Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer [Hardcover]

After you've watched several episodes of the 7-year TV series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," you begin to suspect that, just as in Sunnydale, something is going on beneath the surface. Wilcox explores the depths, revealing the artistic devices with which the series' creators built their marvelous world. This hardened "Buffy" follower found new insights and observations throughout the book. (Try, for example, the chapters on Buffy/Spike, "The Body," and "Once More, With Feeling.") Wilcox convinced me, too, that there's still much more to think about here - a telling point in the argument that Buffy matters.

I bought this book after Christmas and really enjoyed it. I found Wilcox's writing to be clear and often concise. I really enjoyed the essay topics that she included, especially "When Buffy Meets Harry" which compares Buffy and Harry Potter. She does a remarkable job comparing to two of them. As a student in Media Studies and Philosophy, I found her analysis on various subjects to be very insightful.

Non-academics can really appreciate this book and understand her essays. While I do have some philosophical background, I was still able to grasp her material much easier the first time around than some of the essays I have found in other academic Buffy books.

My only complaint is her fixation with Freud, I felt that Freud and phallic comparisons were made far more often than necessary and in ways that I didn't feel were warranted. But it could just be that I'm not a big fan a Freud.

In conclusion, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

To this day, when discussing aesthetic matters with my more intellectual friends, if I mention BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, the initial reaction is usually a snicker, as if bringing BUFFY into a serious discussion was indistinguishable from doing the same with BARNEY or HEE HAW. Once they realize that I'm not making a joke but being serious, there is a somewhat stunned reaction, then amazement upon realizing that this television show with the inconceivably silly name might be taken seriously by anyone. Then there is further amazement when I inform them that BUFFY is probably the most popular show of all time among academics, who often tend to write about it not merely as detached spectators, but fans. In fact, nearly three years after the end of the series, Buffy Studies remains a vital and even expanding field. As television studies moves more and more towards the textual discussion of individual shows, a canon of the great shows is gradually forming. Though the list of canonical shows is rather small and still very much in flux, there is no question that BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER is one of those few shows. Rhonda Wilcox, author of this fine collection of essays, has done as much as anyone within academia to further the serious discussion of the show.

Why does Wilcox's book matter? I can best illustrate this by referring to a proposal that C. S. Lewis makes in AN EXPERIMENT IN CRITICISM. Most critics, Lewis points out, primarily focus on what works are good or bad, a practice Lewis laments because what is regarded as great in one generation is frowned upon in another, while a reviled book in one era is considered a classic in another. Instead, Lewis suggests, we should focus instead on what works promote good reading and which preclude it. John Donne, for instance, in any age can be read in a good fashion, while a romance novel cannot. What is good reading? It incorporates such things as rereading, constant reflection over certain passages, ongoing discussion about it, and perhaps memorization of some passages. These are merely a few of the activities that works that promote good reading can generate. I believe Lewis's proposal applies equally to film and television viewing. And BUFFY can be read in a "good" fashion. If anyone doubts me on this, I would point to Wilcox's book as concrete proof that my contention is true. I believe Wilcox proves beyond doubt that BUFFY generates good viewing. She does this in a host of ways. For instance, she frequently teases out various themes in the series, such as the use of light imagery in the show or the role that names plays. She explains the logic of the series, many of the major narrative devices, the role and use of music in the series, and the way language is employed. She furthermore takes up in the second half of the book a number of individual episodes and amplifies many of the explicit or latent themes contained within. I will not say that everyone will like BUFFY after reading Wilcox's boo, but I will state that it will quiet any snickers and they will at least admit that it is a show to be taken seriously.

Although Wilcox is an academic, I believe the book will appeal to less academically inclined fans of the show. Her writing is very clear and always accessible. Certainly fans of the show will find the going at least as easy as those academics that are unfamiliar with the show but more accustomed to academic writing. I found the book to be very smooth sailing. I not only have a strong academic background but am one of those fans of the show who can name most of the show's 144 episodes in order and by title. My point is that I think the book will have broad appeal.

I do have two bones to pick with the book. First, Wilcox doesn't quite make good on the title. There is never a point at which she either states that BUFFY should matter or why the show does. There is an odd disjunct between the book's title and the content of the book. The subtitle really should have been the title of the book. Second, Joseph Campbell. For my tastes Campbell is mentioned way, way too much. My academic background is in the study of religion and in philosophy (the former earlier in my career and the latter later). Joseph Campbell is strongly reviled among academic students of religion and is widely considered something of an intellectual mountebank. Significantly, few in comparative religion or theology take any of Campbell's work seriously at all. Virtually all of Campbell's fans within academia are in Literature and outside academia New Age religionists or fans of Carl Jung. I don't have the space here to explain all the problems serious students of religion have with Campbell (let me opaquely state that Campbell makes a vast number of unargued for assumptions that if questioned-and they ought to be-undermine virtually everything he says). I think it perhaps significant to acknowledge that Joss Whedon was familiar with Joseph Campbell's work, but I found every use of Campbell to illumine BUFFY an unwarranted distraction.

Those two complaints aside, this is clearly a book of the first importance for fans of BUFFY. But it is also an important book for those who find the expanding textual discussion (i.e., treating TV shows as texts in their own right, and not merely studying them for their wider cultural or sociological significance) to be one of the most stimulating alterations in Television Studies in recent years. Hopefully we will see more studies like this not merely on BUFFY but on some of the other shows that are candidates for television's emerging canon.

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