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.