Review of Fighting the Forces: What's at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Previously appeared at http://www.joebobbriggs.com/bookclub/reviews/f/fightingtheforces.html

Fighting the Forces: What's at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer edited by Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery
Reviewed by Valerie Hawkins

It's not every television show--it's barely any television show--that attracts the attention of the university professor, and, even more unexpectedly, inspires article after article of serious critical analysis as opposed to condescending scorn. But "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" turned out to be just that kind of show.

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" premiered on the fledgling Warner Bros. television network, The WB, on March 10, 1997. Its last original episode aired on the Paramount Studios television network, UPN (its network home for its last two seasons), on May 20, 2003. No one, including series creator Joss Whedon, adapting the show from his original screenplay for the 1992 film of the same name (which grossed a hardly encouraging $16 million at the box office), ever dreamed that the show would last so long. In seven seasons on the air, "Buffy" developed into a pop culture phenomenon, comparable only to the "Star Trek" TV series in the 1960s. While never a smash ratings success like NBC's "Friends," or an Emmy Award darling like NBC's "ER," "Buffy" nonetheless enjoys countless fiercely devoted fans all over the globe, from New York to New Zealand, from Paris, Illinois to Paris, France. Like "Star Trek," "Buffy" has fan conventions all over the world, often featuring actors and writers from the series; there are hundreds of fan web sites and other online communities, including newsgroups and web rings of fan fiction; and there is a wealth of official and unofficial memorabilia, from posters and magazines and postcards to action figures and coffee mugs and t-shirts. A series of paperbacks and a line of graphic novels chronicle additional stories about the show's characters, both the main and the peripheral.

Even in controversy, the series is distinguished; in August, 2002, a grassroots morals watchdog group, the Parents Television Council (PTC), announced that they'd deemed "Buffy" the #1 Worst Show on Prime Time Network Television, alleging the series contains "graphic" depictions of sex and violence -
http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/release/2002/pr082202.asp

Twentieth Century-Fox Home Video has begun to release whole seasons of the series on home video and DVD, but every episode of the series--including its rarely seen original pilot with different actors in some of the roles--is available on Internet file-sharing web sites, such as KaZaA. In short, to millions of fans, "Buffy" rules!

There are two kinds of TV fans. There are those who enjoy the show purely as entertainment. They laugh at the jokes and/or sob at the troubles. They talk about the show with friends who also watch it, sharing their opinions on the story and the actors' performances. It's chiefly an external experience.

But there are other fans who look at a TV show and truly analyze it, trying to ascertain its role in the larger society. Is the superheroine main character an empowering feminist icon that challenges the status quo, or is her feminist cache thwarted because she clearly seeks the approval of men, both explicitly through her talk and actions and implicitly through her clingy, fashionable clothing? Do Buffy and her best friend, Willow, in any way represent a lesbian coupling? How does the universe of people and creatures--called the "Buffyverse" by fans--compare with the world of such legendary literary vampires as Bram Stoker's Dracula or Anne Rice's Louis and Lestat?

Of course, these aren't your usual fans. The twenty essays collected here were composed chiefly by academics, professors and doctoral candidates in a variety of disciplines, including English, Classical Studies, German Literature, and Sociology, from such American institutions as Stanford, Yale, and New York University and from such overseas institutions as Brunel University in London and the University of Sydney in Australia. "Buffy" may be just a television show--and in the eyes of the PTC, "deplorable programming" and "filth" that is even less appropriate for young children and adolescents than "WWE Smackdown!"--but its execution lends itself to the kind of interpretation and discussion that is usually reserved for great literature and the fine arts. The ideas presented here come out of simply observing the actions and motivations of the characters in each series episode--in other words, from just watching the show.

Certainly not every television series could stand up to such analysis. It's a tribute to "Buffy," especially its writers, that it does. And this was not happenstance. Whedon may owe his talent to both nature and nurture, being a third-generation television writer (father Tom Whedon wrote scripts for such TV series as "Alice" and "The Golden Girls;" grandfather John Whedon wrote scripts for such TV series as "The Andy Griffith Show" and "The Dick Van Dyke Show"). But as he revealed on the May 14, 2003 A&E "Biography," or rather, "TVography," about the series, he created Buffy very intentionally to be an icon, and he employed writers that could understand that directive. Buffy's very design was to be unlike the standard two-dimensional characters usually seen on television programs, which were crafted mostly with the intent to sell cars, blue jeans, movies, fabric softener, and whatever other products that are advertised during shows like "Friends" and "ER." The "Buffy" series may ultimately submit to this same intent, but it was always meant to be something more, and this book helps to explain that.

For the first three seasons, while Buffy was in high school, the central metaphor of the series was "high school as hell," and it is during this time period that most of the essays present their arguments. Beyond that, the central theme of the series, which had endured all seven seasons, is that although Buffy is the main character, the "Chosen One" Slayer who possesses superhuman strength and superior fighting skills to battle against vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness, she is triumphant against evil often because of the help and support provided by her friends and family. The series has made clear that it is this support system that makes Buffy unique, even among the long line of Slayers before her. The mythology of the Slayers holds that it is to be a young woman who "stands alone" in her clashes with supernatural creatures that would wreak havoc and destruction upon the human race. She is to be aided solely by a Watcher, usually an elder male patriarchal figure, who passes on all manner of wisdom to winning these struggles, but as implied by his title, he merely watches; the Watcher is not expected to assist in the actual fighting nor form any real emotional attachment to the Slayer. Her very identity isn't even important; once a Slayer dies, the powers are simply passed on to another young woman.

The essays expressly detail the moments in various episodes in which Buffy fights against all of these tenets. Buffy certainly knows who she is; being holed up in a cemetery night after night, staking newly-risen vampires, has not dulled her pre-Slayer fashion sense or sharp sense of humor. Buffy fights all manner of monsters throughout the series--from the high school substitute teacher who's actually a sexually predatory praying mantis, to the human-demon-robot hybrid, symbolically named Adam, created by a college psychology professor who's actually the head of a secret government lab charged with capturing and experimenting on those vampires, demons, and other forces of darkness--but with the ever-present knowledge, advice, assurance, and sometimes accompaniment of her two best friends (plus whoever any of the three is dating at the time), her mother, her little sister, and even her Watcher, who is fired at one point by the Watchers Council, the governing body of the Watchers, after demonstrating that he has a father's love for Buffy. And Buffy is always fighting for her life, fighting to prolong her existence and, in effect, her own personal rule-breaking incarnation of The Slayer.

It was editor David Lavery, spurred by co-editor Rhonda Wilcox's 1999 Journal of Popular Film and Television article, "There Will Never Be a 'Very Special' Buffy: Buffy and the Monsters of Teen Life," who contacted her with his idea of collaborating on an entire book of scholarly treatments of the series, in the spring of 2000. Lavery and Wilcox received so many compositions worth sharing in response to their call for papers that no book could realistically contain them all, and so, after performing a final selection of the essays to appear in this publication, they turned to the Internet, and created Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies, an online-only journal made up of the critical essays that could not appear here. So far, nine issues made up of over 40 more essays appear on the site, which is located at http://www.slayage.tv/

The essays chosen for the publication range from an examination of the characters' quirky and original turns of phrase, to a comparison of Buffy's complex and ultimately doomed romance with the redeemed vampire (!) Angel, to the similarly doomed true love tales of "Romeo and Juliet" and "Tristan and Isolde," to a study of the various characteristics of the music used on the show and how this soundtrack has helped to reinforce certain episode and series themes. But an essay expanding on the show's use of fairy tales and its insights into parent-child relationships may completely capture how "Hansel and Gretel" figured into an episode focusing on the parents' reaction to the extraordinary powers and abilities of their children, including Buffy's mother's reaction to her Slayer powers. (But the writer noticeably neglects the "Little Red Riding Hood" aspects and mother-daughter interaction of the episode that focuses on Buffy's 18th birthday.) An essay comparing the persona of Buffy with the 1960s TV character Gidget seems to be overreaching to come to its various conclusions, despite both Buffy and Gidget being sunny California teenage girls. And the closing essay giving an extensive history of the message board at the former WB-sponsored official web site at Buffy.com seems completely out of place.

Overall, through no fault of its own, the book feels frustratingly incomplete. Television production moves much faster then book publishing, and so even though the book was published in 2002, at the end of "Buffy's" sixth season, the essays themselves were completed two years earlier, at the end of the fourth season, with observations from the fifth season added in, where appropriate, as the book went to press. As sad as it is to see production of the series come to an end, as Wilcox mentioned on the May 13, 2003 National Public Radio program, "All Things Considered," the story is now complete, allowing all scholarly interpretations and discussions to come to their own final conclusions.

This book will resonate most deeply with regular viewers of the series. To someone who has never watched the series, the book helps explain what the fuss over the show is all about. There are at least three other published collections of critical essays on the series. And "Buffy," for a show which was never able to achieve high ratings (at least partially due to its respective networks not being available in all areas), received a very public send-off; besides the A&E "TVography" and NPR, the series was granted the cover of TV Guide, and both the show and Whedon received lengthy profiles in Sunday editions of the New York Times. The series finale was greeted with dozens of newspaper stories, noting its special place in television history.

Lavery and Wilcox hope to keep the Slayage.tv online journal web site going for as long as interest warrants. As with the "Star Trek" series, who knows where that road will end? Already plans are underway for a Slayage Conference in 2004, which is "intended to be a post-mortem/wake/summing up for one of television's greatest shows." Three stars.

Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, $24.95