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revdorothyl) wrote2003-07-02 06:36 pm
revdorothyl) wrote2003-07-02 06:36 pm
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Running it up the flag-pole -- dissertation proposal roughage
Just in case anyone's interested enough or masochistic enough to work through all of this, here's approximately what I last turned in to my professors (which they sent back with suggestions that I make it sound more academic, using more technical terms, etc., and doing a more thorough run-down on what has or has not been done in the area of religion and popular culture, so far).
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DISSERTATION PROPOSAL (rough draft)
Working Title: "Horror, Hope, and Heroes: Practical Religion in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’"
1) SUBJECT MATTER:
The subject matter for this dissertation is the therapeutic and theological uses of the television series 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' (BtVS) by viewers, educators, and care-givers. For those unfamiliar with the series, the basic premise is that in all the world one teen-aged girl is "called" to become the Vampire Slayer, "the Chosen One," who has the superhuman strength and skill to battle the vampires and other demons who prey on humans and periodically try to bring about hell on earth. According to the rules laid down before the dawn of human history, the Slayer is supposed to work alone and in absolute secrecy, guided only by her "Watcher," who trains her and acts as general for the one-girl army. However, the current Slayer, Buffy Summers, has survived and thrived in the face of impossible odds by regularly ignoring the rules, sharing her secret and her battle against evil with a small circle of friends (Willow Rosenberg, Xander Harris, and several others who have come and gone over the years, collectively known as "The Scoobies") and developing a more collegial relationship with her Watcher (Rupert Giles), just as the television series breaks the "rules" of the horror movie genre which require that the pretty, blond cheerleader be easy prey for the monster, instead of being the warrior who fights and kills the monsters. Through examining how the characters and narratives of this particular television series are used by individuals and groups struggling to cope with bafflement, suffering, and evil, I hope to identify some of the needs not being met elsewhere (in religious institutions, families, or traditional forms of therapy) and suggest ways in which those needs are being met by the series and its fandom. Ideally, the data and theoretical tools of this dissertation would have value for pastors, counselors, and teachers struggling to connect with and help people in pain.
2) HISTORICAL BACKGROUND:
[some parts of this section dealing with my previous research and experience have been deleted to save time and space]
...I came to [this Ph.D. program] to learn why certain stories seem to hold such healing power or provide a common ground upon which people can begin to build communities. The theoretical tools necessary for this study of the practical theology aspects of BtVS have been worked out through research papers presented at a variety of academic conferences and workshops and through lectures for Religious Studies and Anthropology classes . . . .
In terms of what other people have done or are doing in this subject area, in addition to THE DOOR’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek designation of BtVS as “Theologian of the Year” for 2002 (which focused on how BtVS reflected themes in Christian theology) and a couple of as-yet-unpublished conference papers on aspects of theology in BtVS, there are essays in each of the 2002 academic books on BtVS, READING THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (Zoe-Jane Playden’s “What You Are, What’s to Come: Feminisms, Citizenship, and the Divine”) and FIGHTING THE FORCES (Gregory Erickson’s “Sometimes You Need a Story: American Christianity, Vampires, and Buffy”), which touch upon my area of interest in a peripheral way. Playden focused my attention on the theme of training vs. education in BtVS in a way that I had not previously considered (pointing out the stark contrast between Buffy's questioning and engaged relationship with her mentor Giles, on the one hand, and the unquestioned obedience to authority figures demonstrated by some other Slayers on the other hand, and noting that Buffy, having been educated to think rather than trained to obey, is the one who survives). Erickson, meanwhile, highlighted the way in which crosses and holy water seem to become mere tools, like hammers and nails, in BtVS, their power to slay or protect being almost completely divorced from their religious meaning, and seemed to see this as consistent with the utilitarian approach of many Americans to religion (if it works and is useful, does it matter to many of us if there is some transcendent truth there or not? Or, from my perspective, does BtVS work for people in need because it is a good story, or because it stands for something more?). Though he never mentions BtVS, Timothy K. Beal has provided some useful models and resources for discussing the religious uses of horror in RELIGION AND ITS MONSTERS (2002), talking about the relationship of monsters to our cognitive maps and to the more chaotic aspects of the divine. Also from 2002, Gerard Jones’ somewhat less scholarly (but still useful) book KILLING MONSTERS briefly deals with how adolescents use BtVS and other pop culture narratives to “play” with problems that would otherwise be too threatening to face, but is particularly useful in suggesting at least one reason why boys might wish to identify with strong female super-heroes (since female super-heroes are allowed to be far more human, by and large, than their male counterparts). In a similar but more scholarly vein is Steve C. Schlozman’s ACADEMIC PSYCHIATRY article from March 2000, “Vampires and Those Who Slay Them: Using the Television Program ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ in Adolescent Therapy and Psychodynamic Education,” which discusses the adolescent developmental challenges represented by the BtVS mythology. Prior to 1997 (when the series premiered), relevant models for talking about the therapeutic uses of pop culture narratives and fan communities can be found in Jonathan Shay’s ACHILLES IN VIETNAM (1995)—which used the characters and narrative of The Iliad as a mirror for the traumatic experiences of Vietnam combat veterans and the crisis of meaning many had experienced when their religious world-view seemed unable to account for the horror and injustice around them—and Henry Jenkins’ TEXTUAL POACHERS (1992), which was the first study of fandom written by a scholar who is also a fan, trying to balance the emic and etic perspectives on fandom, even as the fans balance emotional nearness and critical distance in reading their favorite media texts.
3) PROBLEM AND SIGNIFICANCE:
Thesis: Since its 1997 premiere, BtVS has regularly dealt in the sort of sacred symbols and narrative which (according to Clifford Geertz in THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES) any religion must provide to address the challenges of bafflement, suffering, and evil in human life. BtVS goes where few popular entertainments dare: admitting that there are problems which lie beyond the edge of our cognitive maps, but denying that events are ultimately inexplicable or that life is therefore meaningless; exploring suffering many forms, but denying that life is unendurable; demonstrating that great evils persist, but denying that justice is a mirage or that right and wrong no longer matter. As practical theology aimed squarely at the problem of meaning and the challenge of feeling that you are real and life is worth living, BtVS is surprisingly effective, I argue, providing resources where religious institutions and traditional theologies cannot, or have not, for a wide variety of people. More than a mere pop culture commodity, BtVS provides a potential space—like that ideally found in religion, art, and therapy, according to D. W. Winnicott in PLAYING AND REALITY—in which regular viewers can safely play with subjects and concerns that would otherwise be too threatening to face or talk about. The very ambiguity, or openness, in the series’ cosmology leaves space for viewers to attempt to develop their own set of meanings for terms like ‘soul’ or ‘hell’ or ‘redemption’ and more easily appropriate the mythology of the ‘Buffyverse’ (which, since 1999, includes the spin-off series "Angel," or AtS) to their own immediate needs. This theological play and fan appropriation is demonstrated, discussed, and analyzed on Internet bulletin boards, discussion groups, and a plethora of web-sites. By transplanting the homely horrors and fears associated with growing up and living responsibly with others “off the map,” to the realm of monsters, where they can be explored at a tolerable distance from real life, BtVS also gives viewer-participants the opportunity to expand their cognitive and emotional maps, to address the problem of meaning, and to find some hope and heroism in their own lives (with reference to the essays of Paul Tillich in THEOLOGY OF CULTURE, as well as to the multitude of public discussions, correspondence, fan fictions, critical essays, and live journals already mentioned).
Contribution: This particular line of inquiry has not yet been adequately explored, yet the series BtVS and its on-line fan communities have been generating a level of religious discussion (especially among people who insist that they are not at all ‘religious’ and would not willingly set foot within an actual church) and mutual pastoral care and counseling that I have never seen before, even among fans of the "Star Trek" franchise. Even many people who claim a religious affiliation, and have ongoing relationships with supportive family and friends and skilled counselors, seem to be able to find in the ‘Buffyverse’ a form of sustenance they need and are not being provided with elsewhere. A more detailed language or model for describing the kind of hunger expressed by BtVS viewers and the nourishment for mind and spirit they find in the series should be useful to people in the church seeking ways to better serve their neighbors, as well as to students of popular culture who might wish to use the same tools and model to explore aspects of other forms of entertainment (including the television series and films which I have researched in the past and to which I make frequent reference in this project).
Line of Inquiry: Currently, I have collected both theoretical resources and data (which is drawn from the series episodes—of which I have a complete and ever-growing videotape library—and from fan web-sites and public discussions) into the following outline, which may be radically reorganized as more evidence becomes available each day:
I. Introduction—“The hardest thing in this world is to live in it.” (BtVS 5.22).
From the opening and closing numbers in the BtVS musical episode (“Once More With Feeling” 6.07), the songs “Going Through the Motions,” “Give Me Something to Sing About,” and “Where Do We Go from Here?” are used to give voice to the estrangement from self and others, the inability to feel that one is real and that life is worth living, and the desire to “get the fire back” which figured so prominently in season 6, as well as the response of the series as artistic mirror to the viewer (“You’ll get along: the pain that you feel you only can heal by living. You have to go on living,…so one of us is living.”). As hard as it seems to be to live in this world with courage and a sense of meaning or purpose (as noted by theologians from Paul the Apostle to Paul Tillich and by social scientists and psychologists from Freud and Winnicott to Geertz and Jonathan Shea), where do people in crisis turn for help? For those without the resources ideally provided by communities of faith and family, what alternative communities or systems of meaning are available in popular culture and its fandoms?
II. Bafflement, Monsters, and Mapping—“Gee,...can you vague that up for me?” (BtVS 1.01).
In “Religion as a Cultural System,” Geertz alludes to the chaos which threatens to break in upon us at the limits of our analytic capacities, where the odd, strange, and uncanny simply must be accounted for, or at least the conviction that it could be accounted for must be sustained. Geertz stresses that it is the more mundane experiences of life which, when we are repeatedly unable to grasp them or to get a moderately secure symbolic handle on them, are most liable to raise our anxiety to intolerable levels. Starting with the broad claims made by the authors of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: THE MONSTER BOOK and proceeding through the more detailed studies made by Jones and Schlozman, the usefulness of monsters on BtVS to give form to the anxieties and challenges of living in this world is examined. As openly discussed in the second-season episode “Killed by Death,” if the monster can be identified, it can be fought, and if it can be named, it can be talked about (with a parent, peer, pastor, or therapist). Timothy K. Beal is brought in for his argument that religion is not (as Mircea Eliade and others have argued) all about creating and maintaining a sacred cosmic order against chaos, about keeping the demonized, monstrous (and often feminized) forces of chaos well outside and away from our consecrated established order of things. Sometimes, Beal asserts, the monstrous chaotic is identified with the divine or the sacred, over against cosmic order: “Like the monsters on ancient maps, the monsters within biblical religious traditions and the monsters within the popular culture of horror…stand on and for the threshold between world and abyss. They are personifications of that which is in the world but not of it, appearing on the ambiguous edges of the conceptual landscape, where the right order of things touches on a wholly other chaos, where inside and outside, self and other intertwine.” Perhaps that is why, no matter how many monsters Buffy slays, they always come back for more. And perhaps that is why there is always another Slayer ready to be called, as soon as one Slayer dies. The Slayer, like Aslan or like the gods and monsters with which we deal is not “a tame lion,” and cannot ultimately be contained or confined to narrow definitions of order and chaos, human and non-human, life and death. On some level, BtVS seems to be an invitation to get comfortable living on the edges of our maps, in the potential and unexplored areas where even radical change and healing is possible.
III. Suffering: Telling the Stories of Hope—“My life happens to, on occasion, suck beyond the telling of it” (BtVS 3.18).
As Geertz is quick to point out, the religious problem of suffering is not how to avoid suffering, but how to suffer: “how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others’ agony something bearable, supportable—something, as we say, sufferable.” The role of religious symbols in suffering is (Geertz argues) to give a precision to our feeling, a definition to our emotions which enables us, in some way, to endure the pain. Telling the Christian story of the crucifixion or the story of Buddha’s emergence from his father’s palace, or the stories of the Holy People in a Navaho curing rite is “mainly concerned with the presentation of a specific and concrete image of truly human, and so endurable, suffering powerful enough to resist the challenge of emotional meaninglessness raised by the existence of intense and unremovable brute pain.” Shay’s work in ACHILLES IN VIETNAM is used to test the theory that hearing your own story re-told in a context which attaches some redemptive value to it, or some hope for the possibility of change for the better—or at least affirms that you are not alone in feeling this way, giving voice to your pain, doubts, rage, despair, and general sense of the unfairness and ‘suckiness’ of things—can have a powerful healing effect. Many specific episodes are cited to support my contention that the story of Buffy Summers, the Slayer, is the story of courage and endurance and a willingness to love even when suffering is most intense and unrelenting. The personal accounts of viewers who have watched Buffy suffer and fight on for seven years are used to demonstrate the ways in which people in crisis have found hope, creative expression, or merely a supportive community through identification with the series and its main character. More than that, the series provides ample evidence (mostly through the misadventures of Buffy’s friends, acquaintances, and enemies) that attempts to avoid suffering through (for example) magically altering reality (to escape the consequences of one’s choices or the grieving process) or committing suicide, or even running away, tend to produce far more suffering for everyone. Specific episodes focusing on the character of Willow and her ‘learning curve’ in this regard are cited at length, including “Something Blue” (4.09), “Tabula Rasa” (6.08), “Villains” (6.20), “Two to Go” (6.21), “Grave” (6.22), and “The Killer in Me” (7.13). At the very least, BtVS sets every individual tragedy or real-world defeat within a larger context, reminding us all that even “The End of the World” is not necessarily the end of the world (see “Doomed” 4.11).
IV. Evil, Ethics, and Aesthetics—“We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be” (AtS 4.01).
According to Geertz, along with bafflement and suffering, the “enigmatic unaccountability of gross iniquity” raises the uncomfortable suspicion that perhaps the world, and therefore our life in the world, has no genuine order or moral coherence at all. The religious response to this suspicion, suggests Geertz, is “the formulation by means of symbols, of an image of such a genuine order of the world which will acount for, and even celebrate, the perceived ambiguities, puzzles, and paradoxes in human experience.” The characters on both BtVS and the spin-off series AtS are called upon regularly to cope with the persistence of evil and with the fact that the cosmic reward for surviving each trial by fire and winning each unwinnable battle seems to be having another, even more impossible task thrown your way. Sometimes, doing good in a world full of real, tangible evils can begin to seem pointless, even to the heroes who save the world (or a sizable piece of it) and help the helpless every day. The BtVS episode “Gingerbread” (3.11) and key episodes from season 7 (culminating with 7.19 “Empty Places”) provide examples of heroes battling against despair over the fact that their battle is never fully won. The AtS episode “Deep Down” (4.01) is cited, in which Angel sums up what he learned from Buffy and from trying to follow her example, that a champion is called to be faithful to a vision of the ‘new creation,’ rather than to be successful (“Nothing in the world is the way it ought to be. It’s harsh, and cruel, but that’s why there’s us: Champions. Doesn’t matter where we come from, what we’ve done, or suffered, or even if we make a difference. We live as thought the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be.”). Geertz’ essay “Deep Play” is cited, along with Tillich’s contrast between the safety and possibility in the aesthetic attitude, on the one hand, and the ethical, decision-requiring aspects of life, on the other hand. Jenkins’ work in TEXTUAL POACHERS and recent editorials and research on the “WWBD” (“What Would Buffy Do?”) phenomenon, along with examples from specific episodes, are used to dispute some of the distinctions between art and religion or ethics and aesthetics upheld by Geertz and Tillich.
V. Paradox and Potential Space—“Just take what you need” (BtVS 3.22).
PLAYING AND REALITY is cited at length for Winnicott’s argument that living and loving stem from a creative approach to life which is learned in the potential space (sacred to the individual) where self and parent or self and world or self and the divine overlap. In contrast to Buffy’s own experience of futility through much of season 6 (described and illustrated at some length, and compared to several of the case studies Winnicott describes), I argue that the experience of the viewer of BtVS is more akin to that of the child of a reliable, loving parent, one who mirrors the actual child, rather than their own demands upon the child, and maintains the safety and sanctity of the child’s play. Joss Whedon and the other creative persons who produce the show, rather than narrowly defining the possible interpretations and uses of the characters, stories, and symbols each week (thus prescribing what games may be played and how and by whom), offer up stories and symbols which have a surplus of meaning—not unlike the surplus of content in Faith’s dreamscape apartment in “Graduation Day” 3.22—from which we (like Buffy) can choose the pieces we need and can use to furnish our own mental playgrounds. Not every detail or symbol in the BtVS universe has to be meaningful, or meaningful to every person (citing Erickson’s study of the uses of Christian symbolism in BtVS). Those symbols which are already meaningful to you from your religious upbringing or life experience can be re-invigorated and re-experienced in new ways (personal accounts from viewers, as well as scholarly analyses, are given). On the other hand, the use of the cross and other religious symbols (as pointed out by Gregory Erickson and others) is sufficiently ambiguous that viewers for whom the symbols are not resonant can easily accept them as mere props and leave them where they lay, picking up something else (examples given) which they can use and play around with, until the next show adds new toys to the box.
VI. Conclusion—“Once More, With Feeling” (BtVS 6.07).
The songs from the season 6 musical are revisited, as a way to review the (hopefully) convincing evidence provided in preceding chapters for the usefulness of BtVS and its fan practices for those who want to find a way to live in this world with creativity and purpose.
4) SCOPE:
At the end of this final season of BtVS, the series has a ‘canon’ of 144 episodes with an average length of 45 minutes each, while its spin-off series has 88 episodes aired and more on the way this Fall. Together with the ever-growing fan contributions on the Internet, those 232 episodes provide a sufficiently large pool of texts (and texts which stand up to multiple interpretations and analyses without becoming exhausted) to support an inquiry of this sort, even apart from references to other cultural products and fandoms. At the same time, by focusing on BtVS (using "Angel" episodes only where they enlarge upon or illuminate key elements of the parent series), and especially on the sixth season (in which Buffy struggles to find some meaning and sense of reality in her life, after her friends’ efforts to resurrect her brutally tear her out of heaven and force her back into a life of endless battles), I reduce the number of episodes to be examined in depth to a manageable amount. The fact that each season of the series contains its own narrative arc also helps to keep all the episodes straight and readily accessible for reference purposes. By focusing my online research on the most highly respected fan discussion web-sites (including, but not limited to, “We Band of Buggered” and “All Things Philosophical on BtVS and AtS”) and utilizing the assistance of key informants and friends within the fan community and colleagues in a variety of academic disciplines (who are constantly trading recommendations about new sites or discussion threads), I can get a useful sampling of the sorts of insights and experiences which are being shared, without making any pretense at doing an exhaustive, comprehensive survey of BtVS fandom (which rather resembles the mythical Hydra, in that when you think you have completely “done” one of its heads, at least seven more spring up fresh).
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DISSERTATION PROPOSAL (rough draft)
Working Title: "Horror, Hope, and Heroes: Practical Religion in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’"
1) SUBJECT MATTER:
The subject matter for this dissertation is the therapeutic and theological uses of the television series 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' (BtVS) by viewers, educators, and care-givers. For those unfamiliar with the series, the basic premise is that in all the world one teen-aged girl is "called" to become the Vampire Slayer, "the Chosen One," who has the superhuman strength and skill to battle the vampires and other demons who prey on humans and periodically try to bring about hell on earth. According to the rules laid down before the dawn of human history, the Slayer is supposed to work alone and in absolute secrecy, guided only by her "Watcher," who trains her and acts as general for the one-girl army. However, the current Slayer, Buffy Summers, has survived and thrived in the face of impossible odds by regularly ignoring the rules, sharing her secret and her battle against evil with a small circle of friends (Willow Rosenberg, Xander Harris, and several others who have come and gone over the years, collectively known as "The Scoobies") and developing a more collegial relationship with her Watcher (Rupert Giles), just as the television series breaks the "rules" of the horror movie genre which require that the pretty, blond cheerleader be easy prey for the monster, instead of being the warrior who fights and kills the monsters. Through examining how the characters and narratives of this particular television series are used by individuals and groups struggling to cope with bafflement, suffering, and evil, I hope to identify some of the needs not being met elsewhere (in religious institutions, families, or traditional forms of therapy) and suggest ways in which those needs are being met by the series and its fandom. Ideally, the data and theoretical tools of this dissertation would have value for pastors, counselors, and teachers struggling to connect with and help people in pain.
2) HISTORICAL BACKGROUND:
[some parts of this section dealing with my previous research and experience have been deleted to save time and space]
...I came to [this Ph.D. program] to learn why certain stories seem to hold such healing power or provide a common ground upon which people can begin to build communities. The theoretical tools necessary for this study of the practical theology aspects of BtVS have been worked out through research papers presented at a variety of academic conferences and workshops and through lectures for Religious Studies and Anthropology classes . . . .
In terms of what other people have done or are doing in this subject area, in addition to THE DOOR’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek designation of BtVS as “Theologian of the Year” for 2002 (which focused on how BtVS reflected themes in Christian theology) and a couple of as-yet-unpublished conference papers on aspects of theology in BtVS, there are essays in each of the 2002 academic books on BtVS, READING THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (Zoe-Jane Playden’s “What You Are, What’s to Come: Feminisms, Citizenship, and the Divine”) and FIGHTING THE FORCES (Gregory Erickson’s “Sometimes You Need a Story: American Christianity, Vampires, and Buffy”), which touch upon my area of interest in a peripheral way. Playden focused my attention on the theme of training vs. education in BtVS in a way that I had not previously considered (pointing out the stark contrast between Buffy's questioning and engaged relationship with her mentor Giles, on the one hand, and the unquestioned obedience to authority figures demonstrated by some other Slayers on the other hand, and noting that Buffy, having been educated to think rather than trained to obey, is the one who survives). Erickson, meanwhile, highlighted the way in which crosses and holy water seem to become mere tools, like hammers and nails, in BtVS, their power to slay or protect being almost completely divorced from their religious meaning, and seemed to see this as consistent with the utilitarian approach of many Americans to religion (if it works and is useful, does it matter to many of us if there is some transcendent truth there or not? Or, from my perspective, does BtVS work for people in need because it is a good story, or because it stands for something more?). Though he never mentions BtVS, Timothy K. Beal has provided some useful models and resources for discussing the religious uses of horror in RELIGION AND ITS MONSTERS (2002), talking about the relationship of monsters to our cognitive maps and to the more chaotic aspects of the divine. Also from 2002, Gerard Jones’ somewhat less scholarly (but still useful) book KILLING MONSTERS briefly deals with how adolescents use BtVS and other pop culture narratives to “play” with problems that would otherwise be too threatening to face, but is particularly useful in suggesting at least one reason why boys might wish to identify with strong female super-heroes (since female super-heroes are allowed to be far more human, by and large, than their male counterparts). In a similar but more scholarly vein is Steve C. Schlozman’s ACADEMIC PSYCHIATRY article from March 2000, “Vampires and Those Who Slay Them: Using the Television Program ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ in Adolescent Therapy and Psychodynamic Education,” which discusses the adolescent developmental challenges represented by the BtVS mythology. Prior to 1997 (when the series premiered), relevant models for talking about the therapeutic uses of pop culture narratives and fan communities can be found in Jonathan Shay’s ACHILLES IN VIETNAM (1995)—which used the characters and narrative of The Iliad as a mirror for the traumatic experiences of Vietnam combat veterans and the crisis of meaning many had experienced when their religious world-view seemed unable to account for the horror and injustice around them—and Henry Jenkins’ TEXTUAL POACHERS (1992), which was the first study of fandom written by a scholar who is also a fan, trying to balance the emic and etic perspectives on fandom, even as the fans balance emotional nearness and critical distance in reading their favorite media texts.
3) PROBLEM AND SIGNIFICANCE:
Thesis: Since its 1997 premiere, BtVS has regularly dealt in the sort of sacred symbols and narrative which (according to Clifford Geertz in THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES) any religion must provide to address the challenges of bafflement, suffering, and evil in human life. BtVS goes where few popular entertainments dare: admitting that there are problems which lie beyond the edge of our cognitive maps, but denying that events are ultimately inexplicable or that life is therefore meaningless; exploring suffering many forms, but denying that life is unendurable; demonstrating that great evils persist, but denying that justice is a mirage or that right and wrong no longer matter. As practical theology aimed squarely at the problem of meaning and the challenge of feeling that you are real and life is worth living, BtVS is surprisingly effective, I argue, providing resources where religious institutions and traditional theologies cannot, or have not, for a wide variety of people. More than a mere pop culture commodity, BtVS provides a potential space—like that ideally found in religion, art, and therapy, according to D. W. Winnicott in PLAYING AND REALITY—in which regular viewers can safely play with subjects and concerns that would otherwise be too threatening to face or talk about. The very ambiguity, or openness, in the series’ cosmology leaves space for viewers to attempt to develop their own set of meanings for terms like ‘soul’ or ‘hell’ or ‘redemption’ and more easily appropriate the mythology of the ‘Buffyverse’ (which, since 1999, includes the spin-off series "Angel," or AtS) to their own immediate needs. This theological play and fan appropriation is demonstrated, discussed, and analyzed on Internet bulletin boards, discussion groups, and a plethora of web-sites. By transplanting the homely horrors and fears associated with growing up and living responsibly with others “off the map,” to the realm of monsters, where they can be explored at a tolerable distance from real life, BtVS also gives viewer-participants the opportunity to expand their cognitive and emotional maps, to address the problem of meaning, and to find some hope and heroism in their own lives (with reference to the essays of Paul Tillich in THEOLOGY OF CULTURE, as well as to the multitude of public discussions, correspondence, fan fictions, critical essays, and live journals already mentioned).
Contribution: This particular line of inquiry has not yet been adequately explored, yet the series BtVS and its on-line fan communities have been generating a level of religious discussion (especially among people who insist that they are not at all ‘religious’ and would not willingly set foot within an actual church) and mutual pastoral care and counseling that I have never seen before, even among fans of the "Star Trek" franchise. Even many people who claim a religious affiliation, and have ongoing relationships with supportive family and friends and skilled counselors, seem to be able to find in the ‘Buffyverse’ a form of sustenance they need and are not being provided with elsewhere. A more detailed language or model for describing the kind of hunger expressed by BtVS viewers and the nourishment for mind and spirit they find in the series should be useful to people in the church seeking ways to better serve their neighbors, as well as to students of popular culture who might wish to use the same tools and model to explore aspects of other forms of entertainment (including the television series and films which I have researched in the past and to which I make frequent reference in this project).
Line of Inquiry: Currently, I have collected both theoretical resources and data (which is drawn from the series episodes—of which I have a complete and ever-growing videotape library—and from fan web-sites and public discussions) into the following outline, which may be radically reorganized as more evidence becomes available each day:
I. Introduction—“The hardest thing in this world is to live in it.” (BtVS 5.22).
From the opening and closing numbers in the BtVS musical episode (“Once More With Feeling” 6.07), the songs “Going Through the Motions,” “Give Me Something to Sing About,” and “Where Do We Go from Here?” are used to give voice to the estrangement from self and others, the inability to feel that one is real and that life is worth living, and the desire to “get the fire back” which figured so prominently in season 6, as well as the response of the series as artistic mirror to the viewer (“You’ll get along: the pain that you feel you only can heal by living. You have to go on living,…so one of us is living.”). As hard as it seems to be to live in this world with courage and a sense of meaning or purpose (as noted by theologians from Paul the Apostle to Paul Tillich and by social scientists and psychologists from Freud and Winnicott to Geertz and Jonathan Shea), where do people in crisis turn for help? For those without the resources ideally provided by communities of faith and family, what alternative communities or systems of meaning are available in popular culture and its fandoms?
II. Bafflement, Monsters, and Mapping—“Gee,...can you vague that up for me?” (BtVS 1.01).
In “Religion as a Cultural System,” Geertz alludes to the chaos which threatens to break in upon us at the limits of our analytic capacities, where the odd, strange, and uncanny simply must be accounted for, or at least the conviction that it could be accounted for must be sustained. Geertz stresses that it is the more mundane experiences of life which, when we are repeatedly unable to grasp them or to get a moderately secure symbolic handle on them, are most liable to raise our anxiety to intolerable levels. Starting with the broad claims made by the authors of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: THE MONSTER BOOK and proceeding through the more detailed studies made by Jones and Schlozman, the usefulness of monsters on BtVS to give form to the anxieties and challenges of living in this world is examined. As openly discussed in the second-season episode “Killed by Death,” if the monster can be identified, it can be fought, and if it can be named, it can be talked about (with a parent, peer, pastor, or therapist). Timothy K. Beal is brought in for his argument that religion is not (as Mircea Eliade and others have argued) all about creating and maintaining a sacred cosmic order against chaos, about keeping the demonized, monstrous (and often feminized) forces of chaos well outside and away from our consecrated established order of things. Sometimes, Beal asserts, the monstrous chaotic is identified with the divine or the sacred, over against cosmic order: “Like the monsters on ancient maps, the monsters within biblical religious traditions and the monsters within the popular culture of horror…stand on and for the threshold between world and abyss. They are personifications of that which is in the world but not of it, appearing on the ambiguous edges of the conceptual landscape, where the right order of things touches on a wholly other chaos, where inside and outside, self and other intertwine.” Perhaps that is why, no matter how many monsters Buffy slays, they always come back for more. And perhaps that is why there is always another Slayer ready to be called, as soon as one Slayer dies. The Slayer, like Aslan or like the gods and monsters with which we deal is not “a tame lion,” and cannot ultimately be contained or confined to narrow definitions of order and chaos, human and non-human, life and death. On some level, BtVS seems to be an invitation to get comfortable living on the edges of our maps, in the potential and unexplored areas where even radical change and healing is possible.
III. Suffering: Telling the Stories of Hope—“My life happens to, on occasion, suck beyond the telling of it” (BtVS 3.18).
As Geertz is quick to point out, the religious problem of suffering is not how to avoid suffering, but how to suffer: “how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others’ agony something bearable, supportable—something, as we say, sufferable.” The role of religious symbols in suffering is (Geertz argues) to give a precision to our feeling, a definition to our emotions which enables us, in some way, to endure the pain. Telling the Christian story of the crucifixion or the story of Buddha’s emergence from his father’s palace, or the stories of the Holy People in a Navaho curing rite is “mainly concerned with the presentation of a specific and concrete image of truly human, and so endurable, suffering powerful enough to resist the challenge of emotional meaninglessness raised by the existence of intense and unremovable brute pain.” Shay’s work in ACHILLES IN VIETNAM is used to test the theory that hearing your own story re-told in a context which attaches some redemptive value to it, or some hope for the possibility of change for the better—or at least affirms that you are not alone in feeling this way, giving voice to your pain, doubts, rage, despair, and general sense of the unfairness and ‘suckiness’ of things—can have a powerful healing effect. Many specific episodes are cited to support my contention that the story of Buffy Summers, the Slayer, is the story of courage and endurance and a willingness to love even when suffering is most intense and unrelenting. The personal accounts of viewers who have watched Buffy suffer and fight on for seven years are used to demonstrate the ways in which people in crisis have found hope, creative expression, or merely a supportive community through identification with the series and its main character. More than that, the series provides ample evidence (mostly through the misadventures of Buffy’s friends, acquaintances, and enemies) that attempts to avoid suffering through (for example) magically altering reality (to escape the consequences of one’s choices or the grieving process) or committing suicide, or even running away, tend to produce far more suffering for everyone. Specific episodes focusing on the character of Willow and her ‘learning curve’ in this regard are cited at length, including “Something Blue” (4.09), “Tabula Rasa” (6.08), “Villains” (6.20), “Two to Go” (6.21), “Grave” (6.22), and “The Killer in Me” (7.13). At the very least, BtVS sets every individual tragedy or real-world defeat within a larger context, reminding us all that even “The End of the World” is not necessarily the end of the world (see “Doomed” 4.11).
IV. Evil, Ethics, and Aesthetics—“We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be” (AtS 4.01).
According to Geertz, along with bafflement and suffering, the “enigmatic unaccountability of gross iniquity” raises the uncomfortable suspicion that perhaps the world, and therefore our life in the world, has no genuine order or moral coherence at all. The religious response to this suspicion, suggests Geertz, is “the formulation by means of symbols, of an image of such a genuine order of the world which will acount for, and even celebrate, the perceived ambiguities, puzzles, and paradoxes in human experience.” The characters on both BtVS and the spin-off series AtS are called upon regularly to cope with the persistence of evil and with the fact that the cosmic reward for surviving each trial by fire and winning each unwinnable battle seems to be having another, even more impossible task thrown your way. Sometimes, doing good in a world full of real, tangible evils can begin to seem pointless, even to the heroes who save the world (or a sizable piece of it) and help the helpless every day. The BtVS episode “Gingerbread” (3.11) and key episodes from season 7 (culminating with 7.19 “Empty Places”) provide examples of heroes battling against despair over the fact that their battle is never fully won. The AtS episode “Deep Down” (4.01) is cited, in which Angel sums up what he learned from Buffy and from trying to follow her example, that a champion is called to be faithful to a vision of the ‘new creation,’ rather than to be successful (“Nothing in the world is the way it ought to be. It’s harsh, and cruel, but that’s why there’s us: Champions. Doesn’t matter where we come from, what we’ve done, or suffered, or even if we make a difference. We live as thought the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be.”). Geertz’ essay “Deep Play” is cited, along with Tillich’s contrast between the safety and possibility in the aesthetic attitude, on the one hand, and the ethical, decision-requiring aspects of life, on the other hand. Jenkins’ work in TEXTUAL POACHERS and recent editorials and research on the “WWBD” (“What Would Buffy Do?”) phenomenon, along with examples from specific episodes, are used to dispute some of the distinctions between art and religion or ethics and aesthetics upheld by Geertz and Tillich.
V. Paradox and Potential Space—“Just take what you need” (BtVS 3.22).
PLAYING AND REALITY is cited at length for Winnicott’s argument that living and loving stem from a creative approach to life which is learned in the potential space (sacred to the individual) where self and parent or self and world or self and the divine overlap. In contrast to Buffy’s own experience of futility through much of season 6 (described and illustrated at some length, and compared to several of the case studies Winnicott describes), I argue that the experience of the viewer of BtVS is more akin to that of the child of a reliable, loving parent, one who mirrors the actual child, rather than their own demands upon the child, and maintains the safety and sanctity of the child’s play. Joss Whedon and the other creative persons who produce the show, rather than narrowly defining the possible interpretations and uses of the characters, stories, and symbols each week (thus prescribing what games may be played and how and by whom), offer up stories and symbols which have a surplus of meaning—not unlike the surplus of content in Faith’s dreamscape apartment in “Graduation Day” 3.22—from which we (like Buffy) can choose the pieces we need and can use to furnish our own mental playgrounds. Not every detail or symbol in the BtVS universe has to be meaningful, or meaningful to every person (citing Erickson’s study of the uses of Christian symbolism in BtVS). Those symbols which are already meaningful to you from your religious upbringing or life experience can be re-invigorated and re-experienced in new ways (personal accounts from viewers, as well as scholarly analyses, are given). On the other hand, the use of the cross and other religious symbols (as pointed out by Gregory Erickson and others) is sufficiently ambiguous that viewers for whom the symbols are not resonant can easily accept them as mere props and leave them where they lay, picking up something else (examples given) which they can use and play around with, until the next show adds new toys to the box.
VI. Conclusion—“Once More, With Feeling” (BtVS 6.07).
The songs from the season 6 musical are revisited, as a way to review the (hopefully) convincing evidence provided in preceding chapters for the usefulness of BtVS and its fan practices for those who want to find a way to live in this world with creativity and purpose.
4) SCOPE:
At the end of this final season of BtVS, the series has a ‘canon’ of 144 episodes with an average length of 45 minutes each, while its spin-off series has 88 episodes aired and more on the way this Fall. Together with the ever-growing fan contributions on the Internet, those 232 episodes provide a sufficiently large pool of texts (and texts which stand up to multiple interpretations and analyses without becoming exhausted) to support an inquiry of this sort, even apart from references to other cultural products and fandoms. At the same time, by focusing on BtVS (using "Angel" episodes only where they enlarge upon or illuminate key elements of the parent series), and especially on the sixth season (in which Buffy struggles to find some meaning and sense of reality in her life, after her friends’ efforts to resurrect her brutally tear her out of heaven and force her back into a life of endless battles), I reduce the number of episodes to be examined in depth to a manageable amount. The fact that each season of the series contains its own narrative arc also helps to keep all the episodes straight and readily accessible for reference purposes. By focusing my online research on the most highly respected fan discussion web-sites (including, but not limited to, “We Band of Buggered” and “All Things Philosophical on BtVS and AtS”) and utilizing the assistance of key informants and friends within the fan community and colleagues in a variety of academic disciplines (who are constantly trading recommendations about new sites or discussion threads), I can get a useful sampling of the sorts of insights and experiences which are being shared, without making any pretense at doing an exhaustive, comprehensive survey of BtVS fandom (which rather resembles the mythical Hydra, in that when you think you have completely “done” one of its heads, at least seven more spring up fresh).