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Saint Buffy (the Vampire Slayer)
‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ aka Buffy
Summers, sometime school student and serial saviour of the world.
Habitat: the small town of
A success story spawning a number of series,
translated into many languages, exported to many parts of the world, ‘Buffy the
Vampire Slayer’ has become part of world culture.
A successful formula then; but one whose roots lead
much further back through time than to its apparent point of origin, the Gothic
(even if its face is turned towards a mythical Medievalism).
In the course of centuries, in the culmination of a
long tradition, what is it that remains the same? Boy meets girl perhaps?
Typical; but hardly a story without there being some obstacle to be overcome.
The triangle then; that evergreen, ever-present standby of the history of
storytelling whereby some obstacle obtrudes between lover and beloved (be it
family loyalties, class, race, a kidnapper, or just an outworn husband or
wife)? Well, yes… and no. Yes, there is certainly a form of triangulation
involved. But no, it is not the regular triangle, a tug of love between three
humans. This is the familiar triangle based on a crossing (or a
‘double-crossing’) of desire, the tensions of which may then go on to create
potentially tragic divisions in society and in the psyche, a conflict that is
the motor of literature - as of so many of our popular narratives. However we
are not dealing with this, the ‘everyday triangle’ beloved of soaps and novels
alike, where the change of heart, ‘affair’, ‘adultery’ or external interference
entangles three souls in an emotional crisis that (traditionally at least) requires
resolution. Rather it is its ‘adult’ relative, the metaphysical form of
triangulation favoured by myth, religion and the supernatural that marks
‘Buffy’ out for special consideration. This is the realm of the ‘supernatural
triangle’ where one (at least) of the participants is either more than human or
else represents a fundamental, metaphysical Law, such that earthly law or
desire and sacred Law or Desire must clash. The ‘everyday triangle’ of desire
offers an easy point of recognition, of vicarious pleasure, a symbolic and
diverting hiatus in the smooth transfer of the baton of social continuity
between generations, this form of the triangle is often over-laden with
allegorical overtones of community division (with loyalties divided between the
desire of the Self and the dictates of Family, Community, State or Religion).
The ‘supernatural’ or ‘metaphysical triangle’ by contrast, offers a struggle
between Good and Evil, where a religious culture or world-view is incarnated in
a person (be it a demon or a saint).
Genealogy. To take this path would be to follow a
well-trodden route following the ‘triangle’ through its differing incarnations,
now taking one form, now the other. As we brush aside the dust and debris of
the present we begin to perceive a voyage through the history of human
narrative traversing early (Greek) Romance and the Saint's Life, followed by
the history of Drama and Narrative (the Medieval Mystery play and its
after-echoes in Renaissance drama, the Gothic novel and the genres of the
uncanny and fantastic through to science fiction) manifest in both 'art' and
popular forms (in ‘literature’ as in ‘fiction’). A special case in the
twentieth century would be the Noir genre together with its imitators in prose
and on film. In the Lyric we have the inner landscapes of the courtly love
nexus of themes and the poetry it has inspired (surviving, along with the
complaint, into our popular song traditions). A postcard from the past sent now
to our mass media, home of popular culture.
This repetition of the triangle as obstacle to true
‘desire’ is also an allegorical impediment to the institution of marriage and
so a possible, or symbolic, impediment to the continuation or survival of
society from one generation to another. An impediment to reproduction read as
an impediment to social reproduction. No matter how dedicated its garb of
adventure, chase and rescue, in this incarnation the triangle is little more
than a variation on the marriage plot with its key theme of the splicing of a
new generation into the reproductive cycle (and the same may be said of its
continuation in the novel and in popular culture, with most soaps as little
more than serial triangulations - ‘kitchen sink’ realism spiced with a
sprinkling of ‘la Ronde’).
The post-marital version of the triangle, however,
implies a deeper crisis in society and its (sexual and reproductive) ordering
and so always carries moral overtones (hence in literature the drama of death
and the warning it carried was usually preferred to a prosaic finale ending in
divorce). The block, impediment or crisis, signalled by the triangle is
therefore never only about the desire of individuals; it is a matter of the
continuation of a social form and about the saving of society from its tendency
to entropy, internal decay and obsolescence. At root is the theme of renewal.
Of a rescue from the waste, the conflict and demons which entropy produces… At
its most potent the triangle offers a ritual of incorporation, cleansing and
continuation. In its supernatural form this ritualistic element shines out with
greater clarity. Harbinger of a bright new dawn (with the damned banished
forever to some form of Hell down below – at least until next time…).
(A dawn occasionally brought about by sacrifice,
voluntary or not, as when Buffy replaces her ‘sister’ Dawn, at the end of the
penultimate ‘final series’ and dies in her place. Only to be resurrected in the
final ‘final series’.)
So, should the light of dawn itself fail to return,
should the realm of the social, community, the world even, run the risk of
failing, of falling… Then the blockage is symptomatic of evil…with a
metaphysical capital ‘E’.
In this situation what we are faced with is the
‘metaphysical triangle’, a triangle where one corner will be the representative
of Evil and the other(s) of Good. The Saint will be opposed to the Roman
Governor, a representative of pagan evil, his wife will side with the Saint;
marriage will come second to religion (in perhaps one of the only genres in
which such an exchange is made -until today anyway- the Saint’s Life). Or the
Lover would be demonic, carnal and the Lady must chastise him, chasten him,
keep him chaste and so reclaim him to God and religion (where God is the third
term, and sanctity, a consecrated identity, the issue). Or we see the inversion
of these structures in ‘Dracula’ and the genres of uncanny contagion (to
supernatural contagion can be added medical contagion, as with plague and AIDS
in Hammer’s ‘Masque of the Red Death’ and Abel Ferara’s
‘The Addiction’).
Whence the repeated triangle with its demon lover and
the theme of chastity or unrequited love (at least initially, for if requited
then disasters, moral and more, must surely follow). The epithet 'demon lover'
applies equally to Angel (Buffy's first love) as to Spike (her last), both are
initially unrequited, but when consummated the metaphor of the demonic lover
becomes literal. Angel actually is transformed into a demon. When he is finally
cured of this recidivism the couple must, exactly like the Lover in pursuit of
his unattainable Lady of the courtly love tradition, remain celibate in order
to maintain his (and her) goodness and purity of spirit. Their identities are
moulded by the desire of the chaste (the history of Monasticism, as of much
Western poetry and its influence on the arts can be found here).
On the other hand, Buffy only consummates her
relationship with the reformed vampire Spike after her return from the dead,
and then as lust and distraction, by contrast to Spike's role as faithful
knight. Henceforth (with the odd lapse) Spike will be the staunch defender of
Buffy and her family. Here it is the tamed vampire who is the more moral,
Buffy, on the other hand (now possibly herself some kind of undead
thing) treats her relationship with Spike as a diversion, a sexual as well as
military utility. Such ironic reversals abound in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’.
Indeed such reversals are far from abnormal when a given pattern or formula is
repeated in a different historical context (Buffy's postmodernism lies in this
successful mimicry of previous genres, themes and tropes, not least of which is
the supernatural or metaphysical form of the triangle). However when repulsed
by a Buffy revolted by her own actions (and by her lust) Spike reverts to form.
Turning once again into a vampire, so adding new plot complexities, before yet
again re-emerging as the purified Knight (the sanctified Lover).
The Medievalism of the ‘Buffy…’ series is not only
made manifest in its many Gothic elements; the underlying themes and more
important, repetitive structures, are themselves as old as, or many cases much
older, than then the medieval itself. Even if the late-medieval period was to
present these themes and structures to us in a format which our culture has
recycled ever since; they are nevertheless far older - indeed the particular
form of the triangle we have been discussing would be impossible without the
structure and rhetorical force of the earliest Saint's Lives as told in the
Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. The early and later series of ‘Buffy the
Vampire Slayer’ contain this basic structure, which is played out in the tense
relationship of the heroine to her two significant others (there was also a
middle series, with a middle man, but he could not cope with Buffy's superhuman
status -male insecurity, challenged masculinity, call it what you will, soon
ended that relationship). If this structure, the supernatural triangle is
repeated twice in Buffy, it fits well with its neo-Medievalism and its
post-modern Gothic take on the teen/school/college angst/adolescent genre (with
its overtones of ‘becoming’, or ‘coming of age’ genres). We should not be
surprised by this apparent archaic return, for this is no coincidence, nor is
it a script writer's a-historical flight of the imagination (although certainly
their crock of gold). Rather it is the result of a cumulative literary history
that would not have allowed the story to be told in any other way and still to
gather to itself a comparable success.
Nearer to our own times, we have the influence of what
it has become convenient to call, the Noir tradition - perhaps the definitive
genre of the 20th century. As the Saint’s Life and Baroque drama
were part of a crisis of religion, the arrival of Christianity and the
Reformation respectively, so the Noir formula, or Noir version of the triangle,
is part of the crisis of ideologies of the 20th century that marks
out the beginning and the end of the secular religion of Communism. The
hard-boiled ‘tec (detective, personal investigator,
or private eye) encounters a strong woman, the femme fatale, who he will either save from Evil - or condemn with
it. Typically she will be affianced to (or daughter of) rich, powerful, and
corrupt men (the State and Capital are inevitably corrupt in this genre and
linked directly to the lower depths). The top and bottom of society are
mutually co-implicated, as the ‘tec discovers when an
investigation of events at the bottom leads directly to those at the top.
Echoing the Saint’s Life the saint/’tec, rescues the
woman from the powers that be (otherwise it is her tragedy to be condemned with
them). Unlike the saint, however, yet like the Baroque courtier, the ‘tec is implicated in and complicit with the fallen world he
condemns). In ‘Buffy’ it will be the heroine, literally and supernaturally
‘strong’, who either damns or saves the leading men (the ‘men fatales’) who
have fallen to the side of Evil.
Gender roles. What is new. Yet also what is old. In
the civilising role of women we have a theme as persistent in the history of
literature as its opposite, the variations on woman as Eve the temptress (found
both together in Christianity in the redeeming power of female saints and the
diatribes on the essential sinfulness of women). The positive moral relation is
parodied the second time around in Buffy’s use of Spike; indeed the role
reversals that take place after the sexual consummation of the relationship are
replete with irony. However, these are reversals whose ironies require the
backdrop of the courtly love tradition with its stereotypes and repeated
triangular structures (a tradition already parodied at its onset in the 12th
century by many troubadours, and whose adulterous versions fill the pages of
medieval romance).
Its success and place in our culture? Triangulation,
transgression and rituality… (by which is not meant the rituals of magic which
regularly appear in ‘Buffy’...’).
Television serials as ritual? Rituality within the
world of the text? (Not the same as the presence of rituals within the plot
line of the series; but the ritual functioning of identity confirmation within
the fictional world represented by the series.) Within the text then. Disguised
as… The triangle. A repeated structure that confers identity; purity, a better
self, an improved renewed self. An identity exchange based upon deferral and
sacrifice (in this case usually involving sex, its deflection or deferral, but
also involving the refusal of the use, or gift of power). In Buffy’s sacrifice
and resurrection we find more than a passing reference to one of the master
tropes, one of the key symbolic exchange relations in our culture, the Christ
figure and his role in the fundamental, originary,
ritual of the religion that bears his name. Very few relations of
self-sacrifice, or self-abrogation, pass without being referred to as
’Christ-like’. This later too is a triangular relation (comprising the deity,
the sacrifice and the redeemed).
Transgression. Here, amid so many transgressions -amid
a genre made out of transgression and its trappings- the focus of transgression
falls (as it often does) on the sexual relation. In the series this is a
relation whose taboo–break will damn its participants to unhappiness or worse;
the ‘negative’ exchange which transforms identity. The ‘positive’ exchange was
the sacrifice of desire made in order to transform demon into saint. (All
exchanges are positive, the terms only reflect their moral colouring as defined
by their context). Transgression as a mark of ritual: the absent god in Buffy
is the law that governs (sexual) relations between mortals and immortals. This
is a transgressive relation: it is Law (not law or
mores) that is broken in Buffy... (whence the supernatural nature of the
triangle). The test of which is that the absolutes are exchanged, Good becomes
Evil and vice versa.
The text as ritual ‘for us’. Rituality outside of the
world of the text (the text as ritual for the viewer). Showing by example:
leading by warning (by inoculation). If ritual identity uses the realm of
‘not-temporality’ to cement our temporality, our ‘here’ and ‘now’, and ‘when’
and ‘then’, then how is the relation to temporality expressed in a serial, in
‘Buffy’? The supernatural pole in the serial (just like the rational pole in
ideology, which when read as universal also becomes a-temporal) in this way
raises to eternity the (subjunctive) values of civilisation. Of civilisation as
denial; through the rumoured presence of greater forces as the pace of the
universal and intervening third term (whose place is always ‘outside’ [the
place of the universal and eternal). Deferral is investment in identity, as its
future, its continuation (with eternity as guarantor).
The ‘outside text’; writing ourselves; rituality
again. What identity is confirmed, which identities are confirmed …now? Only
empiricism can give precise answers. However theory would suggest the
following. The episodes of this series are consumed as part of a life-style, a
code of self-recognition, indeed a code of communication to be shared with
others deemed to be ones community of identification. Further, time is given up
(yes, given...up, offered up) from other forms of consumption as investment
(other life practices). As indeed from earning, which may already be in the
process of being sacrificed as earnings exchanged for memorabilia, ‘fanzines’,
images and icons. The watching, or better participation, is then repeated in a
cyclic manner (as with any ritual). Together these investments, these …rituals,
constitute the viewer's identity statement.
Identity/audience. Clued-in teen (and above…) and
other perhaps mainly ‘middle brow’ audiences? Broadly ‘progressive’ in
character, inclusive (but there do not appear to be many African-Americans in
Sunnydale, however a lead character ‘of colour’, the new headmaster, was
brought in for the last -comeback- series). Whereas the Los Angeles-based
branch of ‘Buffy…’ (‘Angel’) has made a determined effort to represent,
include, or exploit the notion of minorities, of a city of communities. Of
sexuality, always such a crucible of politics in America’s culture wars,
‘Buffy…’, although brave enough to include lesbians (and lesbian relations) had
not yet, in these days of the backlash and the 'gay provocation' defence plea,
made any more than a passing attempt at an example of sympathetic male
homosexual relations (such a figure exists in the final -comeback- series, but
not the relations).
Last word: tradition as echo-box. The tradition
inherited by ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’. The supernatural strengths of mythic
women in myth, epic and legend, Brunhilde et al. The civilising role of women as
the positive, productive side of the holy triangle and its restructuring of
identities, often accompanied or underlined by personal self-sacrifice (or
martyrdom). This aspect of the tradition stretches from the early Saint’s Life
of the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, to the Courtly Lady (from the twelfth
century renaissance to the earliest of novels, Madame Lafayette’s ‘Princes of
Cleaves’) and so to the prose of Rousseau and Goethe. Including even the basic
structure of the revolutionary Jacobin novel, where the evil of the aristocracy
(bent also on sexual evil) is diverted, or defeated, by a virtuous Lady in
thrall to a greater ideal, Reason, personified by her, more plebeian,
saint-like lover, who is often an activist in the cause of the Enlightenment.
And finally the Noir tradition of our times, teamed with the new genres popular
culture, as created and disseminated by the mass media. The tradition inherited
by ‘Buffy’ is a potent one indeed; yet to avoid it would have been to chose the
more difficult path...
Copyright © 2003 Peter Nesteruk