Article paru dans le numéro 280 (novembre 2001) du magazine britannique Starburst. Spoilers saisons 5 et 6.
It began as a disappointing film. It's title invites derision. Yet over five years Buffy the Vampire Slayer has won fan and mainstream recognition as the hippest, wittiest show around. What makes it so special?
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WE ALL KNOW THE SCENE. The young, blonde, high school cheerleader, girlfriend of the beefy jock quarterback, hears a noise down a darkened alley/in an abandoned house/out in the forest and, instead of running and hiding under the bed like anyone sensible would, she decides that she'd better check there's nothing big, ravenous and horribly befanged lurking in the area. So she picks up a torch, because of course torches are fearsome weapons and terrifying to all monsters, and walks to her inevitable evisceration. Cue screams, blood, gore and anguished wailing of 'Katy? Kaaaatyyyyy!!!' as Randy the jock happens upon the splattered remains of his main squeeze.
"The first thing I ever thought of with Buffy... was the little blonde girl who goes into the dark alley and gets killed in every horror movie. The idea of Buffy was to subvert that idea, and create someone who was a hero where she had always been a victim. That element of surprise, of genre busting, is very much the heart of the series"
Joss Whedon
The opening scene of the first episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer clearly signals what we can expect. Beefy jock quarterback and cheerleader girlfriend break into school after hours to find some privacy so they can make out. Girl hears a noise, acts scared. Are there monsters in the school? The audience tenses, expecting a vampire to lunge from the shadows or drop from the ceiling and devour the helpless girl. Beefy jock comforts her, assures her no one is around. She relaxes. They're alone. She then turns on him, bares her fangs and goes for the throat.
As mission statements go, this is unambiguous. Here is a show where everything you expect will be wrong. All the rules you've ever learned will be broken. Nothing is as it seems.
Then we are introduced to Buffy Summers, Joss Whedon's little blonde superhero, and the friends who support her, initially christened the Slayerettes, latterly the Scooby Gang. Buffy is the Slayer, the one girl in all the world with the power to fight the vampires, demons and forces of darkness. She is genre subversion made flesh. As the first episode unfolds, numerous stereotypes are deliberately exploited specifically so they could be undercut in future episodes. For example, we expect the adults in a tëen show to be adversaries of the kids: repressive, unsympathetic tyrants. But Buffy's mother, Joyce, is as much the little girl lost as her daughter -listening to motivational tapes to help her be a better parent, trying to balance nurturing with discipline, and winning both the audience and the Slayer's respect ir the process.
The final confrontation of the first episode also demonstrates a unique approach to narrative. When Buffy enters The Bronze, Sunnydale's only nightclub, she finds a horde of vampires methodically chomping their way through the bright young things of town. It's a grim, horrifying scene. And then, against all expectation, the show becomes funny. Buffy stakes an unseen vampire with a pool cue, and we see the end of the cue wobble and then slowly swing upwards as the vamp collapses off screen. It's a visual gag straight out of Buster Keaton. Where, one second ago, you were grimacing, now you're grinning. Buffy defeats the main vamp by breaking the window behind him and, as he recoils out of fear of sunlight, she stakes him and rebukes him for being so stupid as to have forgotten that it was night time and there is no sunlight.
For a show to turn on a dime between horror and comedy, and to make seem so effortless, is one of the hardest possible things to do, and from the very beginning that skill has set Buffy The Vampire Slayer head and shoulders above all other shows in its genre.
As the seasons have progressed, the writers have expanded on that initial outing and pushed the envelope. Take the opening teaser sequence of Bargaining, the Season Six premiere. Buffy, as everyone should know by now, is dead and gone, and the Scooby gang are desperately trying to protect the town by using a robot Buffy, hoping to convince the vampires that the Slayer is still on the case. As the gang try not to think about the death of their best friend the oblivious Buffy-bot makes inappropriate, Dada-ist quips like, "That'll put marzipan in your pie plate, bingo" when she stakes vamps. The juxtaposition of humour, horror and grief immediately establishes that although the show has changed networks between seasons it remains exactly as it has always been - a hybrid that expertly juggles drama, comedy and horror like no other.
But Buffy The Vampire Slayer is six years old and has established its own rules and its own way of doing things. Staleness is hard to avoid - when people expect you to subvert expectations how do you keep your show surprising? Happily, the series has never had that problem. After three years in a row that closed with big battles against that season's 'end-of-level' bad guy, Season Four wrapped with a surreal dream episode; after years of writing snappy dialogue, Joss Whedon did an episode where no-one was able to speak; after having countless innocent people killed by supernatural means, when Joyce dies it is from a brain tumour; a new character joins the cast but she's a sister that everyone, except the audience, remembers. The big secret of the show's continuing appeal is that as time has gone by it has gone from subverting wider genre stereotypes to subverting itself, and to great effect.
"Nobody is what they are forever, they change, their alliances change and sometimes dissolve."
Joss Whedon
One of the most predictable elements of the horror films that inspired Buffy the Vampire Slayer was that the characters, more often than not, were straight out of central casting - the nerd, the school bitch, that blonde girl who goes into the alley and gets killed, the beefy jock and so on. And the monsters were all cardboard cut outs too - the werewolf, the vampire, the mummy - all could be relied upon to behave in a particular way, to follow slavishly the rules laid down.
Given that the mission statement of the show is 'nothing is as it seems', it was only a matter of time before the "genre-busting" ethos of the show started to affect the characters themselves. Each of the characters has had sides to themselves revealed that could never have been suspected when they first appeared: Angel, initially the heroine's informant on the street, turned out to be a vampire, then a good vampire, then the heroine's lover, then a psychopathic mass killer; Jenny Calendar, school computer teacher and Giles' girlfriend, turned out to be an agent of the people who had cursed Angel, sent to Sunnydale on a surveillance mission; stuffy, boring Giles had once earned the nickname 'Ripper', which hints at a far murkier past than his diffident, cartoonish Englishness would lead one to suspect; Willow, who had for so long lusted after Xander, and then found true love with Oz, turned out to be gay; Oz, the cool guitarist, ended up furry and fanged come each new moon; the bitchy Cordelia fell for Xander and then moved to the spin-off show where she evolved into a genuine, compassionate and very funny young woman. Then there's Spike, who embodies all that's best about Buffy The Vampire Slayer and the way it handles its characters...
When he first crashed, literally, into the show Spike was the new recurring bad guy for Season Two. A vicious, impulsive punk, obsessively in love with his mad sidekick Drusilla, he was ruthless and a real threat. But by the end of the season he had betrayed his friends, teamed up with Buffy and helped save the world, although admittedly because he liked that it was full of "Happy Meals on legs".
When he returned in Season Three's brilliant Lover's Walk he was a broken man, alcoholic and desperate because Drusilla had left him. He even analysed the Buffy/Angel romance with far more perspicacity than any of the regular characters had managed.
Come Season Four, Spike had one brief, sarcasm filled outing as villain before being captured by a military organisation and effectively neutered. By placing a chip in his brain that makes him incapable of hurting anyone except demons, the writers created a situation where the old enemy was now a pathetic wreck, relying on the Scooby gang for succour. As the season progressed he even fought by their side, although mainly because it was the only way he could get to enjoy a good scrap.
By the end of that fourth year it seemed likely that Spike would be killed off. He'd walked the whole path from prime threat, to loser, to neutered loser, to unwelcome hanger-on who betrays the Scoobies and thus alienates the only people who had been willing to tolerate him. What else could he do?
Season Five saw Spike fall improbably in love with Buffy, a storyline which initially smacked of desperation and which would have been a terrible disaster if handled by lesser writers or given to an actor less capable than the endlessly surprising James Marsters. And then, in Fool For Love, the production team pulled a master stroke, revealing that as a human Spike had been an immature and lovesick poet, and demonstrating that now, neutered and lovesick, what had seemed to be character evolution had in fact been character regression. As writer Doug Petrie put it: "He's a heartbroken poet and he'll always be a heartbroken poet." As ever, the show had first subverted the genre by having the bad guy evolve, and then, when it risked becoming stale, it subverted itself by revealing his growth to be the very opposite of what it appeared to be.
In Season Six he seems to be approaching emotional maturity at last, has earned the trust of the group, is able to share a laugh with Giles, and is fiercely, devotedly protective of Dawn and Buffy. When Buffy is reanimated and has to claw her way out of her coffin, it is Spike she bonds with first, after all he knows exactly what it's like to wake up six feet under. Sarah Michelle Gellar has said that this season Buffy's bond with Spike will grow and bloom, because she now has more in common with him than any of her old friends.
"I pitched it as the ultimate High School horror show, very basically taking the pain, humiliation, alienation and all the problems of High School and ballooning them into horrific proportions. The show works only if it resonates."
Joss Whedon
Read any interview with Joss Whedon and chances are that sooner or later he will use the phrase 'emotional resonance' and start talking about the central metaphor of the narrative, the real world pain we all recognise that is embodied by this week's monster or threat. When the narrative so completely inhabits a Fantasy world it will fail utterly if the emotions conveyed are not real.
It's an important signifier of how little the show is interested in the reality of things that the origin of the Slayer was only explained ten years after her initial creation, and then only in the pages of a spinoff comic book, Fray, written by Whedon himself. That's because the explanation of why she is the Slayer is far less important than how it affects her ernotionally. Hence the stories told in the show are at their best when they take everyday fears and situations and build horror stories around them.
A key moment in the pilot episode comes when Buffy has to go out in the evening to meet the Scooby gang and save the world by defeating the vamps at The Bronze. Her mother grounds her, and when Buffy tries to tell her how important it is that she go out Joyce responds "I know it'll be the end of the world if you don't go out", because of course, as Joss points out "everything is life or death when you're a 16 year old girl" . Naturally, with the show being what it is, it would be the end of the world if Buffy stayed in. Then she opens the chest in the corner ofher room and finds all the normal paraphernalia of teenage years - combs, diary, hair bands - but she lifts out the false top to reveal the world underneath - stakes, holy water, crosses. The internal life of any teenager is far more complex than external appearances would ever suggest, and Buffy exemplifies that from the off, taking the essence of teenage angst and blowing it to wild proportion.
In the initial meeting to pitch Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Whedon named two episodes as examples of what he was going to do, The Pack and Invisible Girl, each of which took specific teenage issues and turned them into horror stories. The Pack examined the nature of cliques and bullying, the harshness of the cool kids and the closed world of the in-crowd, while Invisible Girl showed us a girl who is so entirely ignored at school that she literally becomes invisible (an idea previously explored in Alan Moore's seminal comic book Halo Jones). In fact, the first season is chock-full of episodes that deal with situations we can all recognise - parents who impose their failed ambitions on their reluctant children (The Witch); having a boyfriend turn out to be an entirely different person to who he seemed (I Robot, You Jane and Angel); the crush of a student on a teacher and the allure of an older woman to a hormonally tortured teenage boy (Teacher's Pet).
This approach continued into the second season when we were given episodes about date rape (Reptile Boy, with its astonishingly unsubtle phallic demon menacing girls in chains), step-parents (Ted, which stretched the Buffy world to include robots, an element that has never really sat well in the demon world) and others. But it was notable that these episodes were far from the strongest of the year; the show was outgrowing its original format.
As the series grew in complexity it became necessary to avoid each episode becoming a metaphor-of-the-week cliché. So the brief was broadened and one central idea - the lover you sleep with but who never calls you again and turns on you as soon as they no longer want you - was expanded to dominate the entire second half of the season after Buffy slept with Angel and unleashed the evil Angelus.
Also, characters' particular situations became extended symbols, the most obvious being Oz's sudden conversion into a werewolf. This nicely played allegory of puberty was made even more explicit when Willow says that its OK that he's wolfy because she's "no fun to be around once a month either". When the show did return to single metaphor episodes, for example in Season Three's Beauty and the Beast, which addressed the Jekyll and Hyde nature of men who abuse their girlfriends or wives, or in the fourth season's Beer Bad, a treatise on the perils of underage drinking, it felt forced. The issues the show was now capable of addressing were wider and deeper than a single episode could encompass, so much had the programme evolved in so short a time.
This evolution continued when, at the end of Season Three, Sunnydale High was blown to kingdom come. High School was over, the characters had grown up, and the show had to find new stories to tell. When moved the action to Sunnydale University the metaphors were at first easy to grasp - the nervousness of a child in a slightly more adult world, the pressures of living with a room mate, what to do when your boyfriend is unfaithful - but as the year progressed it seemed to lose its edge. University was too similar to school for the series to really mature and although the fourth season of Buffy contained some of the best individual episodes the show had yet produced it was, overall, less involving than its predecessors.
The underlying metaphors of the year - moving away from home, starting to gain independence from parents - proved far less potent than might have been expected. Season Four was specifically designed to be about the break up and graduaI reassembly of the Buffy gang as they all reinvented themselves at College, something everyone does when they finally leave the nest and strike out on their own. It turned out, however, that the tensions between the characters turned the audience off. We didn't want to see them fighting among themselves. The awkwardness of the transition between childhood and adulthood was mirrored by a certain awkwardness in the narrative as well for the first time the metaphor was working against the show rather than for it.
Season Five occasioned a rethink and consequently a startling return to form as the show dived into the complexities of family relationships and began to address the meatier issues available. The arrival of Dawn, Buffy's newly-minted younger sister, and Buffy's struggle to balancing a normal home life and sisterly responsibilities with slaying duties, provided a whole new layer to Buffy, a character threatening to become the least interesting on the show. The death of Joyce, wholly unexpected and deeply shocking, also opened up a whole new avenue of story.
In Season Six the transition is complete - Buffy has left University altogether and is effectively a single mother to Dawn, subject to the same concerns as Joyce once was; Xander and Anya, his ex-demon girlfriend, are engaged; Giles has left for England and a spin-off series of his own, leaving the Scooby without a paternal adult figure, thrown entirely upon their own resources for the first time. In Season Six the reality of adulthood will finally start to bite, and there are plenty of horrors to be addressed.
It's the confidence with which Buffy The Vampire Stayer constantly re-invents itself - the way it resists standing still for even a moment - that sets it head and shoulders above all the other Fantasy series around at the moment.
Six years in, and Buffy The Vampire Stayer is cleverer, wittier, faster and more thought-provoking than ever.
Long may she reign!
"Buffy died at the end of Season Five, so in Season Six there's no Buffy. It will be a lot of sitting around talking, drinking coffee, missing her. A lot of homework, a lot of doing taxes. Someone will buy a car at some point in the season. It will be a lot like Friends but not as funny."
Buffy scriptwriter Doug Petrie
Contrary to what Mr Petrie would have us believe, Buffy is back to life surprisingly quickly, in the first 90 minute episode of Season Six, raised from the grave by Willow's magic and a spell that may be darker, and have more dangerous consequences, than Willow has let on to the rest of the Scoobies. So what can she and the gang expect from the year ahead?
In episode four, Flooded, we're presented with the Troika, Buffy's version of The Lone Gunmen gone bad - three geeks who team up to cause havoc. One of them is victim Jonathan, a presence in the series since the unaired pilot episode, another is Warren, who built the Buffy-bot in Season Five, and the third is the brother of the kid who trained the hell hounds to attack the school prom back in Season Three. According to Doug Petrie, these guys are this year's 'Big Bad' villain. They're funny and unusual, but their über-nerd geekiness could start to grate after a while. And are they really a huge threat to the Slayer?
Could Petrie's claim be a production office smokescreen to distract us from the real threat, which scuttlebutt indicates may be Willow, seduced to the dark side or possessed by the forces she called upon to raise Buffy, powers which Giles describes as "more ferocious and primal than anything you could hope to understand." When he goes so far as to callher a "rank, arrogant amateur" Willow openly threatens him. She tells him stone faced: "the magicks I used are very powerful. I'm very powerful. And maybe it's not such a good idea for you to piss me off." It's a chilling moment and it seems clear that Willow's character arc this year will be very intersting indeed.
Either way, be it Troika or Willow who threaten the Slayer this year, it seems certain that Season Six will take a different approach to the end-of-level bad guy, which seems like a good move and, as always, a subversion of their tried and tested formula.
On the wider issues, the year's emotional through-line deals with the perils of young adulthood: what it's like to be engaged, or a single mother, or cast adrift without parental guidance. As Joss said, "the point of this season is that these kids are now entering the grownup world. And of course, they will handle it just as bad I y as possible."
Whedon has been tight lipped about the future of the Xander/Anya engagement, and in the first two episodes we discover that Xander has, three months after his proposal, still not told the rest of the gang. Second thoughts? And as for Tara and Willow, well "that relationship is a big part of next season" says Joss. Since Amber Benson is inexplicably still not included the opening credits, surely her long-term presence on the show must be in doubt. Add to that rumours that at least one cast member won't make it out of Season Six alive...
But rumours are often wrong, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer is always capable of surprising its audience. Only one thing is certain: "I will finish the year as though l'm never gonna make another one," says Joss, "just in case."