Buffy The Vampire Slayer

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With little fan-fare, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was quietly dropped into the 1997 television schedule, in mid-season. According to Joss Whedon, the thirty-something creator of the show, it’s premise was this: pluck that weary plot-line from the horror genre... you know the one... where the young beautiful blonde is being chased, stumbles, and eventually ends up in a dark alley where she’s of course butchered. Well, Joss Whedon wanted to give it a twist. The young beautiful blonde is being chased, stumbles and eventually ends up in a dark alley... where she turns around and kicks the monster’s ass. The show’s premise is given depth with it’s mix of genres: gothic soap opera, super-hero cartoon, comedy and melodrama. Originally Buffy the Vampire Slayer was viewed as a show about teenagers for teenagers. But, now in it’s 7th season, it explores, some of the big questions: what does it mean to be violent? Weak? Evil? Questions that have drawn adult viewers and academics as well. The show has generated thousands of web sites, hundreds of chat rooms, and at least four anthologies, with essay titles like: "Buffy as Gidget for the fin de siecle, " or "I’m Buffy... and You’re History: A Post-Modern Politics of Buffy."

We are being taken on a complicated journey with this super-hero. Buffy doesn’t always save the day. She can’t even save her mother. She’s not an untouchable sex object like Wonder Woman. She has sex and gets her heart crushed by her first love. She’s not a one-dimensional hero like Superman. Buffy gets depressed following her mother’s death. Depressed for a long time. She withdaws from her friends. In a key episode, she is forced to sacrifice herself to save her sister. But the program is clever, in that it allows us to think, that although the sacrifice may look like an act of heroism, it could’ve been a suicide attempt. We are presented with the portrait of a super-hero who is damaged, flawed. A super-hero who is weak just like us. Perhaps that’s why the program strikes such a chord. The internet abounds with thousands of web sites. Hundreds of them discuss the many moral debates the program raises: debates about contradiction. Can a powerful person be emotionally vulnerable? Does badness come from the heart, or from deep in the soul?

Excerpts from Mary O’Connell’s Interview with Marti Noxon

Marti Noxon is the executive producer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Joss Whedon is the creator of the program.

Destiny

MOC: So, Marty, looking at the psychological wiring under the boards, is Buffy really about, that, in life, there are more questions than answers. That super-heroes are human, and that humans, of course can be super-heroes too? Or, do you have your own theory?

MN: Well, I have a theory, and it’s something I’ve been working on all these years, and Joss may hate me for saying this, but I think it’s an exploration of being exceptional. I mean the whole idea of being a super-hero is the idea that you are unlike other people, and people are drawn to that, but at the same time, it makes you the other...someone that may have trouble relating. It’s inherently a lonely thing, and I haven’t said this to Joss, but I kind of think it’s his life story. Because he’s exceptionally brilliant, and he has abilities other people don’t have. He can take the summer off and write a musical that’s every bit as good as what major composers, who’ve dedicated their life, can come up with. He’s just an amazingly smart, over-capable person. And he lives in a world where his brain functions faster than most people’s. And not that he can leap tall buildings, but the more I look at Buffy’s struggle, I see it’s a study of being exceptional.

Redemption

MOC: Let’s talk about Spike as a character, and why he’s generated this moral debate about being redeemed.

MN: Well, the whole genesis of Spike, is that we just wanted a cool villain. He was introduced as part of a Sid and Nancy set, and then he just popped up as a character, and we wanted to bring him back. We weren’t sure how he would function in the group because he was evil, and more or less as a function of story-telling we wanted to make him less so, so he could be around the gang more. So, we had him tracked by the government, and a chip is put in his head, so he is unable to attack people. So for a long time he was good by default. He was still able to hurt demons, his chip didn’t stop that, but he was fighting on the side of right because he still liked to kill things. But slowly you start to have moral questions. Is this a change in conditioning? Was the active fight for good, did that start to make him seek out good? And then he becomes attracted to Buffy. I’ve always joked around that he became attracted to Buffy because she could hit him the hardest, that he liked to be abused. Then we discovered that there was a real heart to that story-line, and they had a real chemistry together. So a lot of times people who see this as a grand design, an opera about good and evil. It’s just really a slowly evolving thing, and sometimes form follows function. And as we watched, eventually we found that Spike was a real romantic foil for Buffy. And also what we’ve seen is Buffy attracted to her own darkness. To her own aggression, to sex without love, to sex where love is really subdued, all of the things that she can’t permit, because she is a hero.

The Calling

MOC: One thing that struck me watching the show was whether it was teenagers or feminist historians, they were attracted to the idea of a calling, a higher purpose to Buffy’s sense of mission. Does that surprise you?

MN: Oh gosh, no...there’s two things. I somehow believe that’s something everybody wishes they had. That everybody wishes they had such a strong sense of their destiny. Buffy, for all of her doubt, confusion, and masochistic impulses, for all of that, she knows what her job is. She knows what her purpose is, above all other. It’s really interesting, but becoming a mom, I feel a kind of clarity in my life, more than anything else, I know what I have to do. I feel more settled. I have something precious to protect. I know what my first job is and also, there’s a spiritual yearning in it.

MOC: I think you’re right about that, tell me about that.

MN: Well, to me, Buffy just doesn’t serve herself. I have a calling which is to be a writer, but that’s pretty selfish. I mean, it brings me great joy, who knows if it brings better things into the world, but ultimately, it serves me. Buffy’s calling is to serve mankind, and it connects her to a greater good, and I know I struggle to feel connected to something, and connected to something larger than our daily existence, and Buffy’s plugged into it. And I think the idea of destiny and serving God in a way, and Joss, by the way, is a rabid atheist, but his work is full of yearning for belief. And I think the show speaks to people who also have that yearning. I mean, the whole show in a way, the whole show ping pongs between the darkest night of the soul and this whole yearning for belief.

The Struggle

MOC: Do you think this is Joss Whedon’s personal belief? That saving the world is an endless struggle, to do good?

MN: I think that he does feel like it’s sort of a meaningless void, and what matters is the struggle to find the good. And the relationships you build with people while you struggle. And in some ways you’ll never find it, but the quest and the questors, and the people that you find, who are not necessarily your family, are the only thing that lends the journey meaning. I think that is his major theme.