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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Here's the full text of the paper I presented at the academic conference Blood, Text and Fears: Reading Around "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
Nov 9, 2002 | It may be the greatest postcoital line ever: "When did the building fall down?"
That's what Buffy says to Spike on the morning after their most spontaneous and passionate assignation, as they lie entwined in each other's arms, at the center of a building that has quite literally fallen down around them. There's broken plaster everywhere and a hole in the ceiling above: At some point in the previous night's festivities, they'd actually fallen through it.
You can almost see Buffy piecing together, like a co-ed after a bender, how it all came about: The previous night, during a particularly violent tussle, Spike -- a vampire who's gone good against his will, thanks to a chip implanted in his head that keeps him from harming humans -- quite literally swept her off her feet and slammed her against a far wall. Buffy -- a vampire slayer who used to be Spike's mortal enemy, who is just recently returned from the dead and somehow not quite as human as she used to be -- volleyed by delivering a high kick to the poor guy's chin.
You say tomayto, and I say tomahto: Let's call the whole thing off.
Maybe that's what should have happened. Instead, Buffy and Spike beat the dickens out of each other -- and then made it up in bed.
No television show has ever been as forthright in addressing the subtleties of sexual desire, including some of the darkest, most deeply recessed fears and longings of the soul, as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" has been. The show isn't particularly explicit about sex; what's remarkable about it is that it deals with issues of erotic intimacy in such an unvarnished and deeply emotional way. If you believe what the media tell you, which is always a bad idea, contemporary movies, television shows and advertising are loaded with sex. But the reality is, although there's a certain amount of coy semi-nudity in many mainstream movies and TV shows, when it comes to sex, there's very little adventurousness, originality or truth in the way it's shown to us.
But with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," Joss Whedon, the show's creator, producer and one of its chief writers, has probed some of the most unnerving, as well the most deeply erotic, corners of sexual desire. In "Sexual Personae," Camille Paglia wrote that with "The Faerie Queene," Edmund Spenser was the first to "sense the identity of sex and power, the permeation of eroticism by aggression." She also wrote a line that, unwittingly and perfectly, decribed the tête-à-tête between Buffy and Spike: "The masculine hurls itself at the feminine in an eternal circle of pursuit and flight."
When Paglia calls that cycle "eternal," she's not exaggerating. We've seen it time and again: In Greek mythology, Zeus fell deeply in love with Europa and disguised himself as a bull so he could carry her off and mate with her. The motif recurs in painting and music and poetry: Even the types of seduction that we like to think of as blushingly romantic often have at least vaguely aggressive underpinnings. Take the famous line from Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," for example: "The grave's a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embrace." The barest interpretation of that line represents the same logic that's been used by teenage boys throughout history: Eventually, you're going to die whether you sleep with me or not, so why not just go ahead and do it?
But those examples suggest that only men are sexually aggressive, when of course we know that's far from true. The point is that Joss Whedon has no qualms about exploring the shadowy connections between aggression and sex. The sight of Buffy and Spike roughing each other up is partly metaphorical -- think of it as a deeply physical, if brutal, version of the verbal banter between Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in "Bringing Up Baby," or Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in "The Lady Eve."
And yet it's too untamed, too raw, to be considered solely and safely metaphorical. Paglia made plenty of people angry when, in "Sexual Personae," she wrote of sexual intercourse as an expression of the will-to-power, a representation (at least sometimes) of the "surges of aggression in nature." Many, if not most, people feel more comfortable with sex when all the potentially scary stuff has been tamed out of it.
But with Buffy and Spike, Whedon is working with characters who are on equal footing in terms of physical strength. Spike, sick with love for Buffy, hurls himself at her; she literally throws him off, only to go after him, ravenously and amorously, a few moments later. Buffy gives as good as she gets. No, better -- between her and Spike, I'd put my money on her in the ring any day. In this dynamic, there's no such thing as the weaker sex. They're both prey to their own desires.
It's shocking but somehow not surprising when, after clocking Spike, Buffy suddenly lunges at him for a kiss. (Note that she's the one to make the first move.) And it's bone-thumpingly sensual the way she slams him against a wall and hikes herself up on him, not bothering to waste a minute with anything so dithery as foreplay. To paraphrase Paglia, now the feminine hurls itself at the masculine in an eternal circle of pursuit and flight.
That's just the sort of twist that Whedon delights in. He's not interested in reinforcing the roles that men and women are expected to play; he's interested in scrambling up the rules. For instance, instead of stressing the differences between humans and vampires, more often than not the show seeks out the spot where the animal desires of humans and vampires intersect. For example, skip back a few seasons and consider the younger, teenage Buffy, at the point when she was contemplating the right time to sleep with her vampire-with-a-soul boyfriend, Angel. Like most girls her age -- she was 16 at the time -- she wanted nothing more than to have a safe, warm, blissfully cocooned romantic relationship with him. And Angel, an unusual cross between a traditionally masculine brooding hero and an enlightened contemporary male, wanted exactly the same thing. The tragic obstacle to his happiness was an old Gypsy curse that turned him into a monster at precisely the moment Buffy has given him the greatest pleasure of his life (and crossed over into womanhood herself).
