The Aching Romanticism of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Fourteen years ago this month, the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted on the (now defunct) WB. I was going to let the anniversary slide by without notice, but then something Fuzzy Bastard wrote in his excellent review of Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood (which I haven't yet seen), got me thinking:

"The tendency of male critics to gleefully embrace power/revenge fantasies and scream in indignation when confronted with fantasies of romance is just embarrassing..."

Well, it didn't start me thinking exactly, as this is something I think about more or less all the time, but I thought this would be a nice time to revisit. What I mean is, in discussion of genre fiction - whether it be books, movies or television - the world at large is incredibly forgiving of all nature of violent stupidity. Tired superhero tropes, even the dumbest and most unforgivable, while not necessarily liked, are viewed as an individual aberration and not used as an indictment of the entire genre. These same people flip out about romance, as Fuzzy Bastard says above, and deride all of it as awful. And don't give me some bullshit rubric about "geek culture". I'm so over it. When there are enough fans to constantly populate gigantic conventions, and the films of a genre are consistently number one at the box office, a line has been crossed: it's just plain old every day "culture", and it's become a bullying one at that.

I think we're going though a bad patch in which mainstream culture isn't particularly welcoming to women. The reasons for this are vast and varied and something that certainly deserves its own blog post, so I'm going to leave that alone for now and talk about a television show that aired its finale almost eight years ago. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was best described as a Horror Comedy Romance, and I'll go out on a limb here and say that the Buffy/Angel storyline is the greatest romance in the history of the medium. Sorry Spike enthusiasts. Sorry Dave and Maddie fans. Sam and Diane? Please. Luke and Laura? Ew. Kelly and Dylan? Don't make me laugh.

You are simply wrong.

Rewatching Buffy, though some parts feel dated, the story is still fresh. A great deal of this is because like all truly good art, the show isn't really about vampires or magic or a Hellmouth or a superhero, but about people. And a big part of that is - as it is with so many coming of age stories - romance. Seasons Two and Three of Buffy contained romantic episodes that felt like nothing I've ever seen on television. They felt like opera or like myth. I've written a bit about the glorious episode in which Buffy loses her virginity, Angel loses his soul, and all kinds of hell breaks loose. The lead up to this pivotal episode, and the way in which the story is shaped through to the end of the season is a complete fucking master class in story structure.

Angel is evil and killing people, and Buffy feels as if she is responsible as, like all over-conscientious control freaks, Buffy feels responsible for everything and usually reacts by shutting down emotionally. Buffy hesitates, like Hamlet before her, in killing Angel. So he, in the episode Passion, kills Giles's girlfriend Jenny Calendar (undercover gypsy and computer science teacher), and Buffy is shaken to the core. The episode contains that gloriously edited sequence in which Giles finds Jenny's dead body on his bed, strewn with rose petals, as an aria from La Bohème surges on the soundtrack. You so rarely see that kind of gothic romanticism played straight anymore.

Which I guess is what I'm getting at. Buffy manages the tonal shift from comedy to horror to romance so well by taking them all equally seriously. Romance is played straight and worked out creatively, and not as an afterthought. I've seen so many people all over the internet make it very clear that they like the horror and fantasy and comedy aspects of Buffy, but have no interest in the romantic story lines - as if that would be somehow embarrassing. Romance novels are given equally short shrift. And, yes, many romance genre novels aren't very good. But many, many fantasy or science fiction novels aren't very good either, and one rarely sees the bad ones as causing critics or those that blather on the internet to dismiss the entire genre as a whole. I've made it fairly clear that fiction that is aimed at or primarily enjoyed by women is rarely afforded much respect. Most often male critics of genre sneer. It's completely tiresome and the reasons for this have a few causes. One of the big ones, which I don't think is spoken of very often, is that men and women are conditioned to respond to books and media a little differently. The typical (and lazy) critical thought (male) as opposed to emotional reactions (female) is far too simplistic.

A few years ago, I conducted a survey in which I asked a simple question: "What did you read when you were growing up?". I left the question purposefully vague in order to have people interpret the question as they chose, which I thought would be illuminating (it was). First, men were far more likely to question me about what I wanted to hear, i.e. what was the "right" answer. They were also five times as likely as the female responders to mention a learning disability, or a reading disorder. They were six times as likely to respond that they "didn't read much". They also were far more likely to mention being bullied or made fun of for reading (zero women reported this). My raw data makes absolutely fascinating reading.

Reading fiction of any sort used to be referred to as a "feminine vice". Still, many men read mostly non-fiction or maybe for relaxation, Stephen King or Tom Clancy. Other men read widely and well. But, over all, more women read fiction then do men. Another gender difference in my survey response was in the language used - three times as many women than men used the word "loved" to describe a book (27 - 9). Women were also more likely to send me email after email, adding books they had forgotten to list. But the thing that surprised me the most was how much commonality there was in the lists from women, as opposed to the lists from men. Many, many women listed Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, the Little House books, the works of Frances Hodgson Burnett, Sweet Valley High, the Bontes, Baby Sitters Club, Nancy Drew, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler, All of a Kind Family, Anne of Green Gables, Harriet the Spy and the works of Dr. Seuss.

There is very little overlap in the books the men cited, which as not something I expected at all. Part of this is that the average male responder listed so many fewer books than the average female one. The following books were listed by multiple men, and by equal numbers of women: Narnia, Tolkien, A Wrinkle in Time, Roald Dahl and The Phantom Tollbooth. The only books citied in great numbers by men and not women are The Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown. Men mentioned genre far more often, though, saying they read science fiction, history and comics. It's all so interesting, and I've been sitting on all of it for ages, as I'm not sure what to make of it all. There were many impassioned responses from both men and woman, which is thrilling. But - the results were kind of overwhelming. I don't think I need to say that my sampling skewed ridiculously toward college graduate, East Coast artistic/educator types, so I really didn't expect there to be as large a gender divide as there was. I expected it to be far more subtle.

One thing I gleaned that didn't at all occur to me before I read the responses was that women have very little shame in admitting they liked things that could be perceived as silly or childish. Several men responded with something along the lines of,"I read a lot of comic books and spy novels and stuff, but that's not what you want to hear about" and then proceded to list a bunch of "school" books. Their lists also skewed far more grown up with far fewer mentions of picture books like Where the Wild Things Are and Dr. Seuss (and I'm pretty certain that these books were read and enjoyed by both boys and girls equally). There was a subtle feeling that the men were a little bit more concerned with how they would be perceived - as exhibited by the worry about answering the question "correctly". Women, by and large, didn't seem to care. They answered with gusto, making few apologies for anything they read and liked when they were young. In other words, the women came off as being far more confident than the men, which was (embarrassing for me) completely unexpected. On average, women enjoy fiction more than men do, I think. They also have so much common ground with each other in terms of what they (or, I should say, we) read. The women responders seem to lap up enjoyment without worrying as much about how these choices would be viewed.

I think one of the big reasons for this is because if you're a girl growing up, your options for watching stories about other girls has always been limited. That's far less true for boys. Girls like Star Wars too, of course, but it's not the same. Movies, television shows and plays are overwhelmingly by and about men. Girls mostly have had to look elsewhere for challenging and entertaining stories about girls, and that elsewhere is often in books. So, there are an awful lot of books that are geared towards girls and women. The fiction stacks of Barnes and Noble (and certainly in the Young Adult section) may be one of the very few places where boys and men aren't top dogs.

Which brings me back to Buffy. More than any other show I can think of, it was about women. And not just one women surrounded by men, but about a female protagonist surrounded by lots of other women. That's one of the reasons lots of women also like the much mocked Sex and the City (of which the first couple of seasons were pretty interesting) and Gray's Anatomy (which I think is a nightmare). But, really, in these post-Roseanne times, there's not much - and even less that can be construed as feminist (my long awaited 30 Rock post is on its way, I promise). I mean, we live in a world in which Two and a Half Men can last for nearly 10 seasons! There are so few women on TV shows who bear any sort of similarity to human women as I've encountered them here on Earth, and Joss Whedon, in a show about high school kids and vampires managed it better than nearly anybody.

There is over the top gothic romance at every turn, which I found thrilling. But Whedon always manages to ground all of it in recognizable human feelings. So, I'll leave you with a flashback musical number in which Anya, the 1100 year old ex-vengeance demon sings of her love for Xander. Of course, as it is a flashback, we know, though she doesn't, that he will leave her at the altar and she will go back to being a vengeance demon, and as the song is played, Anya has a sword through her chest that has been thrust there by Buffy as Xander watched.

Ah, romance.

Miss Pamela by Miss Caviglia

When I was a kid growing up in West Egg, I wanted more than anything to be an artist. I wanted to grow up and do interesting things and meet interesting people.

Like girls all over America, I knew that none of those things were going to happen in my little corner of suburbia, so I got the hell out. But before that illustrious day, I spent lots of time reading biographies and looking at the many books of photographs my mother had. I spent hours looking at pictures of artists and writers and performers in Paris between the wars. I read Edie: an American Biography and loved it, but Warhol had just died, so that was no help. And, of course, part of the problem was that I wasn't precisely sure what it was I wanted to do exactly. It all seemed so complicated (and, honestly, so it remains).

Then, when I was 17, I read Pamela Des Barres's I'm With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, which, while deeply problematic in many ways, I loved, and honestly still do. Des Barres (Bless her!) is a pack rat who saved all her high school journals, letters and notes from friends. She quotes extensively from them throughout the book and they are priceless. She writes a lot about her early teen years of Beatlemania, and about her friends and her boyfriend. It's all very recognizable and candid and relatable. Then, she meets a boy at school named Victor, whose hair is too long and wears corduroy pants and likes the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. She began wearing her hair straight and her suburban friends all freaked out on her for liking "filthy" Mick Jagger. Then:

My new best friend, Victor, had a real-life rock and roll cousin who lived in a trailer in the desert, with the outrageous name of Captain Beefheart. Vic titillated me with this information more than once before inviting me to see his group, The Magic Band, perform at the Teen Fair at the Hollywood Palladium...Don Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, was a wildly intimidating crazy genius who was so far ahead of his time, people are still trying to catch up with him. He was just a wee bit out of place at the Fourth Annual Teen Fair, where the big thing was Knudsen's new fruit-flavored yogurt.

This was when she was 16 in 1965. She writes about how she started hanging around in Hollywood and meeting people like Kim Fowley (of later Runaways fame) and The Byrds. She had a huge crush on their bassist, but he totally ignored her. She met lots of boys and made friends and saw lots and lots of bands play. Des Barres has a a nice self-deprecating sense of humor, and brings vividly to life what it must have been like to be a teen whose world was suddenly exploding in all these exciting new directions.

She started hanging out with artists and poets and musicians. She visited San Francisco (she didn't like it much. She liked her lipgloss more than dirt and lentils, a sentiment with which I enthusiastically agree), and wound up hanging out with Bobby Beausoleil (this was years before the Tate-LaBianca murders). One of my favorite things about Des Barres's book is the gleeful enthusiasm with which she tells of her exploits. It's funny, in the current state of memoir writing, nearly everyone writes of all the miseries and horrors of their youth. It's in fashion. But Des Barres sounds like she had a blast. Sure, there's heartbreak a-plenty, but she knows she has a terrific story to tell and does it justice. I think it's also important to remember how very, very young she was when all this was going on. I mean, she was a kid. As she says at some point, (I'm paraphrasing) she'd rather sleep with rock stars than creepy frat boys like the girls she grew up with.

Which is a little problematic, but it sounds as if she was a willing and enthusiastic participant with few regrets. Another thing I've always liked about Miss Pamela is that she has never been one of those awful women who have no girl friends. She writes just as much about the interesting girls she befriends as the boys. Eventually, she joined forces with a group of freaky, like-minded young women. They would go to shows and clubs and dance, blurring the lines between audience member and performance art. They met Frank Zappa through a mutual friend and he named them the GTOs (standing for Girls Together Only - but the girls themselves decided the O could stand for anything: Outrageously, Outlandishly, Openly, etc.). Eventually, he decided they should be an actual band and they recorded an incredibly strange album with the Mothers of Invention backing them (with Jeff Beck and various other luminaries sitting in as guests), but the girls wrote their own songs.

They performed in a musical, performance art extravaganza that sounds kind of awesome. Alice Cooper played, as did the Mothers, the GTOs sang their weird songs, danced and did some other bits. Opening, was a homeless man named Wild Man Fisher. I think Tiny Tim may have been on hand as well.

The book follows Miss Pamela through her mid-twenties when she marries Michael Des Barres. It's really clear that she was on a mission to find romance and adventure and stardom, and doing a better job at finding all three than most people. She was still married when she wrote this book, but got divorced (amicably) shortly after its publication. One wonders how the subsequent twenty years or so have colored her perceptions of her interesting life. One of the delightful things about I'm With the Band is it's immediacy, but it also makes me wonder how the events she portrays would look to an older Pamela who has a little more distance on her life. Her journal entries all make fascinating reading. She is so clearly torn down the middle, wanting a new sort of artistic and exciting life, and a desire to an almost 1950s-style freaky rock and roll house wife. She was writing at the cusp of the sexual revolution, in the last pre-feminist moment.

There's been some noise that Zooey Deschenel is trying to adapt the book for HBO, and I'm cautiously optimistic. There are a lot of different ways this material can be treated, but with Miss Pamela very much alive (she's 62 and looks both fantastic and unsurgeried), the possibilities are likely somewhat limited. But, you know, I would watch every second of it if it were to happen.

And Miss Pamela is still a very busy lady, writing and making appearances. I recently saw a documentary in which she drove around the country interviewing other former groupies (likely in support of her book Let's Spend The Night Together), including a fantastic one with the late, lamented Tura Satana who spoke of her romance with Elvis. She was so charming and showed some of her old burlesque photos. I've searched, and searched and it is posted nowhere, which is tragic. So, the point is, being a former groupie at this point is Miss Pamela's business, which I think might be impairing her critical acumen.

Whenever writing about women whose principal claim to notoriety was sexual, it's difficult to parse. The world she inhabited was essentially unfair, and she gave the young men she devoted so much of her energy toward so much power. She talks and writes endlessly about the music, certainly, but the boys who made that wonderful music weren't terribly nice to her. The system that (still) tells men that one of the rewards of success is women causes so much unhappiness. I don't feel super comfortable judging her, as Miss Pamela seems so willing to truthfully document her experiences, warts and all, which is rare. As one of the editors of Bitch recently wrote: I have a feminist blind spot where this book is concerned. And she always had her own artistic pursuits, which should not be discounted. She's an awfully likable person, and I think what I liked so much about her book when I was a teenager was the vision she had of Romance. She doesn't write much about just bedding rock stars, she writes of her pursuit of love and art and a different sort of life from the one she was brought up to value in her middle class suburb.

Pride and Prejudice and Romance

Ah. Here we are on the day of Russell Stover chocolate assortments, conversation hearts and lace thong underwear. And sometimes of love and longing.

A year ago I had just broken up with my ex, and was still a couple of weeks away from my first date with my inamorato. I don't remember doing anything in particular, but I did churn out a blog post, if nothing else. I wrote about movie romance, and I touched upon the long and continuous craze for movie and television adaptations of Jane Austen novels, but I'd like to look at least one of them a little more closely.

Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen's masterpiece. It's been filmed about a zillion times for both movies and television. It's strangely appropriate that Bridget Jones's Diary, the book that launched a thousand modern romances, is a loose adaptation. It is a nearly perfect thing and it is essentially yours to ruin if you choose to adapt it. I wasn't going to bother to explain anything about the book, but then I remembered how many people I run into who have never read or seen any version of it. These people are nearly always Boys. So. Let me explain Pride and Prejudice to you.

The set up is great. The Bennett family resides in a house in the country, living on a modest income. Unfortunately, all the property is entailed, meaning upon Mr Bennett's death it will all go to the nearest male relative. As all five of the Bennett offspring are girls, they and Mrs Bennett are in danger of becoming penniless should anything happen to Mr Bennett while the girls remain unmarried. The story primarily concerns Lizzy Bennett, the second oldest daughter, who is about twenty years old.

The hero is Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy, who famously remarks upon first laying eyes on the love of his life, Lizzy: "She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me." She, of course, overhears him, thinks (understandably) that he's a colossal jerk, and thus the stage is set for the best romance ever written, and all the thousands that follow over the subsequent two centuries. But, here's the thing, and the reason modern romances feel so inconsequential: for the Bennett girls, even though Pride and Prejudice is essentially a comedy, the matter of marriage and romance is life and death. For them, romance is a pitched battle in which a loser is consigned to penury and misery. This isn't a decadent game of the lesure class's. The stakes are sky high and one finds oneself desperately wanting things to work out for Lizzy. The book is often very, very funny, but when was the last time you saw a romance set in this day and age that caused any sort of anxiety or worry in you as you watched?

I recently rewatched the film adaptation from a few years ago, starring Keira Knightly and Matthew Macfayden, and beautifully directed by Joe Wright. The film felt a little rushed, but Wright's choices feel pretty much right on the money. Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice in 1797, finally being published in 1813, and the film is set earlier than Austen's works usually are, which feels right. There's an earthiness to it that lends the film a texture and depth - it looks lived in and the period details seem unbelabored and natural. I spoke a bit elsewhere about Knightley's performance as Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and about how the movie felt a little staid and Victorian (though the period was Georgian), and how she seemed a little miscast. Knightly is great as Lizzy and she and Macfayden are lovely together. Knightly has a lovely moment when she first sees Pemberly, Darcy's estate, while on holiday with her Aunt and Uncle - the estate is so ludicrously over the top, enormous and gorgeous she just bursts out laughing, because, I mean, who lives like that. And she's more or less destitute and she has already turned it down sight unseen as someone as stuck up as Darcy couldn't possibly be right for her.

Most importantly, the thing one must get right in the casting of all romances is that the participants must look and feel like they belong together. There's so much sneering at romance, as if it's the province of silly women, and it's so hard to talk about without falling into clichés, but it matters. We live in such an unpleasantly cynical age, where simple pleasures, like being happy for fictional characters is often discounted. Maybe I shouldn't be trusted. I was recently informed that my continued happiness was on the verge of becoming tiresome. I have no doubt that's the case, but I'm not finding it the least bit tiresome and am looking forward to it continuing. On that note, I must ready myself for the celebrations tonight!

A word about chocolate before I bid you adieu and await my beloved: we had a very chocolate heavy Christmas here at the Cabinet. Of special note is the gigantic box of delicious Polish chocolates bought for me by my inamorato. That's Pola Negri on the cover and the candy is filled with delicious things like rum and avocaat (not made out of lawyers as previously feared). The Pola Negri box of chocolates could not be recommended more highly.

A Charles Addams Valentine

Saint Valentine's Day

St. Valentine's Day remains the most popularly celebrated saint's feast day, even though his day has been formally stricken from the Church's calendar. Nothing is really known about the historical Valentine - there were actually two of them, which have pretty much been conflated. Both were (supposedly) tortured and killed by Roman Emperors. But no one really has any idea.

Above, you can see his skull (maybe).

He can be invoked against plague, epilepsy and fainting.

Now, go out and buy those cheap, marked-up, long stem roses!

(photo via Mymuk's flickr stream)

Who Said Romance Was Dead?

Over this past Valentine's Day weekend it may have been me saying it. But personal drama aside, I'm really not cynical enough to completely disbelieve in it altogether. Like all good Americans I've gotten pretty much all my ideas about romance from the movies, and I often wonder if all my real life relationships haven't been totally sabotaged in advance by all that movie watching.

Last week, Nora Ephron published a list of her favorite romantic comedies in the Daily Beast. It's a very good list, but there are a few truly glaring omissions and one inclusion that truly baffles me. I mean, there's no arguing with likes and dislikes but calling Casablanca a romantic comedy at all strikes me as bizarre. One important thing she fleetingly mentions as being very important are plots. That romantic comedies seem to work best when they're about something besides the romance. This was also discussed this week here, on Alyssa Rosenberg's excellent blog. I completely agree with her that the exclusion of The Lady Eve and Trouble in Paradise are completely indefensible. I think what everybody is really talking about here is stakes. Which in the current crop of romantic comedies, simply don't exist. If the girl and the guy don't wind up together, what exactly will happen? Um, nothing. I mean, who cares? And the movie isn't about anything else so it becomes a totally pointless exercise and incidentally totally unromantic because it's just completely annoying and solipsistic and you wonder who would put up with these stupid self-centered people for more than five minutes. That's one of the reasons Jane Austen's stories still work so well. The stakes are sky high. If the Bennett girls or Anne Elliot don't marry they are doomed to terrible lives of penury.

There are some other films that I think are really worth talking about in the context of romance. Ephron's list has very few films from what we'll call the modern era: Hannah and Her Sisters, Splash and Sense and Sensibility (which hardly counts). None from the past ten years. I'll probably be pilloried for this, but I honestly believe something from the Apatow oeuvre belongs on the list. Crass they may be, but they are actually funny. They are surprisingly romantic and the women in his films fare much better than they do in most current Hollywood product.

But the biggest modern omission of all is Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight. This was one of the best movies of the '90s and completely and criminally underrated and ignored. Granted, much of the movie focuses on crime and prison and heists. But the romance provides the structure and it's achingly romantic in a way movies have mostly forgotten to be. I think it's George Clooney's best performance by about a mile and Soderbergh somehow managed to wrench a decent turn out of Jennifer Lopez. There's a scene early in the film where Lopez, a Federal Marshall, is being held hostage by Clooney, who has just escaped from prison. The two of them are locked together in the trunk of a car and they begin to talk. They mostly talk about movies, and it's one of the great falling in love scenes in film. He's certain that he's found his perfect woman, but the obstacles are legion. He's a bank robber who doesn't know how to do anything else. And she's Federal Marshall who wouldn't ever even think about neglecting her duty. After that great early scene, they only meet face to face three more times. Once, he waves to her from an elevator as she stands with the SWAT team sent to capture him. Then they meet in a bar, half pretend they are other people, and have sex (he refers to it as a time out, from their real lives, from crime, from inevitable disaster). The third time, she shoots him. But it's essentially a comedy, if a dark, violent and bittersweet one.

But to get back to Nora Ephron. I think this is as good a time as any to take a look at her directing career and to add her to my sporadically added to list of women who direct movies. She comes from a family of screenwriters (her parents wrote Desk Set), and was once played in a film by Meryl Streep. Her first screenplay was for Silkwood (also starring Streep). I saw it in the theater when it came out and have been using the phrase "scrub oneself like Karen Silkwood" pretty much ever since. I haven't seen the movie in almost 30 years, so I hesitate to say much about it. One thing I do remember was it was the first time I ever saw oral sex being performed on a woman in a movie (very eye opening). She also wrote the screenplay for When Harry Met Sally. The first film she directed, This Is My Life, is mostly forgotten, which I think is unfortunate as I liked it. In it, Julie Kavner (most famous for being the voice of Marge Simpson), the single mother of two young girls (Gaby Hoffman and Samantha Mathis), begins a new life as a stand up comedian. I love movies about women and their careers and their relationships with other women. They so rare, I can basically count them on my fingers. Bedchel's Law is rarely adhered to in Hollywood (or anywhere else to be perfectly honest). This is the point in her career where things get a little dicey. She proceeded to direct the two most successful romantic comedies of the 1990s - neither wound up on her list, by the way, and rightly so. They both starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. The films are not aging well to say the least and the second one (You've Got Mail) is particularly risible for both its moral sogginess and its desecration of The Shop Around the Corner. She made a few other forgettable, poorly received comedies. But then last year she made Julie and Julia. She went back to writing about what I believe she's best at - women and their careers and their relationships with other women. It's adapted from two memoirs (Julia Powell's titular one and Julia Child's) so she doesn't get all the credit. But there are so many places where this movie could have gone wrong and it didn't. Both women have men in their lives and to my great joy, they are each relegated to the roles most commonly played by women: the spouse who either spends the whole film going, "I believe in you, honey, go do that thing you do!" or conversely, saying, "This thing you do is tearing our family apart!". But it's a wonderful film, about hard work and food and finding joy through one's passion and through marriage. My feelings about Ephron are so mixed, as what I'm now referring to as her mid-period was just completely horrifying to me. But in many ways both her first and her most recent films point to a mainstream, feminist cinema that seems to reflect the sensibilities of ordinary, modern, working women.