellmouth, the Scoobies are repeatedly shocked to discover how pervasive secret knowledge is in Sunnydale. In “Lie to Me” (2-7), Buffy attempts to explain away a vampire attack glimpsed by her old school friend, Ford.

FORD: “What’s going on?”

BUFFY: “Um . . . uh, there was a, a cat. A cat here, and, um, then there was another cat . . . and they fought. The cats. And . . . then they left.”

FORD: “Oh, I thought you were just slaying a vampire.”

BUFFY: “What? Whatting a what?”

Again, Ford doesn’t sputter, Buffy does. Ford went to Buffy’s previous high school, and already knows that she’s the Slayer. The mystical forces at work in the Buffyverse are a matter of teenage rumor, dark and knowing humor, an open secret, so even bit players don’t waste time with the usual Passages of Disbelief. Any number of Sunnydale residents, students and adults, turn out to be more or less aware of that ultimate Trespass, the Hellmouth, and all it implies about the reality of their world. Time after time, Buffy’s grateful rescuees blurt out some sort of reversal similar to Ford’s. Perhaps the most underplayed of these inverted Passages of Disbelief comes from the laconic Oz (“Surprise,” 2-25).

WILLOW: “Are you okay?”

OZ: “Yeah. Hey, did everybody see that guy just turn to dust?”

WILLOW: “Uh, well, uh, sort of?”

XANDER: “Yep. Vampires are real. A lot of them live in Sunnydale. Willow will fill you in.”

WILLOW: “I know it’s hard to accept at first.”

OZ (nodding): “Actually it explains a lot.”

Like the dark secrets at work in any small town, only the most willful Pollyanna is completely unaware of Sunnydale’s special dangers. Even the optimistic Larry, in the long traveling shot that opens Sunnydale High School for season three, isn’t entirely clueless: “This is our year. I’m telling you, best football season ever. . . . If we can focus, keep discipline, and not have as many mysterious deaths, Sunnydale is gonna rule.” (“Anne,” 3-1)

The pervasiveness of this open secret is most touchingly demonstrated in “Prom” (3-19), when the students of Sunnydale High elect Buffy as Class Protector, recognizing her years of service as Slayer. As Jonathan explains in his presentation speech, this award is ad hoc (“This was actually a new category. First time ever. I guess there were a lot of write-in ballots.”) and represents a shared knowledge rarely given voice: “We don’t talk about it much, but it’s no secret that Sunnydale High isn’t like other high schools.” But it is precisely on this unofficial level that understanding of the Trespass operates in Sunnydale. The official line may be that monsters don’t exist and that the fantastic and mystical must be repressed. But in the Buffyverse there is a significant space set aside for improvised and heartfelt recognition of realities outside the official narrative, and write-in votes for the people’s hero do not go uncounted.

Of course, the Passage of Disbelief is only half of the Elastic Trespass. With every monster that emerges from the Hellmouth, the elastic of reality is stretched out of shape, and according to the rules it must snap back to normalcy. After each resolved crisis—the monster slain, the spell reversed—comes the inevitable Cover-Up. All evidence must be erased. (Famously, the original Scooby Gang of Scooby-Doo never needed a Cover-Up, invariably discovering that there were no real mystical forces at work. It was always just “old Mr. Withers the caretaker, trying to scare folks away.”2)

Buffy knowingly underplays its Cover-Ups, trotting out genre clichés without much time wasted on believability. At the end of “Harvest” (1-2), Cordelia recounts the rumors meant to explain the mass vampire attack at the Bronze. “Well, I heard it was rival gangs, you know, fighting for turf. But all I can tell you is they were in an ugly way of looking . . . I mean, I don’t even remember that much, but I tell you it was a freak show.” Moments later, Giles provides, “People have a tendency to rationalize what they can, and forget what they can’t.”

Memory repression is a frequent device, but even such tenuous Cover-Ups aren’t always in earnest. In “The Pack” (1-6), Xander claims to be unable to remember his experiences when possessed by a hyena spirit (particularly his attempted seduction/rape of Buffy, one suspects). But Giles comes to doubt his story.

GILES: “I’ve been reading up on my animal possession, and I cannot find anything anywhere about memory loss afterwards.”

XANDER: “Did you tell them [Buffy and Willow] that?”

GILES: “Your secret dies with me.”

In the climax of “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” (3-16), after Xander is saved from an adoring but violent horde of love-spell-bedazzled women at the last minute, Cordelia offers the gathered crowd this stunningly lame Cover-Up line: “Boy, that was the best scavenger hunt ever.” In the next scene, Buffy rolls her eyes at this one.

BUFFY: “Scavenger hunt?”

XANDER: “Your mom seemed to buy it.”

BUFFY: “So she says. I think that she’s just so wigged at hitting on one of my friends that she’s repressing. She’s getting pretty good at that. I should probably start worrying . . .”

More often, the Cover-Up is left to entities other than the Scooby Gang. As early as “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” (1-11), government agents show up to take the invisible girl away for covert ops training. And in “School Hard” (2-3), maintaining the secrets of the Hellmouth becomes a matter for local Sunnydale officials. Parent-teacher night is invaded by Spike and his gang, and Principal Snyder barely survives, coming into close contact with the vampires. It seems as if there will be some hefty Covering-Up to do. But instead of Buffy making explanations and excuses, we overhear this exchange between the police chief and Snyder:

CHIEF: “I need to say something to the media people.”

SNYDER: “So?”

CHIEF: “So? You want the usual story? Gang-related? PCP?”

SNYDER: “What did you have in mind? The truth?”

CHIEF: “Right. Gang-related. PCP.”

This conversation not only neatly provides a Cover-Up, but again shows the fuzzy border between knowing and not-knowing in Buffy. If the chief of police recognizes a vampire attack when he sees one, then knowledge of the mystical must extend beyond the unspoken secrets of high school. After this scene viewers must ask themselves, How far up does this Cover-Up go?

As we learn in the third season, adult awareness and even complicity goes all the way to City Hall. And, of course, in season four the federal government itself is implicated. (Presaged by government involvement in “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” 1-11). As the wider world beyond Sunnydale becomes embroiled in the crises of the Hellmouth, we are forced to reconsider to what extent Buffy is set in “our” world. Despite the credit cards and SUVs on screen, the show begins to leave the strict confines of the Elastic Trespass tale, until the Buffyverse seems almost transformed into an Alternate World.

Of course, every fictional TV show takes place in a fictional reality. Although there is a Tom’s Diner in New York, we don’t expect to find Jerry and Elaine there. But such shows work to minimize their departures from the familiar. In Seinfeld’s New York, the Bronx is still up and the Battery’s down.

A show like West Wing, however, has a far more problematic relationship to reality, given the high profile of the US president. This discomfort is especially apparent when events like the September 11 attacks must be portrayed on the show, but only by analogy. West Wing worked best in the relatively sedate 1990s. Presumably, as our current unsettled era goes on, that show’s reality and ours will unavoidably drift further apart. (Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels frequently used blanks in proper names to prevent this sort of discomfort, referring to the town of “———shire” or “certain officers of the ———rd Regiment.”)

But of course my privileged term “Alternate Worlds” refers to fictions like Dune and Brave New World, in which new realities are created wholesale. The Buffyverse may become less and less like our reality, as its bestiary of government agencies, demons, and alternate dimensions expands, but when those demons rampage in Sunnydale’s pedestrian malls, they still encounter coffee shops and sushi bars. In my book, that’s a Trespass.

Except when it isn’t. Because there’s that other kind of Buffy episode. That one in which reality changes around the characters, altered for one screen hour into a different universe. The Scoobies are the same, but the rules have changed.

Nightmares come true, Halloween costumes possess their wearers, a high-school loser is the super-competent center of a cult of personality, the conventions of the Hollywood musical replace the familiar structures of social discourse (“Nightmares” 1-10, “Halloween” 2-6, “Superstar” 4-17, “Once More, with Feeling” 6-7, respectively). In these episodes, the new rules of reality must be decoded and understood, the cause unmasked, the change reversed. The Trespass is the world itself.

But “The Wish” (3-9), in which Cordelia inadvertently asks Anyanka to change the history of Sunnydale, creates not so much a Trespass as a fully-fledged Alternate World. In this reality, Buffy never came to town, the Master completed the Harvest, and the elastic of normality has snapped. The worlds of light and dark have become intermixed: the Bronze a vampires-only club, the abandoned factory back in business as a human abattoir. Vampires are no longer hidden; the open secret is no longer a secret at all. And as goes Sunnydale, so goes the world. Even Cleveland is experiencing “a great deal of demonic activity.” The result of Buffy’s absence is apparently nothing less than the beginning of the end of the human era. This is It’s a Wonderful Life on a grand scale, or perhaps a quicker version of Ray Bradbury’s cautionary time-travel story “The Sound of Thunder,” in which the accidental trampling of a butterfly millions of years ago turns the present into something barely recognizable.

Like any Altered World, “Vampworld” (as Buffy fans have dubbed it) has its own internal logic, its own rules: humans no longer wear bright colors and always get home by dark. It’s not a fevered dream, but a meticulously worked out reality. Curfew signs and strands of garlic replace the HIV/AIDS awareness posters on the high school’s walls, and classes are suspended for the “monthly memorial.” As Anyanka explains to Giles: “This is the real world now. This is the world we made.”

Interesting choice of words. In the Buffyverse, “we” are responsible even for a reality created by a wish. Vampworld is the world as it very well might have been, had Buffy been a little weaker, a little less lucky, or picked the wrong time to move to Cleveland.

Of course, this contingent nature of reality is to be expected; the Buffyverse is a place in which the world is contested real estate. In “Prophecy Girl” (1-12) (the episode to which “The Wish” is, in effect, an alternate outcome), Willow describes the horrific aftermath of a pre-apocalyptic vampire attack. “And when I walked in there, it wasn’t our world anymore. They made it theirs. And they had fun.”

This Trespass means business. It doesn’t just cross the borders of normality, it invades with intent to remake normality in its own image. It is a potentially world-altering Trespass.

But only potentially. Unlike the wounded future of Bradbury’s “Sound of Thunder,” the Buffyverse snaps back to its “normal” state at the climax of “The Wish.” Giles smashes Anyanka’s necklace and history is repaired, with none of the characters even remembering what happened. (Because it didn’t happen.) Buffy’s Altered Worlds are Elastic. Nightmares lose their grip on reality; Halloween archetypes turn back into cheap costumes; Jonathan turns back into a loser; the last song ends.

So how do these Elastic Altered Worlds fit into my schema? Are they like that tedious Elastic Time Travel story, the one in which the Titanic sinks no matter what the travelers do, proving that history is immutable? Not quite. In “The Wish” (3-9), history is not itself elastic, naturally springing back into its “rightful” state. Setting it aright takes hard work. Not only the work of Giles overpowering Anyanka and smashing her necklace, but, by implication, all the work that Buffy has done since coming to Sunnydale. The possibility of Vampworld, and its disappearance, prove that Buffy and the Scoobies are not powerless observers of history. They are nothing less than makers of history.

As the climax of “Prophecy Girl” approaches, the Master watches the Hellmouth creature emerge, saying, “Yes, come forth, my child. Come into my world.”

Buffy reveals herself, and retorts, “I don’t think it’s yours just yet.”

Across a certain number of story arcs, any fantastic fictional world begins to change and to reflect the alien forces at its narrative center. Like the Bush-era, post–September 11 West Wing, the Buffyverse resembles the nonfictional world less and less as time goes on. But one of the great strengths of Buffy is that the show doesn’t shy away from plot points that have no escape back into normality. No Trespass—an army of zombies, a town unable to speak, a mayor transforming in public into a giant demon—is too extreme for a half-baked Cover-Up line. Or none at all.

Buffy does not repress her memories, no matter how strange or painful. She doesn’t sputter with the arrival of every new monster; just saddles up. Her friends and family die, some never to be reanimated. The strangers who come to town—werewolf, demon, or witch—turn out to be something knowable, even worth loving. The elastic gradually frays until it’s beyond fixing. The fantastic leaves its mark on the world.

The Buffyverse is not simply a Trespassed world, one that snaps back to middle-class normality as a function of natural law. It’s not quite an Altered World either; there are those credit cards and cell phones. But it is a world that, like ours, can be and is changed, for better or worse, by the actions of the people who live in it.