If I were at full Slayer power, I’d be punning right about now

It’s List of Giant Things day!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer has had one of the strongest presences in academic writing about television, or at least, it did until The Wire was crowned “the best show in television history,” and it became popular to fret over urban violence and the inevitable failures of modern institutions. Do not mistake me – I am all in favor of jumping on the “best show in television history” bandwagon, because The Wire just blows everything else out of the water.

Still, Buffy holds a special place in the development of academic television criticism, because while The Wire was catapulted quite quickly into canonical status (is now the subject of classes at Ivy League universities, has become a benchmark against which all other television is compared, is constantly perceived in relation to Dickens, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, etc. as way of solidifying its high-culture position), Buffy grew into its position slowly, and the whole process was accompanied by persistent navel-gazing. There are dozens of books, but take for example Buffy Meets the Academy, a collection of essays broken into sections: Power and the Buffy Canon, Buffy Meets the Classics, Buffy and the Classroom. My favorite essay titles in the book include “Buffy Never Goes It Alone: The Rhetorical Construction of Sisterhood in the Final Season” and “Buffy’s Insight into Wollstonecraft and Mill” – the text is constantly reaching toward the language and references of a standard critical discussion, but is ever self-conscious about making a popular network television show with an audience of teenage girls its subject.

Buffy became an academic hit largely because it turns several favorite gendered tropes on their heads, and dramatizes the reclamation of the Gothic as an empowering female genre. Where the vampire story traditionally narrates the travails of lovely, victimized women, dangerously attractive vampires, and chaste, heroic male saviors, Buffy re-cast the role of Awesome Vampire Destroyer as a far-from-helpless heroine, known for her roundhouse kicks and her attraction to Bad Dudes. It’s not hard to read all sorts of gender politics, role reversals, high school metaphors and sexual commentary into Buffy. But it needs to defined against not just Gothic genres, but also earlier high school-focused television.

One place to see this clearly is in the dialogue, which is crucial on Buffy. Where shows like Beverly Hills, 90210 has a dialogue pacing that forces you to wait entire geological eras before the next line comes lumbering along, Buffy is fast and funny. Joss Whedon-eque dialogue became as important a defining characteristic for the show as Sorkin-esque language on The West Wing or Sherman-Palladino for Gilmore Girls. The common denominator for all of them is speed, but where Sorkin utilizes uncannily complete dialogic paragraphs and Sherman-Palladino was queen of the pop-culture reference, the language on Buffy can be undervalued as merely relentlessly quippy. It is brimming over with ironic one-liners, frequently voiced by Xander, (“Yesterday my life was like, ‘uh oh, pop quiz.’ Today, it’s ‘rain of toads”), but Buffy and even the villains get their fair share of humor. As Buffy nervously enters the dank, dripping sewer that houses the Big Bad of Season One, an ancient vampire called The Master, she comments that it looks like he has some water damage. “Oh good, the feeble banter portion of the fight,” he responds. When Willow worries about asking out Oz, who is a few years older than she, Buffy (who is dating a vampire) replies, “You think he’s too old ‘cause he’s a senior? Please. My boyfriend had a bicentennial.” (Many more examples here.)

Yes, it’s quippy. But the dialogue maintains Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s careful two-tone balancing act, allowing it to walk the tightrope between Gothic plotlines and an average teenager coming-of-age story. At any moment where horror threatens to overrun an episode, a quick dose of snark yanks the atmosphere back into a more grounded framework. Simultaneously, as Buffy’s painful character development forces her to cope with all the usual, awful realities of adulthood – traumatic first sexual experience, death of a parent, assuming the role of caretaker – the dialogue often shifts into a sincere mode, allowing characters to express hesitance or blunt sadness without the benefit of mitigating humor. Dialogue knits together all the light high school comedy with dark monstrous destiny, and as the series moves into later seasons, performs an impressive reversal, where monsters are the light action sequences that punctuate bleak real-world problems. Particularly in seasons six and seven, the quips that were previously used to pepper scenes of apocalyptic danger begin to appear more frequently as Buffy tries to apply for a loan, or get a job that actually has a salary. “Are you in the wrong line? That’s for deposits, that’s for withdrawals, and this one…is for getting kicked in the face.”

The Gentlemen

Of course, I can’t talk about Buffy and dialogue without at least mentioning the episode “Hush,” which appears in the show’s fourth season. A seriously scary group of fairy tale demons called The Gentlemen arrive in Sunnydale and steal everyone’s voices, Little Mermaid-style, so that no one can scream when they start cutting out peoples’ hearts. For the entire body of the episode, there is no dialogue at all, and Buffy and the Scooby Gang resort to writing on dry erase boards, using overhead projectors, and miming (often lewd) gestures. It’s an amazing sequence, and it establishes that Buffy can work without a steady stream of wry, underhand comments. Still, it’s clear that “Hush” is an exception-proves-the-rule example, where the absence of dialogue only heightens our awareness of how crippled the show would be without it.

Willow and Buffy realize they can't speak

As a subject for academic attention, though, I feel sure the show’s incessant punning hinders its foothold as a serious cultural object. It’s not always easy to think about Mary Wollstonecraft in the context of a show where the villain cries out “You were destined to die! It is written!” and the heroine answers, “What can I say? I flunked the written.” But the cheesy, goofy dialogue is really the forum where all those gender politics and David Lynchian dream sequences are built, and where Buffy’s role as a believable sixteen-year-old is defined again and again. Whatever the case, shows like The Wire begin to take their place in a television canon, and Buffy gets stuck underneath the deeply serious enterprises like The Sopranos or Mad Men. But I really believe Buffy has been an important catalyst for television criticism, and hope that it won’t get slowly relegated to the teenage girl-friendly genre project it superficially resembles.