“Were you interested in witches before Willow?” my partner asked. We were in season 6, the penultimate season of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, a program that I saw many times, but was presenting to my partner and 10 year old son.
I had no intention of watching Buffy again – but the pandemic forced us to do many things that we never thought we would do: cancel plans; Stay inside; Admit to your partner that you know all the words in the musical episode of “Buffy”, “Once More With Feeling”, and in fact, owns the cast’s album.
In many ways, “Buffy” is a good program for children like mine, which is fun and wise: the jokes are not complicated, the monsters are not scary and the main characters are tough women, important for my son who was raised by a single mother.
But how tough can a female character be if she was raised by an abusive man?
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Last week, Charisma Carpenter, who played Cordelia on the show, publicly accused “Buffy” creator Joss Whedon of abuse, including mocking her faith, teasing her because of her weight while she was in the second trimester of pregnancy and firing her from “Angel,” Buffy’s spinoff “Carpenter appeared at the time, when she had a baby.
Several cast and crew have since come forward to confirm or show support for Carpenter’s claims, including Sarah Michelle Gellar (chief hunter Buffy), James Marsters (Spike), and – after deleting his Instagram and making his Twitter private – David Boreanaz, who played Angel in the show and spinoff and who settled in 2011 a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against him by an actress.
Carpenter has spoken publicly now largely to support actor Ray Fisher, who Accused whedon “abusive, unprofessional and completely unacceptable” treatment on the “Justice League” set. Last year, WarnerMedia conducted an internal investigation into Whedon. But while the investigation has been completed and “corrective action” has been taken, it is not clear what those actions are. Blaming the pandemic, Whedon recently left his new HBO series, “The Nevers”.
Carpenter’s accusations seemed like déjà vu to me, as if I was stuck in the episode “Buffy”, where time keeps repeating itself. I thought Carpenter had already performed – but maybe I was remembering how his character was totally annihilated and died off camera? (Most of the pregnant characters on Whedon’s shows suffered similar fates.) Or maybe I was remembering the claims of Whedon’s ex-wife, Kai Cole, of serial betrayal and decades of psychological abuse?
Or maybe I was just paying attention to the show, which uses its misogyny on the cover.
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Casual sexism permeates most episodes, certainly each written or directed by Whedon; my partner and I realized early on that we could say. Is there a joke about breasts? A joke that mixes witchcraft with lesbianism? Xander (played by Nicolas Brendon, who did not comment on the abuse allegations) is aggressively chasing Buffy, although she has repeatedly expressed disinterest? As a teenager, “Buffy’s” sexism, which I watched faithfully, was part of my daily life and barely registered. Whedon’s program seemed to hate women – but didn’t they all?
As a Generation X youth, I think I am not alone because the emergence of #MeToo and women talking more publicly about abuse has called into question how I survived the world. How could I explain my whole life before? I can’t even count how many times a man (a teacher, a boss) commented on my body, what he wanted to do to me, although I remember the first time: when I was nine.
I knew that everything that happened to me was not right – but everyone said it was, and it happened to many girls, to all of us. It felt like a collective hallucination we were having, a nightmare we just couldn’t wake up from.
How you survived childhood was with other girls. You faced great evil every season, every day – and he just changed his face: the neighbor’s boy (“If you died now, you would die a virgin”, he told me at 13), your church deacon (“You really blossomed, “as he approached me when I was in elementary school), the 9th grade English teacher (we girls had a secret hand signal for when he was looking up from our skirts; we called the massages not consensual on the shoulders he gave us the “Gerber grip”).
This is the world of “Buffy” too – the world that Whedon made and maintained. Although the program included female writers, notably Marti Noxon, who wrote for “Mad Men”, “The Girlfriend’s Guide to Divorce” and “Sharp Objects”, Noxon confirmed Whedon’s abuse. Whedon bragged about making women writers cry, according to screenwriter Jose Molina. One of Whedon’s tactics was to force writers to relive the worst day of their lives and then explore that trauma in search of a plot.
An example of this is one of the most terrible episodes, when Spike tries to rape Buffy. The scene is to turn the stomach, at least because it is represented for maximum suffering (and actors traumatized during the filming). This scene opens another hole in Whedon’s self-proclaimed feminism: that women can only be really strong if the source of their power comes from their sexuality or from “overcoming” the trauma. Of course, Faith, another hunter, is promiscuous. Of course, sex with Buffy makes Angel mean – his sexualized teen body is powerful.
The rape scene seems totally out of character and out of nowhere, although Whedon stated that his reasoning was to remind viewers that Spike is a vampire and therefore “soulless”. What is the easiest way to do this? Having a sympathetic and frankly non-toxic male character suddenly rape.
Much in the same way that in later seasons Willow changes from gentle and loyal to someone who lies, cheats and is vindictive to a friend, this sloppy development of the character sometimes makes the dialogue of “Buffy indistinguishable. The characters are more like spokespeople. of Whedon, and less as fully realized individuals. So Dawn, a teenager, says the same fifty-cent words as Willow. Cordelia, who is not a Southerner, says “bubba.” And Xander (the character Whedon said was based on himself) calls Cordelia “a whore” and Buffy “a slut”, looks at Dawn from behind, and yells out phrases like “the more I scare you, the better you smell”.
The characters are spokespersons not only for Whedon’s sexism, but also for racism and ability. There are few colorful characters (mainly caricatures with strong accents), and these are quickly eliminated. My partner, who is a Chican, filled his phone with images of racism from “Buffy”, which is aimed intensely at Mexicans. Giles is dressed in a sombrero, characters returning from Mexico speak of speaking “Mexican”. As a partially deaf person, the frankness of the show is difficult (the characters say “lame” and “retarded” and scoff at the adorable deformity of the demon Clem).
I believe that “Buffy” still has redeeming qualities, especially in the work of its actors. Emma Caulfield (Anya) makes even the lines of a word hilarious. Anthony Steward Head (Giles) does the same for complicated exposures. Marsters transformed a disposable villain into a protagonist (and responsible nanny) who is still one of my favorite characters in any story.
The strength of “Buffy” is her ensemble, not the titular character, but the Scooby gang that supports her. This not only reinforces that even the heroes cannot update themselves in a vacuum (Spike or Clem need to babysit, Willow needs to hack a computer system, we need a small loan from Giles), it impacted my own creativity. My first novel, “Road out of Winter”, shows a group trying to cross the country during an apocalyptic snowstorm. My second novel takes the idea of the group even further; this time, I wrote about an entire community. I know that the “Buffy” set lodged in my heart.
There are great moments of feminine power in “Buffy”: Willow learning to control his magic, “Buffy” knocking out – twice – the boy who used her sexually, the hunter sacrificing herself for her sister. The musical episode is wonderful, although some changes in tempo of the songs and discordant “harmonies” have left my partner and me, both trained in musical theater, confused. Written by novice composer Whedon, it looks like another example of his unverified license.
“Buffy” also has many moments of learning. I was surprised at this re-observation to realize how many lessons are about toxic relationships. “This is abusive!” my son screamed when Willow cast a spell on his girlfriend to make her forget about a fight. We can identify Riley’s behavior – jealous of Buffy’s abilities, hurt herself to get her attention, give ultimatums to her – as abusive in a way I didn’t realize when I was 20, a time when that lesson could have changed my life. I hope you can help my son.
“Buffy” interested me in my own power – yes, including witchcraft, or specifically: herbal medicine, studying and caring for plants in a way that fundamentally changed me. I did my own magic in my books. But I am still and always will be disappointed that a show set in a supernatural universe, a world where magic is possible, could not imagine beyond sexism and intolerance, that its creator could only confirm this, repeatedly.
Why does teenager Dawn have to describe a hamburger as a “meat festival in my mouth”? Why is Cordelia constantly ashamed of the way she dresses? Why do several strong women (Buffy and Faith, Buffy and Kendra, Willow and Anya) face each other? I remember a friend who complained about sexual violence in “Game of Thrones”. “But,” she rationalized, “that’s how it was back then.”
At that time . . . with dragons?
Buffy’s monsters are not scary. But Whedon’s monster is, like the precedent he has set throughout his career: people looking the other way; people (men) in a position to make changes without doing anything, without saying anything, allowing the abuse to continue, the mistreatment on the increase and a beginning aggressor (who created another program in which the plot literally rapes people every night and erases their memories) increases. If only we could kill this.