Tuesday 22 November 2011

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Welcome to the Hellmouth



“Oh I would kill to live in LA. That close to so many shoes…!”

Three years ago today, on 22nd November 2008, myself and a bunch of other people on the Doctor Who Forum (as it was at the time) set out on the Gap Year Marathon, in which we would watch all of Doctor Who, from the unbroadcast pilot from 1963 to the very end of David Tennant’s tenure, in time to start Season Thirty-One in April 2010. Not all of us kept up with the schedule (some of us overshot by a year!) but it was an amazing communal experience.

For me, it was also addictive. I started this blog (and the Word documents that act as back-up!), six months into the Marathon because Internet forums can be ephemeral and I didn’t want to lose the many hundreds of pages of reviews that I was writing. But when the Marathon ended I still had a craving to continue, and I still do. I kept on reviewing Doctor Who and spinoffs as they aired (and I always will!), but also fed my cravings with Blake’s 7, Sherlock, The Nightmare Man and movies.

One of those movies was the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And one of those TV shows was Joss Whedon’s very own Firefly. This is a natural moment to start on another massive Marathon of Buffy and Angel, and I admit I’ve put it off for a couple of days just so I can start it three years after the last one! I’ll still be reviewing movies, generally on Saturdays, and I might punctuate things with a short TV show that’s non-Buffy related between seasons, but it starts here…

So, Welcome to the Hellmouth. I watched this on a DVD I bought back in 2004 and thereabouts, and the price tag tells me I paid an eye-watering £34.99 for twelve episodes. I was robbed! I have, of course, seen the whole thing before, but only once for most episodes. So I know in broad terms what’s going to happen plot-wise, but it was all a long time ago.

There are a couple of things I have to get out of the way at this point. Number One (as alluded to in my review of the movie) concerns the American High School. To many, it’s a rite of passage and the focal point of one’s adolescence, but to this foreigner it’s a genre of popular culture. All the tropes of the American High School- those yellow buses, Homecoming Queens (whatever they are), Senior Prom, etc… I know very little about such things and I hope some of my American readers might enlighten me on these things as they come up.

Thing Two is… didn’t the late ‘90s look awful? I may be showing my age here (I was born in 1977 and I was into Grunge as a teenager) but I seem to recall that music, fashion, aesthetics in general all took a distinct turn for the worse around 1996-ish and stayed generally rubbish until the Strokes came along and saved us all. You can see the change in the music videos- in the mid-90s they were all brightly coloured, with lots of sunshine and light blue jeans, but then they suddenly became dark, drab and awful, with people wearing dull clothes in dark, dull colours. And Buffy begins in the middle of this Dark Age. Just sayin’.

Anyway… Welcome to the Hellmouth. What’s it like, then? Well, it’s outstandingly good; you can instantly tell that the characters are all going to be great, the cast is universally superb, and the dialogue is as witty as you might expect. The pre-titles sequence is a brilliant statement of intent, reversing gender roles and our expectations as it’s the girl who turns out to be the vampire.

It’s fun to see Buffy trying to figure out these characters she and we will come to know so well. Xander is the klutz with a heart of gold, Willow is much nerdier at this early stage than we might expect although, of course, Alyson Hannigan is suspiciously gorgeous and adorable to be playing a character like that, brilliant actress though she is, and Jesse… well, there’s no need to say a lot about him, is there? Cordelia, though; the character is comedy gold. Her dialogue is priceless- the coolness interview, the Valley Girl talk, everything!

Giles and Angel (whose name we don’t know yet) share the exposition between them. At this stage their only known character traits are worried and furrowed-browed (Giles) and “dark, gorgeous in an annoying sort of way (Angel), although we’re told about the Harvest and made privy to the apparent return of the apparently resurrected Master. It is of course unclear to what extent, if any, things have been retconned since Buffy was Kristy Swanson, but I’m guessing the Master being alive is one indication that reality has shifted a bit. Still, Sarah Michelle Gellar is a much better Buffy, and Anthony Head, in a subdued performance, really shows us just how much Donald Sutherland was phoning in his performance.

Of course, it’s obligatory when doing this sort of thing to mention as a fairly early stage how vampires and monsters are of course all a metaphor for how horrible it is to be a teenager. And being a teenager is horrible; you have responsibilities that seem to cripple you but with no rights and no money, forever at the mercy of authority figures and told that your future depends on everything you do. You’re a raging mass of hormones, you’re afraid to talk to the opposite (or same) sex, emotional pain hurts so much more, and you just don’t have the experience to feel confident about anything. It’s only years later that it dawn on you just how horrible it was. And yes, there are plenty of obvious metaphors here. Buffy has to choose between her responsibilities and any hope of social popularity. I suppose in a way her stake really is a type of pepper spray. And Willow finally finds the courage to talk to a boy and he turns out to be a monster- a metaphor if ever there was one.

At the end the whole thing switches gear from witty teen comedy to non-stop action; the genre has changed, and so have the rules. Buffy, at this early stage, doesn’t look anything like as confident in fighting bog standard vampires as we’d expect, although her coolness is all there. Combat mixed with witty quips- it’s all very Spider-Man.

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