Before she started up the DVD, the professor asked us to try to come up with a theory about what the vampires stood for. After we watched the show, she asked if anyone had any thoughts and one guy raised his hand. She called on him. "Yeah," he said, "I think the vampires stand for the Jews? Because Buffy's like Jesus? And the Jews killed Jesus?" Apparently someone hasn't heard of Vatican II. I mean, for fuck's sake.

I will grant the Jesus parallel, though. One of my many problems with Christianity is that I am instinctively repulsed by the idea of submitting to a leader. I have read many conversion stories over the years. Here is one: "And all at once, unexpectedly, unimaginably, I found myself out of my chair and on my knees by the coffee table, whispering words I scarcely comprehended. 'Lord, take my life... take everything I am... I commit myself to You.' [...] Now I saw that I had never had a personal relationship with Christ: I had only been religious. When I got up from my knees in our living room on November 20, 1977, I was Christian in a totally new way." That is actually kind of sickening to me. Islam is very nearly as bad: the very word means "surrender," and the way that a billion people flip the fuck out if ever Muhammad (has Ann Coulter started calling him Mahomet yet?) isn't treated with absolute deference is pretty gross. But apparently I have the same switches in my head as everyone else, because after watching 144 of her adventures over the course of seven years, Buffy Summers is imprinted on my brain as my leader. Season 7, when she kept telling everyone to stop doing their own thing and follow her plan? I was right there with her. What the hell are you doing? Buffy is the leader! Shut up and do what she says! And actually, to tell you the truth, if the actual actress Sarah Michelle Gellar were to show up at my door and say, "Hey, I have to overthrow the government of Paraguay and I need you as cannon fodder," I have to concede that I would give it serious consideration. Like Mark Twain, I couldn't understand messianism at all until I was offered a teenage girl to follow instead of a bearded schizophrenic.

(By the way, the conversion experience above was that of John W. Hinckley, Sr.)

As for the vampires, I never saw them as standing for anything more than "scary stuff." Viewed in the context of an American Studies class, though, I couldn't help but be reminded of my damsels-in-distress article. I mean, here's Buffy, coded as femme as she ever is over the course of the series — she spends the episode in a white prom dress — and then here are a bunch of scary monsters who have plans against her and Sunnydale High and us, plans of which we are unsuspecting until it's too late. This seems to speak to the same anxieties as the media's fixation on young white women getting abducted or killed by predatory strangers. We are a girl country. Like Buffy in "Prophecy Girl," we have taken it upon ourselves to police the world, but we don't like to seem too bright and are too self-absorbed to actually know anything about the dangers we're trying to beat back, so we take a lot of punishment and often just make things worse. "Prophecy Girl" offers the hope that we will be victorious anyway. (Oh, and in both Buffy and reality we ended up farming out the gathering of intelligence to the British.)

Return to the Calendar page!