Boy was I wrong about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I finally caught up with the show in its fifth season. I initially happened upon Buffy one night during a couple of passes through all the over the air channels my small SONY television set could pick up. I stopped, for some reason, on a station that was showing an episode of Buffy that I later learned was the fifth season episode called "The Replacement". I found the split personality and difficulty in growing up metaphors of that episode intelligent and ultimately quite moving on both an intellectual and emotional level, something I thought that only some British TV shows could do. From that moment on I was hooked on BtVS and I began I looking backwards and forwards in order to try to catch up with every episode of Buffy that I could and to catch up with it in broadcast order since I quickly recognised the novelistic nature of the show. Today, Buffy remains, with Inspector Morse and Lewis and others, one of the finest things I have ever seen on television, seen on the cinema screen, or read in books.
Though I do not consider myself a specialist in film studies, television studies, or literary studies, I have kept abreast of currents in Buffy Studies, a subdiscipline of textual studies that has been massively influenced by currents in film and literary studies from the 1950s to today. I even published a paper critiquing some of the theoretical approaches used to study Buffy and my discontents with them. Given my strong interest in social theory and my occasional interest in film studies, television studies, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I have tried, if fitfully, to keep up with what is happening in the scholarly Buffy Studies and Whedon Studies world. So, it was only a matter of time that I got around to reading Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), a collection of essays on Buffy and Angel, the Buffy spinoff, edited by Elana Levine and Lisa Parks.
Essays in Undead TV explore several aspects of the series. Mary Celeste Kearney's paper explores the economic demographics of the WB, the netlet Buffy initially was broadcast on, and the influence this marketing strategy had on the form and on the substance Buffy took. Susan Murray's essay explores the commodification of Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar, the Chosen One and saviour of the world, a lot, and promoter of Maybelline cosmetics. Annette Hill's and Ian Calcutt's paper explores the convoluted and controversial scheduling of Buffy and Angel as children's and young adult shows on the BBC and Channel 4 and how such scheduling required cuts to and censorship of both shows since they weren't really children's or young teen shows. Hastie and Calcutt argue that this miscategorisation of Buffy and Angel, two globally sold television shows, gave rise to specific and local fan concerns. Amelie Hastie's essay engages Buffy as a knowledge making machine and explores how the scholarly and fan criticism that has grown up around it is a mirror that reflects the rich interpretive nature of the show. She also ponders how a feminist approach might have a transgressive power that allows viewers to break out of their dominant hermeneutic square shells they are socialised into. Cynthia Fuchs's paper explores otherness in Buffy and Dark Angel, another female centred show that ran on the WB. Allison McCracken's essay explores the complex transgressive and queer nature of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Jason Middleton's paper explores the eroticisation of Buffy, the female hero, in male oriented fan magazines like Femme Fatales sold in comic book shops. Elana Levine's essay explores second wave feminist and third wave feminist readings of Buffy the Vampire Slayer arguing that there are third wave feminist aspects to the show.
Essays and books characterised by approaches that are text centred and anemic when it comes to primary production research, generally speaking, fall into several interpretive traps. First, such criticism is often as much if not more normative or ideologically grounded than descriptive, the attempt by a critic to understand the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts in which a given text is produced. Much contemporary humanities criticism, in other words, is grounded in notions of what the critic thinks the text (and by extension the world) should look like rather than in what the text actually looks like. In this normative or ideological style or form of criticism ideologically grounded ethical and moral concerns tend to overdetermine the empirical description of a text raising questions about the validity of such interpretations, interpretations that should perhaps be ultimately seen as varieties of reader response criticism. Second, such criticism tends to assume that all one needs to do in order to analyse a film, television, or literary text is to analyse the final text as it stands, an approach that one of my former academic colleagues calls crystal ball textualism and another refers to as an approach with a massive empirical donut hole at its heart since it generally doesn't engage in an exploration of the production aspects of the final text. Such an approach assumes that an exploration of the parts of a text is not necessary for an understanding of the whole of the final text, a deductive rather than inductive approach. Third, much contemporary film, television, and literary criticism assumes the existence of ideal readers who read texts in the same way academic and scholarly readers read texts or they assume that readers need the help of experts in order to unlock the secrets of the real nature of a text and can then engage in changing the textual world and the world beyond the text, textual analysis as social ethical activism. Such an approach, however, at least on the level of hermeneutics, is problematic given the differences in social and cultural capital of readers and given what we know about how readers actually read texts. We know, for example, thanks to qualitative empirical research that readers read texts in a variety of ways, including active and focused ways and more inactive, passive, and unfocused ways, and that many readers of texts multitask while watching or reading them.
What I liked about many of the essays in Undead TV is that they didn't fall into the crystal ball textualist traps as much as essays in other anthologies and books I have read in Buffy Studies over the years. I found many of the essays in Undead TV to be some of the most interesting work on Buffy Studies and Whedon Studies I have read in some time. McCracken's and Levine's essays were, for example, fascinating and somewhat compelling text centred explorations of the queerness and feminist aspects of the Buffy text while Kearney's essay does, and thankfully so, engage in much needed production research, production research that is essential if we are to ultimately understand how cultural texts like Buffy are produced. A keeper. Recommended.
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