Geeks, Metafiction and Feminism in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Rebecca Ann Downey Dickinson College
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Dickinson College Dickinson Scholar Student Honors Theses By Year Student Honors Theses 5-18-2003 "Because it's Superman's Book, You Moron!": Geeks, Metafiction and Feminism in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Rebecca Ann Downey Dickinson College Follow this and additional works at: http://scholar.dickinson.edu/student_honors Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Downey, Rebecca Ann, ""Because it's Superman's Book, You Moron!": Geeks, Metafiction and Feminism in Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (2003). Dickinson College Honors Theses. Paper 182. This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Dickinson Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator. For more information, please contact [email protected]. "Because it's Superman's Book, You Moron!": Geeks, Metafiction and Feminism in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Rebecca Ann Downey April 21, 2003 English 404 Professor Ness 1 "Who painted the leon, tel me who? By God, if women hadden written stories, As clerkes han within hir oratories, They wolde han written of men more wikkednesse Than al the merk of Adam may redresse." --Chaucer, "The Wife of Bath's Prologue" "Life's a show and we all play our parts ... " --Buffy in "Once More with Feeling" (6007) 2 Joss Whedon, creator of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has often stated that the series (like his 1992 film of the same name) is based upon a feminist premise. Through the character of Buffy, Whedon hoped to subvert the usual role allotted to women in horror genre films by inserting a capable hero where such films usually present a victim (Whedon, "Commentary"). Much of the pleasure in viewing the show comes from watching as Buffy consistently usurps the male role in traditional hero stories, saving her boyfriend from danger and sacrificing her own life to save the world. However, the show's feminist project is further strengthened by including within itself a more explicit critique of the way in which male power is constructed and reinforced through representations of masculinity and femininity both in film and television, and in everyday life. Buffy's interactions with the members of the Geek Trio, the self- proclaimed super-villains of the show's sixth season, provide such a critique. The members of the Geek Trio function as metafictional characters. Aware of their status as television characters, they attempt to become the central characters in the series and, in so doing, to change the show's narrative conventions in ways that subordinate Buffy and others of the show's female characters. The narrative presentation of the trio's attempts to take over the series remind the viewers of the sort of feminist show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (hereafter BTVS) is, precisely (and ironically) by presenting the trio's vision of the sort of phallocentric show that it is not. In "Ceci n'est ce pas une lesbianne,'" "Pop Matters" television critic Todd R. Ramlow mentions Rene Magritte's painting "The Betrayal oflmages." This painting is a realistic picture of a pipe, beneath which is written, "Ceci n'est ce pas une pipe," or "This 1 This article was part ofRamlow's critical response to the killing off of Tara, one of the lesbian characters onBTVS. 3 is not a pipe." Ramlow explains that the purpose of the painting was to point out that art, no matter how realistic it may appear to be, is not and can never be reality; it is merely a representation of the creator's interpretation ofreality ("Lesbianne" 1 ). This awareness, according to Patricia Waugh, is the driving force behind metafiction (3).2 Waugh suggests that the convention of fictional realism masks the constructed nature of fictional worlds and so tends to naturalize the worldview that is expressed through the fiction ( 6- 7). Metafiction employs the conventions of realism, but disrupts and exposes them in order to reveal how fictional worlds are created (Waugh 18). In addition to exposing the inability of art to represent reality, Waugh argues, metafiction exposes reality itself for a fiction (2). Waugh states that it is impossible to describe a real world because "the observer always changes the observed" (3). She notes that language, the tool through which we understand our world (in everyday speech and thought--not just in print media), is one means through which our perceptions of reality are shaped and distorted (3). Waugh writes, "metafictional writers ... focus on the notion that 'everyday' language endorses and sustains [dominant] power structures through a continuous process of naturalization whereby forms of oppression are constructed in apparently 'innocent' representations"' (10-11). Waugh sees the conventions of literature (one can extend this to include the conventions of other forms of representation, such as film) as another type of 'language' which reinforces these power structures (11). Although Waugh does not mention this specifically, the reality which we experience is also constructed through the social institutions, such as marriage, that 2 While it may be more fully accurate to describe self-consciousness in Buffy the Vampire Slayer as metadrama, or metatelevision, drama and television can be considered more specific kinds of fictional representation. Therefore, my foundation for this paper will be Patricia Waugh's work on metafiction, and I will employ Richard Homby's theories ofmetadrama in order to strengthen my analysis of the relationship between the viewer and a performed piece of fiction. 4 define and limit our expectations of the world. Through revealing the artificiality of these conventions in fictional representations, metafiction can expose the ways in which our own lives are constructed by these and similar conventions. One might argue that metafictional techniques which expose the conventions of narrative realism do not apply to a fantasy series such as BTVS. However, although BTVS does have fantastic premises, the series is also quite realistic in many ways. Although the world of the show is clearly a fictitious one, the lives of the characters seem, apart from the encounters with demons and vampires, to be fairly realistic. The Scoobies appear to live much the way white, middle-class young adults do in the 'real world.' They argue with their parents, attend school and do homework, and have seemingly realistic romantic entanglements with one another. Wilcox notes that Joss Whedon aspires to create "emotional realism," which allows the series to be "grounded in the audience's identification with what [the characters] are going through" (xxiv). The characters' emotional responses to everyday situations, as well as to the more fantastic ones, make them easy to identify with. Although the show's premise is fantastic, the characters do seem to act in accord with the values and mores of contemporary American society. The realism of the series is further enhanced by the technique of the arc television narrative. According to Porter, Larson and Harthcock, The use of the story arc in a television series helps to create a sense ofrealism, a 'sense of the future, of the existence of as-yet-unwritten events,' and a sense of the character's relationships and 'life events.' Story arcs help create an illusion 5 that the characters have existed before and continue living between and after episodes (2). This sense of continuity is encouraged by the series, according to Wilcox, by having the characters change and develop because of their experiences on the show (xxiii). A sense of continuity is also reinforced when the characters make reference to their off-screen lives, as in "The Wish" (3009), when Willow mentions that Amy (who has not appeared on the show since the end of season two) saw Cordelia at the mall the day before. As I will demonstrate, the creators of BTVS call this sense of continuity and realism into question by disrupting the sense that the characters have lives that continue between and beyond episodes and by violating the series' values and premises. One might expect that metafiction in BTVS would actually destroy the series' feminist project. Calling attention to the show's fictional status would immediately expose the fictionality of the young female hero, the construction on which the show's feminist identity rests. However, metafiction as it occurs in the series actually functions to reinforce the show's feminism. While the series acknowledges the fictionality of the fantastic premise of a young girl chosen to save the world from evil, it simultaneously forces the viewer to acknowledge the fictionality of series' with male heroes and reveals the way in which masculinity and male power are constructed in those series'. By showing the viewer the specific ways in which the Geek Trio must alter their characters and other elements of the BTVS narrative in order to make it resemble, for example, a James Bond film, the creators of BTVS reveal to the viewer the ways in which gender and power in BTVS must be constructed differently from such films in order to support its 6 feminist premise. In doing this, the narrative ultimately reveals dominant perceptions of masculinity and femininity as artificial social constructions that enforce male power. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: An Introduction In order to understand how the Geek Trio attacks the narrative of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an introduction to the mythology of the show and its standard narrative structure is in order. Currently in its seventh and final season, BTVS chronicles the life (and deaths) of Buffy Summers, a young California girl who is told during her sophomore year of high school that she is the chosen one, the latest in a line of vampire slayers which dates back to ancient times. According to slayer lore, demons inhabited the earth before men.