episodes: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
brief reflections on TV shows I can’t stop thinking about
Lately, my husband and I have been rewatching Buffy, Joss Whedon’s seven-season exploration of a teenager destined to slay vampires. The title character enrolls in Sunnydale High School when she and her recently divorced mother move from LA (the world of the movie from which the show spun off) to a town built on a hellmouth and therefore rife with demonic activity. As she navigates her nightly vampire hunting with the pressures of high school, Buffy finds herself surrounded and supported by two friends and Giles, her “Watcher” who trains and protects her while under the guise of school librarian. Fans of the show know the group as the Scooby Gang, and like Scooby Doo, the show builds momentum with a monster-of-the-week, a rotation of creatures to show off Buffy’s (and Sarah Michelle Geller’s) skills and lay some cosmological and dramatic groundwork. By the start of season 2, several longer arcs based on relationship dynamics and the ever-looming end of the world are running.
The show premiered while I was in college, and everything about the show, from the clothing and the hair to the emo coffee house mood at The Bronze (the local all-ages hangout that provided a spotlight for many a rising band in the LA music scene), perfectly preserves this slice of the 90s. I watched it here and there during its initial run, but I didn’t really pay attention to it until I moved to DC in 2010. The Black Cat hosted Hellmouth Happy Hour every Saturday…which sounds more glamorous than the reality. About 30 or 40 strangers gathered in the sideroom of the club to watch an episode of Buffy while staff restocked the bars and prepared for the night’s shows. That was it. The club ran other series, too, including Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica. Seeing a trend yet?
The common denominator: nerds. Some of us watched these shows in the closet, afraid to let others know of our cult devotions, but there, in the drafty sideroom of The Black Cat, we found the other people who laughed at the right moments, cried at the right moments, and dropped nerdy factoids and obsessive observations at the right moments. It was a poorly kept secret that the target demographic for Buffy was the Misfit — the kids who weren’t afraid of being different or smart or interested in things. We all saw ourselves in Buffy, Xander, and Willow, and we lived vicariously through each of them as they shattered misconceptions and stereotypes with the help of supernatural forces. We all had a Giles, too, that one adult who treated teenagers like people, who respected the misfits, who made a safe space in word and deed, who held our trust while all other adults and authority figures disappointed us.
Returning to the series this time around, I looked forward to the 90s nostalgia and revisiting the show’s campy effects and trademark self-aware, fuck-the-fourth-wall writing. What I didn’t anticipate, what I didn’t remember from previous rounds, was the emotional depth of the stories being told and the not-so-subtle metaphors for the pressures of adolescence and social life — monsters reflecting addiction and sexual violence, curses that tapped into feelings of loneliness, isolation, and rage, plots that highlight the fraught relationship between adolescents and parents. I didn’t remember the show’s frank (well, franker than any other conversations we were having then) engagement with topics like grief, sex, and anxiety.
And I really didn’t remember the tender and nuanced development of the character Giles over the course of the show. He begins a fuddy-duddy, a nose-in-the-book type, but a shy and retiring exterior hides deep experience, skill, and passion, all of which fuel his mission to protect Buffy. It’s too easy to consider Giles a “father figure” to Buffy — sure, the introduction of Giles in her life just as her father disappears seems to tap into this trope, but he neither situates himself in nor is sought out by the Scooby Gang in the role of parent. His authority was earned, not wielded, and he stepped into the roles the group needed — a friend, a companion, a cheerleader, a trainer, a motivational coach, and at times a very vulnerable, scared, and lonely man who needs to be cared for himself.
The unique relationship of Giles to the Scooby Gang magnifies the uniqueness of the Gang itself. It’s not a family, it’s not a club — it’s a community. Of course it’s the misfits, the ones who know too well what it’s like to be disconnected from others, who can show us what community is: a bond formed out of shared experience, an intentional commitment to helping each other be their best selves. And of course it’s the misfits, the ones who’ve been fending off demons their whole lives, who really kick ass when it comes to slaying vampires.
