Lioi, Anthony. "Slayer and Signal: Joss Whedon Versus the Big Bads." Nerd Ecology: Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 145–168. Environmental Cultures. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 2 Oct. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474219730.ch-006>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 2 October 2021, 01:18 UTC. Copyright © Anthony Lioi 2016. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 5 Slayer and Signal: Joss Whedon Versus the Big Bads In which I argue that Buffy the Vampire Slayer confronts the problem of world-destruction in a California haunted by demons that suburbia refuses to acknowledge. It is a work of advanced nerdism whereby freaks and geeks become aware of their capacity for self-and-world-defense. Here, nerd culture considers what new tropes, plots, and characters are necessary to resist the Powers of predation and eugenics. Buffy figures these forces as demonic Powers in the Pauline sense: the spirits of broken social institutions that attempt to destroy the nerd. Chief among these demons is Gender, the system of norms that dictates what good boys and girls must do to please the Powers. The story of the Slayer begins with a solitary female messiah doomed to destroy vampires and be destroyed in turn; it evolves into a narrative of alliance in which rejected children defend the world by moving into the queer, the uncanny, and the monstrous. Buffy’s creator, Joss Whedon, extended his exploration of the effluvial and the degenerate through his space Western, Firefly/ Serenity, in which a band of misfits uncovers a government conspiracy to hide the poisoning of a planet, Miranda. The broken institutions of Earth remake another solar system into a false utopia that engenders the death of millions of Mirandans and the creation of a horde of cannibals. Though the crew of theSerenity cannot undo the poisoning of the brave new world, they succeed in communicating its buried history through the “signal,” a burst of social media that cannot be contained by the State. Their resistance to eco-political oppression depends on their ship, which becomes a cyborg community of environmental justice. 146 Nerd Ecology “Joss Whedon, you bastard!” This cry resounded through my living room in the late 1990s, a decade consumed by graduate school. Every week my friends would assemble on couch and floor, abandoning other occupations for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Like virgins fixed in the gaze of Dracula, we were compelled to watch episodes again and again, only to discover our favorite characters dead, dying, or wounded. We cried out against Whedon, the demiurge of this virtual world, because he held our attention despite the fact that none of us had ever been petite, blonde, or a cheerleader in southern California. Using an alchemy from beyond the Nerd Triangle, Whedon turned Buffy into one of us, an uncanny enchantment. The claims of this chapter descend from that mythic time, a televisual in illo tempore, when friends would linger after hours to analyze every aspect of this strange show that never should have happened. We had seen the Beta version, the Buffy film that Kristy Swanson, Luke Perry, and PeeWee Herman had tried, in vain, to redeem. In a startling reversal, a bad film had become a classic television series. Whedon had achieved this by turning into the skid: Buffy understood itself not just as nerd drama, but as nerdist theory, a place where the tropes of nerd culture turned back to contemplate themselves. The darkness had won, and nerds rejoiced. Finally, someone understood that the American Gothic explained the dark ecology of childhood. As Tolkien anatomized the process of escape as restoration, defending the world from the curse of the false sky, Whedon turned to myth as ethnography, an account of our battle with the Saurons of suburbia, the first step in preventing planetary apocalypse. If these claims seem overblown, consider The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic, which lists the 1997 premiere of Buffy in its “Chronology of Important Gothic Events” (Hogle xxi), and Buffy itself as the last entry in “Important Gothic Series Made Since 1950” (Hogle 254). In her foreword to Fighting the Forces, a collection of Buffy criticism, Camille Bacon-Smith takes on the skepticism aimed as television as a medium of meaning. Considered the prime example of a visual form long on “slick” entertainment and short on content, television appears to be driven by “raw avarice.” “Art,” she explains, “is seen to occur by accident, if at all, in the otherwise calculated search for mesmerizing images to hypnotize the audience between sales pitches” (Bacon-Smith xi). For critics ranging from Theodor Adorno to Manola Dargis, television constitutes the quintessence of garbage. A show Slayer and Signal: Joss Whedon Versus the Big Bads 147 about a cheerleader turned vampire hunter would seem to pose no threat to this assessment. Buffy already occupies a place in the canon of nerd culture, though it bears no relationship to academic analysis outside the charmed circle of Whedon Studies. It is the perfect test case to determine if the object of a popular and academic cult can move, through the work of interpretation, into the realm of environmental culture. The premise of the show is simple: Buffy Summers, once a popular high school student, moves to Sunnydale, California, because of a mysterious disturbance at her former school. Though Sunnydale appears to be an idyllic suburb, it is the epicenter of supernatural evil, and its high school is built on a “Hellmouth,” a portal to the underworlds of suburban repression. Like Sunnydale itself, Buffy sports a radiant exterior that hides a dark secret: she is the Chosen One, “one girl in all the world” who possesses the power to slay vampires with her superior strength, agility, and prophetic dreams. In this task she is aided by Giles the Watcher, whose day job as school librarian puts him in charge of the nerd refuge of Sunnydale High. Offering both support and hindrance are the “Scooby Gang,” a shifting group of friends centered on Xander Harris, the hapless nerd boy, and his best friend Willow Rosenberg, the computer geek. The term “Scooby Gang” refers to the animated Hanna- Barbera television show, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? (1969–1970) in which a band of teenage detectives, accompanied by the titular Great Dane, drove across the United States disenchanting supernatural mysteries. Nerdists recognize and affirm themselves by identifying as Scoobies, recognizing that Buffy adopts the cartoon’s model of alliance while it reenchants the mysteries. The Scoobies’ name begins with the ridiculous and self-referential: Xander, Willow, and Buffy are television characters who identify with cheap cartoons. Their mission is abnormal: high school children ought not to worry about saving the world. Their mission is also heroic: the world must be saved from vampires and demons, so cartoon lovers must rise to the challenge. At the same time, Buffy acknowledges a difference between those who were born nerds and those who have nerd-dom thrust upon them. Xander and Willow never had any other identity: they have always been socially awkward, introverted, and loyal to each other. Buffy, however, fell from popular cheerleader status because of her role as the Slayer. Her reputation as trouble maker follows her to the Hellmouth: though she tries to fit in, her mission will not allow it. This 148 Nerd Ecology fall into social stigma is marked by the presence of a foil, Cordelia Chase, a beautiful, rich girl with all the privilege Buffy has lost. Though Cordelia soon turns from villain to Scooby, she remains a liminal figure who marks a boundary Buffy cannot cross because Buffy has been cast to the margin of society by her work as Slayer. These basic formations mark Buffy as a Gothic narrative: it depends on a world of light haunted by shadows that the world cannot acknowledge. The prosperous suburbs are built upon a foundation of the monstrous and the uncanny. Sunnydale naturalizes the Gothic, even as it denies the dark. As Sunnydale natives, Willow and Xander understand that they should not venture into town alone after sunset. Their parents do not talk about this rule; everyone already knows it. As marginal citizens, however, Xander and Willow notice that the center stays silent: the recognition of repressed knowledge underwrites their willingness to aid Buffy, who seems to know without being told that something is rotten in suburbia. This resistance to Gothic repression marks Buffy as a nerd narrative. Stigmatized by their performance of intellect and enthusiasm, nerds gravitate toward the acquisition of knowledge and the solution to mysteries. The uncanny must be explained and the monstrous, revealed. From the beginning, the Scoobies wish to overthrow the aesthetic and existential terms of life on the Hellmouth. Apocalypse, we’ve all been there Buffy proposes that self-defense and world-defense amount to the same thing. The vampires and demons that threaten the people of Sunnydale also threaten to destroy the world in the Apocalypse, an annihilation of human life that ends with demonic rule over the earth. This plot is an inversion of the eschaton offered by “The Music of the Ainur.” As Giles explains to the gang at their first meeting, “For untold eons, demons walked the earth” and ruled it. In place of the Valar there were the Old Ones, the arch-demons modeled after the chaos gods of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. As Giles tells it, the rule of the Old Ones slipped away with the advent of humanity, so humankind is threatened by their descendants, the vampires, who are “waiting for the animals to die and the Old Ones to return.” Predation, liquidation, and objectification characterize the demons’ intentions: the human race will be Slayer and Signal: Joss Whedon Versus the Big Bads 149 nerdified tout court.