Buffy
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Buffy:A Big No and A Little Yes
The title story in Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners describes a television show called The Library. I'm led to believe that television in its original, Platonically perfected state would look something like The Library. Link writes:
This is one of the best things about The Library, the way the cast swaps parts, all except for Faithful Margaret and Prince Wing, who are only ever themselves...Fox and the dashing-but-treacherous pirate-magician Two Devils are never played by the same actor twice, although in the twenty-third episode of The Library, the same woman played them both.
Jeremy, a character devoted to the show, "supposes that the casting could be perpetually confusing, but instead it makes your brain catch on fire. It's magical."
The Library's themes are death and resurrection, and require ornate episodic development. During one episode, Link writes, Prince Wing is turned into a teapot, crushed "into a hundred pieces", and buried in a cigar box. Later, when his friends dig the teapot out of the ground and resurrect Prince Wing, he "looked about a hundred years old, and as if maybe there were still a few pieces missing." He feels suddenly betrayed by his friend Fox, who resurrected him. "He stuffed a handful of moss and dirt into her mouth so she couldn't say anything, and then he accused her of plotting to murder Faithful Margaret by magic." He then kills Fox and runs off. The adolescents who watch the show are heartbroken but never less than impatient to find out when and in what way Fox will be resurrected in turn. They become inconsolable when a rumor spreads that Fox's death may be permanent.
Though extreme, this shares many similarities with my now-favorite show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I suspect Link was a fan, too.
I know my fandom is a long way behind the curve. I never saw Buffy during the time that it aired. I gave it a shot after my friend Adam compared such-and-such episode to Antigone, but this was near the fifth season and I lost the thread about ten minutes in. Without the necessary immersion in backstory it looked like a lot of smart-mouthed kids talking about the top demon or the head vampire or something. Now that I've seen the first two seasons on DVD I'm turned around on the subject, averaging about three episodes a day, and a little helpless to the addiction. It's been more useful to me than anything I've read this year with the exception of the reissue of Tom Drury's The End of Vandalism and Charles Stross's Accelerando, about which more in the future.
There is a lot to be said about what has already been said about the show. The writing holds a balance between dark and light humor, and the near-rhythmic drumming of its singular one-to-one metaphor, the episode-to-episode equation of the demons which haunt teenaged life to the literal, dribbling kind, is as deliberate as can be expected but much, much smarter. The breaking of Angel's "curse" in the second-season episode, the one in which Buffy gives up her virginity only to find Angel the next morning literally and conclusively "fulfilled" and therefore without a soul, is handled with a great text, read by actors good at projecting vunerability and loss, and an incredible sensitivity for subtext. Everywhere layers of meaning--political, emotional, dramatic--lay crosshatched in complement by a writing staff and actors who understand what they're doing. David Borenanz, as Angel, knows whose point of veiw he's under, and plays it accordingly, switching from devil to savior to brooding lost soul as the lead Slayer's emotions turn him around for inspection.
Buffy is the best that episodic narrative can do this side of Dickens: better even than the entertainingly chickenhearted morality of The Sopranos or even Deadwood, which cannot help but congratulate themselves on the boldness of their beautifully rendered sins with blue ribbons and bluefaced quality aw-cting.
This isn't to say there aren't a few bum episodes; the Inca Mummy Girl episode from season one was pretty pointless. The point is, to nail it every single time would wring the pubescence from it. Later episodes may prove me wrong, but at least up to season three Buffy retains all the awkwardness of real stage fright and Grand Guignol rubber masks--adolescence to you and me--and acknowledges them in a way I can't see David Milch ever doing, with all his brilliant, macho Shakspearianism. Deadwood's violence is poised and supposed real. There is no mistaking the violence in Buffy for anything but catharsis, and Buffy is above all, even above its metaphorical dexterity, as cathartic as laughter.
What is best about Buffy is the very real act of exorcism it performs on the pop culture of the twentieth century. It resuscitates the weird twentieth-century obsession with death by and against the young, from Leopold and Loeb to Charlie Starkweather and Columbine, from Rebel Without A Cause to They Drive by Night, from Freddy to Jason to Gangster rap, from Ypres to Baghdad, and posits a hyperkinetic feminine response, fists and feet hurtling in a great, clarifying NO to all that death, to corpses that walk unredeemed, to the specifically American notion that life always exists on a pencil-thin line only the strong can walk and outside of which all forms of death are deserved. I can't believe it existed concurrently with September 11th.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:51 PM,
