[URBAN NOTE] "How Buffy The Vampire Slayer helps Gord Perks be a better politician"

[rfmcdonald]

NOW Toronto's Jonathan Goldsbie interviews Toronto city councilor Gord Perks about the importance of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in inspiring his politics.

Is it accurate to say that you find the show nourishing?

Yeah, in a way. It’s a show about how to be a moral actor in an immoral universe.

Explain.

Well, it’s a world dominated by demons and monsters and “Big Bads,” and all of the characters have to find a trajectory to living morally in that universe. And they’re all compromised. Sometimes they help each other, sometimes they set each other back. It’s an awful lot like being part of a government in our not-very-healthy society.

What's your favourite season in that respect?

Every season has its own take on it. That’s the marvellous thing.

I mean, The Master [the main villain of the first season] very much looks like a Nazi. The second season is about finding your own moral strength when everyone and everything you love abandons you. The third season is confronting your own dark side.

The fourth season is Frankenstein and the application of technology as a means of social control and how you respond to that. And the way that the characters respond to it is to literally become a collective and draw on each other’s greatest human strengths in order to find a way through.

The fifth season is about the choice between glory and commerce and beauty and actual filial love. The sixth season — it’s amazing I can just do this off the top of my head — is very much about trying to find your identity after losing your moral centre. And the seventh season is all about how to move from being an individual moral actor to being free to empower others to become moral actors.

And these are all struggles that all of us as human beings, and particularly those of us who try to be conscious and intentional of finding the good and the right in this world, have to reflect on.

They’re also very moving stories. It doesn’t matter how many times I watch the last few episodes of the second season, I cry every time.