The Books of My Life: Buffy Goes Dark

 

Scholarly work on the media worlds of Joss Whedon have become legendary, at least to that small coterie of devotees and analysts in the academic world of Media Studies and its adjuncts who have analysed the work of Whedon since the debut of Buffy on the WB netlet in 1997. Buffy Studies, the scholarly study of the Buffy text, seems to have begun in 1998 with the publication by then Yale Social and Cultural Anthropologist David Graeber, of his essay "Rebel Without a God" in the anarchist magazine In These Times in 1998, only a year after Buffy debuted on American television. Buffy Studies, in turn, morphed into Whedon Studies as Whedon turned to other projects including Angel, the Buffy spinoff that premiered on Fox in 1999, Firefly, Whedon's cowboy space opera which came to Fox in 2002, Dollhouse, with its commercialised corporate Actives or Dolls who serviced the elite and which debuted on Fox in 2009, comic books, particularly his Marvel, Buffy, Angel, and Firefly comic books, and films, including the film that was a continuation of his TV show Firefly, Serenity (2005),  his reflexive horror film, Cabin in the Woods (2011), his updated Shakespeare film, Much Ado About Nothing (2012), and his several Hollywood blockbuster superhero films, most prominently his two Avengers films of 2012 and 2015.

One of the publishers that has been central to, if not at the heart of the subdiscipline of Buffy and Whedon Studies over the years, is McFarland. Among the books that McFarland has published on Whedon's work, in this case Buffy, is Buffy Goes Dark: Essays on the Final Two Seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009) edited by Lynne Edwards, Elizabeth Rambo, and James South, prominent figures all in the world of Whedon Studies. Buffy Goes Dark is a collection of essays that focuses ostensibly on the controversial, at least to some, seasons six and seven of the show, though given that Buffy is an unfolding text and has been since the first season, it also touches on earlier seasons and episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The essays in Buffy Goes Dark explore various aspects of seasons six and seven of Buffy including its authorship, its themes, its narrative form, and seasons six and seven themselves, seasons, which Whedon and others associated with the show, said were organised around the dominant themes of oh grow up and it's all about the power.

As is the case with almost all multiple authored essay collections on any subject I have had the pleasure of reading Buffy Goes Dark,  is, when viewed synoptically, of variable quality. I found some of the essays very good, others good, some indifferent, and a few problematic. The very good first: Brandy Ryan excellently explores the Willow and Tara relationship, one of the few "normal" lesbian relationships on commerical American television in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Ira and Anne Shull offer an excellent analysis of Andrew, one of the many characters who finds redemption in Buffy, in Andrew's case in season seven, as the Candide of the Buffyverse. Michael Adams nicely explores the transformation of Slayer jargon and slayer slang in the sixth and seventh seasons of the show after Buffy's second "resurrection", from verbal style to metaphysical and moral style. Rhonda Wilcox and Gregory Erickson and Jennifer Lemberg offer fascinating textual analyses of seasons six and seven and explore the ruptures and discontinuities in the Buffy narrative and style in both seasons thanks to their refiguarations of flesh and spirit, immanence and transcendence, de-manicheanising of humans and non-humans and their associated rapes and violations, and its subversion of narrative linearity and audience expectations, subversions Buffy had actually been playing around with for some time as in season three's "The Wish" and "Doppelgangland", season four's "Superstar", and in its often reflexive locker and poster mise-en-scene paraphernalia since season one.

I found several essays in Buffy Goes Dark good. David Perry does a serviceable job of exploring the work of Buffy writer and showrunner, Marti Noxon. David Kociemba offers a good exploration of the work of another writer and producer on Buffy (and beyond), Jane Espensen, by drawing extensively on her online blog about writing. Lynne Edwards and Carly Haines offer an excellent analysis of the continuities between seasons six and seven and earlier seasons and note correctly that Buffy went dark bit by bit. I would, by the way, trace Buffy's darkness back to the season one episode "Nightmares " with its realistic depiction of the terrors associated with broken families, to second season episodes like "Anne", "Surprise/Innocence", "Passion", "I Only Have Eyes for You", and Becoming, to third season episodes like "The Wish", "Helpless", "Bad Girls/Consequences", and "Graduation Day", to fourth seasons episodes like "Fear Itself", and to the entire fifth season. Edwards's and Haines's attempt to tie Buffy's earlier darkness to the the rise of netlets like the WB and UPN who targeted their product to specific demographics (market segmentation), on the other hand, seems less successful to me and felt akin to the expansion of a TV show that was short on time. 

Still other essays in the collection left me feeling a bit betwixt, a bit liminal, a bit hot and a bit cold despite the fact that I agree with the utility of the analogies they use in order to understand and unlock the meanings associated with season six and season seven of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Perhaps this was because I was familiar with the themes they were exploring thanks to a fairly extensive reading of previous scholarly work on Buffy, thanks to reading similar interpretations of the show in other critical analyses previously, and thanks to my broad education in social theory and sociology and cultural anthropology. Elizabeth Rambo uses William Butler Yeats's gyre spiraling out of control before returning to its now changed centre while Paul Hawkins uses the myth of the heroes' journey as delineated by Joseph Campbell and mediated by Christopher Vogler, and particularly the hero's supreme ordeal late in his or her journey, a state in which the hero (there are actually several heroes who take heroes journeys in Buffy and the Buffyverse including Buffy herself, Willow, Xander, Spike, Anya, Wesley, Giles, Cordelia, Lily, Angel, and Andrew) is trapped in a liminal state between life and death, human and non-human, good and evil, and light and darkness, as interpretive means through which to explore the penultimate season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. James South uses the seventh season episode "Storyteller" centring on Andrew and narrated by Andrew in Masterpiece Theatre fashion, which is a story about stories, to argue that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is, on one level entertainment and thus conventional and formulaic, romantic, an adventure, and about heroism, and, another level, particularly in season seven, is reflexive, educational, and deconstructionist. Buffy is, in other words, according to South, about, if imperfectly, the reality behind and underneath the conventions and formulae of traditional Hollywood films and television. Finally, South argues that the discipline of philosophy (I would add sociology and history for that matter and note that social and cultural anthropology has always been more broadly focused) must not forget that presentism and its fetishisation of the stories it currently tells, are, ultimately, conventions and formulas that separate the reader, the watcher, or the hearer, from experience and that it should never forget the importance of experience beyond conformity. I found the movement between philosphy and Buffy a bit dissonant, but perhaps that is the point.

Still other essays in Buffy Goes Dark were much less compelling for me and left me somewhat cold and, at the same time, theoretically seeing red. Alissa Wilt's essay on the Willow and Tara relationship in Buffy, is characterised by a number of problems which seem inherent to crystal ball textualism, the form of textual analysis that has become dominant in literary, film, and television studies in the wake of the theoretical revolutions of the late 1960s and which, because it is both contextual and non-contextual at the same time, characterised by a massive hole in its selectively empirical heart. Wilt's accuses Buffy, thanks to the shows killing of Tara by Warren, one of Buffy's trio of evil nemeseses in season six of playing, wittingly or unwittingly, the evil dead lesbian cliche card. Wilt's ultimately overdetermined by its normative assumptions and presuppositions, analysis of the Willow and Tara relationship, distorts the text of Buffy, as Ryan points up in her essay in the collection. Warren was not trying to kill Tara in the episode "Seeing Red". He was trying to kill Buffy. Wilts distorts the text of Buffy ultimately to score, as is characteristic of crystal ball textualism, ideologically correct points. In the process Wilts' paper raises the question of whether many, if not all, of the analyses associated with crystal ball textualism are the product of readers' cultural, economic, political,  geographic, and demographic contexts, since not only is the text as given (the exegetical level) distorted in favour of an analysis of the correct "realties" that ultimately undergird and devour the exegetical text from below (the homiletic level), but since absolutely no empirical quantitative or qualitative based random samples are provided or referenced that actually show how actual readers really read the Buffy text.

Another essay I found problematic was that of Agnes Curry and Josef Velazquez. Curry's and Velasquez's exploration of the theme of the chosen family, the family of choice rather than blood, in Buffy is, like Wilts's similarly grounded in and on assumptions or presuppositions that are questionable. Curry and Velazquez argue that the chosen family in Buffy is grounded in three glues: the eschatalogical, the proto-fascist or hierarchical racialised and sexualised glue, and the we are the chosen people glue, all very similar to the glues that have historically held together theocratic varieties of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam not to mention nation-states. Curry's and Velasquez's conceptions of these glues, however, fails to recognise that, Buffy and the other often changing members of the Scooby Gang, are fighting a reactive war, a real rather than an imaginary war. It fails to realise that Buffy is more Nieburian (Reinhold Niebuhr was a liberal like Curry and Velasquez) than Quaker in its social ethics and morality and notions of human nature (Niebuhr took issue with the liberal variant that had as its sacred key symbols teleological optimism and utopianism, and with Quakerism, whose secondary symbols, secondary to the central symbol of the inner light, were optimistic, utopian, and pacifist in teleological ways). Curry's and Velazquez' reading fails to recongnise that real evil exists in the Buffyverse and that evil, even though it is complicated, complex, and much less manichean than in other mythologies, including that of American nationalism, exists. Finally, Curry and Velazquez fail to realise that the humans, demons, ex-demons, vampires, and witches who make a choice to fight against evil in the Buffyverse do so under the leadership of the charismatic slayer, a charismatic slayer alone among slayers fights the neverending good fight with the help and support of others. 

Because the ideologically correct etic assumptions Curry and Velazquez ground their analysis in are different from those of the Buffyverse they miss the fact that Max Weber's conception of power and authority--charismatic, patrimonial and traditional, and rational bureaucratic (most militaries in rational bureaucratic social formations are largely rational bureaucratic, by the way)--is more relevant to an emic and etic analysis of the Buffyverse than the anarchistic-democratic and fascist ones they ustilise. Given this war against evil Buffy has to fight, Buffy is an exceptional and radically other, though not a singular, charismatic saviour figure (making Buffy and the redeemed Faith, one of the three slayers in the Buffyverse, different from the traditional and bureaucratic saviour figures constructed by patrimonial, rational bureaucratic, and theocratic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) who gains, over time, increasingly adult power and authority that is recognised by other members of what might be called, the slayer sect, the slayer religion, a charismatic religion with its own meaning system and power and authority structure (one that is a community of choosing others, hence sect like, that interestingly becomes more Quakery in its politics in season seven). Given all this, and given that Buffy's power is gendered as female (as is Faith's), the issue of the matriarchal or patriarchal nature of the Buffyverse seems moot to me. Finally, I should note that chosenness and proto-fascism are both variants of ethnocentrism (as are the constructs of racism and genderism) making Curry's and Velazquez's delineation of two of the "family" glues in Buffy somewhat redundant.

All of the above criticisms of textual violation, by the way, are not new. I, for instance, recall Rhonda Wilcox, the mother of Buffy Studies to Lavery's fathering one, once telling me that the work of those engaged in Buffy Studies, and by extension Literary, Film, and Television Studies, with their theoretical and homiletic assumptions, had to be engaged with in a scholarly fashion, in other words, which is fair. The problem with such an argument, however, is that criticisms like those above have been offered about crystal ball textualism at least since the late 1960s though they always seem to land on what appears to be impervious to criticism holy and sacred soil of the crystal ball textualists and which automatically rejects such criticism because, as one Film Studies scholar once said, crystal ball donut hole textualism is founded on and grounded in religious like beliefs or meanings and assumptions that undermine what should be a dialectical process of criticism making criticising Buffy crystal ball textualism a waste of time and energy in the same way that criticising fundamentalist brands of religion is ultimately a waste of time and effort.

Buffy Goes Dark is not perfect as I noted earlier. Its concentration on auteurism, characters, narrative, themes, style, and season six and seven more broadly, gives short shrift to genre analysis and more could be done with the tone and change of tone and metaphors and the change in metaphors in the show over its seven seasons and particularly in seasons six and seven. Since such selectivity probably is inherent in the nature of the anthology beast, however, I am not sure this is an entirely fair cop. Additionally, it would be nice to see something that most of the essays in the book do not do, namely, more historical (including an analysis of primary source material) and ethnographic flavoured approaches to the Buffy text and its contexts.

Finally, one thing that should be kept in mind as one reads Buffy Goes Dark is the fact that the collection was written and published before Whedon's fall from saintly grace (humans do, and one can only assume this is functional in some way, shape, or form, often make holy saints out of fleshly humans). The reasons for Whedon's fall from grace have played themselves out in the often nasty and vigilante like court of public opinion and include condemnations of sexual affairs, the samizdat like release of his screenplay for the film Wonder Woman, which seemed sexist to some though not others and hence ironic given Whedon's self identification as a feminist, Whedon's taking over and transformation of one of the Justice League of America films, a film that brought the wrath of another cult like group down upon his head, in this case the cult associated with the devotees or groupies of Zack Snyder, and the subsequent release of the Snyder version of the film, and allegations of his authoratian behaviour at work, something that descriptively speaking puts Whedon in such company as Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, George Szell, Bob Knight, a host of sports coaches, perfectionists all, and a host of celebrity and celebrity wannabe prima donnas or divas. 

The essays in Buffy Goes Dark thus represent the state of Whedon scholarship before the fall rather than after it. As a result, some critics and some of those who have worked with Whedon over the years have recently, in sadly very typical human fashion, have chosen to throw pots and kettles at what is now Whedon's glass house. In this context, however, we should remember that the character most like Whedon in Buffy, though all the main characters in the show have something of Whedon in them, including a bit of the authoritarian and authoritative Buffy, according to Joss, is, as Whedon has said on several occasions, Xander, a character in the show who is hardly perfect. How Whedon's fall will affect scholarship on the man and his work is still unclear though it has led to the demise of websites devoted to Whedon, websites which once celebrated him as a secular saint, like Whedonesque, and a change in the subtitle of the online journal Slayage (originally subtitled the Online Journal of Buffy Studies) from the Online Journal of Whedon Studies to the Online Journal of Buffy +Studies, after, one can only assume, a lot of gnashing of ethical and moral teeth, a renaming that seems to reflect a need for those studying the work of Whedon to ostracise and exile his now unholy name and concentrate instead on the products of this now absent auteur.