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Yes, She's a Vampire Slayer. No, Her Show Isn't Kid Stuff.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/01/arts/01VINE.html
October 1, 2000
TELEVISION SPECIAL
By STEVE VINEBERG
THOUGH it's popular with high school and college audiences and has
a
small following among older viewers, WB's "Buffy the Vampire
Slayer" has yet to be taken seriously to be removed from the
status of cult entertainment. Yet the show is a knockout: as much
as "The West Wing," which dominated the recent Emmy Awards, it
demonstrates what television can accomplish.
The notion that has lingered into its fifth season, which began
last Tuesday, is that "Buffy" is high camp. That misperception may
be partly due to the fact that the 1992 movie of the same name
that
engendered the series was disposable nonsense, or that WB is also
home to a number of fatuous young-adult shows, slick, unconvincing
portraits of adolescent angst like "Dawson's Creek" and
"Felicity."
As of last spring, "Buffy" was the only show on television in
which
both the characters and the dialogue remind us of the way real
teenagers interact with adults, with one another, and with their
own feelings and impulses.
But the main reason "Buffy" is undervalued is that Joss Whedon,
who created the series and has written and directed many of its
most memorable episodes (and, oddly enough, wrote the movie), sets
his exploration of the nature of adolescence in the disreputable
horror genre. In the 70's, in pictures like "Carrie" and "The
Fury," Brian De Palma showed that horror movies could operate as
stylized expressions of the outsize emotions with which teenagers
grapple. Mr. Whedon works the same territory. The premise of
"Buffy" is that Sunnydale, the sleepy California town where Buffy
Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her divorced mom (Kristine
Sutherland), L.A. natives, have relocated, is built on the
Hellmouth, a convergence of supernatural energies that draws a
wide
variety of vampires and demons. So, Sunnydale is the site of
repeated attempts by unholy entities to bring about the
apocalypse.
For the first three seasons, Sunnydale High and the local teen
hangout, the Bronze, were the favored hunting ground of the
undead.
It's an ingenious metaphor: adolescence as the Hellmouth. Buffy
is the Slayer, divinely chosen to combat evil. But since the
Slayer
traditionally works in secrecy, Buffy's behavior often seems
violent and antisocial to those who have authority over her, such
as high school administrators and even her loving but baffled
mother. Much of the show's humor has derived from the tensions
between the limitations placed on Buffy by her not-yet-adult
status
and her obligation to patrol against the incursion of demonic
forces. Much of its pathos, too, since Buffy has the same needs
and
desires as any other girl of her age.
Joyce Summers wasn't let in on the secret until late in the
second
season, but there's always been a steady cadre of friends who,
bucking the rules set by the organization known as the Watchers'
Council, have served as Buffy's confidants and allies. Besides her
personal watcher, the school librarian Rupert Giles (Anthony
Stewart Head), and Angel (David Boreanaz), the vampire with a soul
(it was restored by a Gypsy curse, to haunt him with the horrors
of
two centuries of misdeeds), Buffy's gang has included a number of
other youngsters. The original crew included the sweet-natured
science and computer brain Willow (Alyson Hannigan), who struggles
with wallflower tendencies; the hormone-driven Xander (Nicholas
Brendon); and Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter), a debutante whose
self-absorption and shallowness, initially just a running gag,
turned out to be a protective shield forged out of teen
insecurities. The second season added Oz (Seth Green), a guitarist
with a deadpan ironic style whose affections started to bring
Willow out of her shell a process that has continued,
unexpectedly, with her current romance with another young woman,
Tara (Amber Benson).
Inevitably, now that Buffy and Willow have gone on to the local
college, the show has shed some of these characters. Angel moved
on
to his own show on WB, taking Cordelia with him, and for the
moment
Oz seems to have departed as well. So, irrevocably, has Jenny
Calender (Robia LaMorte), the computer teacher briefly linked with
Giles until in the most terrifying and upsetting phase of the
show Angel lost his soul again and, still obsessed with Buffy,
the girl who made him feel human, began to prey on her friends.
The central metaphor of adolescence as a supernatural
battleground
has had a rich yield for Mr. Whedon who's a kind of genius at
imaginative re-creations of the teen psyche and for his
collaborators. The show finds ways of dramatizing every feeling
that, in teenagers, threatens to become an explosion: alienation
from the grown-up world and from one another, fear of not
belonging, distrust of authority, and the panoply of emotions that
accompany our first romantic impulses.
Watching the characters figure out how to negotiate the
implications of living on the Hellmouth, we become aware of how
teenagers naturally learn to negotiate the puzzling and
infuriating
obstacles constantly dropping in their path. Oz becomes a
werewolf,
but Willow still adores him; she decides, finally, that if he can
handle her moodiness around her periods, she can put up with his
enslavement to the full moon. (Giles simply locks him in a cage
until he's recovered.) The discovery that Sunnydale's mayor (Harry
Groener) is scheming with the denizens of the Hellmouth to acquire
demon status makes him merely a more flamboyant breed of corrupt
politician; Buffy and her friends wise up fast. The school was
burned to the ground in a full- scale combat with the mayor in his
demon- snake mode at Buffy's graduation an inspired emblem for
how the end of high school catapults often unwilling teenagers
into
the next phase of their lives.
When Buffy loses her virginity to Angel on her 17th birthday, the
moment of perfect happiness he achieves triggers the other side of
the Gypsy curse, and his soul vanishes. What she experiences is a
high school girl's worst nightmare: she sleeps with the boy she
loves and wakes up the next morning to find that he's turned cold
and cruel. And in Faith (Eliza Dushku), a second slayer added in
the third season and seduced over to the mayor's camp, the show
considers the case of the adolescent so deeply damaged that she
confuses love with weakness.
Like Brian De Palma, Mr. Whedon loves mixed tones. The wisecracks
and farce moments don't defuse the suspense or the horror, or
devalue the high-running passions of the characters. He loves
actors, too: the ensemble work on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is no
less impressive than it is on "The West Wing." Performers like Ms.
Gellar, Ms. Hannigan and Ms. Dushku, over and over again, meet the
harrowing emotional demands of characters who are asked to engage
continuously with the terrors of burgeoning adulthood. Mr.
Brendon,
Ms. Carpenter in her three seasons with the show, and especially
Mr. Head have witty styles that crack open every now and then, and
the suppressed anguish of the characters leaks out through the
fissures. Mr. Head's Giles has a twee Englishness that his
faithful
charges are forever joshing, but anyone who saw the episode in
which Jenny was murdered knows what this actor is capable of: he
seemed paralyzed, as if every other emotion had been sponged up by
grief. In his stint as the brooding half-caste Angel, Mr. Boreanaz
illuminated both the tender and rotted sides of romantic
obsession.
And the show has produced a supporting cast of superb villains.
The resourceful stage actor Harry Groener's playful ironies had a
surprising underside of wistfulness in his scenes with Faith.
Julie
Benz was a too-brief presence early on as a baby-doll vamp. On the
other hand, the scene-stealing James Marsters, as a Brit-punk
bloodsucker named Spike, has become a regular, and this season
marks the return of the maddened semi-invalid vampire who jilted
him, Drusilla. The wildly gifted Juliet Landau (the daughter of
Martin Landau and Barbara Bain) plays Dru like an acid-addled
cross
between Ophelia and Cassandra.
BUFFY" has had rocky patches. Mr. Whedon and his writing staff
have sometimes had to scramble to find ways to deal with the new
phases in the characters' lives like Buffy's depression in the
aftermath of the Angel crisis and the onset of college for Buffy
and Willow. It took the show most of last season to work out the
alterations in this intimate group of friends that time has
conspired to scatter. These challenges grow out of the series'
insistence on remaining true to its contract: to articulate the
realities of growing up, when perception and loyalties are
constantly shifting. Mr. Whedon keeps faith with his subjects as
they approach adulthood: he honors the drama of their turbulent
lives.
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