Hellmouths, Reality, and High School
Hellmouths, Reality, and High School
Color me clueless and completely culturally illiterate: I never watched an episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” while the show was running, and I had never seen the movie. But I liked “Serenity” and “Firefly”, so when I learned that their creator, Joss Whedon, had also done “Buffy”, it seemed only natural to order the movie and TV series on DVD, sit down in front of my Macintosh, and not come up for air until I had gotten through them all.
I was impressed. The characters were good, and they grew. The dialog was wonderful. The long-term plot line was fascinating. The flavor of the episodes ran the full gamut from hilariously silly to heartbreaking, often at the same time. And though I am probably a bit older than the average “Buffy” fan, I – like most Americans, I suspect – have strong memories of “High School as Hell”. Perhaps stronger than usual …
Mild SPOILER WARNING for what follows:
If I could step into the Buffyverse, and for some reason did not immediately do the sensible thing of finding a big bed and hiding under it, the character I would most want to meet would be Willow: We uber-geeks are all really looking for some way to make magic work; it would be fascinating to chat with someone who had done exactly that. But if I could meet just one of the characters in the Hollywoodverse who put on the show, it would be Amber Benson – who played Tara; she seems to be something of a Renaissance woman, and has done a tremendous number of creative things.
I particularly liked the frequent plot device of abstracting some common source of angst or unpleasantness for teenagers or young adults into a horror theme, and doing an episode which featured both the actual angst and the abstracted horror in parallel. That made for good drama, for great personal involvement by the audience, and for good object lessons. I’ve never had kids, but if I did I think I would tell them sternly not to watch “Buffy”, in the hope that they would become diehard fans and see the whole thing.
A fun trick was giving characters names opposite to their nature. If you had to choose a name that characterized all that is banal, trivial, and self-centered about stereotypical teenage Valley girls, “Buffy” would surely be near the top of the list. Yet the character, Buffy Summers, was as selfless and serious as any in fiction. Similarly, Willow was strong and determined. Neil Gaiman named the members of the Endless in a similar tongue-in-cheek manner.
Whedon’s occasional use of technology in unexpected ways was wonderful. The first example is perhaps the best: At the end of the first season, in “Prophecy Girl”, Buffy resolutely faced an apparently unavoidable prophecy that she shall confront a master vampire and die, and indeed, she ended up dead – drowned face-down in a puddle of filth in an underground sewer. The prophecy had been fulfilled. Fortunately, one of her friends knew CPR, and ten minutes later, said master vampire was toast. I wonder if Whedon was influenced by Ralph Bakshi’s “Wizards”, which had a similarly surprising technology-based ending.
My favorite episode was the last one, at the end of season seven. Throughout the series, Whedon presented a classical hero’s journey, and in all but childish fairy tales, such journeys do not end happily for the voyagers. Whedon’s resolution of this problem was to have his characters change the rules of their universe. The series-dominating fact that the only way for a new Slayer to arise was for an old one to die stemmed from magic performed by ancient male sorcerers. Yet witch Willow was more powerful than all those old dead guys put together, so she redid the magic and arranged to activate all potential Slayers immediately. Hero Buffy was no longer alone, the principle that the right thing to do with great power is to share it was compelling, and besides, I have always believed that the most fundamental mistake in any game is to play by somebody else’s rules.
I also liked the dialog and the realistic treatment of human relationships. These aspects of the show contributed to one another. I can play back my own memories and see relationships like that happening, and the more witty and intelligent of my friends and colleagues have always tried to talk and joke like Joss Whedon characters, even before there were any of them to emulate. It is odd to think of a show whose theme was a superhero trying to cope with what comes out of a Hellmouth as “reality television”, but I think that title is deserved.
Besides, some Hellmouths are real. How’s your history? The Cuban Missile Crisis broke on October 22, 1962 – my sixteenth birthday – supposedly a magical time in the life of any teenager of any gender. Yet the USSR had thousands of nuclear warheads, and we lived in an area surrounded by high-priority targets – two U. S. Air Force bases and an Atlas missile wing. So my main concern on the eve of adulthood was whether I was going to disappear in a fireball before the next morning, or perhaps die horribly from radiation poisoning in the event of a near miss. The threat of general nuclear war is perhaps not quite a theologian’s Hellmouth of universe-shattering and mythic proportion, but it’s not bad for beginners, and I suspect deserves partial credit.
And I had to go off and study for a chemistry test. Don’t talk to me about Hellmouths. Buffy, I know how you feel.
Jay Freeman’s Blog Entries
Sunday, September 23, 2007