Buffy Season One Episode One: What If Your Toes Itch?

[koganbot]

Some thoughts on, or tangents from, Buffy Episode One:

(And PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT PUT ANY SPOILERS IN THE COMMENTS, THANK YOU.) (Of course, be warned, I'll spoil anything I want to.)(No, not really, I'll keep things vague.)

Mark Twain's original impetus for A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court was, "What if you're in a suit of armor and your toes itch?" - so the comedy is to insert the mundane and the practical into what's supposedly exalted (The Age Of Chivalry). And so there's the juxtaposition of the Yankee's commonsense tone of voice and the romantic forms he's running into (e.g., shortly after he's transported back in time, a knight charges him, lance first, and the Yankee narrator tells us, "I saw he meant business"). Of course, Twain being Twain, a comedian with serious intent and a romantic who wants to have his romanticism and critique it too, and a businessman who lost his shirt trying to make a killing on a new method of printing, Twain's comic story turns into a critique of chivalry, portraying it as a cover for brutality and oppression (his real target being southern gentility), but he also shows the Yankee's practicality and ingenuity leading to mass destruction, massacring a way of life, enterprise running out of control, the result being a dark culture clash. (Actually I read it for college thirty-some years ago and ended up skimming 'cause the English course was, like, my fifth class, so maybe that's not what the book's about at all.)

The Twainishness in Buffy is her being a normal, lightly sardonic teen trying to adapt to a new school and negotiate her way through its social life and, oh yes, it looks like she's going to have to kill some vampires and zombies as well, damn it, what a burden, but the thing is she keeps her level-eyed wit and her tone of voice in both circumstances, as a kid dealing with a high-school social scene and as a skilled vampire killer, so again there's comedy in the juxtaposition of the normal and the supposedly supernatural and superstrange and world-important - but also with a hint that the "normal" may be the real story as much as the fight against evil, that the social life of a normal girl might be more interesting than the battle against the Forces Of The Night. We'll see where this goes, but...

Potential prototype here might be Sailor Moon, where the ditzy and frivolous and boy-happy Serena is informed that she's also Sailor Moon, the young woman born and destined to protect the universe against the Evil Forces Of The Negaverse. Except, at least in the several episodes I saw, there really wasn't an attempt to build tension between the two roles; she goes from one role to the other, her body transforms, she defeats the baddies, then returns to being fungirl Serena. So you get your fun and your superhero too, no real sacrifice either way. Whereas Buffy already is creating tension between the two roles. In Episode One, Buffy discovers that though she wants to be a "normal girl," she can't walk away from being a vampire slayer - among other things, her potential new friends are at risk from the vampires. But so far her attempt to bridge the gap between being a normal high-school kid and being The Vampire Slayer is to maintain the same personality and the same tone of voice in both roles, as if there's only one Buffy here no matter what.

In Raymond Chandler's stories, his detective, Philip Marlowe, has to be unencumbered by family ties if he wants to be the sort who takes risks and slashes through to find the truth; he has to be responsible to that rather than to a friend or a wife etc.; and he also has to be free of authority - he used to work for the D.A.'s office, but that inevitably meant compromising with power and corruption, where if you slash through to the truth, someone of influence stands to suffer. So Marlowe is a lone wolf, charging a low fee plus expenses, doesn't do divorce work, etc. Buffy, on the other hand, it's already clear, will be involved with her friends, and there's some shadowy authority that's wanting her to fight on behalf of the living against the Undead, so friendship and authority may be what are forcing her into a hero role. But will the friendships and the bosses also at some point compromise her heroism?

So far there's no explanation as to why Buffy needs to keep her Vampire Slaying identity secret, though I can imagine several (e.g., perhaps she doesn't want to be considered delusional; you could also say it's so the bad guys won't know who their antagonist is, except it looks like they will know ). In The Mark Of Zorro, one of the key precursors of the modern dual-identity hero, Don Diego's "real-life" identity has to be an elaborate fake so that the evil authorities won't recognize him as their foe Zorro. I never knew the rationale for Superman needing the Clark Kent role, and I never paid enough attention to Batman to know why Bruce Wayne had to keep his identity hidden. But really I'd say all of these dual identities are more for psychology and theme than for the practical needs of plot and verisimilitude. They all say that the fellow who's a fop or a normal guy by day can be a hero at night. The Superman series making Clark Kent an everyman rather than a noble like the Scarlet Pimpernel or Zorro effectively helps to modernize the hero. And from this template you can add uncertainty as to which identity is the person's "real" one.

One of my favorite variants is the mistaken identity, where the protagonist falls into the hero identity by accident (North By Northwest)* or against his will (General Della Rovere) or haphazardly (The Passenger), the premise being that as a character he hasn't jelled either morally or personally, and the new identity gives him a way out.

All these are potential directions/tensions for Buffy. (I haven't even mentioned predecessor vampire stories, which is a genre I don't know very well.) I'll see how the show plays out. I'll be disappointed if there are no actual strains in Buffy's identity. The most interesting might be that she gets to represent one order (the order of a normal society that she's protecting) versus another (the order of the Vampires), but - as is classic - I'm suspecting that she never gets to be part of the normal world she's preserving. And of course that brings us back to the detective, or to great damaged figures like the John Wayne character in The Searchers.

*Well, there's also Along Came Jones which kind of sucks.

Comments

quoting myself from a five-year old section of a review that ended up cut

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

... here's D. H. Lawrence on a literary forebear, James Fenimore Cooper's Deerslayer: "The essential American soul. has never yet melted. [He is] a man who turns his back on white society. A man who keeps his moral integrity hard and intact. An isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring man, who lives by death, by killing, but who is pure white." I found the quote in a book on John Wayne, where 'white man' fights with 'red'. But the pesky real-world drawback of the ethnocentric celluloid representation of Native Americans goes to dust once you grasp how much better demons are as an Other than 'Indians' - and Whedon wants us to wonder also about "isolate", "man", even "death". Epic dramas of right or wrong, good or bad, "in" or "out"? Who makes the law and how do we change that? Vampires offer all a strong mythographer needs, moral, sexual, political, symbolic, mythic, structural, including a permeable Frontier between ordinary life and eternity. With the Hellmouth located right under Sunnydale, doesn't the High School drama via Buffy become our own better Western, that most potent of American genres long gone west?

[bearing in mind (a) no spoilers, which will be TOUGH for me and (b) twain's rawther LOW opinion of fenimore cooper...]

Re: quoting myself from a five-year old section of a review that ended up cut

[koganbot]

Have you seen The Searchers yet? YOU MUST SEE THE SEARCHERS! Among other things, a HUGE theme is about crossing over and not remaining pure white, and about who gets to cross back and who doesn't. Also, demons is not an inherently better Other than Indie rock Indians, is merely one that's available, since you don't have to be racist and lie about demons in order to use them.

But most westerns don't have Indians, just have "bad guys," and you might say that the Other is the Uncivilized Male, and it takes a gunman on the side of right - a civilized male who will cross over into savagery, when necessary - to defeat the Uncivilized Male, on behalf of civilization.

Re: quoting myself from a five-year old section of a review that ended up cut

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

haha i think you pointed out the same thing about westerns -- that they mostly don't have indians -- last time you read this quote as well!

oh well, it never got into print

i actually read the whole of the lawrence essay recently, it's not as good as this little quote suggests it's going to be

Re: quoting myself from a five-year old section of a review that ended up cut

[koganbot]

Also, so far (two episodes) the vampires in Buffy are boring - except for the one moment when Jessie-turned-vampire says that before he was a vampire he never got to first base with the chicks, but look what he's doing now! But come to think of it, the full-fledged Indians in The Searchers are never given much in the way of characteristics. The film pivots around borderline characters and half-breeds.

(Disturbing film for both having racism demonstrated by appealing characters, the movie not endorsing this racism, but also the movie being racist in ways that its liberal-for-their-times makers were unaware of.)

Re: quoting myself from a five-year old section of a review that ended up cut

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

well, no spoilers obv, but buffy didn't sustain seven series plus a thriving comicbook spin-off market without toying a leetle with the "needs more interesting vampires" lever

Re: quoting myself from a five-year old section of a review that ended up cut

[cis.livejournal.com]

you might say that the Other is the Uncivilized Male, and it takes a gunman on the side of right - a civilized male who will cross over into savagery, when necessary - to defeat the Uncivilized Male, on behalf of civilization.

that's odd, I thought it was far more typical for the gunman on the side of right to be a Man With No Name/Lone Gunman type, who much more Philip Marlowe-esque, never fully civilised ftb rootless, men who turn up in town: might sometimes be 'civilised' by a woman by the end (since we all know the feminine is the vector of civilisation) but might just leave again.

maybe i have only seen a strange selection.

Re: quoting myself from a five-year old section of a review that ended up cut

[koganbot]

Well, Leone is his own genre, and The Man With No Name is not typical, not just to the extent to which he's a loner - a man unexplained - but also to the extent that (not counting the first of the three movies, the one that was cribbed from Kurosawa) he actually has no stake in society.

But you're right, "civilized male who will cross over into savagery when necessary," simplifies matters far too much. Sometimes he has a savage past as well, and sometimes he and his antagonist have had similar pasts, wild youths on the borderline between civilization and otherwise. But there will be other movies where the Sheriff is the great figure of rectitude, and it's this that both ties him to and puts him outside society. The crucial point is, he represents society but he's not altogether a part of it, or he wouldn't do his job so well.

And of course, detective/action adventure/westerns all have a lot in common; the westerns are the most tightly controlled as a genre, which may be why they died out so suddenly and thoroughly: starting from the late '60s, people didn't want their outcomes so controlled - it's a weird combination of thinking things were worse than the westerns made them seem, so the enforced "good guys always win" of the westerns was just unsatisfying, and also the belief that sometimes you can have it all, so the limits and the sacrifice of the western seemed too constraining. And with the Hays Code fading out in the '60s, the detective/action adventures had the license to roam free in a way that wouldn't have made sense for the western.

Also, I've been overemphasizing the "loner" aspect of the western/detective hero. Often he has a gaggle of buddies and sidekicks, comic characters. And there's a complicated dual role that they play: he usually does need their help, but the sidekicks, not being as skilled as the hero, often can be used by the bad guys against the hero - that is, the sidekicks can help the hero but they also can put him at risk, since their being at risk is something that a bad guy can use against the hero (create a conflict between concern for friends and concern for Justice). And there's the quadruple role of "hero needs friends' help," "friends' inferior skills make them vulnerable to be used against hero," "friends make it hard for hero to do his job with freedom," "friends tie hero to society, to ensure that he's on the side of Right." Often it's the death of the friend that convinces the hero that yes, he has to go out finally and defeat evil, not simply accommodate himself to it.

"Someone dies helping the hero" is a feature of a lot of adventure stories, for a lot of reasons - e.g., someone that the audience identifies with to some extent has to die for the danger to be credible - but a crucial role this plays in the plot is often that the hero has to feel that he is somewhat responsible for his friend's death.

Re: quoting myself from a five-year old section of a review that ended up cut

[koganbot]

maybe i have only seen a strange selection

Well, Shane actually isn't all that typical, if that's what you're thinking of. (And it's not all that good either.) But you're not exactly wrong,either. And you should go see a every western you can, though remember, nothing after 1972 is a real western (well, the post-1972 westerns may be interesting in their own way, but not in the way that the westerns of the past had been). Actually, I'd even say start before the '60s. Maybe start with the '50s and go backwards and forward from there. (And TV westerns like Bonanza are fundamentally a different genre from movie westerns.) I'll make you a list sometime. Actually, a good start, beyond The Searchers and Rio Bravo and Red River, would be any western directed by Budd Boetticher that stars Randolph Scott, and any western directed by Anthony Mann that stars Jimmy Stewart.

And though I've been mentioning The Searchers a lot, and you have to see it, Howard Hawks is probably closer to Whedon than John Ford is.

Re: quoting myself from a five-year old section of a review that ended up cut

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

whedon's next series, firefly, was explicitly fashioned as a space opera western -- it was cancelled after half a series, so didn't really get very far with what could be done here (nor is it a new concept, obviously) but in dress and trappings, backstory, music....

did "proper" westerns end with the civil rights act? (and if so, why?)

Re: quoting myself from a five-year old section of a review that ended up cut

[koganbot]

No, Civil Rights Act was '64 and the followup Voting Rights Act was '65, and westerns were still flourishing. But I'd say your impulse here is right - not the Civil Rights Act in particular, but the cumulative effect of the Sixties as a whole, which had the sense that the Old Order (e.g., the Forties and Fifties) just doesn't play anymore, killed the western; as I said in my previous post, the Sixties combination of despair (we're worse than we thought, we're just another country, etc.) and optimism (we can do anything, we can defeat racism, we can go to the moon) doesn't leave much room for a very classical and stylized genre. Conventions that formerly felt right and deep suddenly now felt arbitrary and square. And the thing is, yes, you can loosen up the conventions of the western to make it more loose and free and full of free sex and brutality, but why go through the bother of doing that when you can just as easily set your story in a modern urban crimescape? And if you want to create your own conventions and work with them, fantasy and science fiction are much more useful, since you get to make them up! You don't have to modify a cowboy scenario.

Even if you're fundamentally conservative, rather than wanting to see a western, you'll bolster your values with someone like Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson taking on the new dangerous urban world rather than setting them quaintly in the past. Eastwood in Coogan's Bluff and Dirty Harry is a cowboy/gunman in the modern world where people and movies no longer play by the rules.

To me, movies like Star Wars and The Lord Of The Rings are arid in comparison to even a second-level, merely competent western, but in their look and feel they signify a broad space of the imagination, whereas John Ford's far more interesting and imaginative stories and vistas take place in a space we no longer find open.

Re: quoting myself from a five-year old section of a review that ended up cut

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

To me, movies like Star Wars and The Lord Of The Rings are arid in comparison to even a second-level, merely competent western, but in their look and feel they signify a broad space of the imagination, whereas John Ford's far more interesting and imaginative stories and vistas take place in a space we no longer find open.

I heartily recommend the new Battlestar Galactica.

Re: quoting myself from a five-year old section of a review that ended up cut

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

(For reasons I'll touch on in a gigantic post that you probably won't read for fear of massive spoilers, but oh well...)

Re: quoting myself from a five-year old section of a review that ended up cut

[koganbot]

My friend André has the whole series (new version, that is), so maybe I'll see it. Unless he only has it on borrow.

Re: quoting myself from a five-year old section of a review that ended up cut

[koganbot]

Actually, "arid" is the wrong word for Star Wars. But for me the heart and soul of the movie was the bickering romance between Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford, whereas battles and Vader and Alec Guinness and forces being with you and robots acting human were a lot of blah, though they went down easy enough.

Re: quoting myself from a five-year old section of a review that ended up cut

[koganbot]

you don't have to be racist and lie about demons in order to use them

When the original movie Buffy The Vampire Slayer was released (did anyone in the world actually see it?), there was a poster for it with Buffy as cheerleader, shot from the lower half of her body up. So on one of the posters in the BART station, someone had scrawled, "This ad denigrates women." Someone wrote underneath that, "This ad denigrates vampires."

Re: quoting myself from a five-year old section of a review that ended up cut

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

I saw it.

Anyway, having never seen the TV show, I'm going to guess that she continues to maintain the same personality and the same tone of voice in both roles, because the point is that being a vampire slayer is exactly the same as being a high school student. Supernatural teen dramas tend to be just big metaphors for puberty: you get to high school, and you are thrust into a foreign and threatening world where you discover you have special secret powers and must keep your true self a secret, because you don't want your enemies to find you and you don't want the grown-ups to think you're crazy. And the only people who can help you are your friends. If you can manage to make any.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

As girlboymusic says, a major point of the series is that the supernatural adventure and the growing up in school are the same thing. Also, the point about what kind of person she needs to be and what kinds of relationships she can have and what difference they make is a major continuing theme.