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HELL'S
BELLE
From the Sunday
Times, 10 December 2000:
The American
television industry consists of large numbers of highly intelligent people
doing very stupid things. The cream of US universities are drawn to
Hollywood by money and glamour, and there they churn out appalling soaps,
sitcoms, news and breakfast shows, nut'n'slut confrontations and cop'n'doc
dramas, all of them designed to stupefy the masses to the point where they
are incapable of switching off of turning over.
There are, however,
bugs in this program that result, very occasionally, in good things
getting through. Frasier, The Simpsons, Cheers
and a handful of other shows are not just good relative to the dross with
which they are surrounded; they are absolutely good - literate,
thoughtful, crafted products of sensitive, cultivated imaginations.
There has, lately,
been one new addition to this thinly populated hall of fame. It is -
and if you haven't seen it, you're going to have to trust me on this one -
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The fourth series is being
scheduled eccentrically on BBC2, the fifth series starts on Sky in the new
year, and the video box sets and DVDs of previous series are going to be
of this Christmas's bestsellers.
Unlike The Simpsons,
Buffy is not a brilliant, warm-hearted satire; unlike Cheers,
it is not a sophisticated, quasi-religious celebration of the loser that
lurks inside us all; and, unlike Frasier, it is not literate, camp
and psychologically profound theatre. Buffy is unique in the
literal-minded morass of primetime television, for it is an assertion of
the redemptive power of metaphor. This is not just another
run-of-the-mill bloodsucking saga; these vampires are cleverly contrived
images of every conceivable teen trauma.
For those of you
unaware of this series, it is set in a high school in the town of
Sunnydale, California. Unknown to most of its pupils, teachers and
parents, this school is located over the mouth of hell and is, therefore,
subject to persistent invasions by a variety of demons. Buffy
Summers, the heroine, has moved to Sunnydale from Los Angeles to discover
that she is the slayer, the particular individual who, in each generation,
is destined to fight for humanity against these demons. In every
episode she kills several, either by the traditional method of a wooden
stake through the heart or by the non-traditional method of martial arts.
The show has developed
a hybrid pagan eschatology to explain this eccentric state of
affairs. Rupert Giles, the English school librarian played by the
star of those Gold Blend coffee ads, Anthony Stewart Head explains:
"This world is older than any of you know and, contrary to popular
mythology, it did not begin as paradise. For untold eons, demons
walked the earth, made it their home - their hell. In time they lost
their purchase on this reality, and the way was made for the mortal
animals. For Man. What remains of the Old Ones are vestiges;
certain magicks, certain creatures."
This may be a rough
transcription of the lore of fantasy literature, but it is evidently
anti-biblical - hell is seen as predating Eden - and, inevitably, the show
has run into trouble with the fundamentalist keepers of the American
conscience. Interestingly, though, US Catholics - who have,
historically, tended to be smarter than US Protestants - have rushed to Buffy's
defence. Massimo Introvigne, of the Center for Studies of New
Religions, says that people watching the show are not embracing an
alternative soteriology - doctrine of salvation - but "are much more
likely to focus on the characters and to get the symbolic value of the
'occult' episodes as metaphors of very real teenage problems".
Exactly. The
occult in Buffy is a brilliantly sustained metaphor that embraces
the multiple social and sexual crises of the teenage years. More
precisely, it is a defence of teenagers against those who would deny their
pain and trauma. In one superbly acute episode - Gingerbread
- parents at the school form themselves into a body called MOO, Mothers
Opposed to the Occult, and almost end up burning Buffy at the stake.
She is saved only by the mothers' discovery that it is they, not their
children, who are being manipulated by demons. In fact, all adult
authority figures in the show, from the mayor of Sunnydale to the
principal of the school, are either wicked or depraved.
Joss Whedon, the
creator of the show, and his team of writers are fully aware of the
significance of their metaphor, and every episode expresses the point with
wit and conviction. "Everything is life and death when you're a
16-year-old," observes Buffy's mother. And Sarah Michelle
Gellar, who plays Buffy, has remarked succinctly that "high school
scares everyone". The demons are metaphorical expressions of
the way that life, to the teenager, seems more frightening and more
significant than it does to anybody else. "I think the show is
at its best," Whedon has said, "when we remember the sort of
human relationships that people have that are really twisted and scary,
and sort of extend those into horror stories, rather than just have a
monster show up. That's where the stuff really disturbs me, when
it's somebody's parent or somebody's friend who is turning into something
horrible."
The two key
relationships in the series - between Buffy and Angel, a sometime vampire
who now has his own spin-off series, and Willow and Oz, a werewolf - are
brilliantly direct realisations of the sexual anxiety of the teen
girl. Boys in the real world do seem to have a dark, bestial
side. They are also irredemably alien. In Buffy's world this
is because boys may well be demons, and sex, as a result, may be
dangerous. Indeed, when she finally succumbs to Angel, the
consummation results in the death of his soul. The accuracy of this
metaphor is reinforced by the wit with which the show consistently evokes
topicality and practicality as ironic foils to its pagan melodrama.
The series' best running joke is that Buffy and her friends desperately
want a normal, all-American teenage life, but are constantly frustrated by
the need to fight the demons that spew from the mouth of hell. The
teenagers thus become the authentic Americans, struggling, like their
settler ancestors, to build order amid the chaotic wilderness.
Futhermore, Buffy, as Time
magazine has pointed out, is a product of "Camile Paglia-style
feminism". She is a strong woman, but she also cares about
clothes. She's tough but very sexy. She wants it all - boys,
family life, schoolwork and a career in vampire slaying. She
repeatedly fails in this because her schoolwork is poor and, socially, she
is shown as being outclassed by the luscious prom queen Cordelia, played
by the improbably named Charisma Carpenter. But failure, of course,
makes it easier for Buffy's fans to empathise. In their dreams,
they, too, are secret slayers.
In fact, Whedon
created Buffy as a self-consciously feminist icon. He thinks of her
as a reaction against those horror films in which "bubblehead blondes
wandered into dark alleys and got murdered by some creature", and
sees his show as a way of teaching boys about competent girls.
"If I can make teenage boys comfortable with a girl who takes charge
of a situation without their knowing that's what's happening, it's better
than sitting down and selling them on feminism."
There is a further
underlying theme here that was also brilliantly realised in the British
sitcom Absolutely Fabulous and the Hollywood movies The Faculty
and Clueless. This is that the children have learnt something
their parents have forgotten. In Ab Fab it is the daughter,
not her mad, drunken mother and her chain-smoking friend, who has a sane,
adult understanding of the world. In The Faculty, only the
teenagers are aware that their teachers and parents have been taken over
by aliens. And, in Clueless, the highly conservative mores
and rituals of teenage life are compared to the rigour of Jane Austen's
society - the film is based on her novel Emma.
Popular culture is
saying that the dislocation of values embraced by the 1960s generation
must now be reversed and order must be restored. Typically, the
adults suffer from broken marriages, drugs and drink. They are out
of control. They wreck themselves and the environment.
Against this spectacle
of dysfunctional adulthood, teenage rebellion becomes an attempt to return
to a more stable world. It is no accident that Rupert Giles calls
the vampires "the Old Ones"; they are, in fact, the wreckers
from Woodstock. The fundamentalists, therefore, should not be
alarmed. All of these works - and Buffy in particular - may
be unorthodox, but they are extraordinary moral. This is not the
easy, ineffective moralism of political correctness. Rather, it is
based on the genuine moral impulse to confront disorder and
injustice. It is also more realistic than the liberal morality of
the 1960s. Whereas the 1960s liberals believed in technological or
political fixes that would put things right once and for all - an end to
the Vietnam war being the obvious example - Buffy's struggle is eternal:
the vampires keep coming.
Slayers have to be
reborn for every generation; they only keep the lid on the mouth of hell,
they cannot fix the problem of evil. This may be a lot to claim for
what is, on the face of it, a rather daft teen show. And it's
certainly true that Buffy will not change the world and will, in
time, be superseded by some other fashionable Hollywood nonsense.
But, compared to the drab, destructive realism of the British teen-drama
tradition, she is a breath of fresh air. For Buffy asserts
the power of metaphor and the imagination to embody human reality.
Her fans will grow up
with a more lively and purposeful awareness than those brought up on the
dull delinquencies of Grange Hill or Hollyoaks. For
these American teens are right: the demons are real.
I once spoke at an
American school and, completely ignoring the content of my speech, one
12-year-old boy earnestly asked me if I believed in vampires.
"No," I said quickly, glancing at his teachers. But then,
glancing at my conscience, I added: "Not exactly..."
The fifth series of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer starts on Sky One on Jan 5; BBC2 is
currently screening the fourth series.
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