Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Why blood?" Good question, Xander-Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s semi-hapless friend, factotum, and stand-up fall guy is wondering why it happens to be the currency of yet another typically cruel rite of underworldly passage ("Why couldn’t it be, like, a lymph ritual?"), to say nothing of demonic exchange and appetite. " ’Cause it’s always got to be blood," answers quasi-reformed, chip-in-head, Slayer-loving vamp Spike. "Blood is life, lackbrain. . . . It’s what keeps you going. Makes you warm. Makes you hard. Makes you other than dead. ’Course it’s her blood."

Sounds like our peroxide-haired, other-than-dead boy’s been reading a tubercular spot of D.H. Lawrence down in his dusty bachelor crypt. And such extracurricular inspiration would scarcely raise a Buffy Summers eyebrow-by this time, the girl’s already suffered and abetted his twisted romanticism at close range, with so much more yet to come. Underneath that leather-jacketed pose of sneering Billy Idolatry, walking phallic symbol Spike’s got the whole destructive-eros mojo down hot and cold: as the eternal voice of bittersweet unreason, sexualized aggression, and the sacred profane, he might as well have "Love that burns and consumes" tattooed on his pale chest. In Lawrence’s magnificent, rictus-grinning, virtue-slaying Studies in Classic American Literature (final version, 1923), he wrote only half-incongruously, "The essential function of art is moral," by which he meant a darkening, prophetic something not so unlike Buffy’s tapeworm diet of essences and black humors, extremity and antinomy. "But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind. Changes the blood first. The mind follows later, in the wake."

It’s easy to see Buffy in Lawrencian terms, even as its females-on-top end-of-the-worldview relentlessly inverts his dour male chauvinism and turns his apocalyptic apoplexy on its purple head. (Amusingly, too, her generic California hometown is chronically awash in fugitives from Old England and Ireland, stowaways from the 18th or 19th centuries, slouching toward Sunnydale to be reborn in Mall-America.) It was virtually predestinated that the finest single episode of this absurd, self-divided, utterly mad American classic-as if for Lawrence there could be any other kind-would be titled "The Body." That is where this novelistic TV series’ acute, D.H.L.-ish "spirit of place" is absolutely rooted, in the flesh of an undiscovered country, in the physical’s knock-down drag-out, love/hate affair with the soul, life instinct and death wish commingling as tidal pools in the supposedly metaphoric Hellmouth’s tooth-and-maw war zone. And yet, a remarkable stillness and lyric desolation so often pervade the show-the most potent, naked image of our heroine has her painstakingly sopping up her own vomit after finding her mother sprawled dead on the couch at home. Another beautifully rhymed shot in creator Joss Whedon’s script evokes the emotional vacuum of death as follows: "the outline of a figure, but not the figure itself. Negative space."

Which comprises Buffy’s sense of her, you know, personal space as well. Speaking in jokey, stammering, polyglottal tongues, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s New World-confronts-ye-Old Gods self-consciousness always comes down at base to Body Language: shy, infinitely touching Willow painting sapphic verses on her lover Tara’s back, Spike thrusting into love’s void and sinking like a millstone, Giles wearing his English reserve as a coat of armor against his own pagan nature. And above and below the lot of them, there is Buffy, the good American cheerleader turned blessed-cursed Unredeemer, nailed to the cross that divides her single-minded Puritan duty from her instincts, desires, and vulnerability, so poignantly estranged from her own body when she isn’t using it as a weapon, wearing a forget-me-not crucifix around her neck like an absentminded symbol of the stake life has driven through her heart of hearts.

Bearing this in mind (wake-wise, what precisely is the relation between jetsam and jism anyway?), a book called Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale might seem to hold a measure of promise. I mean, here’s the opportunity for that big Buffy vs. Nietzsche face-off of our dreams, perhaps a reckoning with the avant-Kierkegaard implications of B.’s sacrificial "leap of faith" and subsequent hellish resurrection (young Søren gets Carrie for a prom date?), or maybe a point-by-point elaboration of Willow Rosenberg’s insightful neo-nihilist Critique of Pure Buffy: "You really need to have every square inch of your ass kicked." But sadly no, lest we for even one moment forget: There is NO fear or trembling in contemporary philosophic discourse, and zero joy is a given. Though in fairness, this relatively benign slip of a tome is less post- than resolutely semi-modern, a textbookish but not too jargon-overdosed attempt to introduce your average unwary college freshman to fundamental questions of ethics, epistemology, and morality by dressing them up in safe, familiar pop-cult drag. Unfortunately, by watering down Buffy even more than Nietzsche, F&T in Sunnydale casts a fuddy-dud pall that even the best essays here (Thomas Hibbs on the show as feminist noir, Melissa M. Milavec and Sharon M. Kaye on Buffy and "Aristotle’s Love Paradox" ) never really manage-or attempt-to escape.

Mostly, there’s a stolid, anemic didacticism that fails to do justice to Buffy or, for that matter, the bloody mess that is existence itself. Content rather to professionally disinfect both with a swab of Kant, a Lysol cloud of Plato, and some "gender construction of femininity" air dampener, the book provides little to dispute the show’s account of the education system as a well-orchestrated conspiracy against knowledge and understanding. Just enough hardcore zombie prattle is on hand-in one case, exposing B. as ringleader of a fascist death squad persecuting what she would insensitively refer to as "undead Americans"-to remind us of theory’s life-draining, brain-sucking potential. (With characters like Principal Snyder, Professor Walsh, and the Prof’s deconstructionist-Frankenstein protégé Adam representing the pedagogic nether realms, the Slayer’s institution-assaulting response appears unequivocal: ACADEMIA MUST BE DESTROYED.) If you really crave an informed, comprehensive, and impassioned commentary on the show, 2002’s Reading the Vampire Slayer (edited by Roz Kaveney) is a far better bet-actual moments of real thought, real feeling, even real writing.

Or you could pick up a copy of Cambridge’s brand-new complete edition of Lawrence’s 80-year-old Studies in Classic American Literature, including all the distinctive variants and utterly alternate versions of his groundbreaking essays on what then were regarded as mere "children’s books." All the old, weird, uncanny figures, places, and beasts come home to roost: the Deerslayer, the House of Usher, Moby-Dick. All the simple, homespun, Christian lessons: incest, blasphemy, and the open road real-estate mantra of negation, negation, negation. "There are terrible spirits, ghosts, in the air of America." Scarlet-letter fever, devil children, cleansing floggings-a deathhaunted new world rising from the corpse of Europe, out of so many heady native contradictions and competing myths. Land of subterfuge, scourging, amputation, displacement: "And displacements hurt." (I can hear Buffy saying the exact same thing.) It’s all there, the innate "pitch of extreme consciousness" and the ravening daemons of the American unconscious, the Gods of materialism and rootless freedom pulling this way and that, the flight to and from oneself, the doomed wish to escape human nature.

The backward-looking moral universe Lawrence conjures up in his Studies prophesies the one Buffy and her friends and enemies inhabit as sure as their words and deeds echo with his diabolic obsessions and laughter. The Poe-reeking, thrill-killing Drusilla’s childlike sing-song of the "under-consciousness" purrs with such innocent malice: "We’re going to destroy the world. Want to come?" Yes, please, Lawrence answers, with a cherry on top: He reinvents American Lit in his own image and himself in its shadows, re-creating his voice as this amazing vernacular ventriloquist act-a case of two-way possession. (Tracing the evolution of that condition through the different stages of these essays is a journey in itself, though that doesn’t excuse the book’s coach-airline-ticket price.) The final result is a biblical proto-hipster poet-crank tone: treating Whitman as a pop figure ("And Walt’s great poems are really huge fat tomb-plants, great rank grave-yard growths") before there was pop, bedrock cool remorselessly crossing over the borders of emotion into the bowels of the "life-mystery." Here is Lawrence on the Puritan-Calvinist legacy: "It is absolutely necessary to realise once and for all that every enthusiasm, every passion, has a dual motion: first a motion of liberation, of setting free; and secondly a motion of vindictive repression of the living impulse, the utter subjection of the living, spontaneous being to the fixed, mechanical, ultimately insane will."

Which describes the struggle at the core of Buffy the Vampire Slayer lo these past seven years. But writing about Whitman, he put his finger on another indispensable quality: "Sympathy," that empathic fellow-feeling so crucial to the denizens of the Buffyverse, the interconnectedness that transcends salvation. (B. learns firsthand saviorism isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.) So we have this little show about a girl and her plain, ordinary friends, coming face to face with the unthinkable, with their own daemon selves. To each, Lawrence says, his or her own Holy Ghost (with every Kaspar the Holy Ghost for his/herself, and God against all). Thus a would-be "regular kid" stands before her dying, "cradle-robbing, creature-of-the-night boyfriend," and delivers the classic American ultimatum that would leave Lawrence speechless with blushing pride or maybe puritanical shock: "Drink me."