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Author: Phillips, Maxine

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy
Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale
Edited by James B. South
Open Court Publishing, $17.95, 335 pp.

In the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, our golden-haired heroine found herself facing one of the worst enemies she'd seen in the TV show's seven-year run: a minion of "The First" (the primeval evil) named Caleb--a fallen preacher, imbued with supernatural strength verging on invincibility. Buffy was stuck, lost on how to beat him. Lucky for her she stumbled upon a useful-looking scythe, and, King Arthur-style, pulled it from a stone. When the weapon's creator revealed that it was meant for the prophesied savior of the world--otherwise known as the Slayer--she also asked the perky superhero her name.

"Buffy."

"No, really?"

"Yes, really."

That sums it up. Buffy began when its creator, Joss Whedon, wondered what would happen if the helpless blonde who always gets killed in horror films turned around and fought back. He built this story around a Valley Girl in Southern California who was called at age fifteen as the "chosen one" to fight "vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness." It quickly became an epic about the Big Questions (What is our purpose in life? How do we deal with suffering and loss? What should we wear to the prom?) and Big Issues (vocation, redemption, and bad-hair days).

Buffy was "unlike any other vampire fiction ever produced," claims Greg Forster in the first of the twenty-two essays in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy. Where early vampire fiction portrayed a Christian worldview of good against evil and more recent fiction has favored a "nihilistic outlook with roots in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche," the stories of Buffy owe much to Plato. Characters fight evil and strive to do good, often against their self-interest. Buffy "reflects the Platonic view that a just person is always happier than an unjust person." If this sounds like over-interpretation, consider the enormous amount of online scholarship in the seventy-five or so sites devoted to the Slayer as well as annual conferences here and in Europe. Buffy gets people thinking.

So does Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy. Whether you see Buffy as a sympathetic satire of teenage life, a feminist adventure, a political parable, a postmodern bildungsroman, a semi-pornographic soap opera, or a morality tale, there are essays here to set you, well, philosophizing.

For instance, the reader can examine with Nietzsche the qualities of the Ubermensch as they relate to the character Faith ("Also Sprach Faith: The Problem of the Happy Rogue Vampire Slayer"). Faith is a tough, alienated teen who was called as a Slayer--in addition to Buffy--through a fluke, and who over the years moved from believing that her superpowers exempted her from standard morality to taking responsibility for her actions and making amends.

Other essayists commend the way the show treats nonhumans as moral agents and speculate about Buffy as a potential leader of a future master race. Christianity is also here, but none of the contributors sees the show as having exclusively Christian themes, although Gregory J. Sakal believes that Buffy and one of her sidekicks, Xander, "express two opposing views on the nature of redemption...that accurately reflect religious belief in contemporary life." Xander's is the "fundamentalist view that redemption is available only to a chosen group who subscribe to a particular set of beliefs," while Buffy seems to believe that "salvation is available freely to all." This latter view is what makes the "Buffyverse" (how fans refer to the myth-world Buffy and her pals inhabit) different from other vampire fiction, for there are nonhumans in it who regain their souls and seek redemption, as well as the usual humans who lose or sell theirs and are eternally damned.

In season 3 of Buffy, as I watched the Christmas show ("Amends") with my daughters--who are responsible for my interest--I exclaimed that, finally, the capital "G" God was at work. They weren't buying it. Only when I spoke with another fan my own age did I find agreement. This was one of the two most explicitly Christian episodes in the series, explains Wendy Love Anderson ("Prophecy Girl and the Powers That Be: The Philosophy of Religion in the Buffyverse"). Anderson traces the way religion becomes "secondary [to] the interpersonal relationships which lie at the heart" of Buffy. By season 6, when Xander, who is a carpenter, offers unconditional love to another character about to destroy the world (thereby averting yet another apocalypse) and the episode ends with a voiceover singing the "Prayer of St. Francis," Anderson notes that "fan reaction...centered around character issues...rather than Xander's momentary imitation of Christ."

The essayists don't dwell on how Christianity is presented in the series. But Buffy relies heavily on Catholic equipment (crosses and holy water come in handy) for fighting vampires; and priests, monks, and nuns, who have guarded secrets for centuries, show up routinely. In one episode, the ghosts of Indians killed by an epidemic introduced by Europeans hang a modern-day priest in revenge, but for the most part, the Catholic Church fights evil--albeit ineffectually--and fundamentalist Protestantism embodies it.

For example, the demonic Caleb is an Elmer Gantry type. During the last few episodes of the series, he stalked Buffy and her friends, preaching woman-hating soliloquies, flaunting his smarmy sensuality. I picked up echoes of the lay preacher in The Night of the Hunter, a movie that heavily influenced 1950s horror films. When Buffy split Caleb in two with her trusty scythe, she started at his crotch. Whether the writers were making a comment about the fundamentalists in power in Washington and their ability to provoke Armageddon, or paying homage to past horror films, or, er, skewering traditional scenes in which one might have expected a man to save the damsel in distress--pick your own interpretation--audiences of all ages cheered.

Just as Buffy created space for cross-generational discussion--at least between my kids and me--Buffy and Philosophy creates space for discussion about moral issues. This is no small feat. In this respect, however, it is disappointing that the essayists almost never mention the show's racial and class biases. Is it time for someone to edit a volume called Buffy and Socio-political Theory?

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE)

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By Maxine Phillips

Maxine Phillips, managing editor of Dissent, first ventured into Buffy scholarship in her article, "The Buffy Paradigm Revisited: A Superhero and the War on Terror" (Dissent, Spring 2003).