The Books of My Life: The Truth of Buffy

The anthology The Truth of Buffy: Essays on Fiction Illuminating Reality edited by Emily Dial-Driver, Sally Emmons-Featherston, Jim Ford, and Carolyn Anne Taylor, (Jefferson, N.C., McFarland, 2008) explores, via approaches that have become commonplace in the landscape of contemporary film and television studies, the American television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB, 1997-2001, UPN, 2001-2002), specifically Buffy's narrative forms, themes, character arcs, and mise-en-scène, from a number of disciplinary and interdisciplinary vantage points including psychology, sociology/ethnography, philosophy, English Studies, and Cultural Studies. The intent of the collection, which each essay generally succeeds in meeting, is to, as the subtitle of the book notes, relate Buffy the Vampire Slayer to real life.

The problem I had with many of the essays in The Truth of Buffy is the same problem I have with many contemporary approaches in film and television studies, methodological. Many of the essays in The Truth of Buffy seem to me, to take what is ultimately an etic or outsider approach to a TV show. Many of the essays in the book, in other words, apply elements of disciplinary practise, the meaning based approach of psychologist and psychoanalyst Victor Frankl, for instance, to help readers understand the meaning structure of BtVS, with, however, only a limited attention to the emic dimensions of, in this case, a televisual text,  Many of the essays in the collection focus, in other words, on the text without exploring how that text was constructed or manufactured and the real economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts that surround and at least partly give meaning to a text.

What I have always liked about the Movie approach to film and television analysis (see Deborah Thomas's superb "Reading Buffy" in Close-Up 01, Wallflower, 2006, pp. 167-244) is that it is grounded first and foremost in exegesis. The Movie method, as outlined, for example, in Victor Perkins's Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Boston: Da Capo, 1972) starts with an exploration of the text's narrative, plot, characters, mise-en-scène, and editing strategies, and puts, admittedly more in theory than in practise, the text within its broader contexts, before it moves on to interpretation (hermeneutics) and evaluation (homiletics).

Many of the essays in The Truth of Buffy, on the other hand, and much contemporary film and television criticism in general, starts with evaluation or homiletics, generally an evaluation grounded in ideological coherence, the fit of the text with the analysts ideological predilections and evaluates the text on the basis of the fit of the text with the evaluators ideology, on the other hand. Much contemporary film and television criticism, in other words, is deductive and etic rather than, as with the Movie approach, inductive and, at least initially, emic. This means that, as in Sally Emmons-Featheston's essay on the Buffy episode "Pangs" (4:8) in The Truth of Buffy, for instance, analysis is not grounded in an exploration of what the writer of this episode, Jane Espenson, and the director of the episode, Michael Lange, thought they were doing when they, along with others, made this episode of Buffy, leaving, in the process, what sociologist and social theorist Gene Halton calls a rather large donut hole at the heart of such criticism since it is individuals embedded in real economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographical contexts who make films and TV shows and this is important when analysisng and evaluating a television show, a film, or a work of fiction. It also means, since ideological or a lack of ideological coherence is the standard for evaluation, that things like the tone of a television show or film can and sometimes is missed. The tone of "Pangs", for instance, is quite clearly parodic, something I don't think that Emmons-Featherson fully got.

For me, then, a valid criticism must start with sound exegesis, an analysis of what those who make or made a TV show or a film were trying to do or what they thought they were trying to do, and the broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts in which a TV show or film is made. Only then can an analyst move on to hermeneutics, the interpretation of a text, in this case Buffy's narrative forms, plots, themes, character arcs, mise-en-scène, tone, and editing strategies. And only then can the analyst morph into a critic and evaluate (homiletics) a text, for those who approach the text via the classic Movie methodology, the credibility and coherence of the text. Finally I should note that real audience quantitative and qualitative ethnographic analysis is necessary if an analyst wants to explore how real people read real texts.  Assumptions about how people read texts, as the case with much of the crystal ball approach to textual analysis and evaluation, simply won't cut it.

Interesting book particularly Emily Dial-Driver's and Jesse Stallings's "Texting Buffy: Allusions of Many Kinds", which nicely attempts to provide a quantitative basis for analysing allusions in Buffy, and Juliet Evusa's "Witchy Women: Witchcraft in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Contemporary African Culture", which takes a comparative ethnological and ethnographic approach, to note just two of the interesting and enlightening essays in this book. If you are interested in Buffy and television criticism, check it out.