I felt compelled to muse given the renewed interest in vampires via the Twilight phenom, but to my now arguably matured and slightly more pop culture aware eyes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the TV show, represents, well, good TV. In a post HBO world, I believe Buffy holds up remarkably well despite the dated references and unique sensibility.

Typically the series was well written, and well paced, with long story arcs amidst lighter yet equally plot propulsive episodes, and always, easter eggs galore. Straddling action, drama, genre, comedy, fan service, you name it... Buffy nailed the cultural, and more often than not lambasted counter cultural angst and infatuations of a rather broad demographic while pandering shamelessly to the unique geeky logic of those worlds. "Once more with feeling" is really something of a miracle, as the characters sing and dance their emotional conflicts in what seems a cogent reflection on what songs in films do exactly and how characters are driven to use them as weapons of expression. Precisely because the show treats it own trashy nonsense as non-sacred, Buffy is something of an anomaly amongst the recent spate of relentlessly over dramatic and unfulfilling dramas re. Trueblood or Vampire Diaries (the Smallville of Transylvania.)

I'm hesitant to write any heavy duty Buffy critique because the scholarship has a long and rich tradition, documented much, much before my own, but the show absolutely invites it. Philosophical exercises on storytelling such "The Body" or indulging in the intellectual maudlin such as "Hush" circumvent the conventions of the show itself and the business of screenwriting in general to the effect of good drama as framed by Mamet, to show, don't tell. In "Hush", a group of scary bald-headed mimes make everyone mute. Without language, the character's are unable to connect to one another and have to find ways to express what they are thinking and feeling, scary in any context, but this frightening prospect of being unable to scream for help is structurally imposed on the audience for 44 minutes of almost total onscreen silence. It's an exacting kind of terror.


The well known fact that Joss Whedon has a preternatural ability to build character through the development of insightful motivation and write witty relevant dialogue, is superseded by his ability to control drama rather than deferring to exposition. He often exposes repressed fears indirectly and suspends clarity or easy resolution in favor of the expressive or unknown. Buffy's fumbling admonition not to move the dead body of her mother, in "The Body" stands in for all the words she cannot literally move. Watching her try to make sense of the situation by wrongly assuming that Glory had come to the house, and her stunned disbelief is filmed in harsh high contrast sunlight. The ensuing cold efficiency... heart-wrenching. The episode is purposely misleading and without scoring, but we feel her confusion and isolation.

Buffy, the show, is smart enough to acknowledge to an extent, the masochism of the horror genre and within the vampire narrative, a particular masochism towards its female characters. However, in eating the cake of personalized girl power, the show's notion of femininity speaks, I think, to turn of the century anxieties that are refreshingly dated in the age of post feminist feminism and the trend of sassy bling/booty style of sexual empowerment. Compare this to the to the highly ritualized fantasia of Twilight with it's serious undercurrent of hidden unhealthy. Meyer's novel equates idolization to love in a thoroughly underhanded way and absolutely nails (to her credit) the essence of hormonal desperation. Sunshine, predating Twilight's heavy fisted teen bodice ripper, is less immediately successful than my most beloved Robin McKinley novel, The Hero and the Crown, but illuminates what is possible in the genre given some creativity and nice prose. McKinley, routinely constructs strong unconventional heroines within the context of beloved fairytales or fantasy tropes. Her formula, and she is formulaic, relies on character rather than plot and reads slow, but always reacts from within the layer of anxiety inside the fantasy and not construct the fantasy itself. 

After watching so much digitized torture porn or avant death, where gore is used as an end rather than a means, it's easy to be distracted (or bored) by the shiny plot box (ahem, Lost, and Dan Brown. Really, you don't want me to get started...) and ultimately desensitized. Whedon is unafraid to go "there", into the fantasy, meaning to tap the real sentiment behind Bram Stoker's undead incubus and the original anxiety that such a rapist metaphorically cultivates. In Buffy's universe, blood and violence signifies actual pain and inspires real terror. Refer back to the violent culmination between Buffy and Spike of their abusive relationship, or the invasive seductions of Count Dracula. Even when there is no overt violence, the continuity of the metaphor always acts within the internalized logic of the Buffyverse. In "The Body", when a long term character suddenly and inexplicably passes away, images of the lifeless corpse shown in progressive states of decomposition are cut between reactions of grief. The juxtuposition highlights a basic fear of death, and the inability to face the prospect of a violated human consciousness. Bloodlessness, to paraphrase Spike, is Death.

In retrospect, the wierd spaghetti western of spacepunkyness that is Firefly, seems a culmination of lessons learned from Buffy; that sharp, come-to-a-standstill punchline delivery, dialect, cadences, the hearts and horrors of evolving complex character archetypes. Season Four's Riley, even foreshadows, albeit less cynically or interestingly, the character of Mal. I admit, I slept on Firefly at first, which looked from the marketing to be a bad Farscape clone (Farscape being kind of bad already), but I came around. Critics complained that Firefly wasn't connected to current events enough, a la BSG, but does everything have to be about 9/11? I disagree on the grounds that Whedon knows his soft sci-fi and always goes straight for those sentiments, humanity and all that. The ill fated lifespan of Firefly is perhaps a boon for the legacy, forever a capsule of Joss, the auteur, at his best and most consistent.

Thematic continuity is a lesson that the sloppy writers at the Heroes conference table failed to learn in their haste to make the action slap happy. The premise of a superhero stuck between the demands of real life and the supernatural? Done before and unfortunately for them, done better. Maybe I'm just out of touch and people don't have as much angst these days, but isn't Syler a little one dimensional despite his mom issues? I get the feeling these writers never actually experienced any issues at all and thought some secondhand psychological twists would explain things just well enough to get to the next CG effect. Nathan Fillion as a misogynistic evil priest, the sadistic bounty hunter Jubal Early, Chiwetel Ejiofor as an honorable self sacrificing Operative playing for the wrong team? More shades of the big bad please, Mr Whedon.