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December 22, 2013

Other Girls

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There’s this part in Buffy The Vampire Slayer (the movie, not the TV series) where Buffy is slow-dancing with Luke Perry, and he whispers into her ear “You’re not like other girls.” And Buffy replies “Yes I am.”

That exchange has been ringing in my head like a gong since 1992, and I’m still trying to figure out what it means.

In the movie’s context, it comes at a moment where Buffy doesn’t want to accept the responsibility of being a slayer, so the line is a moment of denial, a stall in the narrative, right before vampires attack the school dance and she has to take them out in a whirl of roundhouse kicks and flaming hairspray. It’s sort of the movie’s tagline: she can’t face her destiny, she’s afraid of being special, she just wants to be a regular teenager. But, like Ulysses or Arjuna or Luke Skywalker, she can’t escape the hero’s call. Even the title of the movie itself is basically a sight-gag that’s encapsulated and reaffirmed in her exchange with Pike: Buffy/Slayer. Regular girl/Vampire killer. Cheerleader/Warrior. It’s got a nice comedic ring, and it reflects basically every plotline since ancient Egypt: a character with some special quality who is called to a strange and wonderful destiny. This is the fundamental template of storytelling, if you believe Joseph Campbell.
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November 27, 2012

Meanwhile, the next day

My friend Logan Tiberi-Warner and I have started a pop culture blog, because we think the internet needs more pop culture blogs from people who are like five years behind the times and really only like Star Trek. My first post is about Cloud Atlas:

I read the book in a seventy-two hour binge (it’s a long book, okay) because it was extremely delicious and kind of like obsessively watching Olympic figure-skating, in that I was completely in awe while it was happening and could have cared less the next day. It’s great writing (if your definition of “great” is “highly entertaining,” which I’ll admit mine sometimes is), but the message – in a nutshell, In Every Age of Darkness There Is A Pinprick Of Light – is, let’s be honest, banal. This is not a hugely profound book. It’s about as profound as Terminator II or Aliens or The DaVinci Code, which YES HAVE MOMENTS OF GREAT PROFUNDITY but aren’t really going to break the mould of humanity’s understanding of itself. This isn’t Tolstoy, people. So the movie, in taking on the message, which I’ll shorten to IEAODTIAPOL, as a guiding aesthetic and narrative principle, loses some actually quite engaging and interesting storylines and characters in favour of A Very Important (If Pretty Unoriginal) Message: Slavery is bad, be nice to people, do unto others, and so on.

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