Save the World or Go to the Mall: Conflicting Impulses in Fantastic Teen TV

8/14/2019 Save the World or Go to the Mall: Conflicting Impulses in Fantastic Teen TV

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Anne J.

Television, Gender, and Sexuality

Topic #6 Fantastic Teen TV

Save the World or Go to the Mall: Conflicting Impulses in Fantastic Teen TV

Like the fantastic sit-coms of the 60s, contemporary teen shows structured by the supernatural disrupt

notions of traditional family and attempt to represent the unrepresentable through displacement. Many shows,

however, attempt to have it both ways to offer realistic representations of teen life and make use of fantastic

aspects in order to take up the excess that cannot be portrayed in any direct way through television. The power

in these shows is with the fantastic teens against the unendowed adults (and the rest of the world), and the

intrinsic nature of their freakishness suggests qualities that are more generational than age based. However, in

disrupting biological ties in favor of the centrality of friendship, these programs cannot figure a sustainable

relationship between audience and television. Fantastic teen series express dissatisfaction that they may then

attempt to channel into commercialism (even while critiquing that very system), yet their structural underpinning

make commodities a poor substitute for love and romance. Ultimately, they suggest that only friendship bonds ar

powerful enough to change the world, and in doing so they refigure the role of TV in public life, as one that is

constantly balancing between a system based on individualism and competition which holds TV together, and a

culture of companionship and action that is increasingly defining what TV is.

In her article From Domestic Space to Outer Space: The 1960s Fantastic Family Sit-Com Lynn Spigel

traces the emergence of the fantastic family sit-com as a genre founded on the merger between the troubled

paradise of 1950s domesticity and the new-found ideals of the American future (205). Such programs, she

argues, contested their own form and content as a complex organization of contradictory ideas, values, and

meanings (206). The origins of the fantastic genre, then, were filled with the contradictions that roiled the

historical moment. Spigel contends that this genre did not constitute an escape from reason (206), necessarily,

but instead presented a highly irrational, supernatural discourse on private lifethey launched a critique of the

American family (214). While fantastic sit-coms offered alternative to programs like Ozzie and Harrietthat gre


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further and further out of touch with contemporary social problems, they also presented a genre shift to TV,

making it clear that TV need not attempt a direct reflection of daily life in order to be effective. When it was used

on suburban adults, this technique shook traditional understandings and made middle-class suburban life seem

potentially menacing.

If these fantastic shows humorously depicted a challenge to the status-quo, however, the fantastic teen

genre would seem to uphold it. Since the 1960s, teenagers, and especially teen girls, have been viewed by

marketers and adults in general as alien, as outlined in Moya Lucketts Girl Watchers: Patty Duke and Teen

TV. She writes that socially and culturally, then, teenage girls and their peculiar, ever changing tastes were

deemed incomprehensible, unpredictable, and potentially unrepresentable (100). Thus, whereas Samanthas

power inBewitchedmight suggest that any of your perfectly normal suburban neighbors could secretly be a

witch, fantastic teen TV can be seen to buy in to the dominant idea that teens are something completely different

from adults something desirable yet also unsatisfying. Luckett states that for marketers and television

programmers, teen girls were portrayed as bewildering, creating images of teenage girls as particularly erratic,

incomprehensible, and often irresponsible (97). Of course, like the earlier programs, contemporary fantastic

premises hold both resistant and conservative elements within them. A series likeBuffy the Vampire Slayer

portrays this adult view of feminine adolescence through Buffys mother and her principal, who are confused by

Buffys actions and, not knowing the secret that lies behind them, see her in the very terms Luckett articulates.

Unlike My So-Called Life, for example, fantastic teen TV does not present a unified surface of teen identity

(Byers, 713), but this in itself matches what Luckett notes as strategies connote the fragmented and contradictor

nature of teenage girls subjectivity (101). The program and others like it thus offer the classic view of teens as

alien by literalizing the premise, but it also offers a grounding narrative to explain teen girl actions, which makes

it oppositional to stereotyped perceptions without necessarily turning away from the forces that hold up those

perceptions. Contradictions, then, are part of the dominant representation of female adolescent identity, yet as we

will see later, they present problems for TV form.

Perhaps the biggest shift from the fantastic sit-coms of the sixties to the fantastic teen TV today is the

move away from the biological family as the primary unit of association. For fantastic sit-coms of the sixties, the

fantastic and the strange were embedded in the heart of the biological family itself. As Spigel writes, woman-as


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alien films and television programs problematized the ideology of domesticity by making it strange (222). In

Bewitched, for example, fantastic and supernatural qualities are specifically associated with the biological family

Not only is Samantha tied to the magical world primarily through her mother, Endora, but many of the magical

guests who show up have some familial relation to Sam, often being introduced as aunts, uncles, or cousins. This

is further supported by the fact that both of Samanthas children have magical powers, despite their fathers

decisive lack of fantastic genes. Luckett notes that teens were conspicuously absent fromBewitched and other

fantastic sit-coms of the 60s (99), but it was not only their presence that was missing, it was also their social

practices. Luckett states that gimmick shows, with their deliberate emphasis on fantasy and displacement,

offered an attractive solution to the dilemma of representing the unrepresentable teenager (99), but shows

likeBewitchedemphasized an unbreakable familial bond that certainly spoke to teenagers in strange and

conflicting ways. While the trope of a biological family that you cannot escape from may have been attractive to

teens, the emphasis on the biological family as the site of both the counter-culture andthe secretly empowered

may well have rung false with teen viewers, those who are seen as different from their families and strange

for not conforming to their practices or moral codes.

Part of what may make teens unrepresentable here, and thus cause the confusion, is the problem of

confronting teen sexuality. Samanthas magical power does not come off as sexual, and her desire for Darren

posits an almost oppositional relationship, wherein her sexual orientation is towards the human, the normal,

while her biological ties are to the fantastic. Spigel argues of this convention that it is romantic love and marriag

(the reproduction of the status quo and normal gender distinctions) that finally solve the crisis of the Other. Tha

is, sexual difference structures all other differences (222). This is displayed inBewitchedthrough the difference

between Samanthas relationship, that of the normalized ideal of monogamous marriage, and that of her parents,

who often show up separately, do not live together and have other romantic interests. The fantastic family show,

then, can use socially acceptable forms of sexuality as a device to contain the difference they present, but teen

sexuality carries with it stigma and taboo, and cannot function to reign in difference because since the fantastic i

shared among peers, potential romantic or sexual interests would also be different from adult norms. This is a

problem for fantastic teen TV. Perhaps for this reason, teen programs of the sixties presented a world where

teenage girls participated in a culture that stressed the joys of self and same sex friendships (Spigel, 96),


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evading the messy questions of teen sexuality. This presented a kind of cultural segregation instead of letting

sexual differences cover over other differences teenagers stayed with people similar to them, allowing

difference to be purely generational.

Yet contemporary teen programs, dealing with a culture where teen sexuality is at least grudgingly

acknowledged, do not have the same luxury of marking friendship and self as being the ultimate sources of

satisfaction. WhileBuffy, for example, marks friendship as the ideal social relation, having the show structured

around a group of friends and having friendships last throughout the series, it also depicts characters longing for

romantic and sexual relationships that last. Sadly for the characters, almost none of their relationships do last.

Lovers are murdered, as in the case of Jenny and Tara, or circumstances prevent them being together, as for Ange

and Buffy and Oz and Willow, or they simply betray or leave one another in more mundane human fashion, as is

the case for Xander and Anya. By the end of the program, only Willow and Kennedys relationship remains intac

and it is a relatively new development[1]. Rhonda Wilcox argues that the dangers of Buffys sexual relationships

emphasize the dangers of sexual encounters (21), but the pattern of broken relationships marks a larger void in

the program that cannot be explained away as a pedagogical message about risky sex, since the pattern holds eve

in socially sanctioned cases such as Xander and Anyas engagement. Instead, a consequence of abandoning the

normal, is the loss of love relationships. By keeping teens in the position of the ever-desiring, the show is able

to posit an empowered vision of adolescence without doing away with the longing for more that propels capitalis

economies. This longing supports the continued existence of television, with what Hastie calls its structure of

obsolescence (10). The programs inability to offer an alternative method for satisfaction, though, gives an

underlying critique to its existence, as it encourages a kind of capitalism thats not selling anything.

These changes from the fantastic family sit-com correspond with a change in the location of the fantastic

In contemporary fantastic teen TV shows, the fantastic is strictly opposed to the biological family. While magical

traits often remain innate qualities in shows likeBuffy the Vampire Slayer, they are not shared among family

members. As Wilcox points out in There Will Never be a Very SpecialBuffy, the series implicitly calls

attention to the generational conflict and the horror of facing adults/adulthood (20). InBuffy, the title character

hides her true superhero identity from her constantly clueless mother, who not only remains ignorant of her

daughters true nature for the almost all of the first two season of the show, but also frequently constructs alterna


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explanations for explicitly supernatural events in order to maintain her denial. Rarely mentioned to begin with, th

biological families of the other characters fade into obscurity as the program progresses, until at the finale for the

show they are completely erased in their absence from any characters mention. Instead of family, friendship is

the glue that holdsBuffy together. And while romantic relationships constantly fall apart, friendships remain

sovereign, outlasting any attempts to break them. Wilcox notes, friendship defeats the monster (20). Even Fait

and Buffy, whove tried to kill each other and fought desperately, end up as buddies in the end. The focus on

friendship means that the program is organized around the fantastic core, while the ordinary remains always on

the peripheral, unlike a series likeBewitched, where the normal, structured by sexual difference, is omnipresen

When it does show up, the real menace inBuffy is repeatedly shown to be the real world parents who

dont understand, brain tumors, creeps with guns, and a society that refuses to tolerate difference. Perhaps the

most frightening episode of the entire program involves a demon who poisons Buffy, making her slip back and

forth between the diegetic reality of the program and an alternate universe that can be read as the real world

(Season Six, episode seventeen, Normal Again). In that universe, there is nothing supernatural, and Buffy is

instead having massive hallucinations, basically dreaming her entire life as it has been shown throughout the

series. Importantly, in this real life none of Buffys friends exist, but her parents are alive and taking care of he

reaffirming the link between the ordinary and the biological family. In the normal world, Buffys parents and

doctor convince her to attempt to kill her friends in the supernatural world in order to bring her fully back to th

non-fantastic universe. Thus, the ordinary threatens the lives of everyone in the diegetic real world, the fantast

one. Because the viewer is left uncertain at the end of the episode which world is the true one, this normality

also threatens the entire premise of the program. In Normal Again, even the doctor who claims Buffy is

hysterical suggests this reading, telling her, you used to create these grand villains to battle against, and now

what is it? Just ordinary students you went to high school with. No gods or monsters ... just three pathetic little

men ... who like playing with toys. While the doctor thinks he is pointing to an inconsistency, he actually hits

upon a central truth of the series, that the real is always more dangerous than the fantastic could ever be. It

could be argued that this was always the real problem inBewitchedand programs like it, too that if only the

social norms had been less rigid, almost none of the problems in the series would be an issue. Spigel notes that in

fantastic programs, rather than the aliens advancing a threat, it was the white middle-class suburbanites who


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revealed their darker sides (222). Similarly, in the case of teen programs, the use of the fantastic serves to

critique the status-quo, even though the program itself requires the dominant capitalist system for its existence.

Is this ominous real world aligned with capitalism, though? In a way, it is the teen, here the fantastic,

who is traditionally marked as supporting consumerism. The very category of the teenager is, more or less, a

creation of consumer marketing. A focus on consumption was, in certain cases, used to distinguish teenagers from

adults (at least when talking to teens). As Moya Luckett notes, networks seeking teen viewers in the sixties felt

they needed some novelty that would attract teenage viewers and distinguish the show from mundane, adult life

(98). This was necessary in order to sell to teens. She goes on to suggest that the main strategies for prompting

teen consumerism were to include a fantastic world or character or to have a program that capitalized on rece

teen trends (98). The fantastic show was thus tied up in getting teens to buy and creating the teenager as

synonym for consumer.Buffyplays with these ideas, only to turn them on their head, presenting consumerism as

antithetical to the true teen mission of friendship and service. This fits with Lynn Spiegels analysis of the

introduction of fantastic shows in the sixties, which she notes originated among a general dismay with consume

capitalism (209). At the end of the final episode of the program, the characters discuss what they will do now

that the hell-mouth they have lived over has been destroyed. Buffy suggests, I was thinking of shopping. As per

usual. Giles, always the one to focus on the work to be done, replies, Well, now aren't we going to discuss this?

Save the world or go to the mall? He thus pits commercialism against the fantastic duty, but he appears to be

losing Buffy playfully ignores him to go on about her shoe craving. And when Dawn discovers that the mall ha

gone the way of the rest of Sunnydale underground she replies in mock horror, We destroyed the mall? I

fought on the wrong side. To which Xander sarcastically responds, All those shops gone. The Gap, Starbucks,

Toys R Us. Who will remember all those landmarks unless we tell the world about them? Xanders quip mock

any alignment between national identity and consumerism, yet it also backs up the link between the two by

suggesting that consumerism is how people understand themselves. Although Buffy and Dawn both align

themselves with a stereotypical consumerist mindset, it is clear from the context that they are mocking the very

identities they embrace on the surface. In the fight between fantastic heroism and ordinary consumerism onBuffy

the former wins out every time. While the mall and all it embodies may not have murdered Tara or Jenny or

planted a tumor in Joyces brain, it is destroyed alongside the hell-mouth and the horde of uber-vamps that inhab


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it, suggesting its dark nature, and is here specifically put up against saving the world. If Buffy and her crowd

choose to shop, the program seems to argue, the world is desperately in danger.

Yet some argue thatBuffys critique of consumerism may simply be a cover for a different kind of

consumption. Amelie Hastie argues that forBuffy specifically, consumerism becomes joined directly with

knowledge (1). She states thatBuffy and its tie-ins produces a viewer with an investment in historical

knowledge (18) and that the show itself turns to the desire to know as a central theme (17). However, while

Hasties assertion of the value of knowledge in the show holds true for defeating specific evils and even

understanding several of the main characters (17), it stops short of providing truly life altering satisfaction or

assistance. At the conclusion of the shows first season, for example, Buffy and her friends learn of a prophecy

that states she will die facing the Master. Knowing the prophecy, Buffy almost flees her duty, only to eventually

return not because she knows what will happen, but because her knowledge is irrelevant as, indeed, it is proved

to be when her inevitable death is followed by an almost immediate resurrection. Knowledge may be central to

the show and the consumption of it, but knowledge wont bring Buffy her true love, or get back Willows lost

partner. In fact, when Willow goes to the dark side her first move is to go find books, saying I need power

(Season six, episode twenty, Villains). She then places her hands on the dark arts text and draws the words

from the pages, as the viewer sees the text moving up her skin. Here, knowledge is marked as incredibly

dangerous, so much so that it threatens the entire world. Drawing on the link Hastie maps where the

epistemological economyis tied to this consumerist economy and the economy based on knowledge is also

responsible for the driving of the consumerist economy (13), this scene can be read, by analogy, as being in par

about the dangers of consumption. This is especially possible since Willows thirst for power, here embodied in

the form of textual knowledge, is often portrayed as a stand in for addiction, the quintessential paradigm of over

consumption. Knowledge may equal a certain kind of power in the show, as articulated by Willow, but too much

consumption of it leads to a doom that can be countered only by human relationships. This is perhaps the only

time in the series where non-supernatural means are required in order to save the world it is Xanders human

devotion to his best friend that brings her back from the cusp of destruction. It can be argued that this is a case

where Xander succeeds only because of his knowledge of Willow, thus supporting an investment in historical

knowledge (18), but this knowledge is of a particularly personal kind that cannot be purchased, and is ultimatel


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more about shared experience than knowledge in itself.

By critiquing both the biological family and consumer culture,Buffy puts TV in somewhat of a bind. Fro

a network point of view, what good is peer culture if it is not based in competition and consumerism? Xanders

long standing attachment to Willow upsets the idea that television itself can offer positive answers, since it is

known in part through its very ephemerality (Hastie, 4), not through ongoing friendship. Televisions repetition,

Hastie notes, depends on a forgetting that works against the production of historical knowledge at a structural

level (5). After all, at the end ofBuffy, the mall is not the only thing missing the TV sets are gone, too. The fa

that the program itself has continued on in comic book form, a medium with an entirely different historical

situation than television, only further confounds the status ofBuffy in particular and teen fantastic teen TV in

general. Unlike more realistic teen offerings, such as One Tree Hill, Gilmore Girls, orGossip Girl,Buffy and i

counterparts leave no space for viewers to feel that they can be like the characters through their purchases or

consumer based lifestyles. In the case ofBuffy, this conflict is further complicated by issues of gender which

surround the discourses of both TV and consumerism.Buffys premise relies upon a resistance to women as

passive consumers for all Buffys interest in clothes, her identity is defined by an active role of Vampire Slayer

Joss Whedon,Buffys creator, has stated that his intent with the show was to subvert the trope of the little blond

girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed in every horror movie.[2] When women are not only magical, but

in control of their power on teen shows, they go up against tradition. Teen girls may have been seen as somethin

out of this world for many years, but the idea that they can save the world through their actions is new to an

extent.

After all, Buffys consumer identity never goes away, which highlights the tension between her version o

saving the world and the traditional female role in this capitalist economy, which relies on the figure of the

consumer in order to exist. While it is secondary to her slayer nature, and is rarely actualized on screen (in other

words, we almost never see Buffy shop, while we constantly see her slay), consumerism is presented as an

intrinsic part of the character, an aspect of her personality that, in tension with her slayer skills, comes off as

comedic in both its presence and the subversion of it. If Buffy bought something new instead of slaying a

vampire, every time, she might be seen as making the world safe for capitalism and propping up the perception o

young women as fulfilling a highly coveted consumer function. Luckett notes that in the sixties, [teen] girls wer


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womens genres the romance, the soap opera, the melodrama (151) [3]. On the one hand, TV programs are

under pressure from advertisers to develop an audience who will be ready and willing to buy their products,

potentially by supporting the image of the feminine consumer. On the other hand, TV programs, particularly thos

aimed at young women and girls, are disparaged particularly for pandering to perceived stereotypes of femininity

One way TV balances these competing claims for its purpose, as capitalist and pedagogical, is to offer programs

with, in Michele Byers words, characters and scripts equally entrenched in reality and stereotypes, in reality and

fantasy (713). Byers writes about My So Called Life, in which the text positions the viewer by always insisting

that the facet of reality supersedes and mystifies the facets of fantasy and excess (712). Yet inBuffy, fantasy is

primary, allowing the reality of the show to be the escape valve for the overly fantastic aspects, rather than the

other way around. This uneasy balance means that the push to consume comes through as secondary to the push

save the world, but its secondary status also leaves it without a full fledged system in place for responding to tha

push.Buffy holds both angles at once, and as such sends a somewhat confounding message that teen life is full o

unfulfilled desires which cannot be satisfied through product consumption or anything else. The trick to saving

the world, the program repeatedly suggests, is through friendship and communal action, through interconnection

and public work.

But in heralding these ideals, it also points to a huge loss in terms of familial and romantic relationships.

And while an answer about where to look for this missing component is not readily available, it is oddly

suggested. In the same post-Sunnydale finale that casts shopping as antithetical to saving the world, something

else emerges out of the conversation. At what seems to be a surface level, both Dawn and Buffy articulate their

desire to shop, while those around them scoff at the idea. And while the sisters march off to fight evil together, th

history of the program has shown that such a quest tends to separate them. Shopping, on the other hand, is at

times figure as the one activity that has the potential for familial bonding. At the end of season one, Buffy is

dreading her impending death, while her mother thinks she is only upset about a school dance. Joyce then reveal

a dress shes bought for Buffy, saying, I saw you eyeing it at the store. While Buffy initially protests they cann

afford it, she goes on to exclaim sadly, Its beautiful. Despite the fact that Joyce completely misinterprets

Buffys concerns, their understanding converges on the dress, which Joyce knows Buffy will appreciate. The onl

familial connection here is in a commodity, and we hear about bonding time that happened while shopping.


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Similarly, the second episode of season five has Joyce asking Buffy to take Dawn shopping for school supplies, a

task she abnegates in order to practice her slayer skills. While the supernatural breaks apart the biological family

then, consumerism is figured as having the potential to bring it together, but is always rejected in favor of

supernatural heroism.

What fantastic teen TV shows figure, then, is the often painful process of leaving the home one that

ceases to threaten TV as new ways of consuming and producing television become possible. In the Suburban

Home Companion: Television and the Neighbourhood Ideal in Post-War America, Lynn Spigel shows that from

the beginning, television has been caught in a contradictory movement between private and public worlds

(213). And so, from the time of their creation as a group, have teenagers, who oscillate between the realm of

family and the public world of friendships and work. Yet these days, TV is increasingly public, like a teenager

emerging from the nest as Hastie describes, there are countless spheres for television tie-ins, including the

academic world. And while TV has historically been used for allowing people to occupy faraway places while

remaining in the familiar and safe locale of the office or the home (Spigel, 214), fantastic teen TV argues that it

is time to leave the nest and make television consumption an increasingly active and communal experience. Yet

by marking consumerism as a source of familial bonding, an almost private experience,Buffy suggests that

something is lost if television becomes only about the pedagogical, the active, the good. The biological family,

aligned with consumerism, is not fully disposable, it suggests, and will linger on, while a model of television tha

focuses solely on the fantastic teen friendship group and anti-consumerist sentiments will exclude fulfilling

romantic and sexual relationships, which can stand in for television reproduction and continuation. Situated at a

historical moment in which television is changing rapidly, fantastic teen TV shows present the argument that

television structures need to fundamentally change in order to come into their adulthood. Romantic and sexual

relationships here come to stand in for an adulthood yet to be imagined, a TV model that will evolve out of

current contradictions. In Buffy and Angels final meeting on the program, Buffy tells her former lover,

I'm cookie dough. I'm not done baking. I'm not finished becoming who ever the hell it is I'm gonna

turn out to be. I make it through this, and the next thing, and the next thing, and maybe one day, Iturn around and realize I'm ready. I'm cookies. And then, you know, if I want someone to eat m- or

enjoy warm, delicious, cookie me, then that's fine. That'll be then. When I'm done. (Season seven,episode twenty-two, Chosen).


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Contemporary television is, in many ways, still only cookie-dough. Fantastic teen TV thus becomes a

stage on which the current contradictions of television emerge. To know who will enjoy the warm,

delicious cookies of television to come, we can only wait to see whats next. Of course, there will always

be some people who prefer cookie dough to cookies, and for some, fantastic teen TV will have the final

word on how to leave home in style.

[1] There may also be an extra-textual reason for this particular relationship to make

to the end of the series. When Tara, Willows previous lover, was murdered, there wasa backlash against the program for providing such a strong lesbian romance only to fi

into a homophobic pattern of having one of the partners be killed and the other akiller. Curve magazine reported that when Tara was shot through the heart moments

after makeup sex with Willow, it sparked the biggest backlash in the shows history.

What Buffycreator Joss Whedon thought would play as a heartbreaking loverstragedy instead played like a lost clip from The Celluloid Closet (Dead Girl Talking,

Vol. 13, #7, http://www.curvemag.com/Detailed/453.html). In this light, Willow andKennedys relationship can be read more as an attempt to appease angry viewers and

reject accusations of homophobia than as an organic plot development.

[2] http://www.oregonlive.com/movies/index.ssf/2008/03/joss_whedon_dark_horse_deliver.html

[3] Seiter, Ellen. Sold Separately: Parents and Children in Consumer Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers

University Press, 1995.

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Save the World or Go to the Mall: Conflicting Impulses in Fantastic Teen TV