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.