Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Discuss Their Favorite Television Show (Smart Pop series) (9 page)

A friend of mine in Louisiana had a writing teacher who enjoyed proclaiming, “The king dies and the queen dies. That’s not a story. The king dies and the queen dies of grief. Now
that’s
a story.” I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean, nor what any of these sayings are supposed to do for young writers. Probably make all but the most dedicated break down and get a real job.

But recently I heard a good one: “There are only two plots: a stranger comes to town and someone goes on a journey.” This aphorism helped distill an idea I’ve developed over years of reading and writing science fiction and fantasy, resulting in my own sweeping generalization: “There are only two kinds of fantastic story: the Alternate World and the Trespass.”

What do I mean by this? Allow me to define my terms.

In “Alternate World” stories, the reader goes on a journey to another era, another planet, a world that follows different rules. Alternative histories, stories of the far future, and tales of elves and magic fall into this category. In their own way,
Lord of the Rings, 1984
, and
Star Wars
are all Alternate World stories.

In “Trespass” stories, a stranger comes to town. Something fantastic—whether
The X-Files
’ aliens or Anne Rice’s vampires—invades our familiar world of credit cards and disposable razors. Reality is shown to have cracks and fissures we haven’t seen before.

I must admit, before becoming a Buffyphile I had a deep prejudice against Trespass tales. The techniques that bring Alternate Worlds to life are those that originally drew me to read and write science fiction: the top-to-bottom world building, the ubiquitous and yet subtle exposition, the filtering of a strange reality through a viewpoint character who finds that reality commonplace. This kind of tale was what I considered to be speculative fiction at its most literary, sophisticated, textured, and, most important, subversive. SF allowed me to visit and create worlds that had completely different rules from our own, and that called everything in our “normal” world into question.

On the other hand, Trespass stories felt rather more comfortable, designed for readers who prefer to start with something familiar. And there seemed to be a conservative principle at work in most, a tendency for the alien invader to evaporate at the end of the tale. We’ve all seen this plot, which I call the Elastic Trespass story:

1) “Monsters! I can’t believe this is happening!”

2) “It’s true, there are monsters! Let’s kill them.”

3) “Oh, no! When you burned down the house to kill the monsters all the evidence was destroyed. No one will ever believe us now!”

In the Elastic Trespass, as in a sitcom, everything goes “back to normal” at the end of the episode. A return to an unperturbed, normal, daylight world is always effected. E.T. goes home. It’s as if there’s some sort of natural law at work, a principle of conservation of normality, that makes all the evidence disappear by the story’s denouement. Either all marks of the alien are erased by happenstance, or the characters engage in a frantic cover-up, apparently unwilling to take credit for saving the world.

(A close cousin to the Elastic Trespass is the Elastic Time Travel story, that old chestnut in which time-travelers wind up on the
Titanic
and no matter whom they tell about the iceberg all they get is “But this ship is unsinkable!” and the ship sinks anyway. History
had
to happen that way.)

The elastic form of the Trespass story is inherently conservative, saying as it does that the stranger who comes to town is fundamentally unknowable. We can’t incorporate the alien into our normal world, because that would imply that the world can change. So when the Other pops up, our heroes stomp it into the ground, obliterating all evidence of its passage. Like history, middle-class normality is fixed and unalterable, no matter how many fantastic creatures, ancient curses, and mystical portals might exist in the margins.

This principle is especially strong in stories with young protagonists, partly because no one ever believes kids anyway. It’s as if the young adult Elastic Trespass tale is a training ground for adult conformity. children in these stories always hide E.T. in the closet, repress their own memories, and find themselves unable to break the conspiracy of silence that is the adult world. In C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, at least one of the kids, George, grows up to “remember” that his trips to Narnia were all a game. He manages to enter adulthood only by repressing the fantasies of childhood. Only they weren’t fantasies; they were alien realities! (Naturally, he’s the one who winds up with the best-paying job.)

When I watched the first few episodes of
Buffy
with an uncritical eye, the show seemed destined to be trapped in this mold. The vamps conveniently turned to dust when staked, leaving no evidence. The protagonists were marginalized kids, and their adult mentor a mere high-school librarian (and a bit of a toff), a marginal adult without real-world credibility. Buffy hid her calling from her mother and from the adult world at large. Despite her extraordinary powers, she and her friends (and her viewers) instinctively knew the rules of young adult powerlessness: “They won’t believe us anyway,” and “We better leave everything as we found it, or we’ll be in big trouble.” It’s okay to save the world, but not to change it.

But something about
Buffy
kept me watching. From the first episode, the show was playing with the conventions of the Elastic Trespass tale, subverting the genre traditions in subtle (and sometimes obvious) ways. In Joss Whedon’s hands, the elastic of middle-class reality wound up stretching and twisting into new and unexpected forms.

One of the ironclad rituals of the Trespass is the Passage of Disbelief, the moment where the protagonist says, “This can’t be happening!” Now, we’ve all read and watched a million versions of this scene.
And not only main characters have to come to believe that the Trespass is real, but often they must convince their friends and parents, the police, newspaper reporters, government officials, and whoever else they need help from. But it’s a waste of the viewers’ time, because we’ve seen the movie trailers or read the back of the book, and we already know the vampires or aliens or killer tomatoes are real. We just want to skip to the part where everyone’s on board, especially to avoid dialog like “There must be a rational explanation for all this!” or that most embarrassing line in any science fiction movie: “This is like something out of a science fiction movie!”

Thankfully, the writers of
Buffy
employ a number of strategies to subvert this little ritual, using humor and understatement to breeze past the usual protestations of disbelief.

Buffy herself, of course, has had a movie prequel to adjust to her place in the fantastic scheme of things. In the pilot (“Welcome to the Hellmouth,” 1-1), she takes over Giles’s recitation of a Slayer’s duties with, “‘. . . the strength and skill to hunt the vampires, to stop the spread of their evil’ blah, blah, blah. I’ve heard it, okay? . . . I’ve both been there, and done that.” For the Slayer herself, at least, no time is wasted in disbelief.
¹

At the end of this scene, Xander emerges from the library stacks, having overheard Giles’s exposition, and condenses his initial Passage of Disbelief to a simple “What?”

After Willow and Xander are saved from the Master’s henchmen in the pilot’s conclusion (“The Harvest,” 1-2), they receive a full briefing from Giles. But it is Buffy who mockingly provides the ritual litany of “rational” explanations.

And thus the original Scoobies’ Passages of Disbelief are dealt with, once and for all. Five minutes of screen time later, Xander is ready for action, uttering a line that could be from any
Buffy
episode of any season: “So what’s the plan? We saddle up, right?”

Done and done.

In most Trespass stories, the demarcation between those who know the secret and those who are blissfully unaware is carefully maintained. Initiation is an important ritual. But in
Buffy
, that border is shown to be delightfully fuzzy. When Jenny Calendar is recruited into the Scooby Gang (“I Robot, You Jane,” 1-8), Giles attempts to break the existence of demonic forces to her gently.

End of scene.

In the standard Elastic Trespass tale, Jenny would have sputtered in disbelief, requiring hard proof of Giles’s extraordinary claim. But instead it is Giles who winds up sputtering. When in the next scene he asks if Jenny is a witch, she answers, “Technopagan is the term. There are more of us than you think.”

That last line could be the motto for Sunnydale’s Trespass-aware citizens. While guarding supposed non-initiates from the dark truths of the Hellmouth, the Scoobies are repeatedly shocked to discover how pervasive secret knowledge is in Sunnydale. In “Lie to Me” (2-7), Buffy attempts to explain away a vampire attack glimpsed by her old school friend, Ford.

Again, Ford doesn’t sputter, Buffy does. Ford went to Buffy’s previous high school, and already knows that she’s the Slayer. The mystical forces at work in the Buffyverse are a matter of teenage rumor, dark and knowing humor, an open secret, so even bit players don’t waste time with the usual Passages of Disbelief. Any number of Sunnydale residents, students and adults, turn out to be more or less aware of that ultimate Trespass, the Hellmouth, and all it implies about the reality of their world. Time after time, Buffy’s grateful rescuees blurt out some sort of reversal similar to Ford’s. Perhaps the most underplayed of these inverted Passages of Disbelief comes from the laconic Oz (“Surprise,” 2-25).

Like the dark secrets at work in any small town, only the most willful Pollyanna is completely unaware of Sunnydale’s special dangers. Even the optimistic Larry, in the long traveling shot that opens Sunnydale High School for season three, isn’t entirely clueless: “This is our year. I’m telling you, best football season
ever
. . . . If we can focus, keep discipline, and not have as many mysterious deaths, Sunnydale is gonna
rule
.” (“Anne,” 3-1)

The pervasiveness of this open secret is most touchingly demonstrated in “Prom” (3-19), when the students of Sunnydale High elect Buffy as Class Protector, recognizing her years of service as Slayer. As Jonathan explains in his presentation speech, this award is ad hoc (“This was actually a new category. First time ever. I guess there were a lot of write-in ballots.”) and represents a shared knowledge rarely given voice: “We don’t talk about it much, but it’s no secret that Sunnydale High isn’t like other high schools.” But it is precisely on this unofficial level that understanding of the Trespass operates in Sunnydale. The official line may be that monsters don’t exist and that the fantastic and mystical must be repressed. But in the Buffyverse there is a significant space set aside for improvised and heartfelt recognition of realities outside the official narrative, and write-in votes for the people’s hero do not go uncounted.

Of course, the Passage of Disbelief is only half of the Elastic Trespass.
With every monster that emerges from the Hellmouth, the elastic of reality is stretched out of shape, and according to the rules it must snap back to normalcy. After each resolved crisis—the monster slain, the spell reversed—comes the inevitable Cover-Up. All evidence must be erased. (Famously, the original Scooby Gang of
Scooby-Doo
never needed a Cover-Up, invariably discovering that there were no real mystical forces at work. It was always just “old Mr. Withers the caretaker, trying to scare folks away.”
²
)