Isn’t Buffy The Vampire Slayer awesome?
Saurabh and I have been watching two or three episodes a week for a couple of months now, and we’re absolutely loving it. We’re halfway through Season 3 already. I can safely say this is the only non-sitcom that has ever managed to sustain my interest this long. Heroes, Lost, Six Feet Under, and 24 all fizzled out after the first season but Buffy has endured. And this despite the big inherent weakness of a show of this type – the whole Monster Of The Week deal, which in general is synonymous with repetitive and boring. But surprisingly, not in Buffy. Suprisinglier still, the show works on several levels even when the Monster Of The Week doesn’t. Strong writing, good vision, and lots of emotional torture for the main character… there’s your magic formula, screenwriters!
This is not to say it’s flawless, however.
For one thing, it irks me that in a so-called feminist show the Monster Of The Week is always male. If the MOTW is female – only twice so far! – she is the exception that proves the rule, consigned as she is to the role of KILLER-UTERUS: the female giant preying mantis kidnaps young men only to breed with them. Male MOTW, on the other hand, have any number of motivations for their evil. They’re men, so they’re allowed an existence outside of babies, eh? The show’s staple bad-guys are vampires, and male vampires seem to outnumber female vampires twenty to one, too.
This has been a pet theory of mine for a long time. Why are Orcs always male? Why are Oompa Loompas always male? Why are goblins, leprechauns, centaurs and giants always male? I think when women have achieved parity in villainousness, with equal representation in major and disposable villains alike, we will have taken a big step forward.
But at least one can’t fault the show for having its heart in the right place when it comes to representations of women. According to creator Joss Whedon, “the very first mission statement of the show … was the joy of female power: having it, using it, sharing it.” And in many ways, Buffy succeeds in its portrayal of a strong, multi-dimensional female character.
When it comes to race, however, we can’t even say the show has its heart in the right place. There isn’t even an attempt at tokenism here. Sunnydale is as white as white bread with crusts cut off, and just as unnatural and unsatisfying. There isn’t a single major character of ANY colour but white – no black people, no Asians, no native Americans, no Hispanic people. That’s worth repeating, you guys – no Hispanic people in California. Not even in that episode set in LA. Season 2 had a Caribbean slayer show up for one episode who was promptly killed off in the season finale, so that doesn’t count. Season 3 has introduced a black vampire called Mr. Trick and he’s been on screen for maybe 10 minutes total, if that. Interestingly, MsOTW come in all colours – red, blue, green, purple, black, grey – but unless they’re vampires they’re never white.
This matters. Representation matters. If you’re writing stories that are set in a certain time and place, you ought to write about all the people who live in that time and place, and try very hard not to filter characters based on skin colour. Is this not elementary? Is this not obvious?
For months I’ve had an unfinished draft of a post sitting in my queue. It was going to be a post about why representation is important – why it really is a big deal that in the mainstream media we see and hear so few stories of anything other than the straight-white(or other majority, like Hindu)-male. I never could find a captivating way to write that post, but today I stumbled across another blogger who said it all for me better than I could have.
It’s tempting to quote her whole entire post, but I will try to limit myself to the choicest bits if you promise to go read all of it here.
Stories teach us how to survive. They tell us that our lives can be transcendent, that we can overcome almost anything, no matter how strange, that we can go into the black wood and come out again, that the witch can be burned up in her own oven, that we can find someone who fits a shoe, that the youngest, unloved child will find their way in the world, that those who suffer can become strong, can escape, can find their way into comfort and joy again. That there are secrets, and they are always worth discovering, that there are more and different creatures in the world than we can ever imagine, and not all want to eat us. Stories teach us how to win through, how to perservere, how to live.
As a child of abuse, fairy tales kept me going when I was a girl. Because Gretel could kill the witch, because Snow White could come back from death, because Rapunzel could live even in the desert–then, well, I could too. I could dry my tears and clean up the blood and keep living. This is what stories do. They say: you are worthy of the world, no less than these heroes.
And when we see story after story that has no one like us in it, a book entirely without women, a TV show where white people speak Chinese but there are no Asians visible, a movie set in California without Hispanics, image after image of a world where everyone is straight, and when we are told that it’s no big deal, really, there is no race in future societies, that it’s not anyone’s fault if all the characters are white, that’s just how they are, in the pure authorial mind, that we have no sense of humor, that we are ganging up on people because we speak our minds, this is what we hear:
You do not have a right to live. There are no stories for you, to teach you how to survive, because the world would prefer you didn’t. You don’t get to be human, to understand your suffering or move beyond it. In the perfect future society, you do not exist. We who are colorblind, genderblind, sexualityblind would prefer not to see you even now. In the world we make in our heads, you have been obliterated–even better, you never were. You are incapable of transcendance. You are not worthy of the most essential of human behavior. If you are lucky, we will let you into our stories, and you can learn to be a whore, or someone’s mother, or someone’s slave, or someone’s prey. That is all you are, so pay attention: this is what we want to teach you to be.
…
It is eugenics.
That is what this is about. … Only those who look a certain way, act a certain way, fuck a certain way are allowed to have the blueprint, to have any guide on a path grace, peace, love in their lives. Everyone else can just lay down and die.
And since there is nothing I can say that can top that, this is where this post ends.
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