This past January, I was marching around Washington, DC with a pink pussy hat on my head and Buffy on my mind.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer first aired on 10 March 1997 - 20 years ago. Buffy is no longer a teenager. But she showed, very clearly, that for most of us, high school is hell and that those who make it through adolescence are, in some way, heroes.
Buffy is so important to me that I edit an academic journal, Slayage, devoted to studying the works of Joss Whedon, Buffy’s creator. Over the years, dozens of books and hundreds of scholarly articles have been published on the subject.
The show still has so much to teach us.
Buffy was an underestimated girl - someone who was trivialised because of what people assumed about this young woman. People assumed she thought of nothing but clothes, when actually she was thinking about how to save the world (while putting together a hot new outfit). They thought she was skipping school to cause trouble, when she was skipping school to stop trouble.
Buffy showed us how to be strong.
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The series was, on the surface, far from realistic; it was a show about vampires, for goodness’ sake.
But no show was more real when it came to the struggles of its characters. Buffy was a young girl who had trouble with school and worried about her appearance.
She was a person who sometimes didn’t show up for her friends when she should have.
She had to deal with balancing school with having a job—even if her job was fighting the forces of darkness, not working the supermarket checkout.
At first, many of Buffy’s audience related more to her best friend - the shy but smart Willow. But soon, most of us could see ourselves in Buffy too.
We saw her deal with an annoying little sister; we saw her deal with her mother’s death; with having to drop out of university.
Buffy was about heroism, but it was also a story about outsiders - as surely all of us have felt ourselves to be, from time to time.
Buffy and her friends were not the cool kids.
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At the same time, it was about inclusion. Buffy’s gang was like family to one another. They included Willow and her girlfriend, Tara - this series gave us one of the first depictions of a real, long-term romance between women – and even vampires, the ultimate outsiders, who became part of the group too, by the end.
But the show succeeded, and is worth re-watching, because it is a living work of art, thanks to the skilled acting of Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon, Anthony Stewart Head, and James Marsters; thanks to the wondrous music of Christophe Beck; thanks to the set design of Carey Meyer; the visual direction of David Solomon; and thanks above all to the writing of Joss Whedon and his team.
People still quote lines from Buffy as responses to everyday moments in life. As Buffy herself put it, we know that "The hardest thing in this world is to live in it."
People remember situations from Buffy to laugh when things get hard, or to justify crying. People think of characters from Buffy when they are dealing with people in their own lives - or trying to grow into themselves.
Buffy, I think, is still helping us walk in this world, pink-hatted heads held high.
