Buffy at Play - Intro

Buffy at Play: The Trickster at Work in the Whedonverse
The televison show Buffy the Vampire Slayer has previously been the subject of scrutiny primarily in gender studies. While this is both crucial and relevant to its impact on pop culture, critics have scarcely looked at how the text of the show, as a body of literary work, acts as a trickster entity. In describing tricksters, Lewis Hyde tells us that “the shape [body] comes to represent the shape of the social and spiritual worlds” (256). The points of articulation, or joints, which comprise a body are the intersections where tricksters do their work, perpetually disrupting the way that nature, community, and spirit are connected to one another (257). The Whedonverse, as fans have labeled the imaginary universe which Buffy and her friends inhabit (for it’s creator Joss Whedon), is situated at such joints in a variety of ways, giving the text a striking capacity to bend perceptions and examine misconceptions, not only culturally, but with issues of authorship, methods of storytelling, and the murky area between written and spoken language as well. Such is the business of literary deconstruction.
Designating Buffy (as I will hereinafter refer to the text of the show) as a trickster could explain why its peculiar variety of authorship, ostensible mythological structure, and linguistic playfulness have so captured the imagination of the masses, as demonstrated by its intense, almost cult-like following. The premise of the show features a cute, blonde, teenage girl who wrangles with the ordinary difficulties of being a teenager while simultaneously carrying the burden of being “The Slayer.” A “chosen one” with super strength whose responsibility it is to keep the forces of evil (vampires, demons, monsters, etc.) in check, Buffy (the character) inhabits a liminal world, where distinctions between evil and good are perpetually blurred. Buffy’s locale, the ironically-named town of Sunnydale, sits atop a “Hellmouth” which acts as a porous medium through which such binary distinctions are prone to bleed (Hyde 49). Outwardly a picturesque version of suburbia, Sunnydale represents the borderland not only between city and country, but is a “dialectic between what lies above and what lurks below, between what is visible on the surface and what hides in the depths” (Byers 371). This is the space where tricksters are prone to dwell.
I must proceed with a disclaimer, which is appropriate in that to some degree this is an apologist approach to Buffy. I forthwith declare that all attempts I make to in any way summarize any episode of the series, much less the series as a whole, is bound to undermine to power of the text itself. Such summary has been a hindrance for other scholars trying to examine the impact of Buffy, inasmuch as the whimsical nature of the subject matter and story line lends itself to absurdity when condensed. This is not unlike trying to trap a trickster, slippery creatures that they are. After all, tricksters, when pressed into formality, ultimately resist simple definition (Hyde 48-51).
This could be said of many great literary works. If I were to say, for example, that Hamlet is about a prince whose father died, whose mother married his uncle, and who has suicidal thoughts, any reader unfamiliar with the play would be missing out on any number of subtleties, nuances, and complexities you would be attuned to if you were either reading the text or watching a performance of it. Similarly, if I were to attempt to paraphrase a line from The Importance of Being Ernest (such as, “The truth is dull and never simple“), I would rob it not only of the significance of context, but would diminish the inherent charm and wit as well. Any rewording would cripple the meaning. Although tricksters are translators, they are also instigators of perplexity (Hyde 299). Nevertheless, as I am aware that some of my audience may be unfamiliar with Buffy, some paraphrasing and summarizing will be necessary, but I will limit myself, and instead recommend immersion in the text itself for more complete understanding.
This brings me to the point at which some readers may already be bristling. After all, to compare what many consider to be “junk television” to Shakespeare or Wilde may seem presumptuous, if not blasphemous. Television critic Matt Rouch observes that “any show with the words ‘Buffy’, ‘vampire’, and ‘slayer’ in the title is doomed to be ridiculed” (Buffy “Buffy 101” 7.6). Scholar James Bowman calls Buffy an “utterly preposterous exercise in childish wish-fulfillment fantasy,” but the same could be said of The Odyssey, The Tempest, Peter Pan, and Finnegan’s Wake (13). Bowman also claims that there are “some things which do not rise to the dignity of being subject to criticism” (8). Tricksters are not concerned about dignity. Aside from the fact that Bowman has clearly never watched the show itself, he completely overlooks the need to have such fantasies, and how the trickster fills this role. The trickster‘s association with “ritual vents for social frustrations [in response to being dignified]” as described by William Hynes is a key in understanding the way that Buffy‘s investment in serious play works (206).
For this reason, and others which will become apparent, I want to assert that Buffy is not “junk” but rather has a substance worthy of exploring in academic circles, particularly literary ones, inasmuch as the text is a finely crafted work of art, transcending much of the media “fluff” which surrounds it. Craig Simpson observes that “much has been made about Buffy’s being an allegory for the fears teenagers contend with daily. While true, that view ignores just how meticulously and imaginatively Whedon’s world is drawn” (13) Such a view also devaluates the way in which teens themselves inhabit a world of thresholds and the obscuring of binary oppositions which, in some sense, is never truly outgrown. As Whedon says, “People out of high school respond to [Buffy] because I don’t think you ever get over high school” (Buffy, “S3 Overview” 3.3)