Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Discuss Their Favorite Television Show (Smart Pop series) (10 page)

Buffy
knowingly underplays its Cover-Ups, trotting out genre clichés without much time wasted on believability. At the end of “Harvest” (1-2), Cordelia recounts the rumors meant to explain the mass vampire attack at the Bronze. “Well, I heard it was rival gangs, you know, fighting for turf. But all I can tell you is they were in an ugly way of looking . . . I mean, I don’t even remember that much, but I tell you it was a freak show.” Moments later, Giles provides, “People have a tendency to rationalize what they can, and forget what they can’t.”

Memory repression is a frequent device, but even such tenuous Cover-Ups aren’t always in earnest. In “The Pack” (1-6), Xander claims to be unable to remember his experiences when possessed by a hyena spirit (particularly his attempted seduction/rape of Buffy, one suspects). But Giles comes to doubt his story.

In the climax of “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” (3-16), after Xander is saved from an adoring but violent horde of love-spell-bedazzled women at the last minute, Cordelia offers the gathered crowd this stunningly lame Cover-Up line: “Boy, that was the best scavenger hunt ever.” In the next scene, Buffy rolls her eyes at this one.

More often, the Cover-Up is left to entities other than the Scooby Gang. As early as “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” (1-11), government agents show up to take the invisible girl away for covert ops training. And in “School Hard” (2-3), maintaining the secrets of the Hellmouth becomes a matter for local Sunnydale officials. Parent-teacher night is invaded by Spike and his gang, and Principal Snyder barely survives, coming into close contact with the vampires. It seems as if there will be some hefty Covering-Up to do. But instead of Buffy making explanations and excuses, we overhear this exchange between the police chief and Snyder:

This conversation not only neatly provides a Cover-Up, but again shows the fuzzy border between knowing and not-knowing in
Buffy
. If the chief of police recognizes a vampire attack when he sees one, then knowledge of the mystical must extend beyond the unspoken secrets of high school. After this scene viewers must ask themselves, How far up does this Cover-Up go?

As we learn in the third season, adult awareness and even complicity goes all the way to City Hall. And, of course, in season four the federal government itself is implicated. (Presaged by government involvement in “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” 1-11). As the wider world beyond Sunnydale becomes embroiled in the crises of the Hellmouth, we are forced to reconsider to what extent
Buffy
is set in “our” world. Despite the credit cards and SUVs on screen, the show begins to leave the strict confines of the Elastic Trespass tale, until the Buffyverse seems almost transformed into an Alternate World.

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.

______________________

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!