BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: Vampire Hip 5: Mainstreamed subcultures?
March 13th 2010 03:04
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What vampires are in any given generation is a part of what I am and what my times have become.
Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves
Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves
“What will happen when the popularity of Interview with the Vampire drags their [goth] underground mystique into the naked light of day?” journalist Tim Friend asked a member of the goth subculture in the early 1990s, at the time of the making of the vampire blockbuster: “Yes, we’re afraid. After the movie comes out, little Biffy and Boffy from the MTV crowd are going to go out and get fangs and ruin it for everybody.”
It is Buffy the Vampire Slayer that came along, with a whole lot of fangs and style to boot, but whether it ruined anything by exploring the style of the vampire fraction of the goth subculture is arguable. In “Lie to me” (2.7) the series actually portrays a youth subculture of goth baby bats, parodying it as a pseudo-religious sect of vampire wannabies who cherish “the lonely ones” and mimic their style. These young people meet in a vampire-themed club, where goth make-up and clothes are the norm and Dracula B-movies are played in the background. As in any clique, there are degrees of initiation for the members and among the deluded majority, who believe that vampires are “creatures above us, exalted”, the leader has his private agenda of conquering an illness through vampirism. In typical Buffy role reversal, he asks Spike, who promised to turn him into a vampire in exchange for delivering the others as food for his minions, to perform the part of a stereotypical vampire from old movies as fantasy fulfillment: “‘You’ve got 30 seconds to convince me not to kill you.’ It’s no fun if you don’t say it, it’s traditional”. This subculture is shown to exist in its own detached, imaginary world, where most of its members are in denial as to the nature of the object of their adoration. Angel’s all knowing attitude gets a reality check, however, when he states that “these people don’t know anything about vampires, what they are, how they live, how they dress,” as then a guy dressed exactly like him passes by and gives him the look-over. Surface style is a construction, which can be copied and reproduced. Both sides, inside and outside of that subculture, turned out to have made false assumptions about one another.
Angel (David Boreanaz) discovers how unique his dress sense really is.
The series also explores the potentiality of becoming a vampire and how that transformation might affect personal style. In “Doppelgängland” (3.38) Willow is forced to revise her boring girly look after confronting her vampire self from a parallel dimension: “Well look at me, I’m all fuzzy”. Vampire Willow’s confident, darkly goth and world weary dominatrix style is the extreme opposite of Willow’s wimpish get up. When Willow pretends to be her vampire self to save the day in this episode, she cannot quite pull it off, because she lacks the personality to carry the style: “I’m a bloodsucking fiend, look at my outfit!” is the last resort argument, which exposes her.
Willow (Alyson Hannigan) faces her feisty dark side in “Doppelgängland”
Buffy herself is not immune to vampire lessons in style either. In “The Freshman” (4.45) our heroine extraordinarily loses a fight with a female vampire and runs away. Why? Sunday, a female vampire coded as cooler-than-thou through her chic punk-goth apparel, confident and sarcastic attitude and an entourage of subservient minions, plays on Buffy’s insecurities and criticizes her outfit: “I think you had a lot of misconceptions about college, like that anyone would be caught dead wearing that,” causing Buffy’s meltdown.
Bitchy Sunday (Katharine Towne) disses Buffy's lack of style in "The Freshman"
Vampires are not usually portrayed wearing just jeans and a t-shirt, they need to reflect our fascination in difference and otherness. It is the vampire’s constructed image that gives it visibility. An audience is required to provide a reflection so that that image can be updated, kept interesting and evolve: "Those wacky vampires, that’s why I love’em, they just keep ya guessin’!" (Xander, 5.9 “Listening to fear”). Thus even the wholesome Riley pursues subcultural kicks with the aim of getting close to Buffy, which results in his vamp-bite addiction: “When they bit me, it was beyond passion. They wanted to devour me, all of me. It was just physical. Even if it was fleeting, I craved it. They made me feel that they had such hunger for me” (5.10, “Into the woods”). The fantastical underground presented in Buffy irresistibly draws us in, every time. It is so attractive to belong to and to watch because it allows us to vicariously experience an existence outside of prescribed paradigms yet right beside the familiarity of suburbia. As Joss Whedon puts it, “You make up rules that you need and jettison the ones you don't.”
Riley (Mark Blucas) indulging his vampire bite addiction in "Into the Woods"
Buffyverse contains the ambience of a subcultural underground, where private codes, skills and language come into being and rules can be bent to suit individual purposes. We can criticize Buffy for offering the ‘light’ version of revolt into goth, punk and camp styles, but the show successfully manages to stretch the limitations of what can be shown on prime time mainstream television, simultaneously reflecting a postmodern zeitgeist in terms of style and attitude. The show is self-reflexive, laughs at itself and its own mechanisms and has a postmodern, tongue-in-cheek, post-tarantinian vibe. The show presents itself mainly in terms of style, hiding any other agenda behind its glossy surface. Style however reflects attitude, which is another word for politics, without it, it is just a masquerade. Subcultural styles are a mix of borrowed elements from the dominating discourse, reconfigured to express alternative identities. The malleability of the vampire metaphor allows it to successfully shift between different subcultural discourses. It converges with a subcultural aim to facilitate the dissemination of subversive ideas under ambiguous guises. Vampires are made sympathetic and their ‘evil nature’ is complicated into a whole spectrum of shades of gray, as humorously illustrated by this exchange:
Spike: “If she wants comfort I’m not going to deny it to her. I’m not a monster”.
Xander: “Vampires are monsters. They make monster movies about them.”
Spike: “Well, yeah. You got me there” (5.18, “Intervention”).
A different kind of monster: Spike gets tied up...again
Subcultural content in mainstream media, if nothing else, reminds us that there exist marginalized centres of dissent and alternative expression of identity. Buffy’s pervading subcultural imagery is refreshing amongst the mainstream circulation of images. Buffy signals a political affiliation with that space through the use of subcultural aesthetics. After all, “in matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing” as Oscar Wilde put it. The show is not only a teenager’s wet dream version of a glib outing into vampire kitsch territory, although it pretends to be just that. How many other vampire, or otherwise, prime time television narratives directed at a youth audience deal with issues of impotence, domestic violence or sexual fetishism? But that’s delving beyond the surface. Actor Robin Sachs (Ethan Rayne) mentions in “A Buffy Bestiary” featurette that “people like to be frightened. It jolts them out of their complacency” (2.21-22, “Becoming” Part 1-2 DVD). While watching Buffy we are slightly jolted out of our aesthetic complacency as well at first, some of us turned off by the campy imagery of its fantasy genre. Once we delve into the show’s underground though, we start to uncover the attitude behind the aesthetic, and can be surprised by the quite sophisticated humour and wit to be found there. The surface is the catch, the style seizes our gaze - that is its power, and it either repels us, or invites us to look beyond the surface, to the more disturbing gray zone, and then it “turns” us.
The cast of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"
Article by Patricia Bieszk
© Copyright P. Bieszk 2010
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