Of course, every fictional TV show takes place in a fictional reality. Although there is a Tom’s Diner in New York, we don’t expect to find Jerry and Elaine there. But such shows work to minimize their departures from the familiar. In Seinfeld’s New York, the Bronx is still up and the Battery’s down.
A show like West Wing, however, has a far more problematic relationship to reality, given the high profile of the US president. This discomfort is especially apparent when events like the September 11 attacks must be portrayed on the show, but only by analogy. West Wing worked best in the relatively sedate 1990s. Presumably, as our current unsettled era goes on, that show’s reality and ours will unavoidably drift further apart. (Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels frequently used blanks in proper names to prevent this sort of discomfort, referring to the town of “———shire” or “certain officers of the———rd Regiment.”)
But of course my privileged term “Alternate Worlds” refers to fictions like Dune and Brave New World, in which new realities are created wholesale. The Buffyverse may become less and less like our reality, as its bestiary of government agencies, demons, and alternate dimensions expands, but when those demons rampage in Sunnydale’s pedestrian malls, they still encounter coffee shops and sushi bars. In my book, that’s a Trespass.
Except when it isn’t. Because there’s that other kind of Buffy episode. That one in which reality changes around the characters, altered for one screen hour into a different universe. The Scoobies are the same, but the rules have changed.
Nightmares come true, Halloween costumes possess their wearers, a high-school loser is the super-competent center of a cult of personality, the conventions of the Hollywood musical replace the familiar structures of social discourse (“Nightmares” 1-10, “Halloween” 2-6, “Superstar” 4-17, “Once More, with Feeling” 6-7, respectively). In these episodes, the new rules of reality must be decoded and understood, the cause unmasked, the change reversed. The Trespass is the world itself.
But “The Wish” (3-9), in which Cordelia inadvertently asks Anyanka to change the history of Sunnydale, creates not so much a Trespass as a fully-fledged Alternate World. In this reality, Buffy never came to town, the Master completed the Harvest, and the elastic of normality has snapped. The worlds of light and dark have become intermixed: the Bronze a vampires-only club, the abandoned factory back in business as a human abattoir. Vampires are no longer hidden; the open secret is no longer a secret at all. And as goes Sunnydale, so goes the world. Even Cleveland is experiencing “a great deal of demonic activity.” The result of Buffy’s absence is apparently nothing less than the beginning of the end of the human era. This is It’s a Wonderful Life on a grand scale, or perhaps a quicker version of Ray Bradbury’s cautionary time-travel story “The Sound of Thunder,” in which the accidental trampling of a butterfly millions of years ago turns the present into something barely recognizable.
Like any Altered World, “Vampworld” (as Buffy fans have dubbed it) has its own internal logic, its own rules: humans no longer wear bright colors and always get home by dark. It’s not a fevered dream, but a meticulously worked out reality. Curfew signs and strands of garlic replace the HIV/AIDS awareness posters on the high school’s walls, and classes are suspended for the “monthly memorial.” As Anyanka explains to Giles: “This is the real world now. This is the world we made.”
Interesting choice of words. In the Buffyverse, “we” are responsible even for a reality created by a wish. Vampworld is the world as it very well might have been, had Buffy been a little weaker, a little less lucky, or picked the wrong time to move to Cleveland.
Of course, this contingent nature of reality is to be expected; the Buffyverse is a place in which the world is contested real estate. In “Prophecy Girl” (1-12) (the episode to which “The Wish” is, in effect, an alternate outcome), Willow describes the horrific aftermath of a pre-apocalyptic vampire attack. “And when I walked in there, it wasn’t our world anymore. They made it theirs. And they had fun.”
This Trespass means business. It doesn’t just cross the borders of normality, it invades with intent to remake normality in its own image. It is a potentially world-altering Trespass.
But only potentially. Unlike the wounded future of Bradbury’s “Sound of Thunder,” the Buffyverse snaps back to its “normal” state at the climax of “The Wish.” Giles smashes Anyanka’s necklace and history is repaired, with none of the characters even remembering what happened. (Because it didn’t happen.) Buffy’s Altered Worlds are Elastic. Nightmares lose their grip on reality; Halloween archetypes turn back into cheap costumes; Jonathan turns back into a loser; the last song ends.
So how do these Elastic Altered Worlds fit into my schema? Are they like that tedious Elastic Time Travel story, the one in which the Titanic sinks no matter what the travelers do, proving that history is immutable? Not quite. In “The Wish” (3-9), history is not itself elastic, naturally springing back into its “rightful” state. Setting it aright takes hard work. Not only the work of Giles overpowering Anyanka and smashing her necklace, but, by implication, all the work that Buffy has done since coming to Sunnydale. The possibility of Vampworld, and its disappearance, prove that Buffy and the Scoobies are not powerless observers of history. They are nothing less than makers of history.
As the climax of “Prophecy Girl” approaches, the Master watches the Hellmouth creature emerge, saying, “Yes, come forth, my child. Come into my world.”
Buffy reveals herself, and retorts, “I don’t think it’s yours just yet.”
Across a certain number of story arcs, any fantastic fictional world begins to change and to reflect the alien forces at its narrative center. Like the Bush-era, post–September 11 West Wing, the Buffyverse resembles the nonfictional world less and less as time goes on. But one of the great strengths of Buffy is that the show doesn’t shy away from plot points that have no escape back into normality. No Trespass—an army of zombies, a town unable to speak, a mayor transforming in public into a giant demon—is too extreme for a half-baked Cover-Up line. Or none at all.
Buffy does not repress her memories, no matter how strange or painful. She doesn’t sputter with the arrival of every new monster; just saddles up. Her friends and family die, some never to be reanimated. The strangers who come to town—werewolf, demon, or witch—turn out to be something knowable, even worth loving. The elastic gradually frays until it’s beyond fixing. The fantastic leaves its mark on the world.
The Buffyverse is not simply a Trespassed world, one that snaps back to middle-class normality as a function of natural law. It’s not quite an Altered World either; there are those credit cards and cell phones. But it is a world that, like ours, can be and is changed, for better or worse, by the actions of the people who live in it.
Scott Westerfeld’s fourth and latest novel is The Risen Empire. A sequel, The Killing of Worlds, will be released in late 2003. He lives in Sydney, Australia, but escapes its cruel winters by fleeing to New York City.
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1 At this point I’d like to thank Justine Larbalestier for her help with this essay. Her ability to identify Buffy episodes based on half-remembered fragments of dialog is uncanny (in the sense of disturbing). And also thanks to William Smith, editor of Trunk Stories, who has kept me supplied with Buffy videotapes during my time in Australia.
2 And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those gosh-darned kids!
Peg Aloi
SKIN PALE AS
APPLE BLOSSOM
I miss Tara…
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER is thinking man’s eye candy. Thinking woman’s dramedy. Prime-time soap opera for Trekkies. Strokevision for loner Lovecraft buffs. Textually rich, emotionally dense, psychologically juicy, it’s as layered and complex as Twin Peaks without the po-mo pretension. Douglas firs, doughnuts, and log ladies? Huh-uh: palm trees, herby potions, and vampires, oh yeah. Even academics like me can get away with penning essays and
presenting them at conferences, and in between the sandwiches and mineral water and panel discussions and comparing of CVs we all feel a delicious glee: watching and analyzing this sexy show is legit, somehow. But none of us need fool ourselves: if we still have pulses, we watch in part because the young nubile characters are so damn fine.
Hetero-confession time: I have a thing for Giles. He’s urbane, handsome, brilliant, compassionate (yet capable of cold-blooded calculation when it’s called for), and he sings like a dream. But I feel a need to explore my love for one of the show’s female characters who I find to be a perfect foil to Buffy’s California cheerleaderliness, Anya’s sexpot-alien-bombshell, Willow’s bad-grrrl-geekitude, Drusilla’s nasty little-girl strangeness, or any of the assorted other femme fatales, nocturnal emissaries, or lambs-for-the-slaughter who appear from time to time, sometimes only for the duration of your average Clairol Herbal Essence commercial. One woman walks alone, in quiet strength, with languid gait, street-urchin eyes, shepherdess hair, New Romantic fashion sense, and a penchant for logic of the acid-flashback variety. Tara is to Buffy what brainy rebel Lindsay was to Freaks and Geeks, or raventressed Sam was to Popular (both those excellent shows were, sadly, cancelled prematurely), or Audrey Horne to the aforementioned Twin Peaks: undeniably sexy but set slightly apart from the cast’s more glamorous females, too smart or political or strange, more “striking” than “beautiful.” In the spirit of praising the offbeat and the undersung, I offer a paean to Tara Maclay and to Amber Benson’s unforgettable portrayal.
Okay, she’s blond; this differentiates her from the brunette goddesses just mentioned. And, truth be told, at first glance she’s your classic corn-fed all-American bland, flaxen beauty. She has nice cheekbones. She’s taller than average. There may be a Nordic origin to that peaches-and-cream coloring. But there is something about Amber Benson’s beauty, her earthy authenticity, her solidity, that is refreshing and decidedly not in the typical angular Anglo-Saxon Hollywood mold. Mostly it’s her body. This is not to suggest that Buffy’s bevy of other babes—Miss Gellar, or Miss Hannigan, or Miss Caulfield, or indeed Miss Trachtenberg (I can call them all “Miss” without seeming condescending and arcane, ’cuz I’m a girl, okay?)—are in any way lacking in tooth-someness or serviceability. But, let’s face it, they’re twigs. Like most actresses in most TV shows, these young women, lovely though they are, probably do not weigh more than 105 pounds soaking wet (or clad in leather pants).
Amber has heft. Hips. Thighs. Breasts. A slightly rounded belly. In short, she looks a bit more like the rest of us. Goddess help us, she may even be a size 7.
And it is perhaps the ever-so-slight tendency toward the Rubenesque (this is not to imply she is overweight! Just that she is luscious! Like the actress in Dark Angel in the first season, or Christina Ricci a couple years ago, before they turned into twigs, too. Like Kate Winslet, the curvy English rose, long may she bloom) that suggests a painterly quality to Miss Benson’s looks. Lovely she is, but she is not perfection (her eyes a bit too large, heavy-lidded and far apart, her lips overfull and perhaps not as precisely-shaped as one might like) but her idiosyncratic appeal is unforgettable, haunting, much like the models used again and again and obsessed over by artists like William Waterhouse (the mermaid is the flower-seller is the nymph who finds Orpheus’s head), or Dante Gabriel-Rosetti (willowy redheads clutching, variously, pomegranates, lilies, or serpents), or Degas’s shadowy dancers, or Renoir’s ubiquitous gold-and-pink bather. In Andrew Wyeth’s paintings of longtime model and sometime-lover Helga, we see a glimpse of Tara, too: the soft green tones in her skin and hair, the hint of a secret smile on that closed mouth, the nature-spirit trappings of tree-lined country roads, sere meadows, and frosted windows. Helga’s loden-green coat becomes Tara’s pale-brown suede jacket; one a forest, the other a fawn.
Color and texture touch our senses as surely as pheromones scream “sex” to the neocortex; and the show’s costume design plays upon subtle character traits ranging from the culturally literate to the mythic. Willow’s togs toggle between numerologically pertinent sports jerseys and gypsy thriftshop tops. Buffy slinks, capitulates, and kicks butt in badass leathers, near-nude colors, and soft ruffles. And Anya just plain owns it, baby, whether in tight denim or creamy bridal satin. But in Tara’s clothes (and the sometimes-slouchy, always comfortable way she wears them) we are not swept into flights of fancy, but grounded; not aroused, but soothed. Watch those reruns for the greens and browns that dominate; earthy, yes, but also, according to the color theory of costume design, a sign of a character who is alien, other, or somehow separate from the crowd. Green and brown, the hues of the tree-hugging neopagan, the teenage witch who is too self-conscious to go garbed in goth black.
Not for Tara the nylon sweats and baggy sweatshirts emblazoned with Nike and Tommy Hilfiger insignia—nor the artificially-distressed dark blue dungarees, or the overalls, or the cargo pants and wispy tank tops of the Abercrombie & Fitch clones. We get a frequent suggestion of the pastoral, as channeled through her Southern California retro-hippie garb. Flowing skirts, clingy shirts, color palettes Derek Jarman might have approved of, hip pagan logos, ultra-feminine stylings often trimmed with beads, feathers, shells (more of the pagan, elemental connection) or other ornaments—often, as with the other cast members, her sartorial details are highly suggestive of the emotional tone of the moment, a wry comment upon a plot movement, or a connection to other characters. Remember the green shirt with the hemp leaf outlined in green rhinestones? Cleverly masked by a pendant crafted from a single peacock feather? What about the medieval corset get-up from the musical episode? That scene by the pond looked lifted straight from a Renaissance faire, complete with dancing wenches. There’s a Celtic myth flavor to it, the spreading trees by the water; is this Avalon? Are these two beguiling priestesses of Arthurian times, Nimue and Morgan Le Fay; straight out of a pre-Raphaelite painting by Burne-Jones? Close your eyes and smell the orchard. Listen to the birds.
Ah, the musical episode. How can one fail to wax rhapsodic about Amber Benson’s singing voice? A pure, shimmering soprano, but with a power and warmth behind it that belies Tara’s tendency to stammer and pause before speaking softly. We saw her improvement with this, her growth in confidence as her relationship with Willow progressed and she felt loved and validated. The song “I’m Under Your Spell” celebrates this flowering forth of self (even as it is an ode to sex and a thinly veiled reference to the manipulative magic Willow has recently used on her), and what better way to do this than to allow Tara one of the episode’s show-stopping numbers in a score of mostly fantastic songs? Of course it doesn’t hurt that she shares a duet with the show’s other finest singer, Giles and his smoky, tremulous folk-tenor. I had found myself anticipating this pairing even before I watched it happen . . . when I heard Tara’s sweet siren sound I immediately wondered if she and Giles would sing together. And even though Buffy belted nicely and Anya’s triple-threat moves and chops were staggeringly good (that retro-number with the Golden Era of Hollywood 1940s lounging robes was a stroke of genius), Tara would be equally comfortable with a pure acoustic folk-club sound, a neo-Celtic pop confection, or a legit Richard Rodgers ballad. She not only sings rings around everyone else in the cast, she can do it in multiple styles. And while she’s not the hoofer Anya is, and not the catlike mover Buffy is (even without her stunt double), Tara’s dancing in the musical numbers was just, well, so Tara. Quietly competent, not studied or athletic, a wobbly fawn among whippets. As she enchants with her Guinevere gown and silvery voice, we see a woman come into her power, emboldened by love and ecstasy and total acceptance. A shame it’s a sham; but as that song climaxes (with Tara realizing Willow’s betrayal, and Giles knowing he must leave Buffy), we also hear the passion that remains behind the anger and grief, the passion that will get them through the rough days ahead as Willow must battle her addiction alone and Tara must work her own solitary magics.
Tara’s animal grace is also part and parcel of
her witchiness. She and Willow merged so well magically because they complement each other: Willow is enamored of books and spells and power and rare magic items, but Tara is of a more earthy stamp: buying tea-lights at the drugstore and herbs from the farmer’s market, perhaps, and sitting quietly beneath a full moon after soaking in a rosewater bath. A natural witch, she believed for years she had demon blood, lied to by her family who seemed, after all, to merely want to keep their women down. When the Scoobies stood up for her and refused to let Mr. Maclay take his daughter away, we know they also showed their approval of her relationship with Willow, and after a rough start (no one understood her jokes, for one), they accepted Tara into the Sunnydale family. It always seemed clear that it was Tara who made magic really blossom in Willow, that without a partner in love and witchcraft she would wallow further in greedy spell acquisition and geeky Internet research. In “Tabula Rasa,” when the two forget but then remember each other, they have telling reactions while in The Magic Box. Everyone is wondering why they’re in such a place and with these people. Looking at the occult detritus everywhere, Willow comments on all the “weird stuff” and implies it’s unwholesome (though she lets out a small excited “Ooh!” when she notices a book called Magic for Beginners). But Tara’s face is knowing when she proclaims “This is a magic shop,” as if even total amnesia could not erase her intuitive grasp of her own talents, nature, and karmic destiny.
To paraphrase Bart Simpson (though he was quoting George Burns and speaking of show business), karma is a hideous bitch goddess. Why? we asked ourselves when the blood droplets flew and landed. Why her? “Your shirt” were her last words: an eerie reference to Willow’s near-breakdown when trying to find something suitable to wear for Joyce’s funeral, tossing aside her hated, childish togs like Daisy shuffling through Gatsby’s shirts. And then, unfathomable, final, sad silence. The golden girl, the gentle woodland fawn, the earthy witch, gone from us. When it happened, I thought of Willow’s earlier act of blood sacrifice: luring the hapless fawn so she could procure its blood for Buffy’s resurrection rite. On some level that act (irresponsible and wrong-headed to the extreme, and yet also necessary, and unavoidable) set things in motion that culminated in the murder, violence, mayhem and brutality of the rest of the season’s narrative arc. One fawn slaughtered, another offered up, the Slayer brought back, the universe in balance again, blessed be.
Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Discuss Their Favorite Television Show (Smart Pop series) Page 6
