Buffy The Vampire Slayer

The Tart Time Machine this month collects Tarts’ recollections of the very popular - and much missed - series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Here, Margaret examines the series’ highs and lows, gender politics and cosmology, and why she almost tuned out.

I almost didn’t watch Buffy. In fact, I didn’t watch the two-hour premiere episode the first time it aired. This was partly because one hour of its timeslot conflicted with something else that I already knew I liked, and partly because I was put off by the ridiculous-sounding title and the condescending triviality it appeared to imply.

In my defense, you have to remember that Joss Whedon had virtually no discernible track record at this point, unless you were the kind of hardcore fan of all things Hollywood who obsessively reads and remembers all the credits of everything. When researching Whedon’s pre-Buffy-movie writing credits for this article, I belatedly discovered that they consisted mostly of scripts for a number of episodes of sitcoms like Roseanne and the short-lived TV-series version of Parenthood. This is far from the most obvious or logical background for someone proposing to do a witty but essentially thoughtful reworking of standard cinematic tropes about vampires and vampire slayers. Possibly the preponderance of sitcom-related credits in Whedon’s early resume and the absence of any noticeable professional experience with the horror genre may partially explain why Fran Rubel Kazui and Kaz Kazui, the director and producer of the Buffy film, insisted on turning it into more of a parodic comedy.

While I’d been intrigued by what I initially heard about the premise of the original Buffy movie, due to bad word of mouth based on what turned out to be the Kazui-imposed alterations in tone and content, I didn’t seriously consider making the effort to go see the film in the theater when it came out. After all, judging by the reviews, the actual execution turned the basic concept’s rather nifty gender-switch of the genre roles of heroic vampire slayer and helpless damsel in distress into little more than a rather gory Saturday Night Live comedy sketch with a half-baked feminist subtext.

The critics’ descriptions made the Buffy movie sound like just another sitcomesque, allegedly woman-centric supernatural disappointment like Bewitched. As a small child, I had been instantly fascinated by a commercial for Bewitched which rather misleadingly set forth the premise of the show with a voiceover that went something like, "Once upon a time there was a little girl who was teased by a little boy and turned him into a frog. When she ran and told her mother what had happened, her mother explained that this was only to be expected. ’You see, my dear, you’re a little witch.’ "

By the time I finally got to see Bewitched a few years later in weekday-morning reruns, I already knew that, rather than a TV version of the kind of children’s/young adult fantasy stories that were relatively rare in those pre-Harry Potter days, it was a sitcom about a grown-up witch married to a mortal. But I didn’t expect it to be so silly and full of lame mother-in-law jokes - or so dedicated to the premise that it was not only perfectly okay, but actively desirable, for Samantha to suppress her natural magical talents in order to please her magic-phobic husband and fit in with all the nosy neighbors in suburbia.

True, the magical element did make the series somewhat more interesting in spite of itself than more mundane fare like the inexplicably popular Brady Bunch. But Bewitched was still more like a snider, supernatural-tinged live-action version of something like The Flintstones than what I had been expecting, which was more along the lines of as-yet-unseen-by-me old magical comedy of manners movies like I Married a Witch (1942) and Bell, Book and Candle (1958).

As for Buffy, its very title sounded dumb -not knowing anything about Whedon at this point, it didn’t occur to me that the show’s name might be intended to be ironic, rather than leadenly tongue in cheek - and all the critics seemed to agree that the theatrical movie had been pretty lame. When I eventually saw the film myself some time after becoming a fan of the TV show, I was inclined to agree with them. Both the originality of Whedon’s basic Buffy concept and his flair for characterization and witty dialogue were rendered virtually invisible beneath the more broadly comic rewrite forced upon him by the director and producer. Under the circumstances, when the movie was turned into a TV series, I had very little motivation to even sample it.

Fortunately, the New York City WB affiliate re-ran the two-hour Buffy TV premiere the Sunday afternoon after its official debut. Since there was nothing else on at that time and I had read several rave reviews by TV critics in the meantime, I grudgingly set up the VCR to tape it while I was doing the laundry. Halfway through, I came back upstairs from the laundry room and watched part of the show in progress while I was folding towels and pairing socks. I came in at the part where Buffy and Xander were running around in some of the many sinister caverns located underneath Sunnydale. (I think they were trying to locate the lair of the master vampire who rather unimaginatively called himself the Master.)

Taken out of context, this scene seemed like a pretty standard clip from the more teen-oriented type of schlocky horror movie. I was so unimpressed that I turned off the TV, groaning inwardly at the prospect of rewinding the tape when the episode was finished and sitting through the entire two hours (minus fast-forwarded commercials).

However, when I eventually did (there was nothing much else on later that day, either), the difference was like night and day. Although the show was still far more conventional at that point than it eventually became, some interestingly quirky story elements were already cautiously rearing their heads. For instance, the fact that our heroine was basically a closetly witty defrocked cheerleader who was at best reluctantly resigned to the heroic destiny that had been forced upon her. In fact, that destiny had already had the effect of branding her a juvenile delinquent who had burned down the gym at her previous school. Thus, the world-saving would-have-been future prom queen arrived in Sunnydale involuntarily trailing an aura of general undesirability. When a bundle of sharpened stakes fell out of Buffy’s bag in front of Cordelia a few episodes later, the enjoyably bitchy Veronica Lodge of Sunnydale High naturally assumed that Buffy must be in a gang.

Then there was Buffy’s Watcher, Giles. In the traditional vampire-film cosmology derived from Bram Stoker’s original Dracula novel, this officially-designated mentor and advisor would have been the wise elder/authority figure who was only impeded from actually dispatching the bloodsucking menace himself by his relatively age-weakened strength and reflexes.

But the difference between a Slayer and her Watcher is far more deep-seated than that between the elderly but experienced Dr. Van Helsing and the more youthfully reckless Jonathan Harker & Co. Despite the fragility and defenselessness stereotypically associated with her sex, a Slayer has superhuman strength, resilience, and a supernaturally-enhanced healing factor, while her Watcher, no matter how well-versed in martial arts and vampire lore, is merely human. Even during the brief period when the fortyish Giles was replaced as Buffy’s Watcher by the twentysomething Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, the deceptively petite and slightly-built Buffy was far better equipped physically - and, in this case, psychologically - to fight literally infernal monsters than her Watcher. (In fact, this was tacitly, though rather dismissively, acknowledged by even the dictatorially patriarchal Watchers’ Council, whose predecessors were much later revealed to have created the Slayers as females in the first place for the decidedly unfeminist reason that they considered the young women [who were so often vampires’ primary prey] expendable experimental subjects.) This implicit demonstration of the fact that in many situations, the best man for the job is a woman, a concept which was much more clumsily and unsatisfactorily underscored in the later story arc involving Buffy’s abortive romance with Riley (the initially drug-enhanced undercover officer from the military demon-hunting unit the Initiative) definitely struck an empowering chord with female viewers.

Another intriguing Giles-related aspect of the show was that in the Buffyverse, the mentor/mentee relationship tacitly present in a number of earlier heroic tales has actually been institutionalized. As indicated above, the millennia-old occult watchdog group known as the Watchers didn’t just help the Slayer du jour out whenever they happened to run into her. On the contrary - there was an entire ancient, tradition-encrusted (and, as the audience eventually discovered, rather self-interested and corrupt) organization which had been set up to seek out each supernaturally-predestined Slayer-in-the-making and provide her with a personal handler who would train her, provide weapons and back-up, and, theoretically, instruct her in which paranormal menace to deal with next, etc.

Giles himself appeared to see his role more as that of Buffy’s senior strategist and tutor in advanced vampire-slaying - and, eventually, concerned father figure - than as her de facto boss or commanding officer. This led to an ever-increasing disconnect between the superficially stuffy Giles’ ability to adapt to his strong-minded charge’s unorthodox but effective approach to battling evil and the rigidly hidebound Watchers’ Council’s demands that he control Buffy, forcing her to carry out her slayerly duties in the same monkishly isolated manner imposed on so many generations of her predecessors. These internecine conflicts created additional job-related problems for the Slayer above and beyond dealing with the officially-designated menace of the week.

Eventually, the Buffy/Watchers’ Council culture clash generated storylines dealing specifically with the struggle of the Slayer and her supporters vs. the bureaucracy theoretically designed to assist her in her vampire-fighting endeavors. The first and most overt of these story arcs involved the introduction of the initially callow and foolish Wesley Wyndam-Pryce as Giles’ Council-mandated replacement.

When this heavy-handed interference proved so counterproductive on every level that even the Council was forced to acknowledge its failure, Giles was reinstated. However, the still-dissatisfied Council subsequently coerced him into subjecting Buffy to a power-sapping ritual test of worthiness on her eighteenth birthday. In retrospect, this near-fatal ordeal appeared to be a thinly-disguised attempt to get the unruly and insubordinate current Slayer killed so the Council could replace her with a more conventionally compliant instrument of their will.

An equally absorbing, but more light-hearted, aspect of the Slayer/Watcher arrangement was the contrast between the relatively staid, old-fashioned British Watchers and the hip Californian Slayer and her teenage associates. Whatever their other occasional creative lapses, Whedon and his fellow scriptwriters did an extremely effective job of consistently portraying both Buffy and Giles as being admirable figures in their respective very different ways, while simultaneously deriving considerable humor from their frequent culturally-induced mutual incomprehension.

In one early instance of this syndrome, the bright but un-bookish Buffy expresses uncertainty over whether (newly-appointed Sunnydale High librarian) Giles’ previous place of employment had been The British Museum or just a British Museum. In another memorable first-season exchange, the shoe is on the other foot as Buffy remarks, "My spider-sense is tingling." This evokes only a blank look from Giles. "Sorry - pop culture reference," the notoriously slangy Slayer explains.

Giles is not the only secondary character to be lavished with this sort of attention, either. Far from it. Buffy is, among other things, a series dedicated to the proposition that even a superhero is more effective when she has a support system. Accordingly, virtually all the significant supporting characters on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, especially the members of the inner circle often referred to as the Scooby Gang, undergo far more character development than is typical on most American TV shows, especially those which could be categorized as falling into the action/adventure genre.

Brilliant but shy Willow, the show’s obvious bookworm/geek-girl identification figure, goes from mousy high school nonentity to Giles’ invaluable research assistant (and intellectual superior, when it comes to computers) to apprentice witch, to Dark Phoenix-like magical Big Bad of the sixth season - and, after being successfully talked down by Xander, is rehabilitated and accepted back into the fold. This seems fairly reasonable by Buffyverse standards, since her actual body count consists of exactly one conscienceless self-styled master villain recently turned murderer, as opposed to the hundreds of innocents slaughtered by reformed vampires Angel - and, eventually, Spike - before they switched sides.

Along the way, Willow also evolves from a wallflower whose best friend - and longtime crush - Xander unthinkingly perceives her solely as a nonsexual sister figure rather than a potentially eligible female, to the steady girlfriend of understatedly cool local rock musician Oz, to half of a groundbreaking TV lesbian couple. Not so incidentally, Willow and her girlfriend Tara were also the most stable, long-lasting couple on the show. Willow had a definite flair for picking partners who, though basically as sensible and down to earth as she was, were technically decidedly unconventional: a musician turned part-time werewolf, and a fellow witch who was also a fellow woman. However, her relationships tended to be visibly healthier and more well-grounded than, say, Buffy’s wildly romantic but literally doomed love for the cursed vampire, Angel, or her mutually self-destructive affair with the semi-unrepentant bloodsucking bad boy, Spike.

Conversely, the initially unpromising "mean girl"/alpha bitch Cordelia proves unexpectedly brave, intelligent, and helpful under pressure. In some ways, she actually handles the initial revelation of the vampire menace and the slayer system set up to combat it better than Buffy does - although it undoubtedly helps that Cordy isn’t simultaneously being informed that she is the one who has now been appointed humanity’s vampire slayer-in-chief. Before long, queen bee Cordelia gradually finds herself doing all sorts of things far outside the parameters of her original privilegedly shallow worldview. She even acknowledges -and, eventually, acts upon, however clandestinely - a reciprocal attraction to the poor and decidedly socially ineligible Xander.

It would be unfair to say that Cordelia grows a soul over the first few seasons of the show, since even in the early episodes she was never quite as glossily superficial as she appeared at first glance. But she is undoubtedly one of the characters who grows and changes the most, even before the collapse of her father’s embezzled fortune late in the series renders it logistically unfeasible for her to relapse back into her old habits of ignoring anything that might disturb her comfortably materialistic A-list life.

Even the apparently lightweight, ordinary Xander, the only one of the Slayer’s crew who never exhibits any paranormal traits or talents (since even Cordelia gets stuck with a secondhand penchant for trouble-spotting psychic visions after moving on to Angel) gets to be a fully-rounded character who evolves and remains essential to the group over the course of the series’ seven seasons. Xander is, as he says himself, the metaphysically unremarkable "Zeppo" of the Slayer’s inner circle. But, in another reversal of traditional gender roles, in a number of instances - specifically, Dark Willow and early Cordelia - he is the one who is able to reach out to an obstructive and/or dangerously antagonistic member of the opposite sex and at least partially win her over to the side of the angels by emotional power alone. Underneath all the smart-alecky wisecracks, this is basically the same sort of thing that, in old-fashioned stories with more traditional gender roles, used to be described as someone’s being saved through the love of a good woman. This despite the fact that, in another unconventional twist, in the crucial instance of the Dark Willow incident, that love is not romantic, but the non-sexual, platonic love of one old childhood friend for another. It is because of this that in the Primal Slayer story arc, Xander is accurately described as the heart of the Slayer’s group.