Meta: Buffy, the Vampire Slayer vs Buffy The Vampire Slayer

[beer_good_foamy]

I want to talk about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and how there's a (to quote a phrase) question hidden in plain sight in both the title and the story that the show must address. Basically yet another attempt by me to try to explain what "Chosen", for all its faults, does right as a series finale. This is in no way meant to sum up everything that happens in the last couple of seasons, and if there's anything you feel I leave out altogether, that's because I leave it out altogether to talk specifically about this:

Buffy The Vampire Slayer isn't just the title of a television show, it's the central conflict of it. The very thing that gives Buffy (and Buffy) strength is the same thing that traps her. The story itself is the biggest bad, and the central problem of season 7 is, how do you end the story without killing the story?

EVERY REDSHIRT VAMPIRE EVER IN THE ENTIRE SERIES: (fearfully) Slayer!

The Slayer is designed (as we see in s7, literally designed) to be a badass, to be the thing that nightmares have nightmares about, etc... but always for the demons' and the watchers' sakes, not for her own. The central myth of the Slayer, the central narrative of Buffy The Vampire Slayer is set up right there in the title: There's her name, a name that seems to challenge both the viewer and the titular vampires to not take her seriously ("That name is striking fear in nobody's heart"). There's the singular of it, reinforced by the opening narration in the first few seasons (always spoken by a man, of course). "In every generation, there is a chosen one... she alone will stand against the" bla bla bla. There's "Vampire slayer", which plants it squarely within a horror template with all its fixed narratives and structures (just look at Cabin In The Woods); BtVS is rarely a horror movie, but it's always a dramedy set within a horror movie. And finally, the phrase itself establishes that that is what Buffy is, that's her identity, whether she likes it or not.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer is metaphor-heavy; the stated purpose of it is to show high school being literally hell, to concretize real issues and have them represented by various monsters, secret organisations etc. The myth of the Vampire Slayer gives Buffy superpowers and a solid helping of protagonist privilege to help her fight her issues (vampires), but she's still stuck within a story (the city of Sunnydale itself) where she'll never get a choice in how to use them, where she'll be controlled by strict conventions and expectations (personified by but by no means limited to Giles and the Watcher's Concil) of how she's supposed to act - as a hero, as a woman, as a teenager/young adult. She is, as Giles points out, doomed to always be fighting a war but never waging it. She will fight the demons until she dies, and then a new girl will come around. The story will always repeat: one Slayer dies, the next one is chosen.

GILES: This is the way women and men have behaved since the beginning.

Also, the narrative is for her alone. The story has an ensemble cast, but for most of the series, the Scoobies struggle to find a place within the Slayer narrative, either as supporters of Buffy, as antagonists (the show doesn't change its title when Faith shows up - Buffy is still the Vampire Slayer), as counterweights (Willow), but they don't get a myth of their own to help them do what they need.

And finally, the viewers know that it all takes place within the postmodernly self-aware TV show Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which sets its formula and its limitations early on: This is a show that will play with the cliches of horror, comedy, romance, etc. And will therefore be, to a certain extent, trapped by those same cliches; they can subvert them, but they can't ignore them; Buffy the show is trapped in the same narrative that Buffy the character is. And there's another trap in how US television works: don't change the stuff that got people watching in the first place, just repeat the basic formula as long as you can until the viewers get tired of it, 22 42-minute episodes a year until you get axed, then come up with something "new." (But nothing so new that it doesn't fit the format, nothing so new that people don't recognise it, nothing so new that you can't get advertisers, nothing that wakes people up to the idea that they're living in Sunnydale.) The serial nature of the show means things will just keep piling up and Buffy will never be allowed to win, or even just stop fighting, because then there'd be no story; the Slayer narrative dooms her to an unhappy life and an early death, but without it she's powerless (in-story) and gets cancelled (in our world). If Buffy wins, she dies. One show dies, the next one is chosen.

XANDER: You gotta have something. Gotta be with movin' forward.
BUFFY: Like a shark.
XANDER: Like a shark with feet and ... much less fins.
SPIKE: And on land!

So that's how the story works. That's why it needs to keep returning to the same format, the same monsters of the week, the same 7th episode twist, the same May apocalypse, the same two chords over and over again, round and round. And for most US shows, and for most Slayers in the fictional history of Buffy, that's how they live and die.

So what happens over the course of the last couple of seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but especially in s7? I've said before that "Chosen" is the Slayer going viral, but that doesn't simply mean "suddenly there's a lot of them". Viruses aren't independent beings, they work by latching on to an existing cell and changing it to fit their purpose. Buffy spends much of the first five seasons becoming independent within the Slayer role, but the role itself doesn't change much. What Buffy needs to do in the last season isn't to get rid of the Slayer narrative or destroy it but to take control of it and decide how to wield it - the scythe, but also the most effective weapon: the myth itself, the very thing that's kept her trapped. Exactly how and when (and certainly how efficiently) she does this can be the matter of some debate, depending on how you see the show, but put it this way: the Slayer myth reached its destined end in "The Gift." One Slayer died, the next one was... well, already chosen, so they didn't even need to do that. She did what she was supposed to do: saved the world, died young, became a footnote in a very long line of similar footnotes. Except then Buffy came back, and suddenly the Slayer myth doesn't offer her any more support; it's already played out and now it's damaged, cracked and full of holes. And so after s6, where entropy reigns and everything falls apart, s7 rolls around with all its callbacks to the first couple of seasons - the high school, the inexperienced (potential) Slayers, the horror movie motifs - seemingly putting the story back the way it was, but this time with Buffy getting a say. If season 5 (starting in "Restless") is all about Buffy learning to read the Slayer myth, then season 7 is about her learning to write it.

To do this, she's supplied with a bunch of supposedly blank sheets known as Potentials... except of course, they're not blanks. They don't just do what they're told, anymore than she did seven years earlier. The word "empowerment" gets tossed around a lot about "Chosen", and not always very consistently (or even very convincingly). If it began and ended with a few thousand girls getting superstrength, it wouldn't be much of an empowerment. Strength isn't power; "power" implies a position of influence. Buffy needs to revamp (sorry) the myth itself so that they can use it.

Now... um... I haven't actually gotten to s7 in my rewatch just yet, so this is one of the things I'm going to look at: How, exactly, does Buffy redefine the Slayer role? A couple of examples off the top of my head:

BUFFY: Human rules don't apply. There's only me. I am the law.

For most of s7, nobody denies that Buffy is in charge, but unlike in earlier seasons, there is now nobody who's even nominally above her (though the season is full of people telling her what a Slayer is, or was, or should be - from Giles and Robin to The First). She's on her own; the only thing actively controlling her now, without Watchers, without principals, without bosses (yeah yeah, but her job for Robin turns out to basically be an excuse for her to be in high school), is the raw narrative itself: One girl in all the world, destined to fight and die. And for most of s7, this is a heavier burden for her to bear than ever before - because she's too preoccupied trying to survive and save others. After years of patrolling she's become the chief of police, but not the politician making the laws. This is a recurring theme throughout: Buffy is empowered... to do everything the same way she would have if she hadn't been. Buffy spends much of the season, starting in the aptly titled "Lessons", trying to teach people. Except being the Slayer isn't something she had a choice in, remember, the show forced it upon her; that's not something that can be taught.

FIRST SLAYER: It's not enough!

But then there are the counterthemes that get introduced in the first half of the season. There's the entirety of "Help", which is essentially the episode-length retread of the morgue vamp fight in "The Body": when your entire function is to beat Death up until it inevitably defeats you, what do you do? There's a reason the First doesn't have an ass to kick: eventually, pure physical strength will always be useless. She needs a different approach. She needs to redefine what the purpose of the Slayer is.

BUFFY: Buffy The Vampire Slayer would break down this door.
XANDER: And Buffy The Counsellor?
BUFFY: Waits.

Another thought: speaking of 7th episode twists - how about the fact that episode 7.07 is the only "normal" episode of the series to break the fourth wall and give itself a title? Buffy was always self-aware, but it's in the last two seasons that it starts to flirt openly with outright metafiction in "Once More With Feeling", "Normal Again", "Conversations With Dead People", "Storyteller"... It's as if the very narrative itself shatters along with the Slayer myth; as if the limitations of the medium become a metaphor for the limitatations placed upon the characters. In "Showtime", Buffy can't kill the Turok-Han alone; she needs an audience to see that it can be done.

DOCTOR: Buffy, but that created inconsistencies, didn't it? Your sister, your friends, all those people you created, Sunnydale. They aren't as comforting as they once were, are they? They're coming apart.

"Conversations" also brings back Andrew. red_satin_doll asked me a while back if Andrew served a purpose in s7, and you know, while I'm not the biggest Andrew fan, I think he does. Andrew's role isn't just to make Star Trek jokes, and it certainly isn't to have a big redemption arc. It's to narrate. It's not his story, so when he tries to take it over in "Storyteller" he promptly gets called on it. But what he does, constantly, is to point out that it is a narrative, that their entire lives are a story written by someone else (society's norms, or Joss Whedon), and that they can take control of this narrative and change it.

There's Spike's redefinition of his story, which is a whole other post I swear I'll write one of these days. But just think of this: how about the fact that Buffy The Vampire Slayer's perhaps closest confidant at the end of the series is a vampire, and one who's spent his entire existence deliberately redefining himself, and that her "second front" in "Chosen" is Angel? Buffy has gone from one supposed to fight vampires to one fighting with vampires; in a story set up to subvert the idea of monsters killing women, the woman now learns from and commands the monsters. The shadowmen infected the First Slayer with the essence of a demon, that she may be able to fight for them; Buffy Summers (Buffy The Vampire Slayer) infects her (its) demons with humanity, that they may be able to fight for her.

And there's the fact that Buffy survives. Much like Buffy can't kill Dracula, the original vampire myth, Buffy The Vampire Slayer can't kill Buffy Summers. If it did, there'd be no story.

I'm not saying s7 did everything right. In terms of internal consistency and logic, it's probably the sloppiest of all seven seasons. There are entire character arcs that barely get touched upon. There are some problematic ideas that get presented with no ambiguity at all. But I really love what it tried to do, and in its best moments succeeded in doing. Buffy The Vampire Slayer wasn't cancelled - it scythed axed itself, on its own terms, after redefining the central problem it established in the very first episode. It ends with Buffy having taken the myth that always trapped her there with her, handing the bits she can use out to others and sending the rest down into the crater. It ends outside the story, outside Sunnydale, in broad daylight.