Sphinx

We must be old. We cannot choose but be old. We have heard the chimes at midnight at the the end of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme music – twenty years ago? It was a simpler time, when one girl (albeit with supernatural strength) and her friends could avert the apocalypse, time and again, because the apocalypse was a bunch of demons trying to open a gateway to hell, or the mayor of a small town trying to turn himself into a demon, not an entire global system of doom. Even as the threats became more powerful and apparently unstoppable – deranged hellgods, a rogue military experiment, sexually frustrated adolescent boys – they remained identifiable, nameable, and ultimately susceptible to the judicious application of violence. If only…

This doesn’t mean that Buffy has nothing to say to our times; on the contrary, like all great art it continues to speak, but the message changes subtly in response to changing circumstances. How often, in retrospect, does Buffy have to cope with the fact that masses of ordinary people have lost their self-awareness or self-control and reverted to mindless aggression under some evil influence? You can’t simply slay your fellow citizens, however crazily they’re behaving, while they’re still human – and even the ones who’ve abandoned their humanity may still arouse some compassion – but they are dangerous in that state, and a barrier to dealing with the real problem. Across the globe, too many people have eaten the band candy and hatched out their bezoar eggs.

This is really just an excuse to repost what is still one of my favourite bits of my own writing, my application of nineteenth-century ideas on the revenge of the past to the first five seasons of BtVS, History as Nightmare. Looking back, I think this was my first taste of the joys of blogging, long before I got a blog; taking a couple of ideas and mashing them together to see what comes out, without any of the anxiety or self-imposed limits that come with trying to write Proper Academic Stuff. Another of the eternal messages of Buffy: your greatest enemy is yourself, your self-doubt and fear. Well, and vampires.