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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.

By Katharine Schwab

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

OCTOBER 1, 2015 SHARE & GIFT SAVE

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 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” 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.

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Buffy, along with critically acclaimed series like The X-Files and Twin Peaks,

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 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 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? Check. Buffy as a philosophical examination of
subjectivity and truth? Why not?

Douglas Kellner, a professor at UCLA, has written that popular 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

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 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
fictional vampire slayer. An English-language historian and linguist 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 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.”

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 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 complex relationship Joss
Whedon has to his universes, examining him as an auteur on par with show
creators such as Vince Gilligan, Matthew Weiner, and Shonda Rhimes.

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

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 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.”

Katharine Schwab is a former editorial fellow at The Atlantic.

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