Neverless She Persisted...

[shadowkat]

A good article on Buffy's 20th Anniversary.

Neverless She Persisted - a Look Back at Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Much is made of the show’s first scene, in which gender stereotypes are inverted, and a petite blonde (in this case the vampire Darla) reveals herself to be the powerful one against a world of male aggression and violence. But Buffy was also a show about surviving and about survivors (as, in the fullness of time, we would even learn about Darla herself – a woman who accepted vampirism as her revenge on a world’s puritanical scorn). The continuous visual incongruity of Buffy’s “waif-fu” of tiny women kicking ass has been often critiqued in the intervening years, but it in fact makes an important point about the tendency to overlook, minimize, and infantilize the suffering of young people and particularly young women. In “The Gift,” another of the show’s signature episodes, the teaser ends with the victim Buffy has saved (again male) sputtering: “but you’re just a girl!” Buffy, in the midst with another crippling choice, another taxing ordeal, responds with impossible weariness: ‘That’s what I keep saying.”

The world Buffy moves in, like ours, is one hostile by design to the marginal and minority. Buffy’s Sunnydale is a town built for demons to feed on; its world, its architecture and landscape, are zones of massacre and atrocity: dorms haunted by sexually repressed teens; ribbon-cuttings obscuring colonial genocides; the high school and its terrorized students perched upon the Mouth of Hell itself. Sunnydale is America writ small: a sparkling optimism sugarcoating a history of violence. “Silence is this town’s disease,” Joyce Summers insists, rejecting a somber (and cynical) “moment of silence” – a metaphor made literal (as so many metaphors on Buffy were) when the fairytale Gentleman descend on Sunnydale’s streets, stealing their victims’ voices. In a place presided over by grinningly polite patriarchal mayors and death-white leers in suits, Sunnydale is another Flint, another (as Mr Trick points out), Mayberry, a place where “You’re going to die screaming, but you won’t be heard.”

What I noticed is Buffy turned a lot of long established television and genre tropes on their ear or upside down.

Things have changed now, of course. But back then...I was constantly thinking, OMG, I can't believe they just did that, and it worked.

The show felt like it was a tight rope act, without a net. Taking risks no one else did, and below the radar. Scaring off the culture critics with its funky title and premise, yet the title was a joke - telling us right up front that this was a show that was going to break the rules, and flip genre perceptions and tropes on their proverbial heads, Created by a film major, and media studies student, who had a couple of bones to pick with the horror genre, it ended up in some respects flipping that genre on its head and being a really good commentary in the process of our frakked up culture. In some respects it foreshadowed what was to come politically...with it's villains, the egomanical Glorificus and the Mayor...both of which we see weird mirrors of now, in our political and cultural climate.

I miss Buffy. I miss the crazy-ass, smart as blazes, witty, fandom more. Buffy in many ways was an inspiration...at that time, and now, she jumped onto the screen when I needed her most -- having just moved to NYC, on my own, without many prospects. She comforted me during 9/11 and what came after.
And she popped off...just as I was beginning to figure stuff out...yet remaining in the background, with the inspirational echo...if there's a will there's a way, don't give up. And don't let your demons get the better of you. Slay the bastards, instead, one frigging demon at a time. Because life like it or not can feel at times like a town named Sunnydale sitting atop a Hellmouth, ready to collaspe into it at any moment. Just don't let it suck you in ss well.

Comments

[bespangeled]

Yeah - I miss Buffy too. I can understand drifting off to other fandoms - I'm marathoning a bunch of shows. But Buffy is a one-off for me. For some reason the show stays in the center of my core.

I also miss all the faniction that has passed away

[rogin]

All this 20 year nostalgia makes me want to do a rewatch. Buffy was what brought me to LJ and maybe I should do the rewatch to get me going on DW.

It really was an insanely innovative show.

[shadowkat]

If I didn't have so many other things to watch...I'd do a rewatch. But...as it is, I'm behind in my viewing.
And considering getting HBO NOW on Streaming to Stream Big Little Lies.

Buffy also brought me to LJ. I wouldn't know anyone online if it weren't for Buffy. I think it became larger than everyone involved.