I live my life as I have always done. A sort of slouching, an impassioned lament, equal parts wilting flower and knowing (not necessarily successful) seductress, the lead girl in the chorus line, the one in the tassels and top hat (or so I imagine). Maybe a little too hungry to play lead, a little too hulking and sweating and filled with the primal urgencies which exist as murky antagonistic forces to the formation of narrative; story itself was born of the Hero archetype, a civilising force bringing lands together by allegiance or genocide (willing supplicants take your pick).
I live my life like a pig at a trough, I have very little patience and my bodily satisfaction takes an enormous precedence in my list of priorities. Whether that’s food, sex, or the violent gratification of a vengeful feeling. I hate easily. But I also love easily. I generally assume people just wanna have a good time. Like myself.
It’s difficult to imagine a subjectivity primed to manipulation, to the kinds of toothy cunning you hear about on a true crime show, or see on a movie about deranged teenagers in contest for most popular.
I live my life the only way I can. I see other people doing things differently and that’s okay. I see other people having more success when it comes to imposing their will on the status quo; but thats okay. There’s a valuable and oddly satisfying thrill in experiencing the kinds of slippage between one’s will and the wily configurations of reality that convention deems failures/tragedies/resistances, which apparently flag a lack of nerve (more likely resources) towards mastering what’s around you to better reflect an ideal; a metaphysical sustenance by which reality is constantly appraised (defined?). The dissonance of failure, the ambience of suffering and not getting what you want speaks volumes on the metabolism of the universe, and our place in it as sentient beings (as gut-worms in the cosmic intestines).
Certainly says more about the nature of reality than always getting what you want.
There’s that riff from The Matrix where Agent Smith has Morpheus tied to a chair describing the different versions of the original system which ultimately failed because the worlds were too perfect, and in their unlikely perfection the human subjects recognised the simulation for what it was, rejecting it like immune-responses self-immolating against contamination.
He insinuates that the flaw of each failed version was it’s absence of suffering, that human subjectivity requires acceptable levels of negative stimulus from it’s environment otherwise risking neurological atrophy; an impasse of the evolutionary-adaptive impulse, a total organismic failure.
If that were true then utopian paradise would secretly be everyone’s worst nightmare. Perhaps the reason we’ve never achieved it as a society is because a cybernetic collective subconscious is more than aware of this fact, and accordingly sabotages every manoeuvre that would see us there.
I live my life as if the world would be poorer if I didn’t commit myself to living my life. I live my life because Buffy the Vampire Slayer was basically a tableaux for navigating endgame capitalism, and it’s campily rendered mythos around the drudgeries of a neoliberalised existence better prepared me psychologically (dare I say spiritually) for the real world than school ever did.
After season four of Buffy there’s a drop-off where the show becomes miserable, too much so for some. At the time the criticism from longstanding fans and casual audiences alike was that the show had swerved too hard from it’s existing formula of buoyantly killing the rats when and as they appeared, the teenage dramatics only woven into the B-movie action with the gentle didacticism of a fairy story. Between Buffy and real life the similarities were entirely allegorical.
And then Buffy’s mum dies.
Suddenly the show’s tone shifted and though retaining its supernatural elements it’s verisimilitude with reality, it’s crushing emotional realism when dealing with subjects like worker angst or grief, started feeling less Scooby Doo and more HBO.
Which to anyone invested in adventurous writing and popular entertainments that push on what’s expected of them, was and remains very exciting.
Yes, Buffy seasons five through to seven is miserable. And yes, these more dulcet later seasons contain some of the best television I have ever season, including arcs and themes which lesser shows have tried replicating time and again. With ever-diminishing returns. Basically every contemporary vampire motif post Anne Rice is a Buffy riff; Edward Cullen is an Angel knock-off, Sookie Stackhouse’s telepathy setup is borrowed from a Buffy episode in which the slayer’s bitten by a demon and leant it’s mind-reading abilities, Buffy almost singlehandedly made contemporary the notion of musical tv so you’re welcome Glee. The list goes on (no one does it quite like Joss Whedon).
I personally think the show has had staying power for it’s commitment to exploring much darker themes than the genre warrants. I mean, for a show in which a pornishly hot blonde is fighting rubber-suit demons on low-budget sets, you wouldn’t imagine it’s characters to also be grappling with the industrial-military complex and how it interfaces with both their own university and institutions generally, or the rigours and humiliations of making mortgage payments in the wake of a breadwinner’s unforeseen death, or the psychological minutia of trauma and how individual problems might effect the wellness of the collective.
It’s this emotional realism which has translated from one generation’s cultish Buffy following to the next. But also, the show’s endurance stems from the source of all antagonistic forces big and small which Buffy arguably attempts to prepare it’s audience for, acting as a sort of ‘How To Survive Capitalism’ tutorial, lessons aimed at the high-school student which are intended to walk with them as they matriculate and are eventually ushered through tertiary level education and finally, find themselves in the Big Bad World. Seasons five through to seven are miserable because they represent this transition, moving out from under the skirts of mummy institution into the adult world. A loss of innocence, The Fall, whatever you want to call it; this archetype has more sexual connotations in puritan literature, but in the Buffy-verse it means exposure to the inherent nature of the world which pedagogical relationships often inadvertently shelter us from. The demonic hoards in Buffy are not children of the biblical fall in the garden, but member to an ambience of violent resistance with which (contemporary) reality can be characterised. The darkness the magic, all of these players exist in the Buffy-verse to accentuate this fact, moving against the period’s ideological optimism in which America looked to be championing an endless and linear progression of liberal geopolitical expansion.
It’s as if Buffy knew the whole time that behind the American Dream was just another Big Bad waiting to be unleashed.
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