Welcome to the Hellmouth: Postmodernism and Buffy

Welcome to the Hellmouth:

Postmodernism and Buffy

HUM 3085: Television and Popular Culture

Spring 2014Dr. Perdigao

March 21, 2014

Quality TelevisionRobert J. Thompson’s list of distinctive

tendencies/characteristics:1. “Quality TV usually has a quality pedigree.”2. “Desirable demographics notwithstanding, quality shows

must often undergo a noble struggle against profit-mongering networks and non-appreciative audiences.”

3. “Quality TV tends to have a large ensemble cast.”4. “Quality TV has a memory.”5. “Quality TV creates a new genre by mixing old ones.”6. “Quality TV tends to be literary and writer-based.”7. “Quality TV is self-conscious.”8. “The subject matter of quality TV tends toward the

controversial.”9. “Quality TV aspires toward ‘realism.’”

(xxi-vviv)

Wilcox, Rhonda V. and David Lavery. Introduction. Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. xvii-xxix.

Renaming• Buffy as postmodern heroine—counter to stereotype in horror

genre• Play with her name: Buffy Summers• Fin de siècle mentality

• On Naming:Xander CordeliaSpike (William)DawnWillowAngel/AngelusFaith

Destabilizing• “characters’ identities in BtVS are constantly blurred. . . .

Characters can rarely be defined by the modernist binary of Good and Evil; instead they are complex and their actions often ambiguous. Identity is never fixed, and the modernist quest for the authentic, or essential, self is generally revealed to be the illusion that postmodernism contends. The self, in spite of attempts to understand one’s ‘true’ nature . . . is instead contingent, multiple, and perpetually in flux.” (Daspit 125)

Daspit, Toby. “Buffy Goes to College, Adam Murders to Dissect: Education and Knowledge in Postmodernity.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale. Ed. James B. South. Chicago: Open Court, 2003. 117-130.

Hidden Identities• Exchange student from South America=Inca Mummy Girl• Frat boys=secret society sacrificing teen girls to demon-snake• Billy Fordham (Max from Roswell)=vampire-wannabe cult• Buffy’s mother’s boyfriend=killer robot (John Ritter!)• Oz=werewolf (Seth Green!)• Jenny=gypsy tracking Angel• Giles=Ripper

(291-292)

• (Big) Addition:Dawn=Key

Little, Tracy. “High School is Hell: Metaphor Made Literal in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale. Ed. James B. South. Chicago: Open Court, 2003. 282-293.

Postmodernisms• Heteroglossia, polyphony

(multiple voices, no authoritative account)• Indeterminancies

(gaps, ambiguities)• Fragmentations

(collage rather than unities, cohesion)• Hybridization

(mixing genres, frame-breaking)• Metafictions

(self-conscious, self-reflexive, fiction about fiction)

Simulated Realities

http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/080619/buffy-the-vampire-slayer_l.jpg

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/buffy/indetail/images/prophecy.jpg

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41zdBvGQW4L._SL500_AA280_.jpg

Silence and Action• “Hush” is the only BtVS episode to be nominated for an Emmy

for its writing (Wilcox 147)

• No dialogue for at least 29 minutes

• Professor Maggie Walsh: “Talking about communication. Talking about language, not the same thing.”

• Hierarchical world of the fairy tale: Giles, the wise man, states the need for the princess and the characters and audience assume it’s Buffy (148)

• Giles’ performance in the lecture hall: Gentlemen’s applause

• The Danse Macabre as diegetic music vs. the musical score as non-diegetic

• Old music, old technology (overhead projection)—return to earlier times (148)

Apocalyptic Apocalypses?• Buffy assumes the role as princess

• Heterosexual couple end up together and save the world from the Big Bad

• Experimentation with identity—but here tradition reinstated at the end (Sex and the City?)

The sense of an ending• Episode complicates the fairy tale—surface vs. depth

• “Instead of being the princess imprisoned in the tower, Buffy literally breaks into the tower.” (Wilcox 149)

• “Instead of being swept off her feet to be saved by the hero (cf. Errol Flynn, or Luke Skywalker swinging on that rope with Princess Leia), Buffy herself grabs a rope and swings through the air feet first in battle” (149).

• The scream—over-dubbed—not as a “girly scream”

• Gentlemen=dead white males

• Patriarchal order

• Phallic tower—source of power

• Formal gestures, performance; Victorian era characters; as a “class” (contrast to their henchmen)

• Destruction—explosion

Subtexts• Sexual content

• Escaping censoring—gestures vs. words

• Implicit and explicit sexual content

• Psychology class, dream

• Psychology professor Maggie Walsh, directs the Initiative—ideas about gendered power

• As institution and control over the young adults

• Whedon’s statement “As soon as you say something, you’ve eliminated every other possibility of what you might be talking about” (qtd. in Wilcox 161)