Buffy The Vampire Slayer

NASHVILLE-They didn’t come to Nashville for the tunes, although the Friday-night singalong of "Once More With Feeling" might, with some generosity, be described as music.

The 300-plus academics, scholars and students attending the Slayage Conference on Buffy The Vampire Slayer (SCBtVS) in Tennessee this past weekend came to present and listen to some 190 papers on Buffy and Angel, the television shows that comprise creator Joss Whedon’s "Buffyverse."

With Angel just off the air after being cancelled by the WB it was also a chance to say goodbye after eight years of thought-provoking television. Buffy was cancelled last year.

"Soon after we announced plans for the conference, the end of Buffy was made known. Some people thought that would have a negative effect on the SCBtVS, but it did not. We have conceived the conference as a as a post-mortem/wake/summing-up for one of television’s greatest shows," said Prof. David Lavery of Middle Tennessee State University.

Lavery and his co-convener Rhonda V. Wilcox are co-authors of Fighting The Forces: What’s At Stake In Buffy The Vampire Slayer, as well as editors of the Online International Journal of Buffy Studies, alias Slayage (http://www.slayage.tv).

The serious show with the silly name dealt with Buffy Summers, the chosen one, the vampire slayer and her crew of friends ("the scoobies"), her vampire lovers (one of whom, Angel, got his own show after season three) and the horrors of day-to-day living. Whedon’s willingness to deal with issues of faith, morality, good/evil, the nature of love and sacrifice as well as the necessity of cheap, but stylish, footwear and knowing your pop culture references made for a show that attracted fierce loyalty.

While the Slayage Conference wasn’t a fan convention (not a single set of fake vampire teeth on display) there was no mistaking that almost everyone here was indeed a rapt devotee of the show, as witnessed by the enthusiastic participation in the aforementioned singalong to the musical episode from season six.

"Fan conferences ordinarily feature actors from the series. They are for-profit events, including chats and Q&As with the cast, autograph sessions, and so on. Ours is an academic conference, with scholarly/critical papers on a wide variety of Buffy Studies topics," Lavery said.

"In the book Fan Cultures, Matt Hills makes a distinction between `Scholar-Fans’ and `Fan-Scholars,’ convinced as he is - and I think he’s right - that the chasm between fans and scholars isn’t very wide. Most television/popular culture scholars love the shows they study; many fans are extremely knowledgeable about the shows they love. Because we acknowledge Hills’s point, we have included a few fannish things at our conference. We have fanfic readings, for example, and screenings of fan videos."

With scholars from as far away as Australia, Germany and Singapore, SCBtVS was the biggest academic conference ever on a TV show and had papers that dealt with everything from "Russian Existentialism And Vampire Slayage: A Shestovian Key To The Power And Popularity of BtVS," through "Perspective By Incongruity And The Tao Of Cordelia: Dramatistic Considerations Of Vampires, Technology, And The Technological Society" to "`This Is How Many Apocalypses For Us Now?’: The Buffyverse And Apocalyptic And Premillenialist Christianity."

There were several sessions on Pedagogy to encourage the teaching of Buffy and awards were handed out for published works on everyone’s favourite blonde champion.

During a session labelled "Heroes," one of the participants, English professor David Fritts, spoke on "Warrior Heroes: Buffy The Vampire Slayer And Beowulf," convincingly making the case, by way of Joseph Campbell, that the first five seasons of Buffy mirrors the heroic narrative in the Anglo-Saxon epic about the monster fighter and his eventual demise.

Fritts, who translated Beowulf as part of his graduate studies years ago, said that when he came across Buffy, he found similarities between the two, which made him realize the depth of the show. As for the conference, he was pleasantly surprised at the different angles the presenters came from in dissecting the Buffyverse.

"No matter what people bring to it, it makes sense, just like Shakespeare."

Fritts credits Buffy with opening his eyes to new venues of scholarship.

"The book on Buffy and philosophy (Fear And Trembling In Sunnydale) took me into something I’m ashamed to say I didn’t know about," he said.

Prof. Elizabeth Miller, formerly of Newfoundland’s Memorial University and now a Toronto resident, brought to the conference her expertise on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The author of Dracula: The Shade And The Shadow and other texts on the granddaddy of all vampires is not a Buffy expert, but was invited because of the context she could bring to the discussion.

Miller, who’s a veteran of gatherings on unusual academic subjects have heard it all: "`You’re what? A Dracula scholar? What? Do you drink blood?’"

Miller is thrilled that pop culture, within the last 15 years, has found its rightful place in academia.

"Pop culture is as important as so-called high culture. It expresses the desires, the fears and the anxieties of the population ... our academic world is finally getting down from the stuffy ivory tower. Even comic books are now a subject for serious study," she said. "That there are about 200 papers here says something about the inter-textuality of Buffy."

Three new books were launched at the conference: Jana Riess’s What Would Buffy Do? The Vampire Slayer As Spiritual Guide, which looks at the show from different religious points of view; Gregory Stevenson’s Televised Morality: The Case Of Buffy The Vampire Slayer delves into small-screen moral discourse and Nancy Holder’s Heat is the latest Buffy/Angel crossover novelization.

Riess, who has a master of divinity degree, a Ph.D. in religion and is the religion book review editor for American trade magazine Publisher’s Weekly, said she was inspired by Buffy’s courage, humour and willingness to sacrifice herself and that she wishes Buffy were her neighbour.

"I think that spiritual teachers come in all kinds of disguises and for me, Buffy and Angel have been great spiritual guides."

Riess, who presented a paper on "Buffydharma: BtVS And The New American Buddhism," was thrilled to be at the conference surrounded by people who don’t look at you funny when you talk passionately about your favourite show and where she found the presentations to be, "without posturing and posing. This is all about the show and what we have gleaned from it. And I find that very appealing."

Asked in a recent interview how he felt about the fact his texts are dissected by scholars, Whedon said: "I take these things enormously seriously, and so do my writers. We don’t come at it from a point of view of `that would be cool.’ If somebody does I fire them.

"Cool is easy to come by, but the heart of a thing, what really matters is why we’re there ... the oddities within myself and the oddities within the show that we’re not aware of or in control of/ are absolutely worthy of study. Did I expect people would get together and take them seriously? I did not ... I find it enormously gratifying."

How gratifying he might have found hearing 300 scholars who had just finished their chicken-and-Jack-Daniel’s pie belting out his songs, we can only imagine.