A kindly acquaintance recently sent the Hog household the first season of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer on DVD (which does not stand for discrete valuation domain)...This past day, I partook of the first four episodes. Long have I heard of this Buffy phenomenon; its fans are legion, singing hosannahs from one end of this vast land to the other. The premise, all can agree, is a silly one: a teenaged Valley Girl fighting vampires. Silly can be good; silly can be bad. It depends on the execution; what of that? In the wrong hands--and most hands in American television are wrong--this Buffy phenomenon could easily have turned tepid and lifeless, a collection of mindless conceits turned cliches. But I bit, at last...There is no harm in seeing, I thought. I will settle this, once and for all: is it good, or what, exactly?
Turns out, it's good.
Darn good.
I like it!
It is pop-culturey, I will not deny it. It is built of elements practically archetypical: the stuffy wise Brit, the spunky sassy girl coming into her own, the quiet lonely one who needs only a little consideration to blossom, the dateless stumbletounged yet oddly articulate boy. Vampires, witches, sympathetic magic, crucifixes and all. Brief Lovecraft references, his trademarked Old Ones now subsumed into the as-yet-vague demoniackal cosmology that gave rise to the vampires our Buffy is here to slay.
The great advantage of starting off with such easily summarisable characters and such (by and large) familiar images from pop horror, of course, is that they're hooks. You have an immediate sense of who they are, and what these supernatural conceits are, and how they should work. There is no need for scene-setting, for justifying such transgressions of natural law as vampires. One can advance immediately to story. Part of the reason that FOX's 1996 attempt at a Doctor Who film failed so miserably (apart from the sad, sad writing) is that it attempted to introduce so much unfamiliar mythology so quickly: Time Lords, regeneration, time travel, the Master, blah, blah blah. Such trappings require a delicate touch. They must be delivered digestably. One must avoid the info-dump, in television...At first, at least. Once one is established, one can begin to weave one's mythopoeic tapestry. There is tremendous range for the characters and conceits of Buffy to expand and evolve. Or their was. Whichever the appropriate tense is. Because it's already happened. I just haven't seen it yet. I'm sure it does. Did. Will.
If this slips through a time-hole into the year 1996, I advise whoever reads this to watch Buffy.
It's cute. And funny. Entertaining. It isn't Twin Peaks or 'The Curse of Fenric', but it doesn't try to be. Well, not yet. As I said, I've only seen four episodes.
But I will see more. Oh yes. Much, much more. And I will keep you posted.
Posted by aloysius at August 19, 2003 12:07 AM | TrackBack |