Last weekend Buffy the Vampire Slayer got more attention online than I can ever remember. It’s the 20th anniversary of the show’s first air date and my week was emphatically improved by reading so many love letters to a show that means everything to me. Seeing article after article from authors who adored the show and revelling in the fact that quite often it was something entirely different that drew them to it has inevitably led me to start yet another binge watching session. These articles have done better justice to the cultural importance of the show than I could, so I’ll focus on the personal instead.
I’ve tried to write about Buffy many times. I usually end up losing myself in the rabbit hole of how to explain why this show matters without feeling like I’m straying a long way off of the reservation. How do I write about a show like Buffy without losing my flimsy grip on objectivity? For as long as I’ve been obsessing over essentially unanswerable questions, two of my old favourites to return to are these: Can a TV show/film/song change your life? And if so, could it ever be argued it saved it?
Even with an honorary PhD in hyperbole and a tendency to overthink things, the question of where to draw the line on the influence of media on a (my) life has always fascinated me above and beyond any other.
There are individual films that make a strong argument that it can happen but it’s the form as a whole that I struggle to imagine life without. When I look at music there are stronger arguments for life changing interventions, with Frank Turner responsible for getting me through more days than most, but that’s a separate argument for another blog. I also owe more of my degree from De Montfort University to Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” than I’m entirely comfortable with.
TV has offered me plenty of great options and probably consumed more of my time than either of the two former media. However while I frequently crumble into a bumbling mess when asked what my favourite band or film is, if the same question is posed about television there’s only one answer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Reading a lot of the responses to the anniversary I’ve been struck by a whole bunch of thoughts.
Many describe the show as a feminist awakening for them. That’d be a stretch for me, but it was certainly an essential part of my education. A strong woman kicking every arse that had the temerity to do anything other than respect her was perhaps less revelatory to me than some simply because I had the utterly blind luck to be raised in a household where strength and influence weren’t framed by gender. My mum was always the primary bread winner, my go to guide for how to face the world and as I grew up a continuous reminder of how utterly fucked so many of the default structures of our society are. My dad might argue over whether he is a feminist (mostly because he’s never been presented with a claim he won’t try and dispute for the sheer joy he experiences from being on the opposite side of an argument) but I learnt from him how to be a man utterly un-reliant on outdated stereotypes. I was introduced to the show by them both and we still regularly end up talking about it. In honour of the anniversary we watched “Once More With Feeling” together.
Buffy may not have taught me something entirely new but it delivered the most emphatic argument for my budding and formative world view I could have hoped for. The central female characters were my heroes (and, let’s be honest, crushes) for what they represented. Buffy and her vulnerable strength. Willow and her genius. Joyce and her compassion and aspiration. Faith’s ferocity and self-reliance. Cordelia’s willingness to fight the entire world if it got in her way. Anya’s ability to embrace the changes in her life. Tara’s integrity. And as crazy as she was, even Drusilla had two of the most powerful characters in the show wrapped around her little finger most of the time.
This was the company I spent my teenage years with and one of the main reasons I tried my best to surround myself with female friends. I’d already been insanely lucky with the circle of friends I had, but the idea of forming my own wonderfully diverse Scooby gang was inevitably part of my thinking as I went through my A-Levels and tried to work out what on earth I was doing with my life.
In amongst the multitude of angry male leads (and for balance I loved 24 far more than my lefty politics should have let me) not just Buffy herself, but the entire cast provided expression for dozens of different concepts of strength, whether it was individual or collective, selfish or selfless, calm or angry.
Staring out at the world with perhaps even more uncertainty than the average teenager, I was constantly aware of one of the abiding messages of BTVS: the family you choose is as important as the one you’re born with. So I surrounded myself with the best and the brightest, the kindest and the most fascinating people I could, both during 6th form and Uni. It’s not an overstatement to say I owe an awful lot of my happiest memories from that time to the influence of Buffy and Joss.
I don’t know if I’d have believed that a constantly awkward and self-doubt filled teenager could befriend the kind of people I did without having grown up on a diet of Buffy.
And I don’t know if I’d have made it through the days when that support network couldn’t offset my depression anymore without a few key moments that kept echoing around in my head long after most rational arguments had retreated in the face of the stubborn self-destructiveness that defines those utterly bleak days.
Buffy was a show that managed to combine wit, drama and a hefty emotional punch, always reluctant to sacrifice any of the above to the other. Its most heartbreaking episodes have some great one liners (other than “The Body” in season 5 which is an exquisite exploration of grief and you should never watch it expecting anything other than a rush in demand for tissues). It did a better job of capturing the joys, traumas and uncertainties of being a teenager and trying to become an adult better than most “grounded” dramas I’d seen. It is also a show that revels in language to a degree few other shows manage, no small factor in my enduring love for it.
It was a show about defiance. About accepting who you are and fighting every single day to try and make the world a little bit better. It’s a twin message I frequently fall short of both halves of but keep coming back to. On shitty nights when I’m starting to wallow in my self-pity I can escape into an episode that never shames a character for feeling lost but reminds you of how essential it is that they fight. On good nights where I want that elusive boost to keep me going there are episodes to fire me up with righteous passion that the world can be better if you have the will to fight for it.
It’s been difficult to write this piece without throwing out too many spoilers, but it’s a challenge that is now two decades old. How do you get reluctant audiences past a silly sounding name and concept without giving the game away? How do you hint at how much this show can mean without taking the joy out of its highs and stings out of its lows? I might write a separate, spoiler heavy, piece soon about my favourite moments from the series, but for now I’ll draw to a close.
I was always going to want to finish this post with a quote from the show. There’s plenty to choose from, but there was one that maybe comes closest to providing an answer to the question I posed earlier: Can a TV show save your life?
It would be a stretch to say Buffy saved my life, but not a sizable one. Without the constant reminder of what I could be, of what the fight can be worth or of why fighting for lost causes is worth more than fighting for a thousand sure things, I can’t guarantee I’d be sitting here writing this.
Of all the quotes I could have chosen, all the words Joss put on scripts that shaped the majority of my life, there is one line I keep coming back to. A line that has echoed around my head in the darkest of hours and fired me up in those all too rare moments of defiance, a line that to a neutral observer I suspect might seem lightweight and innocuous.
It’s not possible to give the full context for the line without straying into spoilers, but I’ll frame it as well as I can. Faced with moving on from an almost unbearable sacrifice by a loved one, they reflect on the final words of the fallen. It’s a line I return to over and over again. A line that I rely on to remind myself that no matter how dark it gets there is always hope, so long as you accept that everything in this life that is worth having is worth fighting for. A sentiment that has become even more relevant in the face of recent political developments. A line that works whether I’m just barely holding on or facing a day head on. In good times and bad, Buffy has been there for me and I suspect it still will be when the 40th anniversary rolls around.
“The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. Be brave. Live.”
Passing Time 