{"id":185,"date":"2003-09-29T21:33:08","date_gmt":"2003-09-30T01:33:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=185"},"modified":"2003-09-29T21:33:08","modified_gmt":"2003-09-30T01:33:08","slug":"buffy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=185","title":{"rendered":"Buffy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I guess it’s time for me to come out of the closet, as a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer<\/em><\/a>. Not that I was ever trying to hide it; but most people who know me assume that my favorite show of the last half-decade or so would have to be The Sopranos<\/em><\/a>, about which I only have a ho-hum attitude (I mean, it’s not bad, but I don’t get what the big deal is — I can take it or leave it). Buffy<\/em>, on the other hand, I find both beautiful and sublime. For one thing, Buffy<\/em> had the best horror plots of anything on TV besides the early seasons of The X-Files<\/em>, and the first two years of the great and sadly forgotten Millennium<\/em><\/a>. For another, it provided a welcome alternative to the pallid romanticization of vampires which has gotten awfully old and tired and trite recently, what with Ann Rice and the recent Dracula<\/em> knock-offs and all the Goth stuff. (I suppose you might call Spike a romanticized vampire, but Spike was punk rock, and not at all Goth or Ann Rice-y; even if Drusilla is).
\nBut what really made Buffy<\/em> for me – what really makes any TV series work for me, in fact – was the affect and the characters. Affect: the way the feel<\/em> of alienated adolescence (well, alienated middle-class white adolescence, at least) was transmuted with and by the contamination of monsters; the plot of impossible longing, as epitomized by Buffy’s relationship with Angel, but felt by the other characters as well, certainly by Buffy’s friends, and also, I think, by the vampires and demons; the way the show played between “normality” and marginalization (there’s a big part of Buffy that just wants to be “normal,” i.e. fitting into the paradigms of family and the school pecking order – this is something which of course she isn’t and cannot ever be, but the show got a lot of its power by tracing the line between the desire to conform or belong and the need to reject and rebel, which I think affirms singularity more powerfully than a simple show of unproblematic rebellion ever could.
\nAs for the characters: Buffy is sort of a joke in the movie that preceded the series; but Sarah Michelle Gellar’s portrayal succeeded in splitting the difference between the “hot babe” vapidity that seems to be de rigeur<\/em> these days for anything that’s supposed to appeal to a teen audience, and a sense of existential displacement that is crucial to the role of the Slayer, and which I’ve never seen anything like, anywhere else. Aside from that: I’ve always adored Willow, in all the transformations of her character, and I can’t help identifying with Giles (call it my academicism, if you must; but I’ll also mention that Anthony Stewart Head and I are almost exactly the same age, having been born just about six weeks apart).
\nI’ll only add that the reason I’m going on at length about Buffy<\/em> now is this. During the seven years the show was on, I never managed to watch it regularly; I only caught individual episodes now and again. Now I am systematically working through the entire series on DVD (well, the first four years are out now, year 5 is coming out in December, year 6 in summer 2004.. and I presume year 7 eventually).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I guess it’s time for me to come out of the closet, as a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer<\/em><\/a>. Not that I was ever trying to hide it; but most people who know me assume that my favorite show of the last half-decade or so would have to be The Sopranos<\/em><\/a>, about which I only have a ho-hum attitude (I mean, it’s not bad, but I don’t get what the big deal is — I can take it or leave it). Buffy<\/em>, on the other hand, I find both beautiful and sublime. For one thing, Buffy<\/em> had the best horror plots of anything on TV besides the early seasons of The X-Files<\/em>, and the first two years of the great and sadly forgotten Millennium<\/em><\/a>. For another, it provided a welcome alternative to the pallid romanticization of vampires which has gotten awfully old and tired and trite recently, what with Ann Rice and the recent Dracula<\/em> knock-offs and all the Goth stuff. (I suppose you might call Spike a romanticized vampire, but Spike was punk rock, and not at all Goth or Ann Rice-y).
\nBut what really made Buffy<\/em> for me – what really makes any TV series work for me, in fact – was the affect and the characters. Affect: the way the feel<\/em> of alienated adolescence (well, alienated middle-class white adolescence, at least) was transmuted with and by the contamination of monsters; the plot of impossible longing, as epitomized by Buffy’s relationship with Angel, but felt by the other characters as well, certainly by Buffy’s friends, and also, I think, by the vampires and demons; the way the show played between “normality” and marginalization (there’s a big part of Buffy that just wants to be “normal,” i.e. fitting into the paradigms of family and the school pecking order – this is something which of course she isn’t and cannot ever be, but the show got a lot of its power by tracing the line between the desire to conform or belong and the need to reject and rebel, which I think affirms singularity more powerfully than a simple show of unproblematic rebellion ever could.
\nAs for the characters: Buffy is sort of a joke in the movie that preceded the series; but Sarah Michelle Gellar’s portrayal succeeded in splitting the difference between the “hot babe” vapidity that seems to be de rigeur<\/em> these days for anything that’s supposed to appeal to a teen audience, and a sense of existential displacement that is crucial to the role of the Slayer, and which I’ve never seen anything like, anywhere else. Aside from that: I’ve always adored Willow, in all the transformations of her character, and I can’t help identifying with Giles (call it my academicism, if you must; but I’ll also mention that Anthony Stewart Head and I are almost exactly the same age, having been born just about six weeks apart).
\nI’ll only add that the reason I’m going on at length about Buffy<\/em> now is this. During the seven years the show was on, I never managed to watch it regularly; I only caught individual episodes now and again. Now I am systematically working through the entire series on DVD (well, the first four years are out now, year 5 is coming out in December, year 6 in summer 2004.. and I presume year 7 eventually).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pop"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}