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.
No comments:
Post a Comment