It’s hard to root against Buffy Summers. Even at the end of last year’s television season — when she was charged with murder, kicked out of the house by her mother, and forced to miss her chemistry exam. Even when she had to impale her boyfriend on a sword and banish him to Hell in order to save the world. High school can be rough.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a television series loosely based on a 1992 B-grade movie of the same name. It tells the adventures of an ordinary high-school girl (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar) who — much against her will — has been “chosen” by vaguely defined mystical powers to fight the vampires flooding her small, southern California hometown of Sunnydale. When it first appeared in 1997, Buffy was a surprising favorite of television critics. But only now has the show found popular success, especially among teenagers. It is that rarest of creations: a movie-derived series that is much better as television than the original was as film.
Long before man walked the earth — according to the show’s mythology — the world was beset by monsters. But one day, those creatures were herded into another dimension to make way for human beings. Unfortunately, a few vampires managed to remain on earth as supernatural stowaways. These vampires went about feeding on humans and propagating themselves until the unnamed powers-that-be decided to fight them. As Giles (Buffy’s mentoring “Watcher”) explains, “Into each generation, a Slayer is born. One girl in all the world, a Chosen One. One born with the strength and skill to hunt the vampires, to stop the spread of evil.” So, until she dies, Buffy is the Slayer, whose job is to protect mankind.
This setup may sound silly — in fact, it is silly — but in practice, Buffy is what television executives call a “dramedy”: an hour-long show somewhere between sitcoms like Three’s Company and dramas like ER. In the last decade, the dramedy has produced some of television’s best shows: The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, The Wonder Years, and Ally McBeal. The dramatic fantasy shows that lack the dramedy’s comic edge have mostly proved flops. The Fox channel had a wild success with The X-Files, but the television graveyard is littered with the recent corpses of tepid science-fiction attempts to copy that success: Dark Skies (NBC), Prey (ABC), Kindred: The Embraced (Fox), and Rag & Bone (CBS) all came and went faster than anyone could catch them.
What sets Buffy apart is its ability to mix vampires and Armageddon with a wicked eye for satire and an exceptional ear for tone. In Buffy, all of high school’s metaphorical monsters prove to be real monsters. An evil cheerleader, it turns out, really is a witch. The cutthroat competition of a talent show truly ends in mass murder. The varsity swim team juiced up on steroids actually does become carnivorous mermen. As the new principal of Sunnydale High puts it, “This place has quite a reputation — suicide, missing persons, spontaneous cheerleader combustion. You can’t put up with that.”
Now in its third season, Buffy was one of the first television shows to capture the attention of the teenaged “Generation Y.” When it first appeared on the upstart Warner Brothers’ television network — “the WB” — the show was paired with another teen-centered drama, 7th Heaven, which follows the life of a suburban minister’s family. The two programs carved out a foothold for the WB network among Gen-Y viewers and gave the network its corporate identity as the TV station for teens. Today, Buffy is the twelfth-highest rated show among viewers between twelve and seventeen. And it is also, in many ways, a signifier of a change that seems to have taken place in the moral constitution of television for teenagers — and maybe in those teenagers themselves.
It’s absurd, of course, to impute sophisticated moral reasoning to teen TV, in part because such reasoning may be beyond the capacity of a television program, any television program, to convey. But moral reasoning, even in its unsophisticated forms, typically requires an ability to make two distinctions: We must know the difference between good and evil to behave well, and we must also know the difference between right and wrong. One refers to cosmic ideas and requires an overarching view of reality. The other pertains to the arena of human interaction. Good and evil are grand operas played out against the backdrop of the universe; right and wrong are kitchen dramas played against the backdrop of other people.
It’s Shakespeare, more than anyone else, who knows that the fullest representation of human life demands both good and right, evil and wrong. But the contrast between the two may be clearest in Graham Greene’s 1938 novel Brighton Rock, a story about murder in early 1930s England. The principal conflict in the story is between two characters: a young gangster who understands the difference between good and evil, and a girl who knows only right from wrong. At the novel’s end, it is the criminal alone who has a chance for grace.
Even at their low best, the television programs aimed at the older Generation X know only half of this distinction. Beverly Hills 90210 (the Aaron Spelling drama that put the Fox network on the map for adolescents in 1990) is rife with conflicts about appropriateness: whether a girl may flirt with someone else’s boyfriend, or how late you can be to a party without hurting the host’s feelings. Like most Gen-X shows, Beverly Hills 90210 presents a universe full of decisions about right and wrong.
It’s not a sufficient answer to such programs to observe that the moral decisions they treat as serious are usually trivial and invariably trivialized. Neither is it sufficient to observe that they derive their terms of reference entirely from pop psychology. What they lack as well is the cosmic drama that makes it all make sense. What they lack is good and evil.
Somehow, the Gen-Y Buffy the Vampire Slayer has managed to do what the Gen-X Beverly Hills 90210 couldn’t. The entire premise of Buffy rests on a worldview that takes as its highest priority the distinction of good from evil.
Buffy, in other words, seems to have grasped the other half of morality. The primary villains in Buffy — vampires — typically have no redeeming qualities to muddy the metaphysical waters. In most of the popular mythology about vampires, people bitten by vampires becomes vampires and yet also retain part of their original personalities — morphed in some malevolent way into half-human monsters. In Buffy, a vampire is the soul of a demon which has taken over the body of a human, completely stripping it of humanity and placing it beyond redemption. There is no such thing as a good vampire in Buffy’s world.
And if the evil in Buffy is absolute, then the good is even more so. No one ever questions the duty or the righteousness of the Slayer. It is an article of faith among the characters that Buffy must protect the world and that she is right to do so.
On the other hand, the limitations nowadays on our ability to talk about good and evil may be revealed best by the fact that none of the show’s characters ever ask why Buffy was chosen or by whom she was chosen. One almost has to feel sorry for the show’s writers, who can’t quite bring themselves to say out loud the conditions for the possibility of their show. Good and evil are metaphysical terms with theological roots: Without God as a referee, the universe becomes a moral demolition derby — and in Buffy, always offstage and just out of view of the camera, is God. In Buffy’s world, humanity was clearly created and Buffy herself was clearly chosen, but not one ever says by whom. Every week a silver cross dangles conspicuously from Buffy’s slender neck, but no one ever mentions the Cross it represents.
Of course, this is merely television — a medium not well known for its power to present accurate metaphysics. And besides, there’s that small attack of emphysema television executives get when religion is about to be mentioned on their programs. Even on the WB’s 7th Heaven, the show’s main character, a Protestant minister named Camden, can’t actually talk about the Almighty.
The significance of Buffy, however, isn’t in the words that the show isn’t saying. What’s interesting is that — whatever the show is doing — young audiences are accepting it. Buffy represents the return of the moral tale for Gen Y. The show’s creator, Joss Whedon, has sold teens on good stories about good and evil.
The inability of Buffy to mention God does cause some confusions to crop up. One of the main plot lines deals with Buffy and her boyfriend Angel, a vampire who (as the result of a gypsy’s curse) had his human soul restored. The practical effect of this curse was the torture of Angel — for with the restoration of his human soul came guilt at the memory of all the atrocities he committed as a vampire. But then he and Buffy have sex — the kind of salvic sex that television characters have, in which there is complete forgetfulness of self, complete ecstatic transport, and completely no consequences like babies. And as a result of this “moment of true happiness,” the curse is suddenly lifted — which immediately transforms him back into an evil, guilt-free vampire.
What such confusion means is that while Buffy’s characters know good from evil, they don’t always know right from wrong. This shortcoming isn’t unimportant. But — given the horizon-less trivialities of the previous generation’s popular shows — it’s better to have the cosmic understanding than to lack it.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer isn’t Shakespeare — and it isn’t Graham Greene — but it is certainly superior to the entertainments that found favor with Gen X. And the moral tale deserves to be welcomed back to the center of American pop culture.
