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Title: Rebel Without A God Author: David Graeber Date: December 27, 1998 Language: en Topics: anti-authoritarianism, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, review, atheism, religion, culture, In These Times Source: Retrieved on 3rd September 2020 from https://penseenoir.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/rebel-without-a-god-the-anti-authoritarian-attributes-of-buffy-the-vampire-slayer/ Notes: First appeared in an issue of In These Times.
Some years ago, an anarchist calling himself E.G. Eccarius wrote a
novel, The Last Days of Jesus Christ, Vampire. Admittedly Buffy the
Vampire Slayer, TV cult sensation, does not aspire to quite this level
of subversiveness. But there are times when it comes close. It’s also
quite possibly the best show on television.
Quick background. Hoards of demons menace mankind. They tend to
accumulate in the white-bread suburb of Sunnydale, California, mainly
because the Hellmouth, a kind of font of bad mystic energy, is located
directly beneath Sunnydale High. In Sunnydale, mysterious deaths and
disappearances are an almost daily occurrence.
Arrives one Buffy Summers, recently expelled from school in L.A. for
burning down the gym. In an ordinary world, Buffy would have probably
ended up a slightly less affluent version of Alicia Silverstone’s mall
habitué in Clueless; as it happens, she is the Slayer, reluctant hero
chosen by mysterious powers to lead humanity’s war against the vampires.
To her aid comes Giles, her Watcher, who has just transferred from the
British Museum to become Sunnydale High’s librarian, filling its shelves
(in a kind of fundamentalist’s worst nightmare) with vast leather-bound
tomes on demonology. A band of misfits accumulates around them: class
clown Xander Harris, timid computer hacker Willow Rosenberg, spoiled
Valley Girl Cordelia and mellow lead guitarist (cum werewolf) Oz–not to
mention Angel, whom Buffy fondly calls her “cradle-robbing, creature of
the night boyfriend”–a vampire of once legendary cruelty, who has spent
the last couple centuries feeling guilty after a Gypsy curse restored
his soul. They are united in shifting webs of mutual love, trust,
jealousy, desire and annoyance–conspiring to save the world on a regular
basis as Buffy desperately tries to maintain a C average and head off
efforts to kick her out of school.
There are a lot of obvious things you can say about Buffy. In the show’s
first season, a student becomes invisible because no one notices her; in
the end, she’s whisked away by the FBI for training as a government
assassin. In the second, rich frat boys turn out to owe their wealth to
an evil snake god, to whom they sacrifice virgins in the frathouse
basement (Xander: “I guess the rich really are different”). Slaying the
snake sets off a wave of corporate bankruptcies across America. And
sometimes the supernatural element is a simply obvious mirror for real
life: As when Buffy, having run away from home, gets a job as a waitress
and seems headed for a life of drudgery–until she discovers a band of
demons who have been enslaving teenage runaways to labor in dark satanic
mills beneath the earth, spewing them out, broken and useless, at about
the age of 65. Yet in one way it is decidedly unlike real life: Demon
bosses, after all, can be beheaded (though having Buffy lead the
rebellion with a hammer in one hand and sickle in the other was perhaps
a tad much). Real ones can’t.
The show’s anti-authoritarianism runs throughout. If the series has an
ultimate message for the youth of America, it is that whatever
instinctual revulsion you might feel toward those who claim to be your
betters is not only justified–but things are likely far worse than you
could possibly imagine. Ever think of your friend’s mother, who
constantly pushes her into cheerleading competitions, as a witch? She
is. Ever suspect the swim coach would do anything to win that
championship? You’re right. He would. That the traditional family-values
guy courting your divorced mother is some kind of robot, or a sex-crazed
killer? He’s both. That your sadistic principal is a repressed Nazi
child-molester? Well… we don’t have the full story on him yet, but it’s
probably at least that bad.
Giles: It’s a reliquary. Used to house items of religious significance.
Most commonly a finger or some other body part from a saint.
Buffy: Note to self. Religion: creepy.
I should note that Buffy is not actually a horror show. It’s really a
romantic action-comedy without a laugh track, in which, however, good
people often die. The cast are uniformly charming; the writers (led by
creator Joss Whedon) show a level of wit rarely seen on television. And
the most remarkable thing is that the writers manage to come up with a
new supernatural theme every week without ever (despite the ubiquitous
crosses) even once vaguely implying the possible existence of God.
This is important, because it’s not true of most horror. In overtly
religious horror–Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen–God might seem infinitely
distant, with Satan and his minions pretty obviously in control, but God
is still necessary for the whole thing to make sense. The same, I think,
is true of horror of the slasher/Freddy Kreuger/Hellraiser variety.
These are stories about transgression–having sex, not reporting a
hit-and-run accident, being a snotty teenager–followed by utterly
disproportionate punishment. The ultimate morality is profoundly
Judeo-Christian and sadomasochistic; everyone’s implicitly corrupt. You
are too, is the genre’s subtext–otherwise, why would you be enjoying
this sadistic crap?
Traditional vampire movies are a variation. In a way, they are
ultimately about the failure of the French Revolution–which was supposed
to kill off all those blood****ing aristocrats in their castles and
usher in a rational world of liberty, equality, fraternity and
enlightened commercial self-interest. Of course it didn’t work. The
Count refuses to stay dead. Because deep inside, the movies suggest, we
don’t really want him to. Eroticized cruelty and domination keep
resurfacing because they are rooted in the very nature of our desires.
Again, the proof is in the audience.
Yet Buffy not only avoids such sadistic pleasures, it openly mocks the
underlying morality:
Buffy: (Trying to bluff her way into a fundamentalist church) You know,
I just… I woke up and I looked in the mirror and I thought, hey! What’s
with all this sin? I need to change! I’m… I’m dirty. I’m… Bad, with the
sex, and the envy and that loud music us kids listen to nowadays. (Blank
stares.) (Sigh.) Oh, I just **** at undercover. Where’s Ken? (Kicks down
door.)
In fact, its moral premise is precisely the opposite. Vampire-slaying
has to be kept secret. As a result, almost everyone in Sunnydale
believes Buffy and company are juvenile delinquents: violent, lazy,
irresponsible, disobedient. Bad. In reality, they are almost
unimaginably self-sacrificing and good. In this sense, Buffy is a kind
of anti-horror.
The godless cosmology is something that’s been developing for a long
time, across anything from superhero comic books to Dungeons and
Dragons. What I really want to draw attention to, however, is the
underlying ethic. It would be hard to imagine a healthier one.
People–most people, anyway–mean well, but being good is difficult (Buffy
characters are always fretting over whether they really did the right
thing) and power tends to make you stupid or insane. It’s a difficult
ethos to maintain in an adventure fantasy. After all, the whole point of
such fantasies is, usually, to fabricate a situation where there is an
obvious right thing to do–even more, where that right thing involves
sorts of violent behavior that would otherwise be wrong. Therein lies
the pleasure. It’s not that Buffy doesn’t do this: We are still talking
about a show about teenagers killing demons. But even the fantasy
element has a sort of wistful quality.
If nothing else, Buffy reminds us how much ’60-style youth rebellion was
premised on an assumption of security and prosperity: Why put up with
all this stodginess when life could be so good? Today’s rebellious
youth, rather, are reduced to struggling desperately to keep hell from
entirely engulfing the earth. Such, I suppose, is the fate of a
generation that has been robbed of its fundamental right to dream of a
better world. The very notion of being able to take part in a relatively
democratically organized group of comrades, engaged in a struggle to
save humanity from its authoritarian monsters, is now itself a wild
utopian fantasy–not just a means to one. But cynics take note: If the
mushrooming success of Buffy means anything, it’s that this is one
fantasy which surprising numbers of the Slacker Generation do have.