Buffy The Vampire Slayer

MARTIN O’MALLEY:
Orange County blues
CBC News Viewpoint | November 14, 2003

My friend Father John doesn’t think much of the new Fox TV hit The OC. He takes no offence watching female actors portraying sultry and often scantily clad teenaged women, nor at the steamy clinches and clutches that happen every week, nor at the beautiful, angst-ridden, high school guys who always seem a step away from an early wedding or jumping off a bridge.

Father John is John Pungente, a Jesuit priest who gets up every morning at 4:30, goes for a long walk - he used to run before he broke an ankle earlier this year - then returns to his uptown apartment where he says mass and has breakfast.

The rest of the day Father John devotes to media literacy: television, newspapers, movies, the internet, pop music. He is regarded as a world authority on the topic. We did a book together five years ago, the first chapter of which quotes Bart Simpson of The Simpsons telling his dad Homer: "It’s just hard not to listen to TV - it’s spent so much more time raising us than you have."

When we did the book, Pungente was a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I thought he might have taken a shine to The OC, the smash hit of the teenaged lovelorn this season, but he did not. "Too pretty," he said, which is pretty well how he dismissed the momentarily popular teenage soap opera of the late 1990s, Dawson’s Creek.

He admitted Dawson’s Creek did some things rather well. It had excellent (and expensive) production values, the writing occasionally was clever, even witty, but overall he found it "a world of surfaces with little depth." He also wasn’t impressed with gorgeous late-20-something actors portraying teenagers.

Pungente once was a high school principal, in Winnipeg, and a good one. He staged plays, achieved rapport with his students, and was respected as a cultural savant. That’s why he liked Buffy so much. He believed it did more than anything else on TV to depict teenaged fears, loves and lives. He also believed it conveyed excellent values.

In our book (More than Meets the Eye: Watching Television Watching Us) Pungente said:

"Buffy comes closer to depicting the reality of teenaged life than anything else on television. Don’t be fooled by the weekly dose of vampires and monsters. The vampires and monsters are the point. That is, metaphorically, teenage reality. The obvious joke has always been that vampirism and lycanthropy are metaphors for really raging hormones."

Pungente and I did not agree on everything. He was as non-jock as anyone I ever met and never accepted my contention that the best television is live sports.

I’ve lived in California, but I’ve never visited Orange County. However, I have been in Scottsdale, Ariz., a similar wealthy enclave of America. One night at an upscale restaurant in Scottsdale I encountered a table of older teens and young 20s who could be twins of Seth and Summer and Ryan and their ilk on The OC. Fabulous clothes, movie-calibre makeup and makeovers, expensive cars, outwardly sophisticated conversation. They even appeared to know a thing or two about wine.

In the soap opera of The OC, however, the writing is silly, vapid, though it probably captures some of the fashionable inarticulateness of many of today’s youngsters, as when Summer says, "Stop! I do not like Seth Cohen! I mean, I can’t like Seth Cohen. He’s, like, Seth Cohen."

Like, whatever.

Consider this from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when a British vampire was explaining stuff to Buffy:

"We like to talk big - vampires do. ’I’m going to destroy the world.’ That’s just tough-guy talk. Strutting around with your friends over a pint of blood. The truth is, I like this world. You’ve got dog-racing, Manchester United. And you’ve got people. Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals on legs."

And Buffy explaining how she killed a vampire she loved: "I told him that I loved him and I kissed him and I killed him."

Pungente: "This sounds like something Lauren Bacall would have confessed to Humphrey Bogart in one of their film noir movies."

Pungente used Buffy as a role model for conveying solid values for teens. "She is smart, willing to learn about herself and live with who she is, even if she happens to be a vampire slayer. She is independent, reliable, maybe too much a Type-A personality, but still an entirely credible 1990s teenager.

"Other shows deal with teenage problems - love, sex, peer pressure, school work, family problems, body image, dreams, insecurity, self-esteem - but Buffy adapts a literary and film genre for television. The vampire myth and the sexuality it evokes speak powerfully to today’s teenagers."

I thoroughly enjoyed the episode of The OC that depicted the alcoholic mother of the boy who looks like a clone of Russell Crowe. She is taken in by the boy’s adopted family, but there is no happy ending, as the mom returns to problem drinking and leaves her son - again.

The other shows didn’t come close, so I stopped watching. One thing I must admit, however: those kids really know how to kiss.