Buffy the Vampire Slayer

(Fran Rubel Kuzui, USA, 1992)

This is an excerpt from the chapter “The Forgetting of Wisdom” in my first book, Phantasms (1994). In 1992, when I did my initial review of Buffy The Vampire Slayer for Australian radio, the famous TV series devised by Joss Whedon – on the basis of the film, which was his first produced screenplay – and co-executive produced by the Kuzuis was still five years away (it ran until 2003). Fran Kuzui, although involved with film/TV production and other enterprises, has not directed another movie since.

Back in secondary school, I, like many others, was forced to study some of the classic novels of teenage experience: Catcher In the Rye, Cider With Rosie, Kes, The Outsiders. I well remember the favourite terms used by my English Literature & Expression teachers to describe what these stories were on about: loss of innocence, rite of passage, or plain old growing up.

In other words, I was being sold the sanctimonious idea that youth was a phase from which we would all emerge as responsible, mature adults – and that these fine novels would help us in our heroic life journey.

Nowadays, there are even popular TV series which, week after week, preach the same unctuous message, particularly in their moralistic end-of-program wrap-ups – the reassuring, reflective adult voice-over in The Wonder Years [1988-1993, reboot 2021], or the wise diary musings of Doogie Howser, M.D. [1989-1993]. And there are, naturally, films that pander to the same sensibility: bittersweet, nostalgic, such-is-life human dramas like Summer of ‘42 (1971), Breaking Away (1979), Dead Poets Society (1989) and Flirting (1990). One particularly famous book and film title catches the adult perspective from which so many of these works are created: The Getting Of Wisdom.

I wonder, today, what my old English Lit. teachers would make of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy (Kristy Swanson) does, after all, achieve a rite of passage in the course of the story: she transforms from materialistic shopping-mall bimbo to fearless vampire slayer in command of the world’s destiny. And the film has an undeniably uplifting equal-opportunity kick to it, like so many genre or exploitation films directed today by women: Buffy tones up for battle in pounding, Flashdance-style montage sequences and, although she’s got a sensitive hunk by her side (Luke Perry from 90210), she’s dependent on no man when it comes to the crunch. The magazine Australian Left Review even ran a polemical article by Jenni Millbank elevating Buffy over the Gillian Armstrong-Helen Garner collaboration The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992), as the film which provides “the more sensitive portrayal of women, and the more feminist underlying message”.

But, at least for some viewers, indulgence of Buffy the Vampire Slayer would most likely halt at the point that it is recognised for exactly what it is: a teen movie. This is, of course, a loaded term. Flirting would not be automatically labelled in some quarters a teen movie – a sensitive, witty, naturalistic, psychological drama, perhaps, but not a teen movie. Animal House (1978), Porky’s (1981), Reckless (1984), Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989), Pump Up the Volume (1991): these are what the film industry calls teen movies. And so would those fans whom the genre keeps in the mad thrall of an eternal, delinquent, vacuous youth.

Buffy (scripted by Joss Whedon) is pretty much par for the teen course. Despite its liberal message of Buffy power, it’s a proudly silly and superficial film. There is an endless stream of jokes concerning mall shopping, clothing, facials, pop music trends, dating – all the fabulously consuming trivia of everyday teen life. The plot regularly breaks down for spectacular rock video-style sequences of cheerleading and kick-boxing, or prolonged displays of outrageously camp mugging from Rutger Hauer as ringleader of the fiendish vampire sect. The host of the TV show Studs (Mark De Carlo) and a fallen-from-grace Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens) lurk around inside the proceedings. Much comic mileage is wrought from the interchangeability of ancient vampires and contemporary punks, fair maidens of yore and fashion victims of today.

Ultimately, this film by Fran Rubel Kuzui (like her previous Tokyo Pop [1988] produced in collaboration with her partner Kaz Kazui) is good to see precisely because it has not been acclaimed as a modern pop classic like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), nor a dark, anti-teen movie like Heathers (1989), nor a stylised mood piece like Rumble Fish (1983), nor the hippest film of the year like Wayne’s World (1992). It’s a very ordinary teen movie, which can really only be fully enjoyed if you’re in the groove of this most whimsical, ephemeral and pervasive of contemporary genres.

Teen movies are almost always strange but highly workable hybrids: teen horror comedies like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, subtle teen art movies like River’s Edge (1986), touching interpersonal teen romances like Say Anything … (1989), military teen action films like Iron Eagle (1986), teen sports movies like American Anthem (1986), or feel-good teen musicals like Strictly Ballroom (1992).

Even the most seemingly flip or trivial teen movie, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, somehow embodies the grand, liminal adventure of youth – in the form of a summer holiday, a day off, an unforeseen romantic encounter, a hideout or runaway, or a magical swapping of identities.

© Adrian Martin December 1993