From Boofy to Buffy - Don't Start at the Top

This blog has evolved over time, resulting in the final project for this course, the essay "Buffy at Play: The Trickster at Work in the Whedonverse". In true trickster fashion, I published this piece in upside down fashion, as blogs tend to do things in chronological order, whether that makes sense or not. Hence, if you really want to read it, start with the intro and work your way up to the list of Works Cited and the Bibliography. Or, if you want to be a trickster yourself, just read it from the end first.
(The contents of this blog are copyrighted according to the current laws of internet publishing. Please do not copy in whole or in part without permission. To get permission, email me.)

Buffy at Play - Works Cited and Bibliography

Works Cited
Adams, Michael. “Slayer Slang I-II,” Verbatim 24:3 (1999).
“Ain’t Love Grand? Spike and Courtly Love,” Buffyverse Dialogue Database, Summer (2001) 4 Oct. 2005 <http://vrya.net/bdb/essay1/php>.
Bowman, James. “Childish Wish Fulfillment,” New Criterion 18.3 (1999):1-6. 14 Oct. 2005 <http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do>.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Seasons 1-7 (with Featurettes and Director‘s Commentary). Crtr. Joss Whedon. Perf. Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendan, Anthony Stuart Head, David Boreanaz, James Marsters, Emma Caulfield, Amber Benson, Michelle Trachtenberg. 1997. DVD. Fox Home Video, 2005.
Buffyguide: The Complete Buffy Episode Guide. 25 Nov. 2005
Buffyology: The Searchable Buffy Database. 28 Nov. 2005
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. London: U of Chicago, 1981.
Epstein, Mikhail. “On Hyper-Authorship.” 25 November 2005. Mikhail Epstein Homepage. .
Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World. New York: North Point, 1998.
Hynes, William J. and William G. Doty. Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama, 1997.
<http://arts.usyd.edu.au/publications/philament>.
Simpson, Craig S. “Myth Versus Faux Myth,” Chronicle of ?higher Education 47:37 (2001).
Wilcox, Rhonda V. “There Will Never Be a “Very Special Buffy”: Buffy and the Monsters of Teen Life,” Journal of Popular Film and Televison 27.2 (1999).


Bibliography
Adams, Michael. “Slayer Slang I-II,” Verbatim 24:3 (1999): 1-7.
“Ain’t Love Grand? Spike and Courtly Love,” Buffyverse Dialogue Database, Summer (2001) 4 Oct. 2005 <http://vrya.net/bdb/essay1/php>.
Bowman, James. “Childish Wish Fulfillment,” New Criterion 18.3 (1999):1-6. 14 Oct. 2005 <http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do>.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Seasons 1-7 (with Featurettes and Director‘s Commentary). Crtr. Joss Whedon. Perf. Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendan, Anthony Stuart Head, David Boreanaz, James Marsters, Emma Caulfield, Amber Benson, Michelle Trachtenberg. 1997. DVD. Fox Home Video, 2005.
Buffyguide: The Complete Buffy Episode Guide. 25 Nov. 2005
Buffyology: The Searchable Buffy Database. 28 Nov. 2005
Byers, Michele. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Insurgence of Television as a Performance Text,” diss., U Toronto, 2000 (UMI, 2005) 395.
Chandler, Holly. “Slaying the Patriarchy: Transfusions of the Vampire Metaphor in Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Slayage 9 (2005), 26 October 2005 .
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. London: U of Chicago, 1981.
Epstein, Mikhail. “On Hyper-Authorship.” 25 November 2005. Mikhail Epstein Homepage. .
Early, Frances H. “Staking Her Claim: Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Transgressive Woman Warrior,” Journal of Popular Culture 35.3 (Winter 2001): 11-17 .
Harts, Kate. “Deconstructing Buffy: Buffy the Vampire’s Contribution to the Discourse on Gender Construction,” Popular Culture Review 12.1 (2001): 79-98.
Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World. New York: North Point, 1998.
Hynes, William J. and William G. Doty. Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama, 1997.
Overby, Karen Eileen and Lahney Preston-Matto. “Staking in Tongues: Speech Acts as Weapons,” Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2002): 73-84.
Owen, A. Susan. “Vampires, Postmodernity, and Postfeminism: Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 27.2 (1999): 24-31.
Symonds, Gwen. “You Can Take the Fan Out of the Academic but Should You? Musings on Methodology,” Philament 1 (2003), 15 October 2005 <http://arts.usyd.edu.au/publications/philament>.
Simpson, Craig S. “Myth Versus Faux Myth,” Chronicle of ?higher Education 47:37 (2001): 1-4.
Wilcox, Rhonda V. “There Will Never Be a “Very Special Buffy”: Buffy and the Monsters of Teen Life,” Journal of Popular Film and Televison 27.2 (1999): 16- 23.

Buffy at Play - Enigmatic Resolutions

I use the word “resolution” rather than “ending” because it connotes the image of coalescence which is so often seen in Buffy. Endings, from season to season, and even at the end of the series, are rarely -- if ever-- final. Buffy, who dies and is resuscitated in season one, dies again in season five, and is resurrected in season six, exemplifies the way that death is not the end in the Whedonverse. When she is shot near the end of season six, and nearly dies again, Xander teases her that “This dying is funny once, maybe twice, but…” (Buffyology 6.20). In a world where slaying is commonplace, Whedon and company make the point that when it comes to death, and a number of other seemingly absolute notions, nothing is certain.
Accordingly, while Angel and Oz are “gone”, having left the series, they return to make occasional cameo appearances. So does every single major villain (and a handful of other characters from all previous seasons) during season seven, by means of a “character” called “The First”, an evil force which can take on the form of any person who has experienced death, including Buffy and Spike (Buffy 7.1). Even Buffy’s mother, Joyce, who dies a natural and apparently permanent death in season five, returns as both The First (possibly) and in an episode in which Buffy believes she is in a mental institution and has imagined her entire life in Sunnydale (Buffy 6.17).
Through such manipulations of the impermanence of “ending”, the text opens perceptions to “the realms of the extraordinary and non-linear” (Hynes 205). Similarly, in the abovementioned episode, “Normal Again”, in which Buffy thinks she is insane, the show engages in a questioning of the impermanence of perception itself. This is not the only time we come upon examples of “psychic explorers” who “[break] through into the world of normalcy and order” (Hynes 208,210). Spike also grapples with sanity throughout much of season seven, and when Buffy asks him, “Are you insane?”, in a moment of lucidity he replies, “Well, yes. Where have you been all night?” (Buffy 7.2).
After Buffy is resurrected, she confides to Spike in “Afterlife” that “everything here [in the “real” world] is hard and bright and violent” (Buffyology 6.3). This brings us back to the necessity of mythmaking. As Simpson clarifies, we have a strong need for “entertaining falsehoods” as an alternative to “boring facts” and harsh reality (2). While the text of Buffy makes clear that when it comes to the gap between myth and reality, it is “not always the same difference,” there are times when it just might seem to be. It is this act of brilliant seeming which demonstrates the difference in the series between taking myths literally, and taking them seriously (Simpson 3). While Buffy is, on the surface, “flip and playful”, the nature and scope of that playfulness creates a form of televisoin literature which can be “studied and fruitfully analyzed the way that any good allegory can be” (Buffy “Buffy 101” 7.6).
In observing this, we can see how Buffy in many ways explores the “play of meaning” as posited by such theorists as Jacques Derrida and which Lewis Hyde designates as the work of the trickster in our world. The necessity of “serious play”, particularly in the crafting of mythological narratives of this nature, from ancient times to the present, is in evidence, as well as an elusive sense of authorship and binary-opposition crunching development of plot and characterization. Moreover, “play” at the most basic level of word formation and sentence structure, with Buffy’s witty, well-thought-out turns of phrase and language re-invention, is also a component of the text which marks it as a trickster entity.
The result is a body of work which provides a number of examples of how the principles of the play of meaning in post-structuralist analysis are, themselves, at play with mythic structures and thus, perhaps more importantly, accessible to the masses. If, in a time period when “Reality TV” dominated, a show like Buffy could have so much appeal, then clearly the world is still in need of myths and their power to get at those aspects of existence which are otherwise inaccessible, inexplicable, and unthinkable without deconstructing the parameters of “real life” through narratives.

Buffy at Play - Tricky Characters

Once all these little details of construction of the text come together, the trickster spirit manifests itself most apparently in the evolution of the characters themselves. Each character emerges from the mix as both recognizable and new. In creating characters, both the writers and performers realized that, as actor James Marsters (Spike) puts it, “People are more interesting when they’re fallible and funny and dear” (Buffy “Action Heroes” 5.3). If Buffy herself was merely a standard mythic hero, or if, as a feminist icon, she played the part as, “I am woman, hear me constantly roar,” as Whedon speculates, she would be very dull indeed (Buffy “Interview” 1.1). Hyde comments that “actual individuals are always more complicated than the archetype” and designates the trickster as the “archetype that attacks all archetypes” (14). Buffy’s characters consequently elude precise labeling.
Furthermore, nearly all the characters in the Whedonverse experiment with what Hyde defines as the trickster’s role of shape shifter at one time or another, some shifting many times throughout the series (36). Sometimes the shifts are subtle, as with Buffy’s transitions between insecure teenager and powerful super hero. More often, they are drastic, and rife with metaphorical implications, as when Willow changes from good witch to bad witch as a result of her drug-like addiction to magic (Buffy 6.1-22). In “Out of Mind, Out of Sight”, a shy girl named Marci becomes invisible when no one pays attention to her (Buffy 1.11). Giles, when feeling useless in “A New Man”, becomes a red, curly horned demon who can‘t speak comprehensibly (Buffy 4.12).
The vampire characters themselves are expressly and visually shape shifting, their faces changing from human to monster every time they are about to feed. In the episode “Innocence”, about midway through season two, Angel, who has already shifted from evil vampire to good vampire by means of a Gypsy “curse” which restored his soul, changes back to being evil after making love with Buffy for the first time (2.14). The clear metaphor of the potential for a lover to change after having sex with him or her takes on monstrous realism. When he later regains his soul and returns from death in season three, the potential for him to again shift if he and Buffy consummate their love becomes the impetus for him to leave the show and start his own series, Angel.
Oz, Willow’s boyfriend from seasons two through four, is a werewolf who at one point encounters a Dr. Jekyll-like character in the episode “Beauty and the Beasts” (Buffy 3.4). All three of these characters (vampire, werewolf, Mr. Hyde) explore the “metaphor of uncontained, raw male aggression,” as writer/producer Marti Noxon calls it, and it’s shape-shifting capacity, both literally and figuratively (Buffy “Oz Revelations” 4.3). In “Wild at Heart” , as Oz also prepares to leave the show, he tells Willow, “I don’t know where that line is between me and [the werewolf]” (Buffyology 4.6). Apparently, for the actors who played the characters, shape shifting also at times involved shifting actual acting roles and shifting series, evoking an image of the trickster “on the road” to somewhere else (Hyde 6).
The characters of the various villains, or “Big Bads“, most often designated as demonic in some way or other, are catalogued as shape shifters in the featurette “Demonology: A Slayers Guide” (Buffy 5.3). This humorous piece separates the demons into five categories as follows:
1. “Dead Things That Aren’t Really Dead Until Buffy Kills Them” Demons
[eg. Vampires, Zombies, Frankenstein-like characters].
2. “Oh God! Does Someone Know a Good Dermatologist” Demons
[ie. Demons with really ugly facial distortions].
3. “I Bet You Thought I Was Human When in Actuality I’m This Really Pissed- Off, Hideous […]” Demons [This category includes many shape shifters, such as vengeance demons, who appear as human initially, and werewolves].
4. “You Summoned Me So as Long as I’m Here I Might as Well Rampage and Kill” Demons [Indicating such characters as a Troll God, a Snake Demon, and a slug-like creature called a Quellar demon].
5. “I’m So Hideously Deformed I Couldn’t Possibly Be a Man in a Rubber Suit” Demons [A nod to the complex arts of both animatronics and computer graphic imaging (CGI) used extensively in the series]. (Buffy 5.3)
Although this list is limited, and some creatures cross over between definitions, fitting into more than one simultaneously, this only further illustrates the way that Buffy slips the “trap of bafflement” created when we try to categorize anything (Hyde 49).
The character who probably most aptly demonstrates the art of characterization married with the trickster mythos is Spike. From his debut in the episode “School Hard” to the series finale, Spike proves himself to be the “consummate survivor” (Hyde 43). Originally situated to be the “Big Bad” of season two, Spike comes on the scene as a less orthodox vampire than the villain of season one, The Master. He announces, while killing The Master’s protégé, The Annointed One (who Spike refers to as “The Annoying One”), “From now on, we’re going to have a little less ritual, and a lot more fun.” When another vampire claims that he was at The Crucifixion, Spike observes:
Oh, please! If every vampire who said he was at The Crucifixion was actually there, it would have been like Woodstock. […] I was actually at Woodstock. That was a weird gig. I fed off a flowerperson and I spent the next six hours watchin' my hand move. (Buffy 2.3)
From the outset, Spike establishes himself as a “situation inverter” and a disruptor of the status quo (Hynes 37).
Furthermore, Spike’s sexual exploits, a feature of any trickster character, are implied from the outset when he licks blood from Drusilla, the vampire who is both his lover and creator, a mixture of roles which evokes a breaching of taboos, another trickster trait (Hynes 43, 66). When, after breaking up with Drusilla, he returns in season four, he takes up a relationship with popular-girl-turned-vampire Harmony which is obviously based purely on sex (Buffy 4.3). After being “neutered” shortly thereafter by means of a computer chip placed in his brain by a government agency called “The Initiative”, Spike needs to throw himself at the mercy of the Slayer and her friends to survive. He finds himself in the role of “wacky neighbor”, whose job it is to drop in on “The Scoobies” and say, “Can I borrow a cup of sugar and insult you?” (Buffy “S5 Overview” 5.6). Spike’s subsequent infatuation/obsession with Buffy throughout seasons four and five casts him in the role of “courtly lover” at times, but Buffy repeatedly expresses her disgust with him (“Ain‘t“). In addition to repeatedly telling him he’s disgusting, or a pig, in “Out of My Mind” she says, “I just saw you taste your own nose blood […] I’m too grossed out to hear anything you have to say” (Buffyology 5.4). It seems his “love” for her will remain unrequited indefinitely.
Yet, ever surprising the viewer/reader, the characterization of Spike in Buffy takes a significant turn in season six. After Buffy is resurrected following her death at the end of season five, she finds that the only person she can relate to is Spike. She realizes that he is her “counterpart”, that his experience is “closer to her[s] than any of the other characters” and that he knows what it is like to feel like you don’t fit in anymore (Buffy “S6 Overview” 6.6). The resultant sexual relationship is still largely a matter of lust and power play, but Spike has clearly moved to a place beyond pure appetite (Hyde 62).
The resultant outcome of Spike’s surrender to “fate” in season seven, like Buffy’s death in season five, evoke the principle of self-sacrifice which “goes fairly deep into several mythologies” (Buffy “S6 Overview” 6.6). Though often associated with heroes, Hyde equates sacrifice with the trickster on several points. From Hermes to Eshu and beyond, the ways that trickster sacrifice has benefited humanity, often unintentionally, indicates a “reshaping”, a “reallotment” which promises “the chance that the links between things on earth and things in heaven may be loosened” (Hyde 257). Buffy and Spike each have their turn at unhinging the door between life and death.

Buffy at Play - Loopy Language

Additionally, much of the language of the series centers around already-established concepts such as “The Big Bad” (which many associate with the wolf in The Three Little Pigs, therefore signifying the villain of a particular piece) and the “Scooby Gang” (a pop culture reference to the group of teenagers in the Scooby Doo cartoon series, and thus signifying a similar group intent on solving mysteries, in this case Buffy and the other three core characters, Giles, Willow, and Xander). Such references demonstrate the “disappearance of originary presence” and call into question the “source“ of such terms from even earlier than the days of Disney animation or the advent of Saturday morning children’s programming (Derrida 168).
The scripts also capitalize on the popularity of teen movies and television, from Clueless to Heathers to My So-Called Life, for the tenor of their witty banter. Much of the humor in Buffy relies on the “tracks with multiple meanings [and] ambiguity” which are inherent in both written and spoken language, trickster’s sphere of influence (Hyde 51). The way in which meaning in language can “infinitely promise and vanish” is explored over and over in many episodes (Derrida 128). For example, in the episode “Lie to Me”, Buffy’s best friends, Willow and Xander, engage in the following exchange after entering a club full of people who worship vampires:
WILLOW
Boy, we blend right in.
XANDER
In no way do we stick out like sore thumbs.
[…]
WILLOW
Okay, but do they really stick out?
XANDER
What?
WILLOW
Sore thumbs. Do they stick out? I mean, have you ever seen a thumb and gone, 'Wow! That baby is sore!'
XANDER
You have too many thoughts (Buffyology 7.2).
Such inquisition into the actual play of meaning in a phrase or word is common throughout the text. Another exchange in “Helpless”, between Buffy and her love interest, Angel, a vampire with a soul, is as follows:
ANGEL
I watched you and I saw you called. It was a bright afternoon out in front of your school. You walked down the steps... and I loved you.
BUFFY
Why?
ANGEL
Because I could see your heart. You held it before you for everyone to see. And I worried that it would be bruised or torn. And more than anything in my life, I wanted to keep it safe... to warm it with my own.
[…]
BUFFY
That's beautiful. (beat) Or taken literally, incredibly gross.
ANGEL
I was just thinking that, too. (Bufyology 3.12)
Two other instances involve Buffy in conversation with her British “Watcher“, Giles, who is responsible for teaching her about the “Slayer” history and the nature of her foes, and who moonlights as the high school librarian. In “What’s My Line, Part 1”, Buffy contemplates the phrase “the whole nine yards” asking “nine yards of what?”; similarly, in “No Place Like Home”, she reflects on the concept of making money “hand over fist”, waving her hand over her fist in puzzlement (Buffyology 2.9, 5.5). Numerous other cases abound, but these will suffice to show how the writers, via their characters, indulge in the play of meaning to which Derrida refers (168).
Yet Buffy is not content to toy with well-used idioms or story lines for play. Drawing upon the extensive resources of its intertexuality, from plot to phrase levels, it engages in the trickster’s art of bricolage to create something completely new (Hynes 42). As Michael Adams explains, “the show does more than merely capture current teen slang [or past Hollywood history]; rather, it is endlessly, if unevenly, inventive” (Slang I 3). Playing with meanings running even more deeply than that of common expressions, Buffy begins to expand the vocabulary of it’s characters by creating new words and word usage. Experimentation with prefixes such as un- and suffixes such as -y are just two common examples. Such expressions as “You seem bad mood-y” and “Don’t get all twelve step-y” have meanings that are comprehensible but not exactly standard English (Buffy 3.17, 6.7). Adams explains that when Willow once says of Giles that he was “unmad”, or Buffy refers to Angel as an “undead American”, such constructions “reflect meaning inadequately conveyed in the standard lexicon (Buffy 2.6, 2.1). “When one is unmad, one certainly isn’t angry, but there is no reason to assume that one is happy, either.” In so doing, “the word mediates two common emotional states, and thus identifies a third” (Slang II 3). While the term undead is not new, it likewise reflects a state which is neither dead nor alive. Duly, in such cases the text acts not only as bricoleur, but also as mediator and deconstructor of oppositions (Hynes 40, Derrida 85).
Two other constructions which are seen often in the show are the use of over- as a prefix (“He‘s not exactly one to overshare”) , and the uses of -free and -age as suffixes (“I want to be fester-free,” and “the whole post-slayage nap thing”) (Buffyology 2.6, 3.15, 3.20). The various uses of the word thing alone could occupy much of this paper, probably more. In just a couple of examples, it stands in alternately as a signifier for “an event or appointment”, as when Willow says, “I have a thing; there’s this Wicca group on campus,” or “a problematic issue”, as Willow again indicates when she apprehensively tells a potential love interest, Kennedy, “I have a thing.” (Buffyology 4.6, 7.13). Another possible interpretation is expressed by the vampire Spike, who tells Willow’s girlfriend Tara of a mysterious leg cramp, “What! It’s a thing,” meaning “a legitimate occurrence” (Buffyology 7.14). The variations are many, but the meaning is always clear within the context.
Similarly, the Buffy texts extensively experiment with what Adams calls “clipping”. Adams says that the teens (and later young adults) on the show are one step ahead of slang dictionaries, taking terms like flake out, wig out, and bail out, as well as messed up, team up, and deal with, and reducing them to flake, wig, bail, messed, team, and deal. (Slang II 4). Another practice which “reinvigorates common items from the standard lexicon” is the shifting of adjectives, especially emotional ones, to nouns. The character Xander often uses this construction, when he says things like “After everything that happened, I leaned towards the postal,” and “I want to know, ’cause it gives me a happy” (Slang II 5, Buffyology 3.7, 2.7). In such interpretation, we see the trickster as linguist and translator operating throughout Buffy’s text (Hyde 299).

Buffy at Play - Crafty Storytelling

The notion that we are perpetually stuck in the horror that was high school, that, as writer and Whedon’s fellow executive producer Jane Espenson puts it, “There is no one who coasts through [adolescence] without horrible psychic wounds,” relates to the persistence of myths (Buffy “S3 Overview” 3.3). What Whedon calls the “central myth of high school as horrific” is all bound up in “the humiliation, the alienation, the confusion” that is life (Buffy “Interview” 1.1). The ongoing formation of new mythologies, not just the perpetuation of ancient ones, and the recurrence of archetypal figures from heroes to tricksters, all play a part in both the formation and success of Buffy. Myths represent a convergence, a coalescence of meaning in an otherwise apparently diffused and meaningless existence. Probably the most important factor in myth as it relates to Buffy is the manner in which myth allows the reader/audience to explore the possibilities and impossibilities of meaning outside of the framework which represents the often vexing strictures of “reality”.
Northrop Frye asserts that myths stick together because there are “cultural forces” which impel them to do so (179). He further explains that wish-fulfillment, as evidenced in romantic narratives such as Don Quixote, are an outgrowth of myth, and that there is an “encyclopedic tendency” toward myth in both folktale and fable (12). The oral tradition of storytelling, subsequently literature, and now film and television thus evolved out of myth, and are prone to return to it. How this relates to Buffy is explained by Simpson:
For ancient people with a dearth of information, myths explained what humans didn’t understand. For modern people with a surfeit of information, much of it conflicting and confusing, [telemyths], at their best, probe a deeper reality, the moral ambiguities and moments of truth [with a lower case t] that illuminate our experiences as they did our ancestors. One culture’s oral tradition is another’s boob tube. (2)
In Buffy, we can see how myths are still functioning, why we need them, why, in an age of globalization and post-structuralism, they are still relevant. They explore that moral ambiguity which is the domain of the trickster, both in terms of the way a story is told and the construction of it .
To understand the telling and construction of Buffy as a trickster entity, we must look at its nebulous origins. The trickster is polytropic, as Hyde tells us, “changing his skin or shifting his shape as the situation requires” (62). The writing of Buffy, in terms of authorship, is a perhaps unprecedented mixture of intertextuality and hyperauthorship, a polyvalent exercise from any viewpoint. Creator Joss Whedon assembled an often fluctuating team of co-writers who took turns being the lead writer for any given episode. Each episode was then filtered through the team, who gave creative input, and then Whedon himself gave the final approval, often with some additions of his own. Writer and executive producer Jane Espenson relates that whenever someone raves about a particular line from one of the shows she “wrote” it is usually one of Whedon’s additions. Many of the jokes, in particular, were either written by him or pitched when working out the story (Buffy “Buffyspeak“ 3.3).
This process is a somewhat inverted version of hyperauthorship, in which the creative process, as Epstein describes in his letter to Motokiyu about the Yasusada hoax, is “dispersed among several virtual personalities which cannot be reduced to a single "real" personality“ ( Feb. 6 par 4). Yet with Buffy, this is done openly, and the multiple personalities come from “real” people. Furthermore, the practice is then turned around and funneled back through the original author/creator’s voice, somewhat like an hourglass. The progression is further expanded by the input of fan opinion, mostly through chat rooms via the internet, and then impressively reduced by the authorial willingness to be receptive to such communal pressure. Thus polytropic, trickster-like, the writing “colors [it]self to fit [its] surroundings” (Hyde 53)
Furthermore, the writing team is often inspired by other writers or directorial style icons, frequently playing the mimic, often parodically, sometimes with great finesse. Matters of intertextuality are extensive. The Buffy scripts, in their entirety, represent a considerable catalog of not only pop culture references, but also Hollywood, literary, mythological, and legendary history. There are entire websites devoted to chronicling every referent, from Star Wars and Star Trek quips to Shakespeare and William Burroughs (Buffyguide, Buffyology). The basic vampire construct itself relies heavily on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but as Nina Auerbach states, “Every age has it’s own vampire” (qtd. In Wilcox 18). The character of Buffy herself is based on Whedon’s perception that there were “so many horror movies where there was that blonde girl who always got herself killed.” He wanted her to “take back the night [a phrase itself gleaned from rape awareness campaigns],” and created an environment in which “she’s not only ready for [the monster, but] she trounces him” (Buffy “Interview” 1.1).
After thus inverting the horror genre, Whedon and company devote much of the first season, and a considerable part of the second season, to recycled horror themes, including The Bride of Frankenstein (“Some Assembly Required” 2.2) I Was a Teenage Werewolf (“Phases“ 2.15), The Creature from the Black Lagoon (“Go Fish“ 2.20), Carrie (“Witch“ 1.3), Alien (“Bad Eggs“ 2.12 and “Ted“ 2.11), A Nightmare on Elm Street (“Nightmares” 1.10), and the Chucky movies (“The Puppet Show“ 1.9), to name just a few. As the seasons progress, Buffy takes on the horrific elements of fairy tales, at times specifically (Hansel and Gretel in “Gingerbread” 3.11, Little Red Riding Hood in “Helpless“ 3.12), at times allegorically (the Kindestod in “Killed by Death” 2.18, and the Gentlemen in “Hush” 4.10).
But for all the seeming dreadfulness, each of these is executed with such dry humor and irony that we never lose sight of the way that the writing plays with us. Buffy is not just about horror. David Boreanaz, the actor who plays the vampire Angel, explains, “You can’t really pin Buffy as an action show or a dramatic series or a comedy [or horror or romance]; it has elements of all of that [and] breaks it up. One moment you can be enthralled by the adventure, the next you can be saddened by the drama,” and the moment after that you are laughing until you cry. (Buffy “Interview” 1.1) In so doing, the show “appears on the edge, or just beyond existing borders, classifications, and categories,” as Hynes tells us a trickster would (34).
One episode, “Restless”, breaks down the very boundaries of plot construction by engaging in a series of dream sequences. While still drawing on textual styles and motifs including Stephen Soderberg’s The Lymie and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Whedon and company throw in Tom Clancy novels, Death of a Salesman, 1930’s horror films, Barbara Stanwyck-style acting, and a host of Freudian dream metaphors, just to give a sampling (Buffy “Director‘s Commentary” 4.6) . While the dreams expand on and develop the existing storyline, they represent a hodgepodge of images and ideas redolent of popular culture random sampling which are accessible even to those unfamiliar with the characters or plot. We see how, through the medium of dreams, and the way that they are inherently intertextual, a text can “give lie to the inconvenient world of fact” and explore the “otherness” which Hynes associates with “metaplay” (214).

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)