A cultural blip, disowned and dismissed. A cultural phenomenon, nurtured and celebrated. Is there any doubt Kristy Swanson’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an Xer, and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s a Millennial?
Joss Whedon famously dislikes the movie made from his original screenplay for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui and starring Kristy Swanson. Seems he’d envisioned a B-movie with a Shakespearean soul, whereas Kuzui saw pure juvenile camp—an empowerment tale for prepubescent girls.
Buffy arrived right before it became cool for teenagers to brood about real things like depression and the cost of Doc Martens. But something about this particular movie was bewitching to a tweeny bopper with an alternative undertow. It had gloss and edge—but more gloss than edge. This was a pre-Clueless, Skittles-tinted ode to California ditz. . . . The result was an unfussy pre–Spice Girls girl-power fantasy for a 12-year-old kid.
Soraya Roberts, “I’ll Always Love the Original Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Atlantic, July 31, 2022
Only a modest success during its theatrical run, the cult horror/comedy found an appreciable audience on VHS. Three years later, nascent netlet The WB saw an opportunity to bring the inspired concept of Valley girl–turned–vampire slayer to television—only this time under the auspices of the IP’s disgruntled creator:
Building on his original premise, he re-imagined the monsters as metaphors for the horrors of adolescence. In one climactic scene, Buffy loses her virginity to a vampire who has been cursed with a soul; the next morning, his soul is gone and he’s lusting for blood. Any young woman who had gone to bed with a seemingly nice guy only to wake up with an asshole could relate. . . .
In those early days of the internet, before nerd culture swallowed the world, fans flocked to a message board set up by the WB to analyze Buffy with the obsessive zeal of Talmudic scholars. Whedon knew how to talk to these people—he was one of them. He would visit the board at all hours to complain about his grueling schedule or to argue with fans about their interpretations of his work. Back then, as he pointed out to me, the internet was “a friendly place,” and he, the quick-witted prince of nerds, “had the advantage of it.”
Lila Shapiro, “The Undoing of Joss Whedon,” Vulture, January 17, 2022
It is impossible to fully appreciate the monopolistic stranglehold geek interests have maintained on our culture over the first two decades of this millennium without acknowledging the pivotal role Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) played in elevating such pulp ephemera to a place of mainstream legitimacy and critical respectability. It was the right premise (Whedon pitched it as My So-Called Life meets The X-Files) on the right network (one willing to try new ideas and exercise patience as they found an audience) by the right creator (a card-carrying, self-professed geek) speaking to the right audience (impressionable Millennials) at the right time (the dawn of the Digital Age). It all synthesized at exactly that moment. Forget Booger—Buffy was our culture’s revenge of the nerds.
In what was surely a first for any geek or screenwriter, let alone a combo platter, a cult of hero worship coalesced around Whedon. His genius was celebrated on message boards and at academic conferences, inked in books and on body parts. “He was a celebrity showrunner before anyone cared who ran shows” (ibid.).
Master storyteller that he is, Whedon didn’t merely reset the narrative of Buffy; he reframed the narrative about it. While serving as a loose sequel to the feature film, the television series wasn’t Buffy the Vampire Slayer 2 so much as Buffy the Vampire Slayer 2.0—a complete overhaul and upgrade. This was Buffy as it was always intended to be, before Hollywood fucked up a great thing. That the startup-network show emerged as a phoenix from the ashes of a major-studio feature only burnished Whedon’s geek-underdog credentials. To utter the word “Buffy” was to be speaking unambiguously about the series, not the movie.
What movie?
In 1997, Whedon premiered his Buffy series on The WB and essentially wiped the film from the collective memory.
By that point, I had turned 17, and even though the show was more serious than the movie, even though its universe was cleverer and more cohesive, even though the silent episode “Hush” was probably one of the best things on television at the time it aired, Buffy was still a vampire show—to me, it was just kids’ play. My adolescence adhered to a kind of Gen-X aimlessness, to indie films with lots of character and very little plot. Whedon’s show seemed more like the kind of thing Reality Bites would make fun of—a juvenile, overly earnest studio product.
Roberts, “I’ll Always Love the Original Buffy the Vampire Slayer”
As a member of Ms. Roberts’ demographic cohort, four years her senior, I’ll second that appraisal. Yet for the Millennials who came of age in a post-Whedon world, and who were introduced to Buffy through the series—who fell in love with her on TV—Whedon’s creative contextualization of the movie became the universally accepted, unchallenged, and perennially reinforced perception of it:
You actually can’t watch the Buffy the Vampire Slayer film online, and honestly, you might be better off. Luckily, all seven seasons of the Whedon-helmed (and approved) masterpiece that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer the series is easily streamed. 25 years later, Buffy movie is proof that our heroine was always better off in the hands of her maker.
Jade Budowski, “The ‘Buffy’ Movie At 25: A Rough, Rough Draft Of The Magic That Followed,” Decider, July 31, 2017
The simultaneous display of blind devotion, proprietary entitlement, and self-assured dismissiveness in a statement like that, far from the only likeminded Millennial assessment of Buffy, is the kind of thing we humble Xers have spent a lifetime swallowing and shrugging off, even—especially—when we know better. Not that anyone much cares what we have to say:
Here’s a refresher on the measliness of Generation X: Our parents were typically members of the Silent Generation, that cohort born between 1928 and 1945—people shaped by the Great Depression and World War II, people who didn’t get to choose what they were having for dinner and made sure their kids didn’t either. The parents of Gen X believed in spanking and borderline benign neglect, in contrast to the boisterous boomers and their deluxe offspring, the millennial horde. . . .
. . . Baby boomers and millennials have always had a finely tuned sense of how important they are. Gen Xers are under no such illusion. Temperamentally prepared to be criticized and undermined at all times, we never entirely trusted the people in charge anyway.
Pamela Paul, “Gen X Is Kind of, Sort of, Not Really the Boss,” Opinion, New York Times, August 14, 2022
Whereas the Millennials who deified Whedon have in recent years had to square their enduring love for Buffy with the spate of damning accusations against him—marital infidelity, feminist hypocrisy, emotionally abusive treatment of subordinates—the geek god’s fall from grace is no skin off Gen X’s nose; Big Daddy disavowed our Buffy, to the extent we feel that strongly about it one way or the other, decades ago. Lucky for us, as Ms. Paul observes, we never entirely trusted the people in charge anyway. And since Whedon’s critique of the Buffy movie remains to this day the culturally enshrined view of it, perhaps that merits reconsideration, too?
For the past quarter century, the differences between the Buffy movie and TV series have been authoritatively chalked up to all the usual cinema-snobbery bullshit: tone and aesthetics and emotional depth and worldbuilding breadth. Wrong. The tonal disparity between the two Buffys has from the outset been greatly overstated. The gap between Swanson’s Buffy and Gellar’s is, at its heart, generational.
Mothers and Daughters
Let’s start with the ways in which Swanson and Gellar are parented. In the movie, adults function mostly as minor obstacles or white noise, much as they’re portrayed in Buffy’s spiritual forerunner, Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (1987). Both movies exist in a teenage world in which teenagers are responsible for resolving their own issues. That’s textbook Gen-X adolescence. To put it in terms any Xer would understand: Your parents didn’t wanna know about your fuckin’ problems.
Gellar’s mother, Joyce Summers (Kristine Sutherland), is a quintessential Baby boomer, raising a quintessential Millennial, who prominently asserts her parental influence in ways both supportive and overbearing. At some point between the events of the movie and the series pilot, Joyce moved her daughter out of L.A., where Buffy “fell in with the wrong crowd”—wonder what that’s code for?—and into suburban Sunnydale, an idealized Southern California community that manages to make Santa Barbara seem second-rate by comparison.
As a boomer, Joyce came of age during the period of white flight, so it makes perfect sense she’d be more comfortable in the ’burbs—that she reasoned she’d have greater control over her daughter’s activities there. (My parents, native New Yorkers and members of the Silent Generation, brought up me and my sister in a Bronx rental apartment while all their younger siblings and cousins fled to the pristine suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey.)
Joyce drops Buffy off at school on her first day at Sunnydale High and lovingly assures her she’ll make new friends in no time. She listens to parenting-advice tapes for affirmation that it’s okay to say “no.” (Christ, the one and only thing my late father, raised in an Upper Manhattan tenement during the Depression, never reflexively said “no” to was another Meister Brau.) She hovers like a gatekeeper by the front door, dutifully inquiring as to where Buffy is going and whether—egads!—boys will be there. Joyce’s smotherly tendencies become a considerable impediment to Buffy’s nocturnal assignments.
By stark comparison, when Swanson’s Buffy returns home after her first night of training under the guidance of her Watcher (Donald Sutherland), here’s what happens:
Note that Buffy’s mom (the awesome Candy Clark, spinning comedy gold from her few brief scenes) is only ever referenced in the script or credited onscreen as exactly that: “Buffy’s Mom.” She isn’t “Joyce Summers” in either name or worldview. She is an NPC in the life of her daughter—pure background noise, easily tuned out. Far from a plot complication, she is at best a punch line. She doesn’t even bother to learn the correct name of Buffy’s boyfriend, Jeffrey, before leaving them alone in the house for the weekend. “She thinks my name is Bobby?” he asks. “It’s possible she thinks my name’s Bobby,” Buffy suggests.
(Fun fact: The Buffy pilot, “Welcome to the Hellmouth,” which establishes Joyce Summers as a complete reconceptualization of Buffy’s Mom, was directed by Charles Martin Smith, who, twenty-five years earlier, got his acting break in George Lucas’ American Graffiti playing Terry the Toad, the unlikely love interest of… Candy Clark’s Debbie.)
Gellar is forced, on occasion, to rely on lying and sneaking out of the house, whereas Swanson is under no such domestic restrictions. But Gellar also benefits from a far more supportive cover story: Her Watcher (Anthony Stewart Head) is installed as school librarian, so the convenient “I was at the library” excuse is both truthful and verifiable. By the third season, though, it becomes unnecessary as Joyce finally learns of her daughter’s mystical birthright, but, succumbing to moral panic, she founds M.O.O.—Mothers Opposed to the Occult—thereby saddling Buffy with both a vocational obstacle and a social embarrassment in one swoop.
Benign neglect, despite Swanson’s resentment of such treatment, has its advantages. Yet the Slayer heritage offers a host of other resources, though, they, too, differ by demographic cohort…
Tools of the Trade
In every generation there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.
Opening narration from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997)
Sure—but why she? The series never even bothered to address that question, and the fandom, otherwise notorious for demanding literal-minded explication from and meticulous continuity curation of these sorts of mythopoeic media franchises, never made an issue of it.
We got the backstory—a prehistoric girl named Sineya, abducted by three shaman who magically weaponized her to fight demons, became the first in an ongoing line of Slayers—but no rationale for why a female would be exclusively suited for this responsibility. Customarily, monster hunting has been a masculine vocation. In the ancient mythologies of the world (Gilgamesh, Hercules, Shiva, Thor), to say nothing of conspicuously conservative horror fiction like Dracula and The Exorcist, the patriarchy didn’t outsource that honor as happened on Buffy.
The movie, however, offered a reason that was simple, logical, and utterly persuasive: because Slayers experience menstrual pain in the presence of a vampire—a natural “reaction to their unnaturalness,” as Donald Sutherland explains to Swanson’s Buffy. Why that innovative conceptual foundation for Whedon’s superheroic lineage—what I would even compliment as enviably brilliant—was abandoned by the series, so celebrated for its feminist themes, is altogether bewildering to me.
I suppose as a Millennial, Geller was a Slayer for the Digital Age, and therefore had technologies at her disposal that obviated the need for uterine aegis. The first episode of the series, which aired less than five years after the movie, establishes cellphones and the Internet as at-the-ready resources in Buffy’s battle against the undead.
That’s a far cry from when Swanson’s boyfriend, fed up with his inability to reach her while she was at the graveyard, dumped her via telephone message. “You broke up with my machine?” she clarifies incredulously. Swanson’s newfound duties alienated her from her friends, who were left stupefied by her increasingly routine absence from cheerleading practice and the shopping mall.
If being a Slayer was a social handicap for Swanson, it had the opposite effect on Gellar’s life: By the end of her first week at Sunnydale High, she’d assembled a team of loyal best friends, affectionately dubbed the Scooby Gang, who never left her side, the threat to their own safety be damned. So much for “She alone will stand against the forces of darkness,” huh?
If anything, that tagline applies more aptly to Swanson’s Buffy, who lost her friends, and all she got in return was a chronic case of cramps. For the burden of responsibility Buffy is made to shoulder, Big Daddy compensated, even rewarded, his Millennial scion, whereas the Gen-X also-ran was left to suck it up by herself.
When viewed through a demographic lens, it becomes apparent that it is the show’s affirmation of the Millennial worldview to which Millennial fans overwhelmingly—and understandingly—respond. That the TV series was “less campy” or “more emotionally complex” than the movie is just a haughty excuse to justify one’s preference for the “Whedon-helmed and -approved” version of this premise.
The series’ mythology may very well have been richer and more elaborate, but I would argue that came at the cost of the movie’s conceptual simplicity.
When She Was Bad
Since the movie is only ever referenced as an inferior “first draft” of the series, the latter of which hasn’t stopped being celebrated for its capital-I importance in the quarter century since its premiere, is it too soon to acknowledge that out of seven seasons, exactly two of them achieved greatness? The first season is to Buffy what The Motion Picture is to Star Trek: an uneven but necessary transition between what the franchise was previously and what it would become in its new medium.
Seasons two and three represent the show’s creative apex. The high-school-as-hell metaphor provided uncommon thematic depth for a teen-vampire melodrama, and the Buffy/Angel romance brought real passion and tension to the series.
But by season four, the characters were in college, a very different and less universal experience from high school, and Angel (David Boreanaz) had moved on to his own spinoff series, and while there were certainly some standout episodes, sans the adolescent metaphor and love story that made Buffy so compulsory, even special, the show was running on goodwill at that point more than good storytelling. Buffy peaked in high school, alas.
If the series probably should’ve ended after season three, it definitely should’ve dropped the curtain at the conclusion of season five. Season six got weighed down with that tiresome resurrection plotline, an emotionally unrelatable theme, and by season seven, the show had completely forsaken its long-diminishing sense of humor. This was a problem with later seasons of Angel (1999–2004), as well, both of which got too high on their own supply of apocalyptic angst.
If Kuzui’s movie, in Whedon’s estimation, failed to take the Buffy concept seriously, the postadolescent years of his TV series took the whole thing far too seriously. Buffy was a tougher tonal balancing act than it appeared, and even Whedon’s creative instincts weren’t infallible.
But fans were forgiving, because Buffy followed the same developmental arc as any childhood favorite that grows with its audience into adulthood: It got increasingly darker and more somber as it got older. Much like that other Millennial fave Harley Quinn, who also debuted in 1992, what started out as a character appropriate for 12-year-olds would eventually be subjected, rather exploitatively in my view, to sexual assault. We didn’t grow up without trauma and neither, I suppose, would these characters—Whedon saw fit to that with Buffy.
In the later seasons of “Buffy,” Whedon literally kills and resurrects his heroine, ripping her out of heaven so she can return to Earth and reluctantly avert the apocalypse once again. Buffy’s revivification traumatizes her, leading to self-harm, depression and emotional calluses that play out until the series finale. It’s a narrative ethos that suggests that maturing into womanhood means growing emotionally numb.
Robyn Bahr, “Joss Whedon’s ‘feminist’ shows all concealed toxic ideas about women,” PostEverything, Washington Post, February 13, 2021
Indeed. Or as Joss Whedon justified it: feminism.
The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth
Buffy’s feminist agenda, the subject of endless books and college courses, is a sack of shit. Much like the long-settled “debate” about the show’s creative superiority to the movie, that discussion is—and has been from Day One—a complete waste of time.
I submit fans were, from the outset, far less taken with how Whedon championed feminism—I don’t think that’s ever mattered nearly as much as he or his fan base would have you believe—than with how he destigmatized geekiness. They “were searching for community, not artistry” (Sonny Bunch, “Joss Whedon shows what happens when a fandom attaches to an artist over art,” Opinion, Washington Post, January 20, 2022).
As an Xer who, like Whedon, grew up on comics and B-movies, take my word for it we didn’t go around advertising our passion for that stuff. What a different world we live in today. Grown men obsess over superhero universes, openly and proudly. Grown women can’t get enough of lovesick-vampire lit. And all of us somehow came to consider a glorified Dungeons & Dragons campaign the crowning cultural achievement of human civilization, awarding it a staggering fifty-nine Emmys over eight seasons. All of that would’ve been unthinkable pre-Buffy. Sure, we canceled Whedon once his transgressions became undeniable—
But try finding any modern franchise without his mark: the detached irony of the dialogue, the empowerment story, the superficial feminism. A body of work that Whedon himself called “a rage-filled hormonal autobiography” has become the lifeblood of American popular culture.
But an angry young man doesn’t change just because he reinvents himself as a young woman. And to me, it’s notable that when a woman had the power behind the camera, Whedon, whatever the reason, felt free to basically wash his hands of the project. But this same woman shot the following conversation, which notably doesn’t appear in Whedon’s original Buffy script:
Pike: I saved you a dance.
Buffy: You gonna ask me?
Pike: I suppose you want to lead.
Buffy: No.
Pike: Me neither.Kuzui seemed to know that this exchange—in which a man refuses to control a woman, even when given the opportunity—would land with girls. And it still lands with me, as a woman, now.
Roberts, “I’ll Always Love the Original Buffy the Vampire Slayer”
Pike, if you’re unfamiliar with the movie, is the male lead played by the late Luke Perry, cresting on 90210 fame in ’92. He and his best friend Benny (David Arquette) are a pair of penniless losers who can only admire Buffy and her girlfriends (including pre-stardom Hilary Swank) from afar. As the story progresses, though, our superficial Valley-girl heroine learns to see past Pike’s motor oil–smeared coveralls at the fundamentally decent young man underneath.
During the climactic battle at the senior dance, Pike proves himself an indispensable ally, and once the master vampire (Rutger Hauer) is vanquished—and after that last dance to which Ms. Roberts refers, of course—Buffy rides off into the sunrise with him.
(Are we to assume Pike is the “wrong crowd” Joyce later accused Buffy of falling in with? He’s demonstrably the most emotionally well-adjusted boyfriend she ever had. Or could it in fact be that the “wrong crowd” were the Kuzuis—Fran and her husband Kaz, the film’s producer? Whedon certainly considers them a bad influence on Buffy.)
Pike is the character I related to when I went to see Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the summer of ’92. He was me. I was 16, working in the warehouse of a cosmetics supplier in Chelsea; my best friend and sidekick, 14, had an office-gopher job at a construction company down on Mulberry Street. Believe me when I say, with nary a scintilla of pride, this could easily be a picture of the two of us at the time:
We were hopeless outcasts, just like these guys, sneaking into movies we couldn’t afford at the cineplex in Union Square, resigned to feeling subhuman around any pretty girls we encountered. So, for a 12-year-old girl like Ms. Roberts, Buffy was an empowerment fable. But for a 16-year-old boy seeing the movie through the eyes of Pike, it was a wish-fulfilment fantasy about finding acceptance in a world you’ve only ever glimpsed from the outside looking in—about being noticed by the prettiest girl at school. That’s what the movie meant to me then, and that’s what it reminds me of now, thirty years later.
The grace-note scene Ms. Roberts cites above, the one that impressed upon her so powerfully, has Buffy and Pike resuming a dance that got interrupted immediately preceding the movie’s grand finale, before the vampires crash the prom. It’s that earlier moment, in which Pike works up the nerve to ask Buffy to dance, that still to this day resonates so strongly with me, and as far as I can tell it is mostly Kuzui, not Whedon, who deserves credit for it. Let’s break it down.
Close Your Eyes
The diegetic use of Toad the Wet Sprocket’s deep-cut ballad “Little Heaven” is an inconspicuous yet effective background detail, because musically, it sets a proper wistful tone at the top of the scene, given the solitary self-pity in which Buffy is wallowing right then. She’s lost her mentor at the hands of the villain she was expected to vanquish. Despite all her training and initiative and courage, she has fallen woefully short. She isn’t cut out to be the Slayer. So, she does what anyone feeling the sting of colossal failure and disillusionment would do: She retreats to the familiar comfort of her old world…
… only to find, to her disappointment and disorientation, she’s outgrown it. Her friends’ priorities and preoccupations seem so trivial to her now; she can’t relate to them. Her boyfriend has moved on. She’s neither Buffy the Valley Girl—that’s finished—nor Buffy the Vampire Slayer—that died on the vine. She can’t go back and she has no path forward. It’s the heroine’s low moment. “Little Heaven,” with its pensive rhythm, underscores her anguish.
But as Pike arrives and the mood shifts, the melody, which hasn’t actually changed, now somehow seems romantic, tonally mature. And the song’s lyrics (“Opened my eyes / The fire had come”), which for the most part are not made to compete with dialogue, speak like a Greek chorus to exactly what Buffy is grappling with, emotionally and intellectually, at that point in the story: the realization that sudden, seismic change is inevitable sometimes, but it doesn’t have to mean you’re cursed—a hapless recipient of divine punishment, a helpless victim of cosmic misfortune. Rather, change impels—and, depending on one’s outlook, inspires—personal growth and matured perspective, even if we weren’t actively looking for it. “Adulting,” as Millennials came to call it.
Perry plays the moment with such believable apprehension—his discomfort at the dance, his uncertainty over how Buffy will receive him—we willingly suspend our skepticism that someone with the aquiline handsomeness of Dylan McKay would have any self-confidence issues around the ladies. “Breathe in waves of doubt,” the song intones at the very moment Pike catches sight of her from across the gym and makes his decision to go for it.
At his unexpected appearance, Swanson’s body language turns on a dime: She’s instantly at ease. She leans into that, and even puts him at ease by playfully teasing him, with self-aware irony, about how shallow he is to have crashed the school dance. In her most emotionally vulnerable moment, Buffy chooses to be open, not closed or callused—not snarkily dismissive as she’d previously been.
“You know, Buffy,” Pike ventures as they slow dance, “you’re not like other girls.” As she comes into view over his shoulder, she pays the comment thoughtful consideration before self-confidently assuring him otherwise: “Yes, I am.”
As I interpret this exchange (scripted by Whedon), Buffy is explicitly and hopefully declining in that moment to be the poster child for “a reductive, masculinized conception of what it means to be a forceful woman” (Bahr, “Joss Whedon’s ‘feminist’ shows all concealed toxic ideas about women”).
It isn’t that Swanson’s Buffy is insisting with defiant hope or disingenuous humility that somehow she’s like every other girl; rather, she’s reassuring the 12-year-old girls in the audience that they’re like her—that despite the hardened action-heroine role models male storytellers reliably provide for them, they needn’t see themselves as “the girl who can deal out punishment partly because she takes so much abuse, one who can absorb everything you throw at her, only to spout a retort while spitting blood and kicking you in the crotch” (ibid.).
Kuzui lobbed setbacks and disappointments at Buffy, sure, but didn’t punish her with emotional detachment. Instead, Buffy attains greater depth of feeling for having endured those trials. As she tentatively initiates a kiss with Pike on the dance floor, either unaware of or unconcerned with the scornful gazes from her snooty classmates, a subtle shift in the lyrics echoes her implicit acceptance of her change of fortune: “I understand / The fire will come.”
The scene can be viewed and appreciated from either character’s standpoint; it takes on a different meaning depending on whether you’re watching it through the eyes of a 12-year-old girl or a 16-year-old boy. In Buffy, the movie gives us a hero to aspire to; in Pike, it offers a surrogate with whom we can relate.
On the page—in Whedon’s script, I mean—this is an eyeblink-quick, emotionally flat beat; it exists nigh exclusively to establish Pike’s presence at the dance before all hell breaks loose. But in the film, it’s a two-minute, forty-five-second segment—an astonishing amount of screen time (especially for a compact 86-minute movie) to linger in such a contemplative, actionless scene. It isn’t scary; it isn’t funny; Pike doesn’t make any grand romantic overture, other than the courage it took for him to approach Buffy in her (former) world; she doesn’t do anything heroic, other than demonstrate a willingness to let go of the things that once defined her. And yet there’s so much going on in it emotionally. It’s truthful. Relatable.
While that particular scene is my personal favorite (and only enhanced by the aggressively ’90s look of the dance-floor DJ), Kuzui’s Buffy is full of little layers like that—deliberate creative choices to discover and appreciate, for those willing to take the time to do so. There’s a low-key, low-stakes quality to the Buffy movie I find utterly charming, even refreshing in our era of self-serious, overplotted mega-franchises. This is not an epic. It doesn’t aspire to importance; it isn’t the “cultural phenomenon” Whedon explicitly intended for Buffy to be.
Rather, like The Lost Boys, the Buffy movie is an unassuming teen dramedy concerned with those little human connections that happen between young people who spend most of their day feeling misunderstood—even given up on—by parents, teachers, and peers. Vampires are entirely incidental.
Buffy and Pike’s sweet little romance isn’t meant to be a star-crossed love story for the ages à la Buffy and Angel, or Bella and Edward. Pike doesn’t sacrifice his soul for her, merely his soul patch. The small-scale relatability of it makes the movie, at least for me, far more romantic and affecting than the emo-sodden portentousness of the TV series. It reminds me what it felt like to be that age, and how we ached for girls to just see us, not necessarily herald the arrival of true love or destiny calling.
The ensuing multimedia franchise that would eclipse the movie, on the other hand, doesn’t really remind me of anything but itself—nor is it meant to.
Buffy Everywhere All at Once
Given its humble origins as an overlooked movie and underestimated TV series, its remarkable how expansive the franchise became—and how enduring it’s remained.
Scores of original tie-in novels were published during the show’s run. The movie screenplay was adapted as a Dark Horse comic called The Origin, rendered in the visual style of the TV show and likenesses of its actors, and correcting any continuity discrepancies to match the series’ mythos. Whedon himself declared The Origin “canonical.”
(Is that where fandom’s puerile fixation with “canon” comes from—the provenance of its obsession with immaculate continuity reconciliation, of definitively establishing which fictional stories, like, “actually happened” and which ones don’t really “count”?)
Subsequent “seasons” of both Buffy and Angel, overseen by Whedon, were produced as ongoing comic-book arcs, concluding as recently as 2018, a full fifteen years—the timespan of an entire generation, ironically enough—after the series finale.
With its acquisition of Fox in 2019, Disney added Buffy the Vampire Slayer to its extensive register of commercially flogged culturally defining IPs, alongside Star Wars and Marvel, and went straight to work establishing—and this is the official name for it (because of course it is)—the Slayerverse. This includes a new line of comics from BOOM! Studios that feature Gellar’s Buffy as an old woman, Willow as a Slayer, and apparently Angel as a TV actor moonlighting as a monster hunter? (I can’t believe that last one is accurate but by all indication it is.)
Curious to know about Willow’s daughter? Disney Hyperion’s got a novel for that (In Every Generation). And a Spike prequel (Bloody Fool for Love). A Tara prequel (The Bewitching Hour). A villain team-up pitched as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Suicide Squad” (Big Bad). It goes on and on and on.
As a narrative device, the “multiverse”—parallel dimensions, alternate realities, and the paths not taken they represent—should and can be creatively fertile soil, as it was in Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library (2020), as well as Buffy’s third-season episode “The Wish.” After all, the multiverse is the ultimate expression of the all-things-everywhere-at-once ethos of the Digital Age—the very era that coincided with the creative rebirth of Buffy.
It’s probably no coincidence that the idea has become so popular during an era of pandemic, climate change and political turmoil, when so many of us have felt helpless and trapped. Who doesn’t want to imagine a different world?
S.I. Rosenbaum, “I Fantasized About Multiple Timelines, and It Nearly Ruined My Life,” Opinion, New York Times, March 20, 2023
However, when a corporate transmedia franchise adopts the construct, it invariably has less to do with artistic expression than brand management. A story evolves over time into a storyworld, the inconsistencies of which “necessitate” the establishment of a multiverse. At that point, a franchise is pretty much solely committed to curating its own sprawling intertextuality, not cultivating, as Kuzui did in the standalone Buffy movie, little human moments like the Buffy-Pike dance.
Instead, it becomes a metanarrative exclusively in conversation with itself about itself, otherwise known as a masturbatory exercise in fan service, written for—and verifiably by (Kendare Blake, Kiersten White, Lily Anderson, William Ritter, Ashley Poston)—nostalgic Millennials.
This is the problem with this sort of nostalgia-driven storytelling, which can often feel like a narrative cargo cult. It chases the recognizable artifacts and the iconography of beloved properties, without ever engaging with the storytelling mechanics that made them so compelling in the first place.
Darren Mooney, “In ‘The Next Generation,’ Picard Works Hard to Justify Its Nostalgia,” The Escapist, February 16, 2023
Whereas the Buffy movie and first three seasons of the TV series were designed, however simplistically, to provide emotional contextualization and catharsis for the traumatic experiences of high school, the “Slayerverse” encourages romantic yearning for that period of emotional development. It wants you to live in a state of commercial adolescence forever, among the characters you grew up with in the preferred “universe” of your choosing.
Drink from Me and Live Forever
In the subsequent teen-centric genre fiction Buffy inspired—what might even accurately be called the emo–industrial complex—the notion of eternal pubescence isn’t an aberration, but rather an aspiration.
Take, for instance, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005). The approximately 360-year-old patriarch of the series’ coven of “vegetarian” vampires, Carlisle Cullen, necessarily moves his ageless family to a new town every few years, where he unnecessarily enrolls his five “teenage” sires—Edward, Rosalie, Emmett, Jasper, and Alice, all of whom are, give or take, a century old—at the local high school. They aren’t merely eternal teenagers, like Kiefer Sutherland’s glamtastic gang in The Lost Boys—they are perennial high-school students.
Why does Carlisle do this—and why does Edward tolerate it? Owed to an administrative error at my high school, I was made to spend an entire schoolyear repeating the ninth-grade curriculum—which, for the record, I passed in full the first time around—and thought I was going to go insane from boredom and frustration. Not Edward, though. Evidently, he was perfectly happy being miserable taking Chemistry and Algebra in perpetuity.
You know who did go insane from sustained infantilization, though? Claudia, the dollified child bloodsucker in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976). But whereas Louis and Lestat’s infantilization of Claudia was dramatized as a selfishly cruel act of emotional abuse with devastatingly tragic consequences, Carlisle’s same treatment of Edward and his “siblings” is presented by Meyer as a noble virtue—the stuff of adolescent-Millennial fantasy. The message? Adulthood may be a developmental inevitability, but adulting is a lifestyle choice.
Everlasting immaturity is the philosophical underpinning of all our multimedia “universes,” counting the so-called Slayerverse, which—let’s face it—is surely just an appetizer for the inexorable television revival. Antithetically, the Buffy movie, that jejune “rough draft” of Whedon’s culturally canonized pièce de resistance, is about moving on from adolescent concerns and outgrowing juvenile interests—including ephemeral crap like Buffy itself.
Once More, with Feeling
Notably, there is no setup for a sequel in Kuzui’s film, even though Whedon’s original script features a postlude, set sometime after graduation, in which Buffy leads Pike up the steep approach to a Gothic castle—in Europe?—and knocks on its carved wooden door. The End. What awaits them on the other side—the next phase of her training? a hive of vampires?—is left for us to ponder and, presumably, a sequel to illumine.
But even if box-office receipts had warranted a direct continuation, Kuzui had no interest in teasing what came next for Pike and Swanson’s Buffy. After they drive away from the school gym, in the film’s closing shot, we never see them again. They aren’t heading off into destiny—nothing so portentous. Merely adulthood.
Everything about the Buffy movie now—from its sense of humor about itself to its bittersweet conclusion to its earnest message that adulthood itself is empowerment, so don’t resist it when it comes around—seems like it’s from a lost world, a time before pop culture became its own socioreligious belief system, and “adulting” was what happened to those who’d fallen from the pure faith.
From superheroes, Star Wars and fairy tales to cartoons, the things many of us loved as children remain something we love today—protectively, passionately and even problematically. This fierce nostalgia is arguably even more common with millennials, whose instantaneous embrace of the internet has allowed very few childhood staples to slip through the cracks in memory. Even if we’re not buying lightsabers, Hulk hands or Barbie Dream Houses anymore, these characters and concepts are possessions that reside with many of us and sometimes define a key aspect of our identities. Previous generations, less driven by early age consumerist culture, don’t quite have the same involvement as late-game Gen Xers and millennials.
Richard Newby, “What Happens When Fandom Doesn’t Grow Up?”, Heat Vision, Hollywood Reporter, September 1, 2018
How do we learn to let go of childish things when the culture itself encourages, incentivizes, and conditions us to cling to them possessively? My generation was the involuntary test subject for government-sponsored commercial adolescence, having been raised on cynical toy commercials masquerading as harmless children’s programming. It was in the 1980s—take it from someone who was there—that geek interests got their first foothold in mainstream media.
Then came the Internet, which empowered young Millennials to celebrate—and galvanized them to promote—their favorite shows and movies through online discourse. In this environment, geek gods like Joss Whedon were born.
Generation Z, consequently, has only ever known an entertainment landscape of commercial adolescence on steroids, one in which corporate mega-franchises don’t produce movies so much as movie-length coming attractions, promising a Bigger, Better Event—not this one; the next one—right around the corner.
And we’re no longer merely the paying audience for that product; in the multiverse of social media, we’re its volunteer army of publicists, too. Just like the Potential Slayers who were “activated” in Buffy’s joylessly grandiose series finale, we’ve all become Chosen Ones—unwittingly conscripted by Hollywood to serve as both hostage buyers of and brand ambassadors for its oppressively juvenile media franchises.
Here in the post-Whedon reality to which we’ve been interminably consigned, not that he’s by any stretch exclusively to blame for this, there’s absolutely nothing fun about pop culture anymore. It has become as rapaciously extractive, time-consuming, energy-intensive, and infantilizing as your average soul-sucking, white-collar job in corporate America—the very conditions from which our movies used to at least offer us respite, before they, too, became optimized for neoliberal consumerism.
I can’t help but consider that upon its release in 1992, the Buffy movie wasn’t any of that. It was by no means the Most Important Thing Ever, and it was absolutely nothing I’d expected to still be discussing three decades later. It was just something to help pass an unremarkable midsummer afternoon when I was an aimless teenager. It did not command my eternal devotion.
And yet somehow, in a way few movies ever do over the course of a lifetime, it’s earned my enduring appreciation—not because it was momentous or ambitious, but because, much like Generation X, it wasn’t. For Millennials, Gellar’s Buffy is the love of their life; for Xers, Swanson’s was a high-school crush. Speaking for the latter demographic, sometimes it’s nicer to just remember something fondly than to carry it on your shoulders forever.
IIRC, The biggest discussion when the original movie was released was the returrn to the spotlight of Paul “Pee Wee Herman” Reubens
When I was about four years old my parents left Brooklyn to raise my sister and me jn a suburb in New Jersey for basically the same reason
Yes, Reubens had just been arrested the year prior for public masturbation in a Florida movie theater, which at the time was a fairly shocking event. And far from getting “canceled,” the following summer he had roles in two major movies: Buffy and Batman Returns! I recall how none of us could square the visage of Pee-wee, with his crew cut and red rouge, with Reubens’ mugshot, in which he had wild, disheveled hair and a goatee. And that was the same look he brought to the role of Amilyn, the vampire henchman, in Buffy! That was ballsy.
Reubens’ performance as Amilyn exemplifies everything fans of the Buffy series think is wrong with the movie: that it’s over-the-top. Certainly, the scenes with Amilyn and Lothos (Rutger Hauer) in their Gothic chamber play far more campy than scary. But I have to tell you, though, I went back and selectively watched a bunch of old Buffy eps in preparation to write this post, and I thought the scenes in the Master’s cavern, for instance, were just as cheesy — made worse by the fact that the actors were made to deliver their baroque dialogue through costume dentures — except the audience was being asked to take it all seriously!
Reubens seemed to understand that the only way to play a part like that is to be comically threatening. Actors in latex monster makeup being asked to play dramatic scenes are as impossible to take seriously as actors in superheroic spandex costumes. It’s just inherently silly. Actors like Adam West and Paul Reubens understood how to walk that balance beam.
The other thing that struck me as I watched the series is how obnoxiously stylized I found the dialogue to be. I know Whedon was praised for it at the time, but the “Buffyspeak” was all too clever by half. It’s annoying and dated now. It’s used with far more disciplined restraint in the movie. I was reminded of how fresh and effective the self-referential humor has been in Scream, but then screenwriter Kevin Williamson got full of himself writing Scream 2, and the self-aware dialogue that was clever the first time around now just came off as indulgent.
Both of my parents were born and raised in New York — my mother in Queens and my father in Manhattan. I’m not entirely sure why they didn’t follow the rest of the family to Jersey, quite frankly. Part of it probably had to do with the fact that we had no money, and at the time, New York City was actually hospitable to working-class people (versus how unaffordable it’s become now, with the average rent of a Manhattan apartment at $5,000/month).
But I also think they both genuinely liked living in the city. My dad lived for a time in the New Jersey suburbs when he was raising children with his first wife, and my older half-siblings will attest to this day that Dad was like a stranger in strange land in the ‘burbs. He was out of place there. He liked living in the city, where there was a pub on every corner. That suited him. I get it: It suits me.
Dad died at the VA Hospital in Kingsbridge Heights, directly across the Harlem River from the Manhattan neighborhood where he’d grown up, appropriately enough. My mother is still here in the Bronx after all these years. And my wife said just the other day how much she loves living here — how she feels like she’s part of a community for the first time in her life. New York isn’t perfect, but I don’t see myself living anywhere else from this point onward.
Sean,
Whew, you must be exhausted after this deep-dive! I’m not sure anyone has written so extensively about the Buffy movie. I can certainly appreciate your take on it, but it never really clicked for me. I think I saw it maybe once and then not until years later, after I was fully invested in the series, so in that respect it never had a chance with me.
Concerning the series, I never really thought much about the “why” for it being only women as slayers. We were given cursory backstory about it, but it’s such rich thematic material that was essentially left on the table.
One thing I’m not quite on board here is the framing of Gen X vs. Millennial. I was born in 1982, which places me right between those two generations (Xillennial, I’ve seen it named). A lot has been written about our lack of generational identity, and I think Buffy reflected a lot of that. One foot in the past, one foot in the future. When Buffy started, the Internet was just gaining steam, but there was no social media. AOL instant messaging was the closest at that time. Cell phones were rare (Buffy even says ‘beep me’ or something like that in an early episode) and had no purpose other than calls. I had to program a VCR to tape Buffy—something that would make a Millennial’s head explode.
So it’s not quite as cut and dry, for me anyway, concerning the fandom of the film vs series. It’s too nebulous for me to really define without some serious brain-scratching, but I think the struggles of growing Xillennials were uniquely represented in the show.
>the Internet was just gaining steam
They actually had an ep about the internet, treating it as a novelty, something brand new, little understood, and totally fringe: I, Robot… You, Jane (Season 1, Episode 8. Air date: April 28, 1997)
I remember that episode where a demon got sucked into the computer because Willow was scanning Giles’ books, and the demon then wooed Willow via instant messages…
Yes, an early example of cyber-horror, a genre later given its own full-series treatment with Black Mirror. For more on the subject of cyber-horror, check out novelist Margot Harrison‘s New York Times‘ essay from 2020: “The Horror Novel Lurking in Your Busy Online Life.”
Indeed. In the media of the 1980s, computers were for the most part treated like magical boxes that could conjure anything you typed into them (Superman III, Weird Science, Knight Rider). By the ’90s, they were being incorporated into cinema and television as something more technological than magical, but there was still little understanding of how they really worked. I recall Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible (1996) sending e-mails that got instantaneous responses!
Thanks, Jeff! I am exhausted from writing this, absolutely! LOL. I drafted this one on and off over a period of about two months. Now that I’m blogging less often, I find I’m being more selective about the theses I take on, but I’m also thinking and writing about them (even) more deeply. I have discovered that my blog posts tend to be formal expressions of things I’ve been thinking about informally for years or even decades.
I’d say that was certainly true of my Heat 2 essay; even though it was a direct response to a book I’d just read, it was informed by a lifetime spent consuming and analyzing the genre. So, when it occurred to me that Swanson’s Buffy is an Xer and Gellar’s a Millennial, suddenly I understood the entire movie-versus-series divide in a very clear way. Then once I started writing, I surprised myself by how much I had to say. But if a writer doesn’t surprise himself now and then by what emerges from his keyboard, then what’s the point?
On balance, I tend to think superheroic lineages are best left as abstractions — something sketched rather than explicated. The Jedi are a perfect example of this: The more we learned about them through the prequels, the less sense any of it made. Christ, once you saw how dysfunctional and arrogant they were, you actually started to find them hateful! But it surprises me to this day that the Buffy fandom never spared much of a thought for why women are exclusively Slayers, especially when the movie had provided such a compelling — and distinctly feminine — reason, before that rationale was summarily discarded by the series, which, oddly, prided itself on its feminist enlightenment.
I think that blanket dismissal goes to what I suggested in the piece above: that the show’s supposed feminist thematics were never really important to Whedon or his fans. Whedon was a misogynist who created Buffy as an act of revenge against whichever women in his life had fucked him over: his mother, his wife, some high-school crush who’d ignored him — whoever. As Lila Shapiro said in her Vulture article: “[Whedon] wanted to be [Buffy], and he wanted to fuck her,” and when he couldn’t do either, he fucked with her by killing her, ripping her out of Heaven, and then subjecting her to endless psychological torment and sexual abuse. That’s the legacy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One cannot soberly appraise the narrative arc of that series in its totality and reach any other conclusion.
On the matter of the generation gap: It’s fair to say that when we speak of generational identities and experiences, we’re speaking in generalities. Generational identities tend to be truthful in their broad strokes if not always precisely factually accurate for each individual member of the cohort. Personalities, experiences, and family dynamics all differ, and all play a role in defining who we are. I don’t think any of us particularly enjoy or take any sense of pride from our generational identity; it just is what it is.
From what I understand about Xennials, they tend to identify more closely with Xers while exhibiting more of the characteristics of Millennials. Xennials — those born in the ’80s — actually have memories of the analog world, whereas pure Millennials — those born in the ’90s — are digital natives. So, it stands to reason that Xennials identify with Xers who were born and raised in an analog world but have had to live their adult lives in the digital world, and yet perhaps you guys are more comfortable in a digital world than we ever were. (Again: speaking in generalities.) Part of the reason Xers ache for the ’80s is because we just want to go back to a time without e-mail and cellphones, technologies with which we’ve never been entirely comfortable.
It’s very possible, as you suggest, that the Buffy series reflects the Xennial experience more than a pure Millennial experience, but it definitely does not resemble Gen-X adolescence in any way, shape, or form. The movie gets at that much more accurately. It’s funny how both the movie and the TV series are artifacts of their era — they’re both very dated, but in entirely different ways — because it’s not like they were made all that many years apart. Fewer than five years separate the two Buffys, and yet they so completely belong to their respective generations.
And no — I don’t think anyone’s ever put this much thought into the movie, either! LOL! It wasn’t anything I ever intended to do, but no one ever stands up for that movie. Worse, it’s somehow seen as a “mistake” that got corrected by the series. Through the process of writing the novel adaptation of “The Lost Boys of the Bronx” these past few months, I’d been thinking a lot about those days — being a teenager in the early ’90s and identifying with vampire fiction — and it occurred to me that the Buffy movie spoke to a moment in time that was truthful for anyone who was the right age for it, and that it deserves better than to be remembered as an also-ran, as a franchise footnote.
And that’s kind of the way Gen X in general is treated: We’re the passed-over generation. We waited patiently for our turn to sit at the head of the table… but the Silent Generation and the Baby boomers refused to cede the chair. (They still haven’t.) Then Millennials and Gen Z came along with their own ideas about the world they want to build in the 21st century — ideas I actively support, by the way — and effectively said to us, “Step aside, old-timers, it’s our turn to lead!” To young eyes, we got lumped in with the boomers. We were born in the 1970s, but to Gen Z we may as well have been born in the 1870s — it’s all the same. We’re from a time they can’t even fathom — not merely another century, but another millennium. We’re artifacts of an old mode of thinking.
I know a Gen-Z kid — a sweet kid — who reassured his Gen-X mother the other day that she shouldn’t blame herself for being racist and homophobic (she doesn’t and she isn’t), because it’s not like her generation knew to be any better. In other words: Gen X can’t help being so woefully ignorant because we didn’t emerge from the womb fully enlightened like the Millennials and Gen Z.
That is the way, generally speaking, the younger generations view the Xers — as part of the problem, not the solution. And I believe that Generation X is deeply resentful about its place in history — about being disowned by previous generations and dismissed by successive ones — and that’s why we’ve retreated into a 1980s time capsule where we’re happily anesthetized. You wanna know why Gen X loves superheroes and Star Wars so much, that’s the answer: resentment.
Again: generally speaking.
Thanks, Jeff, for reading and commenting on this piece. I know it was lengthy and I appreciate anyone who took the time to read it and then engage with it here in the comments. You’re the man!
SPC
Sean,
Great example about superheroic lineages with the Jedi. I’ve never looked at the Jedi the same way since the prequels. Whereas before they were mythic beings of good, in reality they’re just as power hungry and ignorant as the Sith, just in their own way.
I hear what you’re saying about Whedon, but I think there’s still a lot of merit in the show, and the best of it probably comes from the other writers. Specifically in episodes that didn’t have to deal with Whedon’s overall arcs. There’s so many enjoyable “monster of the week” episodes by brilliant writers like Jane Espenson, even in the much-maligned sixth season. The nerd trio were a breath of fresh air, a wannabe “big bad” that gave us breathing room between the ripped-from-heaven, sex-with-the-enemy, almost-raped nightmare. And even though Whedon turned out to be rather reprehensible, he penned some genuinely brilliant episodes, like “Hush” and “The Body.”
Yes, Xillennials DO identify more with Gen X for that exact reason—we lived in the analog world for our formative years. That is a huge deal. Hell, I didn’t have a cell phone until I graduated college. My first “social” account was Myspace when I was 22. Teen years were blockbuster movie nights, AIM messaging, skating around town, etc.
I can’t believe Gen-Z treats X with such dismissal! Very sad. When Did X become Boomers? 🙂
Back to Buffy for a second. Even with all that came out about Joss, I met and befriended too many behind-the-scenes peeps involved in the show to ever write it off. It was a major source of inspiration for me as a writer and gave me the courage to pursue my dreams. I’ll always treasure it, despite the unfortunate taint of reality.
Jeff,
Many, many scholarly articles have been written about the Jedi’s breathtaking incompetence. (If you’ve never read it, I suggest David Brin’s 1999 Salon piece “‘Star Wars’ despots vs. ‘Star Trek’ populists,” published immediately after the theatrical release of The Phantom Menace. Rather than crapping on the movie for its ham-fisted dialogue and retroactively “ruining” childhood memories of the saga the way everyone else was at the time, Brin takes Lucas to task for the prequel’s moral messaging.) Here’s an excerpt from a conversation I had with dellstories in the comments section of “In the Multiverse of Madness, Part 2” regarding the Jedi Order, which nicely summarizes my feelings about it:
After I posted my original reply to you on Friday, it occurred to me that Orphan Black is, like Star Wars, another noteworthy example of a great genre series (with feminist themes, at that, like Buffy) that completely lost its way creatively when it became concerned with exploring and explaining its own byzantine mythology — the organizations (Dyad Group and the Proletheans) and the motives behind Project Leda. The writers bent over backwards to ensure the series was serving its premise, rather than letting the premise serve the storytelling. Pity. It would have been a markedly better series had it just used the sister-clones conceit to tell character-driven stories about identity and sisterhood and bodily autonomy. That’s what it did brilliantly for those first two or three seasons… before getting lost in the labyrinth of its own convoluted mythology.
All of that is to say I think the less explained about a supernatural or superheroic lineage (for lack of a better term), the better. Keep it simple. Wolverine had infinitely more mystique before his backstory was dramatized. The Jedi inspired wonder, not disdain, when all we’d heard were whispered legends about them (and the same can be said of Darth Vader and Boba Fett and the Clone Wars). And Orphan Black was delightful, not Delphic, when all it cared about was having Tatiana act against different version of herself.
That said, I do think the menstrual cramps were the masterstroke detail that conveyed why Slayers were special (or superheroic, to use a more accurate term), and why they could only be women. Without that, Buffy’s “powers,” such as they are, are just standard-issue comic-book stuff: enhanced strength and agility, accelerated healing — all the same shit Wolverine has. The menstrual cramps, though, were like Wolverine’s adamantium claws — the thing that made her different. That would have been such an interesting power/curse to have explored in the series. Even in 1997, I didn’t understand why they abandoned that. But as far as I can tell, I’m the only one it ever bothered, so take that criticism for what it is.
I’ll say a few more words about Whedon’s creative intentions and the show’s feminist thematics in my reply to dellstories and Lena below, but consider it just as much a response to you, too, because I appreciate your engaging me on this.
As for Generation X as it relates to Z: We are, for the most part, the parents of Z, so they’re naturally going to hold us in a certain degree of contempt! Haha! As a teenager, you’re going to at some point think your parents are old and out of touch; Xers certainly thought that about our parents, the Silent Generation. But at least Xers were born in the same century as their parents. I don’t think it helps that we were literally born in a different millennium from our children. Especially this generation, which prides itself — not entirely without reason — on being more enlightened than its forebears (more “woke,” if you like, though even invoking that term betrays my Gen-X out-of-touchness).
Gen Z has big dreams and big plans for the world of the 21st century — plans I passionately and actively support! On occasion, Gen-Zers would do well to recognize that, yes, they attained a greater sense of social justice and cultural sensitivity sooner than we did — and that’s commendable — but that there are many members of the Silent Generation (including President Biden), the Baby boomers (like my mentor Al Gore), and the Xers (like yours truly) who are making a good-faith effort to get up to speed and to support the younger generations in their pursuit of a more equitable and sustainable world. And what I would advise Gen Z is this: When you encounter members of elder generations who are well-meaning but perhaps not quite as culturally/socially savvy as you, instead of calling them out for that, call them in. Extend people grace now and then. Let’s learn from each other, huh?
I totally second your closing comment on Buffy: My screenwriting mentor — one of the guys who taught me how to break down movies and understand them — had been a staff writer for Buffy during its first two seasons; he taught me about the Double Hocus Pocus principle before Blake Snyder codified it in Save the Cat!
And one night on the Universal backlot in 2004, they were shooting an episode of Angel, so me and my buddy hiked up to the European streets from the Amblin complex where we were working and went up to watch. We got friendly with the set P.A., a guy our age, who eventually (a few years later) introduced me to the very folks who introduced us — you and I. (You know the guys I’m talking about.) So, many of the friendships I keep and cherish today can reasonably be traced back to that night I insinuated myself onto the set of Angel!
The series absolutely did foster a sense of community that was unprecedented at that time (and probably still). So, that’s part of its legacy, too.
SPC
What an amazing analysis. I’ve never seen any of the versions of Buffy and I can see why, just looking at the pictures. No one ever smiles! Life is good, innit? Even for vampires?
OK, never mind. It’s probably my rose-colored glasses. You are amazing, Sean, with your ability to break down these movies and themes in ways even I understand. I hope NY is treating you well. I check often for updates on how you’re doing back in your home.
Thanks, Jacqui — for all your kind words and support. I appreciate you.
For anyone who’s never seen Buffy, either the movie or TV series, it’s not the kind of thing I would recommend seeking out and discovering now, like I would, say, Chinatown or The Golden Girls — something timeless and classic. Buffy was of its moment, and it resonated with an audience of a particular age at a particular moment in time. That time has passed. For reasons I argued in “Here Lies Buffy the Vampire Slayer” two years ago, it’s time to let Buffy go. We’ve held onto it for too long. It’s only value now is nostalgic in nature.
New York is indeed treating me well, thanks! The weather is getting warmer, the days longer, and the first flowers are pushing through the soil. It’s a hopeful time of year. I plan to spend the spring continuing work on my new novel, and expect to post another essay here in June. I hope only good things are happening for you!
Hi, Sean! Thank you so much. I’ve been waiting for this one!
Thanks, Lena! I hope you enjoyed it! As a writer of occult fiction yourself, I’m sure you’re well aware of the long shadow Buffy casts on the genre.
I enjoyed it very much. I am indeed aware of the shadow it casts. You explain everything in such detail. It’s perfectly done. What interests me about some of these shows is how much they shape how teenagers think these days. I never was a Buffy fan myself nor a committed follower of Angel. It just didn’t interest me that much. Thank you for this insightful post.
The stories we consume absolutely shape the way we see the world, Lena. That has been a recurring theme on this blog for the past many years, particularly with regard to the ways in which Hollywood stories train men to view themselves as the solitary protagonists of their very own heroic narrative (a subject I revisited as recently as my previous post).
Buffy deserves special consideration, because it has long been considered a feminist subversion of the damsel-in-distress trope that motivates the patriarchal monster hunters of conservative horror stories as well as our action-movie antiheroes. But it was still a portrait of “empowered femininity” as conceived and presented by a straight, white, cisgendered, “rage-filled” (his words) male. And whereas the movie is Kuzui’s interpretation of those characters and scenarios, the TV series, for better or worse, is all Whedon:
That is a really hard contradiction for Buffy fans, particularly but not exclusively Millennials, to reconcile. That Buffy may’ve been a problematic narrative from Day One — reflective of the toxic, rage-filled ethos of its creator — is a bitter pill to swallow for fans who consider the show integral to their identity and who viewed it as a progressive representation of women. (And it wasn’t merely Buffy he punished, either: Willow and Cordelia and Tara and Drusilla and Winifred Burkle were all extraordinarily emotionally traumatized and/or killed throughout the series.)
As both Ms. Bahr and Ms. Roberts observe in their articles, Whedon’s fingerprints are all over contemporary popular culture. His notions of femininity and feminism took root in the minds of an entire generation of content creators. And now those storytellers are passing down Whedon’s toxic values wholesale to the next generation. That would suggest to me that we, as a culture, need to have a come-to-Jesus conversation about Buffy, not merely “cancel” Whedon and wash our hands of the matter. Whedon can be banished to a desert island tomorrow, but the ideas he embedded in his TV shows and inculcated in their fans live on. We need to address that. We need to acknowledge that Buffy the Vampire Slayer, beloved though it may be, was encoded with some very pernicious notions about women.
That’s going to be challenging. My generation, after all, has never really come to terms with the capitalist values of our favorite 1980s cartoons, like The Transformers and Masters of the Universe. On the contrary, we continue to recycle those concepts and characters to this day! So, how we’re ever going to convince the generation influenced by Buffy that it was sold a false bill of goods… I have no idea. This essay is my opening salvo, I suppose.
Thanks, Lena, for your contribution to this conversation. I wish you a safe and restful weekend.
SPC
I’ma have it both ways
Buffy the series was a major step forward in feminist representation
AND
Buffy the series was highly problematic from a feminist perspective
Both can be true
Well said, sir. We appreciate contradictions, ambiguities, and ambivalence here! One cannot read my takes on Heat 2, Superman IV, Fury Road, Young Indiana Jones, or the Mariachi trilogy and suggest I don’t express a healthy measure of ambivalence about the works I study here.
Buffy‘s representation of feminism has been exhaustively explored in no fewer than zillions of blog posts and doctoral dissertations. I only fleetingly touched upon the subject here, obviously, and that was merely to say that it doesn’t really matter, anyway. For Whedon, it was a smokescreen — a clever form of creative cover to allow him to present his “reductive, masculinized conception of what it means to be a forceful woman” (per Bahr), and to get fans on board with that before they had a chance to size up Buffy for themselves. Such is why Whedon is a master storyteller: By explicitly telling his audience what he was doing (subverting an archetypal trope) before he did it, he primed us to accept his vision from the outset. So, when things started to get narratively weird, audiences were too invested in Buffy — and too in love with Buffy — to doubt the pure-heartedness of Whedon’s creative intentions.
And fans could tell themselves they were supporting a “feminist” show, even though I submit they never really gave much of a shit about that anyway. Perhaps that’s too harsh. How about this: Buffy‘s supposed feminist agenda wasn’t why they were watching. It was the way both the show and its creator destigmatized geekiness that won viewers over. Whedon gave them a safe space to be geeky, and expanded that space to include the entirety of popular culture — the cultural shitshow in which we find ourselves trapped today. Like Robin Hood, he seized pop culture from elitist film critics and cinema snobs, and gave it to the masses. And in return, he got to Trojan-horse his series with a shitload of (unconscious?) misogyny… and no one noticed.
On the subject of Whedon’s creative intentions: I suspect they were probably aspirational to start. I think Lila Shapiro is absolutely spot-on when she says, “He wanted to be her, and he wanted to fuck her.” And in a way, he did become her, right? He became a kind of cultural superhero in his own right. His ascension from geek outcast to geek god was as unlikely as Buffy’s from vacuous cheerleader to vampire slayer. And by his own admission, he fucked all sorts of women who worked for him — women that were only brought into his circle because of the power and prestige that the success of Buffy afforded him. So, he got his second wish, too.
I’ll make a guess and say that having achieved what he set out to do with his creation — having both become her and fucked her, in a way — he probably was faced with the awful realization that the hole in his soul was as gaping as ever. All the money, power, and adulation in the world still couldn’t fix what was broken inside him. And I think that’s when we started to see the Buffy narrative shift from this aspirational little empowerment fable to the misogynistic revenge fantasy it became. That deep-seated misogyny was likely lurking in the recesses of his heart the whole time, it just emerged with a vengeance — much like Angelus after Buffy and Angel consummated their romance — once he’d achieved everything he set out to do and yet felt no better about himself for it.
Even Gellar and her husband Freddie Prinze Jr. had to hit the brakes at a certain point when they were screening the show for their children:
I hear that, Sarah. But I think we need to ask ourselves why those later seasons make us so uncomfortable now — why we censor them for our children — and maybe face up to the idea that the ugliness and misogyny of them was baked into the series’ premise from Day One. You don’t get to pick the parts of the narrative you like and dismiss the rest. You know? You don’t get to enjoy the gonzo-whirlwind first hour of Goodfellas without then enduring the punishing tension of the second hour; the story’s meaning comes from the totality of the experience. And from start to finish, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the vision of one Joss Whedon, and I think where it ended up is far more telling than where it started. You spend enough time with someone, and eventually they show you who they really are. As such, it is impossible to view those early seasons and overlook the fact that its central character grew out of some deeply malicious place in Whedon’s heart.
But because he hates the movie so much, watching it is still a guilt-free pleasure — it isn’t tainted with his toxicity. So, for disowning the Buffy movie all those decades ago, Joss, Gen X sends you our thanks, pal!
Always a pleasure, Sean! Thank you for sharing this post. I wish you a wonderful rest of the weekend as well.
Thank you, Lena!
I never watched any Buffy television or movies, Sean. I just couldn’t hack teen movies, even as a teen. (You and I have talked some about Dirty Dancing, a teen movie I loathe/d. Lol. Sorry). But my daughter was a huge Buffy fan, and still plays the board game at the age of 40. I’m baffled, but for young teenage girls at the time, it was a cult hit.
I enjoy your analysis of the film industry, and it’s interesting to see, from your perspective, how it’s evolved. As a baby boomer who started watching on a black and white (3 channel) television, the scope of change is tremendous. I’m curious to see how it continues to change and reflect the next generations.
Thanks, Diana! As I said to Jacqui, if you were a kid of a certain age in the 1990s, Buffy was speaking directly to you. If your daughter is 40, then she’s a Millennial (or Xennial) who likely grew up on the TV series, and for reasons I demonstrated in the post above, Millennials have carried their love of Buffy straight into middle age. That show struck such a nerve; it profoundly affected an entire generation.
It also revolutionized televisional storytelling, something I didn’t address in this post. The way stories for TV are presented these days, with season- and series-long narrative arcs, was unquestionably influenced by the way Whedon structured Buffy. There were other popular shows at the time (the mid-’90s) that were breaking free from the conventionally episodic structure of the TV drama — NYPD Blue, Babylon 5, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — but Buffy inspired a passion and devotion in its audience like none other. As Soraya Roberts notes in that excellent Atlantic article I cited, it’s virtually impossible to find any modern franchise without Buffy‘s mark. Its cultural influence is impossible to quantify. The pop-cultural landscape of today, for better and (unquestionably) for worse, was terraformed by Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I’ll have to say that this article and your analysis of Buffy really resonates, for reasons I’ll leave undisclosed. I watched Buffy the TV show at the suggestion of someone else, and, yes, it’s tied up into certain…characteristics..of that said someone. I’ll have to go back and rewatch the movie!
Thanks, Willow! Oh, so you came to Buffy later — after the series had already concluded? That’s interesting. Many fans who consider it a formative influence have come to terms with Whedon’s personal shortcomings, but have a harder time acknowledging some of his show’s misogynistic and exploitative undertones. As I said to Jeff, a sober appraisal of the narrative arc of the series shouldn’t leave anyone feeling particularly good about its worldview. I think Whedon hated Buffy, and enjoyed putting her through hell. As Ms. Roberts notes in that Atlantic article I cited, he himself described it as “a rage-filled hormonal autobiography.”
The movie is not at all ugly, cynical, vengeful, misogynistic, or mean-spirited like the series turned out to be. It’s exactly as Ms. Roberts describes it: a girl-power fantasy for a 12-year-old kid. But I also doubt it’s a movie that’s going to make any new fans, even if they were to watch it with an open mind. It was designed to appeal to a certain kid of a certain age at a particular time. It was never anything we were meant to still be discussing 30 years later, and I very much think it would have wound up in the dustbin of pop culture had it not inadvertently spawned such an immensely influential media franchise. It’s not a movie anyone would remember were it not for its place as the urtext of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
That said, if you do give it a rewatch — and it’s presently streaming on HBO Max — please come back and share your reaction! Your participation here is welcome and appreciated, Willow!
Fascinating stuff, especially since I’ve never seen a single episode–now I feel like I need to see this in the context of your analysis. I love the idea that the Twilight kids just spent their entire existence in high school–just when you thought being immortal would be fun!
Is that right, Suzanne — you’ve never seen Buffy?
Well, the movie is currently streaming on HBO Max, and both the TV series and its spinoff (Angel) are available on Hulu (though I think Hulu’s license to stream the series may be expiring soon). I mean, it’s hard to imagine a series that’s had greater influence on the pop culture of the last quarter century than Buffy, for better and for worse; Soraya Roberts is absolutely right when she says you’d be hard-pressed to find a current major media franchise, from YA lit to prestige TV to cinematic universes, that hasn’t drawn inspiration from it, in one way or another, so far that reason alone, it’s worth being familiar with. But…
It’s also very dated and of its moment. The show is a late-’90s relic in every way; I would think that a grown adult coming to Buffy for the first time here in 2023 would be immune to its charms, which don’t seem nearly as novel or clever as they once did. As I said in the preamble of this post, Buffy was speaking to a very particular audience (impressionable teenagers) at a very particular time (the turn of the millennium). As a pop-cultural artifact, it may hold some scholarly value for a genre enthusiast like yourself, but I’d be surprised if you got swept up in its supernatural soap-operatics. I suspect it would play as very juvenile to your eyes; it certainly did to mine when I selectively rewatched some of it in preparation to write this post.
But maybe you’d dig it! Who knows. If you do give it a try, please let us know what you think of it. The movie sets up the character’s origin, and then the TV show, despite some retconning, picks up after Buffy is already an experienced slayer.
Fuckin’ Twilight makes absolutely no sense to me! I mean, I know it’s fashionable — hell, it’s long since passé at this point — to shit on it, but it isn’t just a poorly executed story; it’s conceptually nonsensical. The very first movie to do teenage vampires, The Lost Boys, got it exactly right: If you were an immortal 18-year-old, you’d spend eternity on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. Where else? Who the fuck would opt to be in high school forever?! Whose idea of a fantasy is that? Armchair critics can say what they want about the Buffy movie, but it ain’t emo. Emo was not a thing for Gen X, one small favor for which I am eternally grateful.
One of the most successful series. I grew up watching Buffy on TV. But OMG why haven’t I heard about the movie and comics?
Thanks for reading and commenting, Lux! The Buffy movie from ’92 is a mostly forgotten conceptual prototype. As Soraya Roberts points out in her excellent Atlantic article, the TV series “essentially wiped the film from the collective memory.” Many (Millennial) fans of the show have either never seen the original movie or don’t think much of it, other than as a pop-cultural curio. I thought it was time someone said something nice about the movie, hence this essay. The film is currently streaming on Max, if you’re inclined to check it out.
During the run of the television series and for many years thereafter, numerous comic books supplemented and continued (via subsequent “seasons”) the narratives of both Buffy and Angel; to my understanding, those stories were published under the creative auspices of Whedon himself (and I believe many writers from the series, including Whedon, contributed story ideas and/or scripts to those comics). If you’re interested in exploring some of those titles, you can peruse an overview of them here.
What an amazing analysis, Sean. Being a Baby Boomer, I missed the Buffy movies, but you’ve stirred interest. Thank you for letting readers in Story Empire know about your remarkable work.
Thanks, Gwen! I can’t imagine Buffy would have much to offer you: The original movie (currently streaming on Max) is a mostly forgotten piece of early ’90s pop ephemera, aimed squarely at an audience of twelve-to-sixteen-year-old-girls; the subsequent TV series (available on Hulu), though a groundbreaking cultural phenomenon during its initial run at the turn of the millennium, has since been the subject of some sober (and often unflattering) critical reappraisals. (Much like another show from the same era celebrated for its supposedly feminist themes, Sex and the City, Buffy‘s “progressive” values haven’t, in retrospect, aged particularly well. Both the cinematic and televisional iterations of Buffy, regardless of one’s personal preference, are conspicuously dated pop-cultural artifacts whose only appreciable value these days is sentimental/nostalgic.)
Nevertheless, as an exercise in examining how different generations are portrayed in popular fiction — a project you yourself have recently undertaken over at Story Empire — I thought it would be fascinating to take a character who’d been interpreted through the lens of both Generation X and the Millennials, and study how she demonstrates the different characteristics and experiences and worldviews of those successive cohorts. And given Buffy‘s sacrosanct commandment — “Into each generation a Slayer is born” — this thesis was just begging to be written, in my view. I was sort of shocked no one had thought to do a comparative analysis of the movie and series through that lens before now. I’d already written a long post on Buffy two years prior to this essay, and I’m loathe to revisit specific subjects — I don’t like to circle the same ground unless I have something appreciably new to say — but the opportunity to compare and contrast Swanson’s Buffy with Gellar’s was too irresistible. I think this is one of the better posts on my blog; I should add a link to it on my Start Here page.
Thanks for dropping by, Gwen! I encourage anyone interested in further reading on this subject to check out Gwen’s “Writing through the Generations” series of posts over at Story Empire.