Buffy The Vampire Slayer

The tote bag says it all — "Buffyologist."

Some professors might be embarrassed to let their colleagues know they’d recently attended an international conference on the deeper meanings of the television show "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

Not Alanna Brown, 60, an award-winning English professor at Montana State University.

She has the red tote bag to prove it, as well as six seasons of "Buffy" on DVD and several books, including "What Would Buffy Do? The Vampire Slayer’s Spiritual Guide."

"I cannot be humiliated," Brown declared during an interview in her living room. She cackled, hamming it up for a photographer. "Buffyologists are a fun group."

Fun, but also serious and passionate.

The third international Buffy conference, held two weeks ago in Nashville, Tenn., drew more than 325 people from 16 different countries.

The conference was "fabulous," said Brown, who received travel expenses from her college to attend and present her academic paper on "The Monstrous Within and Without."

Some 190 scholars, from psychology, religion, media and other fields, presented papers on such topics as existentialism, witchcraft, masculinity, slayer slang, and sex and pain.

It may sounds frivolous or campy, but Brown argues that "Buffy" is part of something important going on in today’s culture, particularly among younger people. They are struggling to find their way in a world where the old values no longer seem to apply.

For many people, she said, the old bedrock ideas — the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Enlightenment world views — are breaking down in a fast-changing, pluralistic, technological era.

A new world view has not yet emerged, and it’s in fantasy that people are exploring new visions, Brown said. Hence, the popularity of Harry Potter, "The Lord of the Rings" and "Buffy."

In such fantasies people reinforce values like community, loyalty, forgiveness and compassion, and consider how to face "the monstrous within ourselves."

Buffy, which ended a seven-season run this spring, told the story of a beautiful blonde teenager who engaged in hand-to-hand combat with evil, while dealing with such moral issues as inter-racial (human-vampire) love affairs.

Brown said she grew up when the only strong female role model was Nancy Drew, girl detective, so she was first drawn to Buffy as a model of female strength and courage. Then she was hooked by the show’s word-play.

Far more than that is going on in "Buffy," however.

Ideas of good and evil, love and hate became confused when, for example, Spike the vampire realized he loves Buffy, Brown said.

Then Spike wondered if it would still be OK for him to kill bad human beings and suck their blood.

"It’s a very funny show," she said.

Yet in a serious way, Brown wrote, "Buffy" provided "wonderful models, not of perfection, but of the striving ... and the acts of courage and love that reflect the heroic in us all. ... What a brave new world."

The last episode is over and the show is headed for reruns, but Brown is confident that "Buffy" will refuse to die.

"It will be a classic," she said.