On My Shelves: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

"Into every generation, there is a chosen one. One girl in all the world. She alone will wield the strength and skill to stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness; To stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their numbers.

She is the Slayer."

 

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the biggest media phenomena of its generation, and probably the single largest reason for the explosion in popularity of urban fantasy in the last few decades. While it has many ancestors (including the original movie, which didn't fit Joss Whedon's vision very well), the Buffy television series defined itself and transformed much of modern television in the process.

Buffy Summers comes to Sunnydale High School, trailing a reputation for trouble that includes, somehow, being connected to the destruction of her former high school's gymnasium. This references the events of the original movie, although the details of those events would likely be somewhat different. Unlike the movie, then, this version of Buffy already knows she is the Slayer – and having defeated the mass of vampires threatening her prior school is set on having a normal life.

But every Slayer has a Watcher, a member of a secret order dedicated to observing and ostensibly training and supporting the Slayers. Her Watcher, Rupert Giles, becomes the school librarian and reminds her that the defeat of one evil does not mean the defeat of all. In fact, her journey to Sunnydale itself is likely no coincidence; beneath cheerful Sunnydale, California, is a "Hellmouth" – a weakness in the mystical fabric of reality that allows dark forces to escape and wreak havoc upon the mortal world. A Slayer is drawn to such places to duel evil and protect the world she lives in.

Buffy makes friends at her new high school, chief among them red-headed shy nerd-girl Willow Rosenberg and rather dorky would-be hero Xander Harris, who – upon discovering the truth – become the nucleus of the "Scooby Gang", the people who support Buffy in her one-woman war against the forces of evil. Together they will face vampires, werewolves, demons, witches, and even full-fledged gods, battling them with magic, wooden stakes, explosives, and weapons-grade snark, while also dealing with the pain of loss, angst of self-doubt, and the weight of the world, as well as of impending graduation.

From this beginning sprang a television series that lasted seven full seasons and took Buffy from high school to college and beyond, spun off another series (Angel), and influenced media from 1997 to the present day.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is true to its name, a series that is both deadly serious and sometimes side-splittingly funny, usually walking the razor-thin line between comedy and tragedy in a way that very few shows ever manage. The show deals with typical high-school concerns – the high-pressure parent who insists their child fulfill the parent's childhood dreams, the feral behavior of gangs and peer pressure, the lure of drugs – and puts a supernatural spin on them that allows the show to highlight the issues in manners both sympathetic and amusing. At its best, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a show that fulfills all of the requirements of a great work of fiction – full-on entertainment with a core of well-realized emotion and reality to support even the most fantastic aspects of the show.

At its worst… well, it becomes clumsy melodrama whose fast one-liners can't really hide the clumsy contrivances of the plot, or, worse, a show that at least for a time betrays the basic themes and implications of its earlier work.

The one-liners – the fast, sparkling, ironic dialogue that dominates Buffy pretty much throughout its run – define the universe of Buffy. This is a world where there's never a wrong time for a "Why You Suck" speech, for a Schwarzenegger Post-mortem One-Liner, for either a villain monologue or a moment of Heroic Resolve. Joss Whedon first demonstrated his true powers of dialogue in Buffy, something that set him on the path to The Avengers – and the same flashy wit that made that film work so well was honed, and honed well, in Buffy.

Buffy was of course far from the first story to try to bring the supernatural into direct collision with the modern world; many old-style pulp stories touched on it, the works of horror writers tried their hands at it, and television had Kolchak: The Night Stalker for a few brilliant moments. I had myself written most of Digital Knight (later re-issued and expanded as Paradigms Lost) many years before Buffy ever appeared on the scene.

But Buffy managed to combine the high-school drama with the supernatural adventure – a very potent combination that gave rise to an entire subgenre of school supernatural adventure, and influenced other related stories that had slightly older roots such as the Persona series of videogames (first one in 1996). The combination allows for the emotional conflict inherent in the high-school setting, with older children trying to become adults and dealing with all of the issues surrounding this extremely challenging time of life and the more objective dangers of supernatural investigation and combat to intersect and highlight each other with a clarity and immediacy difficult to manage in other settings.

While most obviously targeted towards the teen age bracket, Buffy's quick wit, significant older characters such as Giles, and common adult themes made the show appeal to a far wider audience, making it a long-running phenomenon.

Overall, my personal experience with Buffy is that the first three seasons were the best, with other seasons having some good episodes or arcs but having failings ranging from repeating themes that could have been better let go to directly damaging the overall work that had been done in developing the ensemble cast and universe.

There were certainly moments of brilliance even in the least-good seasons ("Nothing on earth can stop me!" *WHAM* "I'd like to test that theory, if I may." is still one of my favorite scenes in all television), but like many series, Buffy was allowed, or even forced, to keep going long after it really should have been ended. Like Dragonball, forcing a series beyond its end did sometimes allow the creation of new and interesting events, but was clearly prone to disaster due to building an extension onto a metaphorical building whose foundations were not sufficient to support it.

The show was also quite able to look at itself in different ways, ones that could be terribly creepy. The worst – or perhaps best – of these was "Normal Again", wherein Buffy is affected by a demonic hallucinogenic toxin that sends her into a dream-state in which she is a normal girl who had suffered a psychotic break and had a long delusion of being this superhuman "Slayer" fighting vampires and demons. The truly horrific part of the episode is, of course, that this could really be the truth. The entire series could be the adventures made up by an insane girl in a mental hospital, and the ending of the episode is not focused on the "real" Buffy having rescued her friends, but the mental patient now fully retreated into her fantasy universe.

At the same time it had marvelous moments of heroism and self-affirmation, perhaps the greatest being Buffy fighting alone against Angelus – the demonic version of the good-guy vampire Angel – in a race to prevent Angelus from releasing a world-destroying demon. Buffy is fighting desperately, but losing to Angelus, who continues his assault, backing her against the wall, mocking her as he is about to deliver the final blow: "No weapons... no friends... no hope. Take all that away and what's left?"

Buffy (catching his sword between her hands and looking him straight in the eye): "ME."

This show has certainly influenced my writing -- mostly in trying to find ways to match Whedon's hand at dialogue. I'm not that good, but it is a goal to strive towards. He was able to keep multiple characters in character while still letting their dialogue sparkle, which is a major achievement; sure, many writers can come up with awesome lines, but figuring out how to make them not jar the reader/watcher when they're being said by the work's butt-monkey, that's harder.

In the end, Buffy is one of the best products of American television of the last few decades. It has some flaws, of course – the constant requirement for Buffy to have a "boyfriend" is one of the most annoying – but it is overall a great show, especially in the first three seasons, and I recommend it highly.