The Books of My Life: What Would Buffy Do?

 

Jana Riess’s What Would Buffy Do? The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004) has one significant advantage over many other books and articles written about Joss Whedon’s television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer; it focuses on the existentialism and consequent social ethics that is at the heart of this television series. Unlike many academic books on the show, which far too often take a sociological approach, but a sociological approach sans empirical evidence beyond the text to back up their arguments (take a moment to take that in), What Would Buffy Do?, as its title suggests, is, like Buffy itself, is a hybrid. 

On one level What Would Buffy Do? is part analysis. It explores, for instance, the themes at the heart of Buffy the Vampire Slayer particularly its existentialist and mythological dimensions. On another level the book is part self-help manual. It is a guide to how Buffy can help us humans living in twenty first century core nations get through the existential and meaning difficulties associated with everyday life and our everyday life courses. Speaking of growing up and to digress for a moment, Buffy is a bildungsroman so growing up is the key symbol around which all other existential and ethical symbols revolve including mercy, forgiveness, and redemption.

Among the things Buffy explores are, Riess implies, things that every one, at least in complex core nation societies should think about (though many don’t deal with then consciously and intellectually, at some or any points in their life courses) are questions of identity (who am I?) and questions of purpose (why am I here?), all issues religion and spirituality have dealt with for centuries if not always or at all (primitive Buddhism with its emphasis on psychology and social psychology may be the exception here) from the existentialist perspective Buffy does. In the course of her book Riess focuses on what Buffy can teach us about how our emotions, our humour, our friendships, those who mentor us, our ability to cooperate, the choices we make, and the power of forgiveness we have all of which can help us, as we move through our life courses. All of these can help us, Riess argues, deal with the reality of evil both internally and externally, the ambiguities of life, including the fact that good and evil are not always cut and dry, the reality of death (what do we want our legacies to be), and our constant struggle for redemption (redemption is, as Buffy teaches, not linear but cyclical).

Riess’s book does an excellent job of exploring the existentialism and consequent social ethics at the heart of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel though I do have a few quibbles with Riess’s terminology and approach. It is understandable that Riess, a progressive Mormon, prefers to use the term “spiritual” to explore the meaning dimensions of Buffy. I, however, not being religious in the conventional sense, prefer to use the term mythology since I, a social and cultural constructionist, don’t fetishise either religion or spirituality. Buffy, which has a mythological dimension as Douglas Kellner notes, does, like all mythologies, including those of ancient Greece and the ancient Near East, provide us answers to the questions of who am I and why am I here. As an existentialist myself—a term Riess interestingly avoids using in her book though the creator of Buffy Joss Whedon has emphasised it—I find the answers Buffy provides (though not everyone gets the same social ethical answers from Buffy as reaction videos on YouTube show thanks to economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic contexts) much more compelling than that of virtually all organised forms of religion today (though I do admire aspects of Buddhism, Quakerism, Anglicanism, and progressive Judaism).

The Books of My Life: The Psychology of Joss Whedon

 

As a general rule I have never found the pop culture meets academic discipline or subdiscipline genre particularly satisfying. They are often a curious hybrid or mixture in which a television show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, or Firefly is pushed screaming and shouting into a science, physics, philosophical, or psychological box and made to fit, sometimes violently, into that box. Additionally, they are often written by fans of the show raising questions about how dispassionate or objective those writing essays in what are mostly collections of essays are.

Now don’t get me wrong sometimes these edited collections can be helpful to those attempting to understand a pop culture phenomenon (something which often means that they have a cult or sectarian following and hence people who will buy books on the subject given their often rabid interest in the show) when they are relevant to the television shows or films under discussion. And relevant to a number of academic boxes the work of Joss Whedon, specifically his television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly, is. 

Buffy, Angel, and Firefly, as anyone who has closely watched these television show knows, have great philosophical and, thanks to their focus on character and character arcs, great psychological depth, to them something many of the essays in James South’s edited collection Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2003) and the essays in Joy Davidson’s edited collection The Psychology of Joss Whedon (Dallas: BenBella, 2007) point up. The essays in the former explore the Platonic, Aristotelian,  Nietzschean, feminist, noir, theodicy, scientific, pragmatic, Kantian, educational, irrational and tragic, fascist, religious, political, moral, and metaphorical aspects of the show. Paradoxically, its existentialism, something its creator Joss Whedon has said is central to the show, doesn’t even merit an entry it the index of this book. The latter, part of BenBella’s Psychology of Popular Culture series along with edited collections on The Simpsons, the Harry Potter series, and Survivor (see that fanboy and fangirl cult connection?), explores the social psychological, clinical psychological, neuropsychological, psychotherapeutic, psychoanalytic aspects of the show in an often compelling and often convincing way.

There are, for example, essays on free will versus determinism issue in The Psychology of Joss Whedon. Is the work of Whedon deterministic, filled to the brim with free will, or a bit of both these essays ask There are essays on character personality traits and character development in Buffy, Angel, and Firefly. Who are Buffy, Angel, and Mal and why are they the way they are these essays ask? There are essays on the reason Buffy falls for the guys she does in Buffy. One of the essays is therapeutic. It is an essay on how the television work of Whedon helped one writer get through the trauma of leaving an authoritarian Christian fundamentalist social and cultural group. There are essays on the existentialist aspects of all three shows, apropos given the fact that Whedon is a self-professed existentialist and atheist. In terms of theory, some of the essays take a nature perspective, other a nurture perspective, still one of the binary fractures in a lot of the social sciences.

Unlike the essays in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy, many of which I found interesting and compelling and many which made me roll my eyes in the way that only academics of the crystal ball persuasion can make you roll your eyes, I found most of the essays in The Psychology of Joss Whedon interesting for what they told me about the state of the psychological art circa 2007 and for what they told us about the show itself, quite an achievement for a book in the academia meets pop cult genre. After finishing it I thought that it would make an excellent book to use in an introductory psychology class given that its explorations of early 21st century psychological thought are easy to understand and  are written in a clear and straightforward language that even a university frosh can readily grasp in a world where American universities and colleges look and feel more like high schools that they did fifty years ago.

That does not mean that I did not have qualms about some of the essays in the book. Some, particularly those on the nature side of the spectrum, seemed far too reductive and needed a more social psychological perspective to balance them and make them more compelling for my taste. After all, humans are the product not only of nature but of nurture (their economic, political, cultural, and geographical environments they are embedded in) and there is, as several of the essays in the collection make clear, an, at least, grain of choice that humans can make by drawing on the complexity and contradictions available in our broader cultural contexts. Finally, we must never forget the dangers of psychological hubris and the fact that it has a close relationship to the powers that be (including the legal system and its core nation cultural systems thanks to the fact that it has historically proved easy to harmonise with modern and postmodern notions of individualism) and, as such, can institutionalise those they conceptualise as “deviant”, a category that has a strong whiff of the cultural, ideological, and polemical about it. That is even scarier than aspects of Buffy.

The Common Crow Books and Biblio Kiada

 

I recently had a fascinating experience with a used book shop, Common Crow Books of Pittsburgh, PA, USA. I want to talk a little about that experience here and now. 

I don’t know how common the experience I had was and is. I would not be surprised, however, if it was and is more common than I and many others would think it is. After all, in the brave new used book world in the brave new digital age of bookselling the number of snake oil pedlars selling used books out there in cyberland has increased exponentially thanks to the internet and it is often aided and abetted by third parties on the internet like Biblio, a supposedly independent site enabling independent booksellers to peddle their wares. It was through Biblio that I bought the book from Common Crow Books.

In this brave new digital used bookselling age it is worth remembering that many of these book selling conmen and conwomen, of course, don’t give a crap about the books they sell. For many of them books are no more than a commodity to be bought and sold. Needless to say, many of these snake oil books sales people, many of whom seem genetically incapable of accurately describing the used books they have for sale, ultimately have the moral consciousness of a blueberry scone when it comes to selling books on the internet.

Despite this new used book selling reality in the brave new digital age I must confess that I did not expect to experience what I experienced from Common Crow Books and from Biblio. After all, Biblio has historically differentiated itself from Amazon, which it almost sees as the beast of the Book of Revelation, and itself, of course, as that which will save us from the beast of prophecy. It turns out, alas, that Biblio is really not that different from Skankizon as I learned when I bought a book through Biblio from Common Crow.

And this brings me back to my tale. As I mentioned I purchased an item from Common Crow Books through Biblio. I purchased it this last weekend. I found the item I wanted, clicked on the purchase button, and voila in a few seconds I had purchased the book at the price and the shipping charges listed by the seller using my credit card. 

A few days after this purchase I received an email from Common Crow saying they needed to charge me more money for shipping because the shipping cost had not been accurately calculated. I ignored the message assuming if it was a scam. I rightly assumed that I had already purchased the item at the cost of the book and accompanying shipping charges set by the seller and as a consequence had entered into a contract with that seller. The next day I received yet another missive about the book, this one from Biblio. It said that Common Crow needed more money for shipping. I learned, in other words, that this attempt to rewrite a contract was not a scam but the real deal

Now I don’t want to appear without sympathy or empathy, but I must note that I was rather shocked that a used bookseller who has his own webpage and who appears like someone who has been around the block a few times did not know the approximate shipping cost of the item I purchased and wanted to revise the contract we agreed to when I purchased the book at his or her price and at his or her shipping charges. Frankly and bluntly, my thought was that it is not my fault that the bookseller did not know how much the shipping charges were before we agreed to the contract for a specific item at a specific cost and a specific shipping charge. And I must say that I was shocked that the bookseller wanted to revise the contract after the fact and Biblio was more than willing to let him get away with this, something, by the way, I also experienced once when I bought a book in Amazon Marketplace, but them these booksellers are Biblio’s bottom line bread and butter. By the way, the bookseller on Amazon Marketplace who wanted to renegotiate our contract was from the Maritimes who likely had difficulties grasping the dollar to dollar exchange rate.

Needless to say I cancelled the item and I decided that in the future I will not purchase anything from Common Crow Books or through Biblio. In fact, I asked Biblio to close my account. I may also contact the Attorney General of New York state about the experience I had with both. That is something to reflect on for the future.

Caveat emptor.

Musings on the Theatrics of Donny Drumpf...

As cultural anthropologists have known for decades symbols are at the heart of human life. Humans have always given meaning to their lives and to the worlds in which they live those lives in. They give cultural meaning to their lives in the form of, for example, religious beliefs. They give economic meaning to their lives in the form, for instance, the theology and ideology of free enterprise. They give political meaning to their lives in the form of, for example, the belief that “democracy” is the greatest political system the world has ever seen, They give demographic meaning to their lives in the form, for instance, of rites of passage marking the transition from childhood to adulthood, rites of passage which have, of course, varied across time and space. And they give meaning to the places in which they live those lives in the form of, for example, beliefs in the exceptionalism of their nation, state, clan, or tribe.

Cultural symbols (sacred, mundane, profane) are at the heart not only of so-called traditional societies but of so-called complex modern and postmodern societies like that of the United States as the recent symbolic theatrics of American president Donald Trump point up. Trump and his ilk, including many White Nationalist American worshipping so-called Christians, like their women domestic and domesticated and their men leaders of men and women. They like their dudes to be dudes (John Waynes, Rambo’s, feudal knights) and their dudettes to be dudettes (helpmeets, damsels in distress) and they justify and rationalise it all by claiming and maintaining that such social and cultural constructions are god given and hence universal. The fetishisation of culture. 

These socially and culturally constructed gender meanings along with political, economic, and geographic meanings and realities were evident in Trump’s and his mini-him J.D. Vance’s treatment of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelinsky at an oval office meeting before cameras at the White House last week. Trump and Vance gave their target demographic what they wanted, namely a manly man warrior king, the messiah of a resurgent American nation, berating the president of a foreign nation at war as if he were a supplicant child of a less powerful feudal estate of less status, a vassal. But then that is exactly what Zelinsky is. He is a vassal of a weaker feudal estate relative to the “beneficent" United States and its "gift giving” king and messiah, Donnie Trump.

As such this event points up the fact that power, the thing that really makes the world go round is often if not always at the heart of cultural meanings and theatrics. Trump was not only showing his groupies or devotees that he is indeed their king and messiah by standing up, as they see it, for poor downtrodden America and for poor downtrodden Americans, something, one presumes, his target audience found the spectacle reassuring even if it was, from a more objective point of view, rather like a school yard bully confronting the weaker members of school society but then Trump and Vance do seem to like their Social Darwinism and eugenics. He was also showing Zelinsky American power, showing the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, that things had perhaps changed, showing America’s once close allies that things had likely changed, and preparing the American people for likely changes in US foreign policy. This last seems to indicate that even the Trumpies, those elites at the top of the Tangholio cult, are, at the moment, not fully ready to jettison support of the Ukraine before preparing the ground with a narrative in which the president of the Ukraine is a bad, bad man who has no respect for the United States or its king-messiah, Donald Trump. For as demagogues and conmen like Trump have learned over the years the more manichean, good versus bad, a story is the more likely it is to sell to the lowest common denominator masses.

Given this it is important to recognise that Drumpf is not interested in real negotiations, in real compromises. He is interested in expressing, symbolically, his power and expressing America’s power. He wants thing his way. It is thus a waste of time trying to negotiate anything with a brick wall, which the self-righteous Trump is. He simply wants vassals to give obeisance to him and to the power of the United States, a superpower, a superempire. The stuff about fentanyl in relation to Canada is simply a hyperbolised smoke screen, a smoke screen to cover up what Trump and his minions are actually doing. Those who have to deal with this adolescent still in diapers and this now adolescent government in diapers must, therefore, look for other options. Canada, for instance, should probably consider reintegrating more strongly into the Commonwealth once again and increasing its political, economic, and cultural ties with Europe, including one of Canada’s mothers, Britain. After all, it is clear that you can no longer trust a nation like the United States that treats its friends, like Canada which has an economy that is legally and officially integrated with that of the US, like shit.

Another recent instance of the symbolics of Trumpian politics involves tariffs. Trump, of course, needs to show the faithful that he is actually trying to do what he told them he would do, make American great again. He is thus creating a narrative in which he is using tariffs to make American great again by bringing manufacturing back to the US and he has been able to achieve some successes in this thanks to supplicant sycophantic economic elites who have agreed to build new facilities in Texas though some might argue that such facilities are more needed in other places such as Ohio. He is trying to use tariffs in the same way the US did in the mid and late 19th century and in much of the twentieth century, to bring manufacturing to the US by making the prices of goods made elsewhere more expensive.

Whether this tariff plan will work in the long run is an open question. One has to ask whether tariffs on China and Mexico (those on Canada are another matter and are closely tied to power and the long standing American manifest destiny urge to annex that country) will work. Are these tariffs likely to make shipping goods from China or Mexico to the US so much more costly that cost conscious Americans looking for the cheapest prices and the best deal likely to switch to American goods even if they are American nationalists?

A fundamental problem here, of course, is that American wages are higher than those of China and Mexico something that will make American produced goods more expensive than goods produced in those countries prior to tariffs even with the additional shipping costs. One could, I suppose, cut American wages making them lower if not as low as China and Mexico hoping this will bring down the cost of goods (but will American economic elites want to cut their salaries and benefits too in order to accomplish this?). The problem will still remain, however. How will the American working class, poor, and middle class pay for the maintenance of their beloved and holy consumer lifestyles? Credit? I am sure American usurers are salivating over that scenario.

Of course, Trump could do other things such as raise taxes on corporations and wealthy American to subsidise the brave new American world he hopes to ressurect. He is, however, unlikely to do this given that that would be akin to foxes guarding the hen house. He has already said he wants to cut taxes and the reason he thinks he can (a rationalisation and justification of his class and status position) do this is because of downsizing at Trump, Inc., also known as the US government, and increased tariff revenues coming into Trump, Inc. Time, as always, will tell.

 

Buying a Humidifier: Ron Goes Dreamzy

 

I had to buy a new humidifier recently as my old one went bung. A humidifier is essential in the apartment complex in which I live. It is an old house that has at least been around since the 1850s and whose heat is, as a consequence, old school. It was remodelled in the 1970s into five flats but its heat is still the old radiator heat which, as those who have lived with it know, dries out your flat in winter necessitating a humidifier particularly for people with sinus issues like myself. My sinuses, in fact, get so dry as I sleep with radiator heat and under blankets and in beds which make you hot that a humidifier is essential, along with periodic visits to Ear, Nose, and Throat medical specialists to counteract the additional stress radiators add to my already existing sinus problems (which my Father had as well).

I did some research online about what “tests” found the best humidifier to be. I ended up going with the Chinese made Dreamzy K30, the one with the copper ball (see below). It was pricy, even with it supposedly being on sale, and the shipping fee was substantial but I thought from the rating guides that it sounded interesting and sounded like the one for me.

When I got the humidifier I opened the box. Got it out. Read the instructions. Soaked the sticks which fit into a two pronged apparatus in the brass ball that create the mist, and filled the tank with tap water. Then I hooked it up. I noticed when I bought the item that it ran off of a very short usb chord so I made sure I had a plug that had a usb port in it in the power strip in my bedroom. I turned it on and voila…disappointment after a week and a half of use. Mist comes out of it as advertised but in much less amounts than I had hoped. It works but I had hoped it would work better.

As a senior I should say something about this humidifier and its use by seniors. Since you have to pick up the humidifier and take it to a tap to fill it it after detaching the top, which isn’t easy even for those without arthritis, it is very cumbersome for seniors to use. Probably best to avoid it altogether and seek other easier to use options.

Given the limited stream flow I may have to supplement my Dreamzy with another. On the other hand I may have to buy one with a more substantial mist flow entirely particularly since the mist flow in this one seems to get worse with use not better, and has just stopped entirely. I did try to contact the company via the email on the site I ordered from but it came back as undeliverable making me wonder if I was the victim of a scam. Perhaps i should contact the attorney general of New York state. Anyway, caveat emptor and definitely don’t believe the hype and don’t waste you money on this overhyped piece of crap.

The Books of My Life: Blood Relations

The post-World War II period in the West is interesting for a number of reasons. One of the changes that was evident in this era was a change in intellectual and academic attention to and response to “popular" culture.

One of the key texts in this changing attitude toward popular culture was Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White and published by probably the leading social science publisher of the immediate post-war era, The Free Press. Mass Culture brought together a host of intellectuals and academics interested in popular culture from varying sides of the political, ideological, and cultural spectrum. Some, both on the left and the intellectual as opposed to the populist right, decried and condemned popular culture—films, television, comic books, mass fiction, radio, advertising, and comic books—for its socialisation for mass conformity function and its lowest common denominator content. Others found much to praise in popular culture. Still others found mass culture or masscult a double edged sword, both praising it and damning it alternatively for a variety of reasons. 

By the time Mass Culture was published the popular culture revolution was in full swing. Many pop culture critics had already been singing the praises of European cinema from auteurs like Ingmar Bergman and Vittorio de Sica. Soon intellectual film critics associated with the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema and Postiff, the British film journal Movie, and critics like Andrew Sarris and Peter Bogdanovich, waxed poetically about those pantheon auteurs in Hollywood like Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, John Ford, and Howard Hawks who, they argued, had produced personalised art within the belly of the corporate beast, the commercialised and standardised Hollywood studio system.

This increasing intellectual interest in cinema eventually stimulated an increasing interest in film as a critical study and as a practical vocation even within the staid academy where talk of popular culture often cooled the cockles of the high art academic heart. By the 1970s there were even programmes in film at elite American research universities like the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, USC, and UCLA and universities, elite and not, such as Queen’s, York, McGill, and Simon Fraser in Canada. Not surprisingly, the critical study of film as a historical and sociological phenomenon came late to many older elite institutions with strong boundary markers between high culture and popular culture like Toronto, Cambridge, and Oxford.

The revolution or revivification of a host of theoretical approaches such as Marxism, Semiology, Semiotics, Psychoanalysis and a sensitivity to the realities of economic, political, and cultural inequalities like gender and ethnicity (including race) in the post-World War II era and particularly from the mid-1960s on, had an impact on theoretical and methodological approaches to critical film studies in the academy as many of the younger generation and even some of the older turned away from an auteurism they saw as inherently romantic and anti-contextual in the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic sense exchanging it for one or more of the elements above in sometimes shifting syncretistic or hybridic configurations, a movement reflected in Bill Nichols’s two volume edited collection Movies and Methods published by the University of California Press. From an emic point of view many in academic film studies believed that the study of film as a historical, social, and cultural phenomenon had come of theoretical and methodological age and, and in the process, had reached the level of theoretical and methodological sophistication sociology and cultural and social anthropology had and perhaps had even surpassed those disciplines in their level of theoretical and methodological sophistication.

By the 1980s and 1990s another pop culture form was trying to emulate the trajectory of film studies in academe and fighting for recognition from the guardians of higher education, television. Scholars such as Horace Newcomb, Thomas Schatz, John Fiske, John Tulloch, Robert Allen, Robert Thompson, David Marc, Christopher Anderson, Douglas Gomery, Jane Feuer, and others, including the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, were trying to bring respectability to the critical studies of television in the same way that Gomery, Schatz, Brian Henderson,  James Naremore, Andrew Tudor, Peter Wollen, Dudley Andrew, Umberto Eco,Jill Mulvay, David Bordwell, Rick Altman, and others had brought a certain if somewhat tenuous level of respectability to film in the academy. 

The study of television has had a more ambiguous and tenuous place in the academy in English, Communication, and Media Studies departments and faculties even than film studies. As with film—there has always been a fanboy and fangirl component to academic critical film studies—the development of interest in television was stimulated by television programmes themselves and particularly cult television series like Star Trek. Critical writers like David Gerrold published a book on the episode he wrote for Star Trek, "The Trouble with Tribbles", in 1974. Horace Newcomb edited the first edition of his critical reader on television, Television: The Critical View in 1976. Jane Feuer and her colleagues published their seminal collection of essays on MTM, Mary Tyler Moore Enterprises, which produced television hits, both popular and critical, like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, Lou Grant, Hill Street Blues, and St. Elsewhere in 1985. The personnel of Mary Tyler Moore Enterprises, by the way, would not only link American television of the 1970s and 1980s to the past, 1960s shows like the highly praised The Dick van Dyke Show and That Girl, but also to the future. Many critically praised shows of the 1990s, like NYPD Blue,  Cheers, and The Simpsons were created by alumni of MTM. By 1987 television studies had, with the publication of the first edition of Richard Allen’s edited collection Channels of Discourse, a book in which the smorgasbord of contemporary critical approaches to literature and film had been recapitulated and replicated in television studies, reached, at least from an emic point of view, adulthood. This did not mean, however, that television studies was seen by most in the academy as an adult worthy of inclusion in the humanities or social sciences curriculum.

The 1990s saw an explosion of writings in television studies mostly thanks to a cult show on the WB netlet, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As I write no show, not even its nearest rival Star Trek, has stimulated the amount of academic attention as has Buffy. One of the first and the first essay on Buffy I read was that of noted cultural and social anthropologist David Graeber, “Rebel Without a God”, published in In These Times in 1998 within a year of when Buffy debuted on the late WB in 1997. More articles and books, now numbering in the several hundreds, academic conferences, and even an online journal on Buffy and Whedon Studies—Joss Whedon created Buffy— Slayage, followed—and can be found at listed at Whedonology: An Academic Whedon Studies Bibliography at the Association for Buffy Studies+, and shows little signs of abating.

In the world of publishing McFarland and Tauris, both independent academic publishers not associated with universities, have led the academic charge in Buffy and Whedon Studies and TV Studies in general. University presses, like Syracuse and Duke, have played a much less prominent role in Buffy Studies suggesting the tenuous position of Buffy and Whedon Studies in the contemporary academy and the attitudes that exist toward the study of television in the academy. 

Over the years I have read many of the McFarland and Tauris Whedon Studies books. The latest on my now read list is Jess Battis’s Blood Relations: Chosen Families in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005). Battis, now at the University of Regina, argues, to use an analogy from cultural anthropology, that chosen families, families of choice, is the key symbol or the key theme, the symbol or theme which all other symbols or themes in the Buffyverse, in the television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (and which are also central in Whedon’s short lived television series Firefly), revolve. According to Battis Buffy herself in Buffy, and Cordelia and Fred, in Angel, function as the chosen matriarchs of the Scooby Gang or Slayerettes and Angel Investigations or the Fang Gang respectively. The chosen father of Buffy is Giles. The chosen fathers of Angel are Angel himself and Wesley. The children of the Buffy chosen family include Willow and Xander and, if of less duration, Cordelia, Willow’s one time significant other, Oz, Xander’s one time significant other, Anya, Tara, Willow’s significant other until her death, and Dawn, Buffy’s made by the monks sister. The adult children of Angel include Gunn, Lorne, and Angel’s blood son Connor, none of whom Battis explores in the detail in which he explores Willow and Xander. Battis finds much to praise in his homiletics about the key symbol of chosen families in both shows, chosen families that reflect, Battis argues, the changing family dynamics of post-World War II America and Canada and which offer a loving and communitarian alternative to the West’s dominant nuclear families, particularly for outsiders, and finds much to condemn in his polemics about the chosen family key theme of the show, namely the absence of non-White ethnics and much in the way of class diversity in the characters of the show.

Though focused at least ostensibly on the symbol or theme of chosen families in the Buffyverse and limitedly in the Whedon verse, Battis’s book jumps around to other issues, including reflexive ruminations on postgraduate life in the staid and conventional university of today.  I was left with the feeling that without such padding the book, like so many books in film studies and television studies, would probably have made a better journal article than a monograph.

Beyond this structural issue I had a number of issues with Blood Relations, a book that is in someways Buffy meets sociology, but selective sociology. Like so many of those who engage in crystal ball textualism Battis, while briefly exploring quantitative data on Canadian and US families and far to limited in its utilisation of primary documentary material (mostly interviews of Whedon)—Battis’s analysis is grounded in the sola textura method, an exploration of the text alone, a kind of academic fundamentalist approach to texts. Whether one can discern everything one always wanted to know about a given text, including its economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographical contexts, is an open question, an open question in which I would answer that it is not possible to do that with any confidence given its lack of evidentiary checks and balances. This, in turn, means that one can compellingly argue that academic textual analysis is actually a form of situated reader response that tells us as much if not more about the reader, including his or her ideological persuasions, than the text itself.

Battis, like so many social and cultural constructionists—who got there before Foucault, by the way, as did social and cultural anthropologists like Franz Boas and Margaret Mead—does not grasp Buffy’s and Angel’s theodicy. Real evil exists in the Buffyverse along with shades of grey. And this is why the Scoobies and the Fang Gang fight not for god, not for country, not for any ethnic group, not for any particular gender, but for humanity. And at the end of Buffy that fight becomes much more democratic than it was under the gaze of the patriarchal and paternalist Watcher’s Council.

Battis does the now time warn cystal ball textualist representational song and dance. He calls for greater ethnic, gender, and class representation in ostensibly middle class texts like Buffy which is well and good but it ignores the “realites” of American television. British and even Canadian television, all of which seem to be more representational in these areas than US TV. The problem I have with these clarion calls is how far do we go in asking for representatonal representation in television shows? How about identity groups like the Amish, Christian fundamentalists, and Southern Baptists? Should they be represented in proportion to their populations on American TV? If so, how? An Amish remake of All in the Family perhaps? 

Battis misses some things. For example, Battis comments in a footnote that he has no idea what happened to Willow’s and Tara’s kitten, Miss Kitty Fantastico. Actually, Dawn explains what happened to Miss Kitty in the very last episode of Buffy. Speaking of Dawn, the introduction of Dawn into season five of Buffy adds a blood family dimension to a show emphasising chosen families making it more complicated it in the process, since Dawn, though she may be the key created by the monks to protect her from the hellgod Glory who wants to use her to go home, is literally blood kin to Buffy. 

Finally, while Battis makes a compelling case for the importance of chosen families in the work of Joss Whedon and in Buffy and Angel in particular—there are also chosen families of sorts in The Dick van Dyke Show, That Girl, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show—it is not the key symbol that gives meaning to  all the secondary symbols that circulate around it in the Buffyverse. The key symbol in Buffy, I would argue, is not chosen families but growing up, an existentialist portrayal of growing up with all its attendant joys and—this is a Whedon show after all—horrors and terrors. It is growing up that gives chosen families meaning in Buffy along with the increasing complexity of evil in the show, the problems associated with addictions, the problems associated with parental issues, and the decision to fight the good fight even if it is likely never to end the conflict once and for all. There is still a hellmouth in Cleveland after all.

A historical note. It is, at my age, quite interesting to read a lot of crystal ball textualism that has been produced since its rise to hegemony after the 1970s. In a lot of what I have read and perused it sometimes seems that the successive young turks associated with crystal ball textualism are constantly reinventing the wheel and seem to have a limited knowledge of the history of social and cultural theory. For example, they often seem unaware that social and cultural constructionism has been around since Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber and that some of what Foucault asserts has parallels in earlier social and cultural constructionist literature. They far too often seem unaware of earlier attempts to meld social and cultural analysis with psychoanalysis. Cultural anthropologists, for instance, melded the study of culture, national character, and psychoanalysis back in the 1930s by looking at a host of “texts” including media texts. Cultural anthropologists have also been engaged in something else Battis muses on, whether some identity groups can really understand and grasp other identity groups. Cultural Anthropologists, for example, were reflecting on whether men can, when doing fieldwork, grasp women and whether some ethnics can grasp the “realities” of other ethnics since at least the 1970s, an era which also saw the increasing prominence of reflexive anthropology and reflexive ethnographers such as the authors of essays in Dell Hymes’s edited collection Reinventing Anthropology, James Clifford, Michael Fischer, and George Marcus. Of course, social and cultural anthropologists learned long ago that informants weren’t always generous with the truth, something that led to ethnographers to reflect on the practise of fieldwork and what one learned during fieldwork. As for the notion that humans perform, ethnographer Erving Goffman focused on human performativity practises long before those in English Studies faculties did as did Shakespeare.

The Books of My Life: The Aesthetics of Culture in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

 

I have said it before and I will probably say it again at some point: Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the best things I have ever seen, heard, or read. I love its gender bending, its genre blending, its seriality, its tonal blending, and its reflexivity and playfulness, none of which are admitedly novel since many of these techniques clearly go back to the Shakespeare if not before and to the BBC’s adaptations of classic novels as does the damaged man motif one finds in the series and in so many books, films, and television shows since their advent.

This—aesthetics—may be one of the reasons so many scholarly books by academics and intellectuals have been written about the show. Another reason is undoubtedly the fan boy and fan girl culture that has grown up around Buffy, a fanboy and fangirl culture that often centres around certain currently popular genres and its made into saints auteurs and which shows no signs of abating given DVD’s, streaming, and social media sites like YouTube where a host of younger viewers (and older) are watching and “reacting” to Buffy mostly in a way that foregrounds the variations in cultural capital different readers or watchers bring to the text.

Like the “reaction” videos on YouTube scholarly writing on Buffy also varies according to cultural capital acquired though none of it is as decontextualised as most reaction videos are. The books on Buffy by Gregory Stevenson and J. Michael Richardson and J. Douglas Rabb, which focus on philosophical issues and social ethical issues related to the Buffy text, are excellent and enlightening. So is the collection edited by Roz Kaveney on Buffy and Angel and the long essay on the show by Deborah Thomas in the first issue of the occasional and now sadly defunct and now lamented journal Close-Up. Others, like many of the essays in Fighting the Forces and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy are, in my opinion, comme ci comme ca, a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Some of these are, in other words, good while others are more mediocre, but then that is often the case with edited collections. Uneven monographs and books on Buffy may be but at least they are interesting and sometimes even enlightening, something again that makes scholarly analysis on Buffy very different from “reaction” videos, which often seem of to be of the lowest common denominator hey look at me react to this or that variety.

Matthew Pateman’s The Aesthetics of Culture in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Jefferson, NC, 2006) is one of those books on Buffy that is interesting even if, in my opinion, it is uneven. In part one of his book Pateman focuses on what he refers to as four aspects of the Buffy text: the knowledge level, the ethnic or identity level, the historical level, and the ethical level, all of which, Pateman argues, are central aspects of the Buffy and Angel texts or text. I was much more impressed by part two of the book where Pateman explores, using the fourth season episode “Restless" as his starting off point to explore involution—Pateman’s term—in the Buffy text. Involution, of course, is a fancy—you know how scholars like to use descriptive technical language that one can also argue is jargony—way of saying that Pateman explores inner textual and extra textual references in Buffy and to a lesser extent Angel, Buffy’s spin off, past, present, and future. 

The problem, in my opinion, with Pateman’s book is the same problem one finds in other books that largely eschew, save often in name only, broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic and importantly, documentary analysis beyond the text. To be fair, Pateman does touch on the production contexts of Buffy but ultimately, for my taste, in much too limited a fashion focusing instead on the cultural level, a somewhat odd cultural level since most of the context is actually internal to the text, something which I suppose is not surprising in a book that links culture and aesthetics and something that links crystal ball textual analysis like that of Pateman to interpretations of the Bible that decontextualise or wrongly contextualise that book.

The problem with the crystal ball or donut hole textual approach is that something is missing at its heart, namely sound historical and contextual exegetical analysis. Most of the analysis in Pateman’s books lies on the hermeneutic level and as such, like other essays, monographs, and books in this genre whether focused on literary, filmic, and televisual, ends up being ahistorical if not, and paradoxically so given Pateman’s lip service to history, anti-historical. Examples: Pateman claims, in historical fashion, that modern enlightenment texts are grounded in apocalyptic and eschatological ideologies which are teleological in form. This is true as far as it goes. There is, however, another apocalyptic and eschatological ideological form that is cyclical in form in that the end times leads backwards to an Edenic or paradiscial future where time ends just as it does in the modern teleological form. Pateman, like others, asserts a non-essentialist essentialism when it comes to identity, an ideological strategy that leads him to criticise—Pateman working on a homiletic level backwards—the lack of attention of Buffy’s writers to Willow’s Jewishness or more accurately lack of it. It almost seems as if Pateman is unaware of the secular (a recent poll found that only 50% of American Jews believe in god, only 26% believe in the god of the Bible, that 19% believe there is no god, and that only 22% of American Jews say religion is important to them), and Reform, Polydox, Reconstructionist, and Conservative American Jewish communities. Pateman’s focus on good and evil and the increasing complexity of this in the Buffy text while interesting and valuable largely misses, save in fragments, the importance of existentialism in the work of Joss Whedon, something Whedon himself has commented on. Pateman plays the old straw man of romantic auteurism card missing, as is common in many postmodern writings on literature, films and television, that auteurism doesn’t have to be romantic. It can also, for example, be Marxist, grounded in economic, political, cultural, and demographic contexts and the author of film and televisual texts certainly can be understood, at least in the few cases where there are film and television authors, as akin to a conductor in a symphony orchestra or a general in the military. 

Like so many of a postmodernist bent Pateman’s ahistorical historicism grounded in cultural and ethical relativism, a relativism that often does not recognise the difference between these two forms of relativism, tends to often to impose cultural and ideological readings on the text rather than to discern readings exegetically and empirically from the text. Pateman, for instance, fails to realise that Buffy’s theodicy, Buffy's notion of evil, is not ethically relativist and that real evil is depicted as existing in the Buffyverse along with demons, monsters, vampires, etc., that do not fall in the evil category because they are not harmful to humanity, something Buffy tells Faith the Vampire Slayer in season three of the show. This ideologically determined misreading or malreading raises the question of whether postmodernist readings of texts that are not grounded in empirical exegesis, broad contextual exegesis, are a species of reader response which tell us as much if not more about the interpreter than about that being interpreted. I think they are and I think they do. Scholarly interpretations guided by cultural and ideological correctness may be of a higher quality than those of “reaction” videos by amateurs but they are like them in that they both are ultimately ideologically overdetermined.

There is much that is praise worthy in Pateman’s The Aesthetics of Culture in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. His exploration of echoes and foreshadowing in the Buffy text is encyclopaedic if not exhaustive, assuming the latter is possible in the first place given the richness and density of the Buffy text. This alone makes the book worthy of acquisition by those interested in contemporary literature, film, and television and in Joss Whedon and the Buffyverse.

I Just Wanted To Buy Canadian: The Indigo Kiada

 

I have experienced a lot of Sisyphean moments with new digital media in my life but nothing as Sisyphean as happened to me with the Canadian bookseller Indigo. I created an account at Indigo’s website. A verification was sent to my email. I put the verification number in and presto I had an account. I put five books in my shopping queue. Then I attempted to check out these five items that I had in my queue. It asked me to sign in. I signed in with the user id and password I had saved in my browser (you know the user id and password key) when I created the account. I, however, could not sign in and instead got the mantra of the digital age, namely, there is a problem with your user id and your password memo.

Annoyed I contacted Indigo chat and eventually had them cancel the account. I then started anew rinsing and repeating what happened earlier including placing five books in my queue. And when I went to check out guess what happened? Yup, I could not sign in in order to order the five books and have them forwarded to my address.

I contacted Indigo AGAIN. They said no such email existed though I had once again received a verification from Indigo via that email (digital cleansing?). They said they could fix this but I gave up not trusting that what could not be accomplished twice could be accomplished on the third try. I don’t like spending forty-five minutes doing Sisypheanish nothings again and again. Paradoxically and perhaps even ironically I continue to receive promotional emails on the email Indigo says does not exist.

The moral? Well there are several. Indigo lost a potential customer one who wished to avoid American owned skanks like Amazon. And I learned, once again, that the brave new digital world is a pain in the arse over and over again. Bah humbug.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Quality of Mercy is Not Always Buffy Reactors

 

One of the things Jana Riess’s book What Would Buffy Do: The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide, which I recently read, got me thinking about was how readers, in this case reactors to Joss Whedon’s television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Youtube, read Buffy’s existentialist social ethics. Specifically, it got me thinking about how Buffy YouTube reactors read and respond to Buffy’s emphasis on the need for mercy, forgiveness, and redemption, themes that are all at the heart of this television show.

There is no doubt that when it comes to the social ethics of mercy, forgiveness, and redemption Buffy preaches the gospel that mercy is necessary, that forgiveness is divine, well as divine as humans can get, and that redemption is possible. There is also no doubt that in Buffy humans are frail and fallible and that they are often in need of mercy, forgiveness, and redemption. And there is no doubt that because of human frailty humans are not always saints, are often sinners, and that they need redemption for their various “sins” again and again. Episodes of Buffy like the superb “I Only Have Eyes for You” in season two, the excellent “Amends" in season three,  the superb “Something Blue in season four, the magnificent “There’s No Place like Home in season five, virtually every episode in season six, and Buffy’s sometimes abuse of power in several episodes in season seven make this abundantly clear. All of the protagonist-heroes of Buffy, in fact, including Buffy, Angel (who was described by one Buffy writer as one drink away from becoming Angelus, his evil double again), Willow, Xander, Giles, Faith, Anya, and Spike are in need of mercy, forgiveness, and redemption at some point or other in the series, often at several points in the series again and again.

It is also abundantly clear that in Buffy vengeance, the negation of mercy, forgiveness, and redemption, is not divine, metaphorically divine, in Buffy. The vengeance is a thing curse that the gypsy’s put on Angel because he has killed one of the beloved females of their tribe has disastrous consequences for everyone including the gypsy’s Jenny Calendar, Jana of the Kalderash people, and her Uncle Enyos to such an extent that it essentially karma that comes back to bite then in the proverbial arse. Vengeance, the metaphorically eye for an eye, Buffy tells us, results not in justice but in violence not only against the perpetrators of violence but also against those who seek vengeance upon the perpetrator of the initial act of violence and immorality. Buffy is not, in other words, your Tanakh or your Christians reinterpreting the Christian New Testament as the Tanakh kind of television show. Vengeance in Buffy makes those seeking vengeance blind to its violent consequences.

Despite this condemnation of vindictiveness, of the lack of forgiveness, and of vengeance in Buffy reactors like Nick (aka,Thor) Reacts, SofeReacts, the LexieCrowd, After Show Reacts, EvilQK, and all but one of The Normies, come to praise vengeance when it comes to the misogynous Warren Mears in “Villains". Warren, as those who have watched Buffy know, is one of the Trio of season six, one-third of the Troika of Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew, who accidentally kills Willow’s girlfriend Tara while trying to kill Buffy. As Willow gone dark (an iteration of VampWillow in season three) takes her revenge on Warren, seeks vengeance against Warren, they cheer Willow on (and look at those facial expressions as they do) urging her to murder Warren and revel in her torture of Warren (and the bullet Willow magically and slowly uses to rip apart his insides as she tortures him before murdering him) and her murder of him (though to be fair some are reflexive about the murder and disturbed when Willow skins Warren alive). The quality of these reactors to Warren is not, in other words, mercy. It is not forgiveness. It is not hoping for Warren’s possible future redemption (they don’t believe his apology and realisation he needs redemption), it is vengeance. It is an eye for an eye, a death for a death vengeance. Nick goes so far as to compare, in his reaction to the last episode of season six, Warren’s execution to the killing of a cockroach recalling in th process, at least for some of us, Nazi metaphors for Jews. Vengeance is vicariously ours these reactors seem to say. This is somewhat paradoxical given that while they seek vengeance against Warren they have repeatedly hoped for the redemption of others in the Buffyverse such as Faith and Spike (who they eventually forgive after his attempted rape of Buffy) not to mention the four original Scoobies. But then they liked if not loved those characters while they hated Warren.

Note: Three English reactors, Liam Duke, Liam Catterson, and Dakara are disturbed by Willow’s torture and murder of Warren and a bit more reflexive about the murder than the American reactors. Additionally,  the two Liam's make the connection between DarkWillow and VampWillow.

NoteL Another English reactor, Dakara, expressed her discontent with season six of Buffy with its darker arcs and DarkWillow character arc in her reaction video to “Villains". Many at the time of broadcast felt similarly. Of course, growing up—that which Joss Whedon, Buffy’s creator, and who wasn’t as involved with season six as with previous seasons, was primarily about before the season began—is not all sugar and spice and everything nice, which is what Buffy is trying to depict in season six. Unfortunately, many fan boys and girls don’t want their beloved characters to suffer or change that much. They like repetition (so does Hollywood). I think this is at least one of the reasons some were discomfited by season six and season four of Buffy.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: "How Come She’s in the Club?"

 

There is, and some might find this interesting, something, using the language many social media “kiddies” use today, something “ewww" and “weird” about reaction videos to television shows on YouTube and in academic bureaucracies. The something that is “eww” and “weird” or interesting and fascinating about them is that one can argue compellingly that they are both forms of reader response criticism.

They are both forms of reader response because both amateur responses to television shows on YouTube and professional academic crystal ball textualism, a form of textual analysis that largely eschews any documentary evidence beyond the text as important, to television shows (and film and literature) are both similar in that they both are equally grounded in a kind of ideology of fundamentalist literalism, namely that all you need is the text in order to understand any given television show. (or film or piece of literature). They are both, in other words, limited in scope.

Now don’t get me wrong, I do understand that there are differences between amateur and professional reactions. Amateur reactors and their reactions don’t have the theoretical, methodological, and interpretive depth and sophistication (varying degrees of cultural capital) professional reactors and their reactions do. They largely fail, as a consequence, to explore important economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic aspects about the text under ethnographic observation. Amateur reactions generally do not ask about how the industrial and corporate structure of Hollywood, for instance, impacts how a given television show is made, about the compromises auteurs have to make to get their television shows funded and on the air, and how auteurs can sneak more marginal cultural forms into a text, particularly if they are of the science fiction or fantasy genre. Like the Soviet censors of yore, Hollywood’s standards and practises suits appear to have a blind spot when it comes to some things. Academic reactors are more attuned to such questions, though not entirely, sometimes they seem to think that economic contexts aren’t that important, and ask such questions even though their analyses are problematic given their blind spot for primary source materials beyond the text making their approach a kind of donut hole approach to empirical phenomena. They may ask the right questions and get, on occasion, the right answers but their is something missing from their analyses, namely, the primary source material beyond the text that would add heft to their arguments and allow for sound scientific replication on the basis of evidence beyond the text.

There are other aspects particularly of amateur reaction videos on social media that are interesting as well. I have written about and explored other aspects of amateur reaction videos in other posts focusing on social media on this site. One I haven’t focused on extensively is how reactors react to the introduction of new characters into a television show. For instance, in season or series five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (see “Buffy vs. Dracula” and “The Real Me”) a new character who we have never seen of or heard of before is introduced into the Buffyverse, Buffy’s sister Dawn. Dawn is a fourteen year old teenager, which means she is annoying to those of an emotional and proprietary bent, by definition. Viewers have no idea who she is. Is she Buffy’s sister who has never been mentioned or who we may have heard of but forgotten about? Is she a demon, the Big Bad of season five who is doing something bad to Buffy’s mother Joyce in order to weaken Buffy?

Many of the reactors have those initial reactions to the introduction of Dawn to the series (for examples of reactions to Dawn see the Horror Bandwagon, SofieReacts, TheLexieCrowd. Fan Theory, VicFrost, cass reacts, Dakara, George Alexander, alley box, domi e, Liam Catterson, Jules Reacts, After Show Reacts, Liam Duke, The Normies, JayPeaKay, DodoReactions, for example). Few of them, despite the fact that an episode that showed how the manipulation of space and time can change things in season four called“Superstar”, grasp the admittedly somewhat arcane obvious about Dawn, that she may be the product of something akin to what Jonathan did in that episode, this despite the fact that they must be familiar with how Buffy has manipulated its viewers and played with its text in reflexive ways before throughout its run. Most of the reactors, in fact, have little sympathy and empathy for Dawn and some even immediately dislike Dawn wondering why she, as Willow asked when Jenny Calendar became a sometime member of the Scooby Gang in season one’s “Prophecy Girl", a curious reaction to a show that privileges outsiders and rails against insider cliques. Some of them, like VicFrost, even express their dislike of Dawn yelling at their screens within their screen querying why she is here thinking she must be evil, something, admittedly, the writers and actors play with as a red herring, something again most Buffy viewers should be used to by season five.

It is not until the fifth episode of season five (a way to build Hitchcockian suspense and anticipation in viewers) that reactors learn who Dawn really is, namely, a ball of mystical energy, a key, that opens portals to other dimensions, something that raises further questions in the process. At this point some reactors like SofieReacts feel a bit guilty about their previous unsympathetic and un-empathetic feelings toward Dawn, something many initial viewers of the series did not and even expressed this hatred for whining Dawn at “Once More With Feeling" sing-alongs at the Alamo Draft House in Austin, Texas, something that is a pretty stark reminder about the real life behaviour of some human beings toward others of their same ilk. 

All of this, of course, raises the question of what these reactions say about us, about us humans, in general in real life? Personally, to go all homiletic and social ethical on you, I don’t think it says much that is good about the human species. But then life amongst core nation humans has made me cynical (or realistic) about them. 

The Cultural Therapeutics of Losing My Religion

 

I have been reading a several books on film and television recently along with the curated film festivals on John Ford and others I have been recently doing. In particular, I have been reading several books on what is easily my favourite American television show—a kind of backhanded comment given that I don’t find most American TV shows worth watching—Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other television shows created by Joss Whedon.

The most recent book on the television worlds of Joss Whedon I have been reading is The Psychology of Joss Whedon edited by Joy Davidson and published by Dallas based BenBella books. Amongst the interesting essays by various social scientists in this collection is an autobiographical one by Stephanie DeLuse, an essay that stimulated me to follow her example and explore how I lost one of my traditional religions, though i was only marginally devoted to it in the first place, just as she lost hers.

DeLuse writes about her upbringing in a Christian fundamentalist religion in her essay “More Than Entertainment’ in the book. She explores the minuses of such an upbringing. She mentions that were positives but doesn’t make these explicit. Perhaps it was a focus on ethics if an authoritarian ethics and morality.  This community—she doesn’t note which fundamentalist Christian group it was though I suspect it was not Mormon fundamentalism as polygamy, which is central to sectarian Mormon fundamentalist groups is not implied whatsoever—was, she writes, authoritarian patriarchal, paternalistic, ethnocentric, apocalyptic, and manichean. It was an authoritarian group which convinced if not coerced her to marry a 26 year old patriarch when she was 17 and which had negative impacts on her health (mental? physical? both?), impacts that eventually forced her to leave the community and face shunning, a shunning she still faces today from the group.

One of the things Deluse notes was that she was not allowed to, in this authoritarian social group, watch television, particularly television of a “nefarious” sort like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, both of which the faith defined as “occult” and hence evil. For this faith such television was worldly and wicked and hence verboten. Paradoxically, television, in the form of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, would prove to be healing balm for the scars that fundamentalist Christianity left on her body and her mind. It made her think, think about women’s roles in society, about misogyny, and about social ethics and morality.

I was not brought up in any Christian fundamentalist, evangelical, liturgical, or mainstream religion at all. The Dallas I grew up in—Big D was only one of the places I lived in my youth—was dominated by the Southern Baptists and the Methodists, the former perceived as conservative, the latter as liberal—but I was neither nor were my parents. My religion was, if only briefly and without much depth to it, Americanism and Texasism, the religions which preached the gospel of American and Texas greatness (second to none), manicheanism (we good, they bad), messianism (we are on a mission from god), apocalypticism (utopia is coming to the America and Texas near you), and compassionate (if, of course, converts accepted the gospel of America and Texas). I recall feeling briefly proud of being a Texas as I sat in my Texas civics class in junior high and reflected on the brilliant words to the Texas national hymn, “Texas Our Texas".

It really didn’t take me long to lose this faith. The war in Vietnam was the initial agent of change. It was a war I eventually came to realise was based on a series of lies: lies about the dangers of communism to the US (the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were, of course, primarily nationalists), lies about dominos falling, likes about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and the lie that the US was not the latest in a long line of imperial great powers. With the proper empirically grounded scepticism in place I soon realised that the US was grounded it lies: lies that it was democratic (it is, as is almost always the case with great powers and beyond, oligarchic), lies about its economic system (the lie that it is great for everyone; it is good, of course, for the oligarchs), lies that it was a beacon to the rest of the world (the lie that its messianic mission was to spread “democracy” and that it was protecting democracy by its police actions all around the world), and lies that it was the most moral nation on earth (tell that to those collaterally damaged by America’s war machine, political system, economic system, and cultural system).Unlike DeLuse, for whom Buffy was therapeutic, it helped her think her way through her sometimes difficult situation and helped heal her as she went through this process, my therapy was history, sociology, and the knowledge music, like that of the Beatles and the Stones, and films, like Dr. Stangelove, brought to my consciousness.

Faith in and worship of the United States and Texas weren’t the only things my escape from a fundamentally and inhterently hateful faith brought me (the US is ethnocentric as are all human groups and what they have wrought). I also, over time, recognised the fallacies associated with the ideologies these religions had about human beings. Many, if not most human beings, drawing on a Christian cultural script similar to the manichean and apocalypiic good versus evil and virgin versus whore ones that have had an immense impact on Western culture (including Islam which has its own iterations of these), the saint versus sinner binary, tend to divide human beings into saints on the one side of the accounting page and sinners on the other. Of course, human beings in general, are neither saints nor sinners. They are, in fact, both. Take the recent case of Buffy’s creator, Joss Whedon. 

Whedon, like America and Texas, has been accused of being a hypocrite, of shilling for feminism while cheating on his wife. Like America and Texas, who are perhaps more whores than adulterers, he has been accused of adultery (something unlike many adulterers he has admitted to) and harassing behaviour on set, which I assume means he was dictatorially demanding (something that comes with the territory of director, military commander, football coach). Unlike America and Texas, however, he has been shunned by pots and kettles living in glass houses. Humans, you see, just like nation-states like the US, are tried and true hypocrites.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that Whedon’s weaknesses should be ignored. I am simply noting that those self-righteous, self-serving, and vengeance seeking individuals who are whinging about Whedon’s behaviours, such as Sarah Michelle Gellar, Charisma Carpenter, and Marti Noxon, have, I am certain, similar skeletons in their own closet. I should also, while I am here, note the similarities between those who watched the Shoah happen without doing much, bear some similarities to those who, in the soap opera that is human life and existence, try to straddle the fence trying not to offend anyone in the process.

The Vietnam War was not the only thing that made me question my religion and heal from it. Cultural Anthropology also made me sceptical of religion and made me recognise that not only nation-states are fallible but so are humans. I learned from Cultural Anthropology that humans have had, over the course of human history, among other things, varying marriage systems, varying conceptions of when marriage is acceptable, and varying sexual practises, all of which function to do one of the things all of these function to do (increasing the age of marriage is functional in a demographically growing world), replicate the species. I learned that notions of what is “deviant” are often if not generally social and culturally constructed and that deviance serves the function of socialising for conformity in most cultures, in showing the masses what not to do if they want to get along and what to do if they don't. I learned that adultery is common, that sexual “deviance” is common, and that hypocrisy is omnipresent in the human species. I learned, in other words, to question political, economic, and cultural authority and developed, in the process, a healthy dislike of, for example, paternalism, patriarchalism, patronisation, bureaucracies, and hypocrisies of all flavours.

And it is here—the commonplaceness of, the widespread reality of “sin”—that one has to ground one’s understanding of the human species on and one’s social ethics on. We have to understand, in other words, that humans are fallible, that human criticisms of human weakness is a socialisation for conformity process and that it is often if not always hypocritical, and that we have to accept human beings for what they are and what they always will be not what we wish they could be (utopian ideologies are almost always dangerous and hazardous to human health). Now don’t get me wrong, human weakness runs along a continuum. There is a massive difference between, for example, Adolf Hitler and Joss Whedon though one wonders if his groupies turned haters grasp this anymore than they grasp their own hypocrisies. 

Being a life long and professional “deviant", of course, has brought much pain—being the “deviant" has its drawbacks including shunning and isolation including in the academy that vaunted (if mythical) bastion of freedom of though—but it has also brought much pleasure, pleasure that, to some extent, compensates for the trials and tribulation of outsiderness. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

The Books of My Life: The Searchers (Buscombe)

 

As I came to know more and more about film in my teenage years and to understand that there were some films that were considered classics and some directors who were considered to put out classic film after classic film, I came to look for certain films on television and at second run theatres, the latter after I went up to university.

There were several films that I wanted to see that were hard for me to find so they became films I really wanted to see. After I became interested in the work of Howard Hawks, for instance, I looked especially hard for Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire (I was also, by this time, an appreciator of the work of Barbara Stanwyck and made every effort to watch any film with her in it) and Twentieth Century, both of which I was finally able to see if only once on television. And I looked especially hard for John Ford’s The Searchers, which I too was finally able to see on television in those dark age days before the advent of the VCR and later the DVD. Blu ray, and 4k disc.

The first time I saw The Searchers I was unimpressed. At the time I chalked my moderately negative attitude towards the film up to the very high expectations I had for the film given its critical reputation. The second time I saw the film—again if memory serves on television, on television in the days where widescreen VistaVision films like The Searchers were sadly and badly shrunk into the academy frame doing injustice to it—I was much more impressed with the film and could understand why many considered it not only a classic but one of the best films ever made, something made flesh by the Sound and Sight poll of filmmakers and film critics of their favourite films. It is still number 13 in the most recent poll of 2022, an iteration of the poll that bears the marks of a greater attention to female filmmakers. 

The third time I saw the film was this week. I watched it on DVD this time around, the Warner Brothers (easily the worst studio producer of DVD’s on the market) “Ultimate Collector’s Edition” DVD of the film, a DVD which is in the correct aspect ratio but which doesn't sadly gives viewers the option of listening to the film's soundtrack in the original mono, something any quality producer that cares about history (fat chance these days) would give us. The film looked pretty good in DVD format though the reviewer of the transfer of the film at the wonderful DVDBeaver found it somewhat wanting. The “Universal Collector’s Edition” was accompanied by a lovely reproduction of the comic book produced for the film’s marketing campaign and some lovely reproduced theatre cards, both of which made the lack of a mono track and the good but not great transfer even more annoying. Anyway, the third time I watched the film, this time during my John Ford film festival, I responded more to the film as a historian and a social scientist than as a fanboy or fangirl. I ended up finding it interesting and appreciated it as a consequence particularly for what it told us about the cultural contexts of the era in which it was made.

Seeing the film again stimulated me to read, Edward Buscombe’s monograph on the film, The Searchers (London: BFI, BFI Film Classics series, 2000). The monograph follows the same strategy as Western film specialist Buscombe’s excellent monograph on another John Ford film, Stagecoach. Buscombe, while he is summarising and analysing the meaning of the film text, takes readers on a journey into the production, distribution, and exhibition of the film just as he did in is monograph on Stagecoach. The only major difference between what Buscombe did in that monograph and what he did in his monograph on The Searchers was that in The Searchers he made greater use of psychoanalytic theory, something Buscombe deems appropriate in a film impacted by the social, cultural, and psychological darkness of American film noir, something that also impacted, as Buscombe notes, the Westerns of director Anthony Mann—the director of several of my favourite Westerns, a genre I am not as into as I was when I was younger—who directed film noirs before he directed Westerns and it shows. As such, the utilisation of psychoanalytic approaches to literary and film art makes more sense than its fetishisation by many contemporary film scholars given its increasing impact on American intellectual culture in the post-World War II era.

For some reason, a reason I can’t precisely put my finger on, I preferred Buscombe’s monograph on Stagecoach to his monograph on The Searchers. Perhaps it was the fact that the first time Buscombe’s approach seemed sensible if not revelatory while the second time it appeared somewhat repetitive particularly since I read both monographs one after the other in a short period of time. That said, I had and have no doubt that like Buscombe’s monograph on The Searchers, like his monograph on Stagecoach, should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in the film, in the work of John Ford, and in the history of American film.

Did Buscombe, who claims that The Searchers is one of the greatest of films ever made, convince me that The Searchers was one of the greatest films ever made? No. It is, however, as Buscombe notes, interesting for its magnificent compositions, something Ford was expert at, for its use of Monument Valley as a character, for Ford's meaningful punctuations of the film with significant camera movements, and for its noirish and almost nightmarish portrayal of American racism embodied by John Wayne’s character Ethan (Ford’s sympathies seem to lie with Marty, the “half breed” character Jeffrey Hunter plays), and for its somewhat “fakish" fairy tale ending. Just as Buscombe’s book on The Searchers is worth reading the film is definately worth watching. Perhaps it and the book on it can teach us a little something about American myths, American legends, American racism, and American imperialism.

The Books of My Life: Stagecoach (Buscombe)

 

Recently, thanks to retirement, I have been watching a lot of movies and television shows from my substantial, actually my way too substantial given the size of my flat, DVD and blu ray collection. Just last week, for instance, I ended a Gillian Armstrong film festival and began a John Ford film festival.

Watching the filmed work of noted and celebrated directors is not something new to my viewing pleasure, my not so viewing pleasure, or my viewing displeasure. One of the first films I ever watched, for example, was a film of Alfred Hitchcock’s of whom my recently departed father was a fan and who allowed my sister and me to watch the film because he thought we would like it. We did and his allowing to watch The Birds set my sister and me on a film watching life course that has lasts to this day. Both of us remain inveterate film watchers.

Sometime in my teens my film watching became more oriented to directors than to genres and stars. My sister, on the other hand, remains more oriented in her avid film watching to genre—the Western—and stars—John Wayne in particular—than mine. No doubt this was because my sister and I grew up in an era when Hollywood, Hollywood film stars, and certain Hollywood genres ruled the roost. Westerns, film Westerns and television Westerns, were still a big deal in the sixties when my sister Cindy and I came of film watching age in the mid-1960s and Hollywood stars were the biggest draw in bringing bodies into cinemas all across North America. 

I soon learned, however, particularly after I left for college—a defining moment in my relationship with my sister and in my life—where I gravitated toward others who were also film heads or cinephiles and took a few film classes, and learned that the work of certain directors was worth seeking out. I learned, for example, not only that Hitchcock’s film work beyond The Birds, was interesting in general and worth seeking out, but also that the film work of Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Joseph Mankiewicz, and a host of European art cinema directors like Ingmar Bergman, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and others like John Ford and Gillian Armstrong were worth paying attention to as well. I came of intellectual age, in part, in the age where the film director, well a few film directors, were regarded as auteurs, as authors of a film, after all. As you can see by my film festival format I still feel the same way though today though I do realise that performers like the Marx Brothers and even writers and music might be auteurs too.

Stimulated by my recent auteurist film watching festivals I decided to pick up several monographs on film auteurs to read. So, after I rewatched Stagecoach and listened to the commentaries on the Criterion and Warner Brothers DVD’s I owned  by noted scholars Jim Kitses, author of the highly regarded monograph Horizons West, and Scott Eyman, who wrote a highly regarded biography of Ford, I picked up and read Edward Buscombe’s excellent BFI monograph on John Ford’s film Stagecoach (London: BFI, BFI Film Classics, 1992). I am glad I did.

Buscombe’s monograph on Stagecoach is almost everything one could hope for in a brief work on a film classic. In between summarising the film and exploring the meaning of the film and its mise-en-scene Buscombe tells us about the life, career, and film strategies of John Ford. He explores the history of the Western in its literary and film forms. He tells us about the production aspects of the film. He tells us about the promotion campaign for the film. He tells us how much the film earned upon release. He writes about the casting of the film. He tells us about the themes of Ford’s Westerns, of which there are many, and of his film work in general (I am particularly fond of Ford's pokes at moral guardians like the temperance league). He tells us about Ford’s use of folk and folk like tunes in his films, tunes that sometimes provided themes for the characters in his films. He tells us something about the historical and cultural contexts the film draws on from both the past and from the 1939 and thereabouts present of the film. He tells us something about the contemporary and historical reception of the film. Buscombe’s Stagecoach is thus everything an excellent guide to a classic film should be and can be.

Watching Stagecoach and reading Buscombe’s outstanding monograph on the film foregrounded for me something I have sensed for some time, namely, that how we watch films and how we view or see them changes with time, age, and education. I was, for example, in my younger film watching days, raised on nationalist and Texas nationalist robbery. Then the Vietnam War came along and nutted me with reality forcing me to become much more sceptical and critical than I was before of the American nationalist and Texas nationalist ideologies I had been socialised for conformity into. I began, as a consequence, to look at America or American films differently than in the naive way I used to. The American Westerns I grew up enjoying as pure entertainments I suddenly realised were, in many cases, the embodiment of an American manifest destiny ideology, the embodiment of the American White man’s burden ideology, the embodiment of the ideology of American chivalric masculinity, and the embodiment of the American fear of the wild savage whoever that wild savage happened to be—commies when I was a young lad. Today I am no longer embedded within such nationalist religious bubbles and I am, as a consequence, much more critical of the cultural fabric woven into American films and American genre films like the Western and its ancestors.

As a consequence I no longer watch an American film, an American Western, or a John Ford film the way I used to. That doesn’t mean I no longer have an aesthetic appreciation for certain Westerns. Like Buscombe I recognise the qualities of Ford and his work including Ford's wonderful eye for composition, the wonderful ambiguity Ford felt, on occasion, toward America and the myths and myth making at the heart of the imagined American nationalist politically and ideologically correct enterprise, Ford’s limited use of close-ups to make narrative points, his emphasis on the gestures of his actors for expressing meanings in his films, and Ford’s use of comedy amidst drama and tragedy for effect, something that Ford drew from Shakespeare and something that I think, particularly in retrospect from the vantage point of 2020s, is not as successful as I thought it was when I was much younger. 

As I have grown older I have become much more choosy about the films and television programmes I like and watch.  I still like. the work of Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Francois Truffaut, Joss Whedon’s Buffy and Firefly—both of which meld tonal variations much more successfully than Ford—and the films Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and WR: Mysteries of the Organism. I am, however, less and less enamoured of the films of Ford—too much stereotyped and caricatures farce, too much sentimentality (I prefer the sentimentality of a Capra to a Ford)—though I still have fond memories of his Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, Rio Grande, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, and Howard Hawks, the subject of an upcoming film festival which will undoubtedly result in more re-evaluations, than I was when I was younger. I have come to realise that my notions of who is in the pantheon of film authors and the films I really like changes, just as does life in general.