Fear and Laughing in Sunnydale Buffy Vs Dracula
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Fear and Laughing in Sunnydale Buffy vs Dracula Peter Gölz [Dr. Peter Gölz is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria. He is currently working on a study of the three Nosferatus (Murnau, Herzog, Merhige).] Buffy Summers saw the light of night in 1992, exactly eighty years after a bald, rat-like Nosferatu had crawled across the screen at the Berlin Marmorsaal des Zoo. Murnau’s version of Bram Stoker’s novel set the stage for a cinematic myth that would continue to haunt the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Read as fear of foreign invasion, capitalism gone wild, horror of war experience, fear of the New or “suddenly sexual” Woman, Oedipus complex, Victorian sexual repression, a metaphor for the new medium film with its undead characters,1 the Nosferatus and Draculas have been mirrors of our fears and desires: “We conjure up the vampires that we want or need for the cultural and historical times that we find ourselves in” (Williamson 5). Buffy the Vampire Slayer did to the vampire myth (and to horror in general) what post- structuralism, deconstruction and postmodern theories had done to literary and cultural studies: it challenged everything that had come before. Along with her group of friends, the Scoobies, Buffy questioned notions of genre, gender, and self with the help of kung fu, witch fu, and most of all, humorous Buffyisms. To quote Buffy: “You’re a vampire. Oh, I’m sorry. Was that an offensive term? Should I say undead American?” (2.01) The show’s creator, Joss Whedon, described the basic idea as follows: I’ve always been a huge fan of horror movies and I saw so many horror movies where there was that blonde girl who would always get herself killed. I started feeling bad for her. You know, I thought it’s time that she got a chance to take back the night. So the idea for Buffy came from just the very simple thought of a beautiful blonde girl walks into an alley, a monster attacks her and she’s not only ready for him, she trounces him. (qtd. in Tracy 13) And so she does. By the end of the twentieth century (in 1997 to be precise), a postmodern, hip and witty Buffy Summers moves from Los Angeles (where the 1992 movie version had taken place) to Sunnydale, California to fight vampires. In Sunnydale’s special universe, the “Buffyverse,” anything can and will happen. Extensive literal metaphors and ironic distance allowed the show to go where no show had gone before.2 In the world of Buffy, … the problems that teenagers face become literal monsters. A mother really can take over her daughter’s life (“The Witch,” 1003); a strict stepfather-to- be is indeed a heartless machine (“Ted,” 2011); a young lesbian fears that her nature is demonic (“Goodbye Iowa,” 4014; “Family,” 5006); a girl who has sex with even the nicest-seeming guy may discover that he afterward becomes a monster (“Innocence,” 2014). (Wilcox and Lavery xix) 1 See, for example, the “Criticism” section in Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal, eds. Dracula. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1997. 411-482. Print. 2 “The demon-filled world on Buffy is cast as the ‘real’ world; the sunny world of American middle-class culture is a façade, concealing the dangers inherent in its very structure” (Chandler 5). Horrific themes are combined with humor in a way that stresses their similarities. This is not far- fetched since, according to Robert Bloch, “comedy and horror are opposite sides of the same coin … Both deal in the grotesque and unexpected, but in such a fashion as to provoke two entirely different physical reactions” (qtd. in Carroll 146). The ‘grotesque,’ made up of fear and disgust, is what defines a monster. The ‘unexpected,’ however, is the key concept for both the literal metaphors as well as the humor on the show. Surprising turns of events or rather unheard-of combinations are what define comedic incongruity. Incongruity, which Carroll calls the “leading type of comic theory” (152) and “the basis of comic amusement … [brings together] disparate or contrasting ideas or concepts” (153). A frat boy, for example, who actually turns into a hyena certainly fulfills these criteria. And metaphors (alive or undead) also function this way by combining what is not directly connected, allowing for new meaning to be created within a shared framework. We understand the meaning of “it’s raining cats and dogs” without having to imagine large numbers of animals hitting our streets. If they do, however, this can be cause for a horrific scenario (or a humorous one). As soon as metaphors become scenarios instead of matters of speech, they hit home because they are recognizable yet at the same time remain strange. This applies to comedy, too. Unheard-of combinations or obvious incongruity make us laugh because we understand the categories and react to the way they are broken down, disrespected, or dissolved. In his discussion of horror and humor, Carroll uses the following example to describe such category errors: On a planet in deep space, the inhabitants are cannibals. One butcher shop specializes in academic meat. Teaching assistants go for two dollars a pound, assistant professors cost three dollars a pound, professors with tenure are only one dollar and fifty cents a pound, but deans – deans are five hundred dollars a pound. When latter-day astronauts ask why deans are so expensive, they are asked, in turn: Have you ever tried to clean a dean? (153) Academic achievement and animal cleanliness could probably not be any more incongruous. Incongruity, along with superiority, is applied to speech acts to add humor to the Scooby gang’s fights and their very special ‘Buffyisms.’ They yield performative power and express what Butler calls “an awareness of language … as that which brings into being what it names as an effect of the act of naming” (Bodies 224). In her discussion of Butler’s theories, Nussbaum also points to “Austin's linguistic category of ‘performatives’ [which] function, in and of themselves, as actions rather than as assertions. When (in appropriate social circumstances) I say ‘I bet ten dollars,’ or ‘I’m sorry,’ or ‘I do’ (in a marriage ceremony), or ‘I name this ship...,’ I am not reporting on a bet or an apology or a marriage or a naming ceremony, I am conducting one.” The way Buffy, Willow, and Xander apply such acts as actions (in Butler’s terms linguistically and theatrically)3 is characteristic of their individual power and also defines them. In season 4 episode 17, for example, Xander learns his lesson when he off-handedly uses language in such a performative way and his incantation “librum incendere” quite literally backfires.4 Commenting on this scene, Overbey and Preston-Matto state: “This incident demonstrates … the materiality of language in Buffy the Vampire 3 “My theory sometimes waffles between understanding performativity as linguistic and casting it as theatrical…. A reconsideration of the speech act as an instance of power invariably draws attention to both its theatrical and linguistic dimensions…. The speech act is at once performed (and thus theatrical, presented to an audience, subject to interpretation), and linguistic, inducing a set of effects through it implied relation to linguistic conventions…. Speech itself is a bodily act with specific linguistic consequences. Thus speech belongs exclusively neither to corporeal presentation nor to language, and its status as word and deed is necessarily ambiguous” (Butler, Gender Trouble xxv). 4 As the side-kick character Xander learned when speaking the words “Librum Incendere” in front of a book and it literally was set on fire, the power of the utterance is one which enacts, not merely represents (Cover 9). Slayer. Words and utterances have palpable power, and their rules must be respected if they are to be wielded as weapons in the fight against evil” (73). At the beginning of season 5’s long-awaited opener Buffy vs Dracula (which first aired 26 September 2000), there is a comparable incident when Willow shows off her ‘witch fu.’ The title sequence also presents the different fighting styles used by the Scoobies and comments on gender roles.5 Buffy and her boyfriend Riley use physical strength in a humorous manner playing ball, Xander and Anya are passive and ineffective bystanders watching the others interact, while Willow and Tara personify verbal power by casting a spell which starts a rainstorm. At this point, Buffy has been demoted to ‘football slayer.’ Her sense of self, “as an effect of a performance that is constituted in and through language, discourse and culture” (Cover 4) is based on being able to define herself as vampire slayer, a combination of physical strength and performative wit. To define and re-establish herself, repeated references to a foundation outside herself are required. As Butler states, “there is first a discourse which precedes and enables that ‘I’ and forms in language the constraining trajectory of its will” (qtd. in Cover 9). In other words, she must perform as slayer and she must be recognized as slayer. When Dracula comes to town, she is elated when he recognizes her and tells her that he only came to Sunnydale because of her (“Obviously not for the sun,” he adds). At the same time he questions her slayerness and asks her how she would define herself—as a passively chosen slayer who succumbs to her vocation or as a hyper-active, sensually and sexually stimulated hunter. She knows there is no simple answer to this question.