[LINK] Katharine Schwab in The Atlantic on the rise of Buffy studies

[rfmcdonald]

Katharine Schwab's article in The Atlantic makes a good case for the importance of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not only as an element of popular culture but as inspiration for entire fields of academic research.

When Joss Whedon’s classic show Buffy the Vampire Slayer went off the air in 2003, its cult status was still very much nascent. Cue the novels, comics, video games, and spinoffs, not to mention fan sites, fan fiction, conventions, and inclusion on scores of “Best TV Shows of All Time” lists. But while it remains good fun to watch a seemingly ditzy teenager and her friends fight the forces of darkness with super-strength, magic, and witty banter, the show’s seven seasons have also become the subject of critical inquiry from a more intellectually rigorous fanbase: academics.

Buffy, along with critically acclaimed series like The X-Files and Twin Peaks, came before The Sopranos and the beginning of the Golden Age of Television, but helped pave the way for scholars to treat television shows like The Wire, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad as sprawling works of art to be dissected and analyzed alongside the greatest works of literature. Academics have found Whedon’s cult classic to be particularly multi-dimensional—trading heavily on allegory, myth, and cultural references—while combining an inventive narrative structure with dynamic characters and social commentary.

As a result, hundreds of scholarly books and articles have been written about Buffy’s deeper themes, and an entire academic journal and conference series—appropriately called Slayage—is devoted to using the show and other Whedon works to discuss subjects such as philosophy and cultural theory. Buffy as an allegorical spectacle of postmodern life? Check. Buffy as a progressive, feminist challenge to gender hierarchy? Check. Buffy as a philosophical examination of subjectivity and truth? Why not?

Douglas Kellner, a professor at UCLA, has written that popular television does a particularly good job of expressing the subconscious fears and fantasies of a society, and that Buffy is an especially useful example. The show’s fantastical elements, he said, provide “access to social problems and issues and hopes and anxieties that are often not articulated in more ‘realist’ cultural forms,” like cop shows or sitcoms. But even popular dramas with similar surface-level conceits like Teen Wolf and Vampire Diaries, which focus mostly on soap-opera romance and teen issues, lack Buffy’s allegorical elements, which elevate the show and make it fascinating for scholars to study.