Why Academics Love 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' - The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/the...

CULTURE

The Rise of Buffy

Studies
Scholarly interest in Joss Whedon’s cult classic points to the
growing belief that TV shows deserve to be studied as
literature.

CW / Andrey Kuzmin / Shutterstock / Paul Spella / The Atlantic

KATHARINE SCHWAB | 9:53 AM ET

When Joss Whedon’s classic show Buffy the Vampire Slayer went off the
air in 2003, its cult status was still very much nascent. Cue the novels,
comics, video games, and spinoffs, not to mention fan sites, fan fiction,
conventions, and inclusion on scores of “Best TV Shows of All Time”

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lists. But while it remains good fun to watch a seemingly ditzy teenager
and her friends fight the forces of darkness with super-strength, magic,
and witty banter, the show’s seven seasons have also become the
subject of critical inquiry from a more intellectually rigorous fanbase:
academics.

Buffy, along with critically

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and Twin Peaks, came before The
Sopranos and the beginning of the
Golden Age of Television, but
helped pave the way for scholars to
treat television shows like The Wire,
 Mad Men, and Breaking Bad as 

sprawling works of art to be

The Trouble With Teaching Dr. Who
dissected and analyzed alongside
the greatest works of literature.
Academics have found Whedon’s
cult classic to be particularly multi-dimensional—trading heavily on
allegory, myth, and cultural references—while combining an inventive
narrative structure with dynamic characters and social commentary.

As a result, hundreds of scholarly books and articles have been written

about Buffy’s deeper themes, and an entire academic journal and
conference series—appropriately called Slayage—is devoted to using the
show and other Whedon works to discuss subjects such as philosophy
and cultural theory. Buffy as an allegorical spectacle of postmodern life?

Check. Buffy as a progressive, feminist challenge to gender hierarchy?
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Check. Buffy as a philosophical examination of subjectivity and truth?
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Douglas Kellner, a professor at UCLA, has written that popular

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television does a particularly good job of expressing the subconscious

fears and fantasies of a society, and that Buffy is an especially useful
example. The show’s fantastical elements, he said, provide “access to
social problems and issues and hopes and anxieties that are often not
articulated in more ‘realist’ cultural forms,” like cop shows or sitcoms.
But even popular dramas with similar surface-level conceits like Teen
Wolf and Vampire Diaries, which focus mostly on soap-opera romance
and teen issues, lack Buffy’s allegorical elements, which elevate the
show and make it fascinating for scholars to study.

In Buffy, monsters act as physical stand-ins for societal differences and

threats: Vampires symbolize sexual predators, werewolves represent
bodily forces out of control, and witches tap into tropes about how
 female power and sexuality is seen as threatening. By fighting the “Big 

Bad,” Buffy and her friends fight the monsters everyone faces—
oppressive authority figures, meaningless rules, confining social norms,
sexual awakening, loneliness, redemption—in other words, the terrors
of growing up and finding one’s way in the world.

Buffy scholars have taken dozens of different approaches to

understanding the television show or using it to further work in other
disciplines. In the decade since it went off the air, a Stanford University
population ecologist used mathematical formulas to determine
potential vampire demographics in Sunnydale, the fictional California
town where the show is set. A strategist at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, the prominent Washington, D.C. think tank,
compared Buffy’s war against the forces of evil to the U.S.’s war on

terror and named a new paradigm in biological warfare after the
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fictional vampire slayer. An English-language historian and linguist
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published a lexicon of ‘Buffyspeak,’ the insider name for the particular
slang and expressions used in the show (Examples include: “Love
makes you do the wacky,” “What’s with the grim?” and “She’s the

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Do-That Girl”).

“Whedon seems to be an almost inexhaustible source,” said David

Lavery, an English professor at Middle Tennessee State University who
teaches courses on Mad Men, Doctor Who, and Lost as well as Buffy, and
co-founded the Whedon Studies Association, an academic organization
devoted to analyzing the works of the eponymous writer, producer, and
director. “There’s the complexity, intertextuality, authenticity of his
stories that makes them so rich for study. If he keeps making stuff for
the next 10 years, I think Whedon studies will be going on for quite a
long time.”

 
By fighting the “Big Bad,” Buffy
and her friends fight the
monsters everyone faces.

Even though it helped set the stage for prestige shows like Mad Men to
be studied in an academic context, Buffy lacks some of the same
gravitas those series do. The New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum has
lamented that Buffy doesn’t look the way “worthy” television should
look, which has made it difficult for her to convince friends and peers of
its quality. (In early seasons, she noted, “the werewolf costume looked
like it was my great-aunt Ida’s coat.”) Still, Buffy’s sometimes Dr.
Who-esque campiness itself has merited critical essays. Meanwhile,

other scholars have unpacked the complexSPONSOR
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has to his universes, examining him as an Invest inpar

auteur on our Cities
with show
creators such as Vince Gilligan, Matthew Weiner, and Shonda Rhimes.

Beyond Buffy, the field of popular-culture studies is rising in

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universities across the country. Students are critiquing Madonna, Jay-Z,

and Harry Potter, as well as The Sopranos, The Wire, and Lost. These
scholars—many of whom are fans of the works they study—sometimes
brush up against an academic culture that looks down upon their texts
of choice, despite television’s formal and thematic similarities to other
well-established areas of study.

But throughout history, yesterday’s lowbrow is often tomorrow’s

cultural classic. Rhonda Wilcox, who also co-founded the Whedon
Studies Association, frequently compares the episodic format of
television to 19th century serialization of novels, like those of Charles
Dickens. Dickens, as well as Shakespeare, was considered “pop
culture” and thus unworthy of study by close-minded academics who
 maintained that epic poetry was the most legitimate text. Literary 

studies and film studies as they’re known today both underwent similar
battles for legitimacy that television studies is currently facing. “I think
that we’re slowly getting people to recognize that television studies
needs to be taken seriously. It’s a general prejudice because it’s fun,”
Wilcox says.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Whedon himself supports the rise of the

discipline. In an interview with The New York Times in 2003, he said, “I
think it’s always important for academics to study popular culture, even
if the thing they are studying is idiotic. If it’s successful or made a dent
in culture, then it is worthy of study to find out why.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR


KATHARINE SCHWAB is an editorial fellow with The Atlantic.
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