Buffy The Vampire Slayer

GREENSBORO - The social implications of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" are, like, super brainy.

At least that’s probably what the title character in the popular TV series would say.

The Valley Girl turned Chosen One would also warn against boyfriends with fangs, and demons who turn life into a never-ending musical.

For seven seasons starting in 1997, Buffy and her devoted gang of friends battled the undead, psychopathic geeks and perhaps worst of all, the social hierarchy of high school.

Now more than three years after the last vampire was staked, the show’s cult status continues to grow and perhaps more interestingly, it has become a favorite topic in the academic community.

Hundreds of scholarly papers with titles such as "Community, Language and Postmodernism at the Mouth of Hell" and "Biological Warfare and the Buffy Paradigm" delve into issues of religion, sexuality and socialism. Books and Web sites explore the show’s use of symbolism and metaphor.

It will be the focus of a year-long lecture series starting Wednesday at UNCG called "Why Buffy Matters: The Smartest Show on Television."

"This show has used television in the way it should be used," says Rhonda Wilcox, a UNCG alum and an English professor at Gordon College in Barnesville, Ga.

Wilcox co-edits an academic quarterly on the show and is the author and editor of several books on the topic; she’ll speak at a UNCG mini-conference that concludes the lecture series in March.

Participants will meet twice monthly to watch and discuss selected episodes and clips.

"We’ll look at the show as a text to be read," says Sabrina Boyer, a graduate student in the Women’s and Gender Studies program and series coordinator.

Boyer taught an undergraduate course on "Buffy" at Florida State University and noticed it was an easy way to get students excited about writing. The idea for the conference evolved over a lunch with colleagues in the WGS program last spring.

The free series is open to the public and newcomers are welcome, as are long-time fans.

Carole Lindsey-Potter, WGS program administrator, is one of the newer converts. She is watching the show episode by episode with her husband.

Part of the show’s appeal, she says, is the portrayal of a strong female heroine who is capable of saving herself instead of relying on a dashing male hero to rescue her from the Big Bad.

"I’ve heard some people say that they don’t like that she’s so pretty," Lindsey-Potter says. "But I guess the show also breaks the stereotype of a sweet little blonde."

Though "Buffy" ended in 2003 (it lives on in syndication), Boyer says she thinks the show’s popularity is in no danger of waning.

"Buffy really kind of spans space and time," she says.

What is it about the busty blond and her hapless gang of Scoobies that is so appealing?

Witty dialogue and smart humor are often cited, but the easy answer, Wilcox says, is the characters’ humanity. Like everyone else, they’re inherently flawed - they fall in love with the wrong people, mumble and stutter over complex emotions and aren’t understood beyond their small group of friends.

There’s Willow, the high school dork turned lesbian, turned Wiccan warrior. Xander, Buffy’s lovesick buddy, turned construction worker, turned devoted boyfriend to a reformed demon. And Spike, the wheelchair-bound vampire turned peroxide-blonde love interest.

"Buffy keeps getting knocked down, and she keeps having to pick herself up again," Wilcox says. "And that is true of so many people."

The series also makes heavy use of symbolism. The most frequently cited example occurred in the second season.

On her seventeenth birthday, Buffy decides to have sex with her vampire boyfriend, Angel, only to discover that finding true happiness turns the previously peaceful guy into a soulless bloodsucker.

"She goes through what so many young women go through," Wilcox says. "She sleeps with a man, and the next morning he turns into a monster."

Of course, the rest of us haven’t dealt with the trauma of stabbing said boyfriend with a sword, which sends him to Hell and saves the world from an otherwise certain apocalypse.

Buffy’s tough that way.

Maybe that’s part of the reason she’s such a fascinating subject for scholars.

The earliest academic articles about the show were published in 1999, and the first "Buffy" conference was hosted by the University of East Anglia in 2002.

Slayage, the online journal Wilcox co-edits, goes through the traditional academic review process and recently spawned a journal for undergraduate essays called Watcher Junior.

"At the Slayage conference, we had people writing on philosophy, history, Classics, literature, sociology and more - including a couple of professors from Appalachian State writing on mathematical applications of the series," Wilcox says.

The event drew 200 people from around the world and 150 academic papers from places as far away as Italy and Germany.

"I really do think that this is a work of art," Wilcox said. "I believe we’ll still be talking about this 100 years from now."