Saturday, Jul 19, 2008
From 'Buffy' to 'Jawbreaker,' today's culture makes teenagers the battlegrounds of cosmic forces.
Mar 3, 1999 | Buffy had a moral crisis a few weeks ago. As she was offing vampires with Faith -- a Rose McGowan-like compatriot on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" -- Faith accidentally offed the wrong vampire, which is to say someone who turned out to be not a vampire at all. Never especially enthusiastic about her work, and feeling complicit in the mistake, Buffy was tormented; Faith, liking her work too well, shrugged and moved on.
I wish I could claim I was hip enough to have caught on to "Buffy" from the beginning, but I wasn't, though I remember liking the original movie some years back. I can't even claim to be a true convert, since converts are by nature obsessive and I'm not obsessive about "Buffy" like I've become about "The Practice" or used to be about "Larry Sanders" and the brilliant British cop series "Cracker" (by all means not to be confused with its dreary and short-lived American counterpart). But "Buffy" is probably as witty as prime-time TV gets these days, and sly enough in its postmodernism to almost redeem postmodernism, in part because it sustains a narrow concept through its characters in a way that, for instance, "The X-Files" now routinely fails to do. Where Scully and Mulder, defying even the best efforts of their able actors, have been straitjacketed into types -- more functionaries of the show's tedious "conspiracy" than real people -- the dynamics of the "Buffy" ensemble constantly evolve, led by Sarah Michelle Gellar in the title role. At first glance every inch the usual vacuous three-named TV blond, Gellar gains both personality and credibility with every episode; I have no problem believing she's kicking the asses of vampires twice her size.
"Buffy" is the best and most currently prominent example of a cultural phenomenon I'll call, for lack of something better, Teen Millennium, just as the new movie "Jawbreaker" is the worst. As a movement Teen Millennium may have begun in the mid-'70s with Brian De Palma's "Carrie," but it really coalesced 10 years ago with Winona Ryder in "Heathers" and David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" TV series, and more particularly the "Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me" film. In these shows and movies, teenage life is the millennium, with every kid born after 1981 his or her own walking apocalypse. In "escapist" fare like "Buffy" or "Scream," in more serious efforts like Larry Clark's "Kids" and somewhere between the two, as in Doug Linman's upcoming "Go," epic themes of cosmic judgment, moral retribution and spiritual redemption are as commonplace as the horrors that engender them: kids abused, violated, assaulted, overdosed, murdered, possessed and haunted as a matter of routine.
Lynch, in particular, has been fascinated with Teen Millennialism since "Blue Velvet" in 1986. But it was in his '90s work, like "Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me" and "Lost Highway," that Sheryl Lee and Patricia Arquette emerged as spectacularly depraved millennial icons of late adolescence. Whether writhing in a borderland whorehouse or strolling blithely naked into a flaming desert shack, Lee and Arquette tumble into the void, pulling us along in the vortex.
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