Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Buffy lives

One of the podcasts this week was about the website Flow and about how one of the posters said she couldn't teach an episode of Buffy b/c it made her weep. Peters makes three points "1. These people enjoy Buffy a lot. 2. They may like Buffy too much and 3. Its a shame most contemporary media scholars don't practice some self indulgence and simply forget McLuhan and move on to Buffy in their actual classes. It
would be much more interesting."

Now, here's what I think (thanks for asking):
*Before anyone gets in a huff, if anyone even reads this, I am playing devil's advocate to Johnathon's devil's advocate. plus i just like to talk about Buffy.

Point one assumes that first and foremost, its wrong to enjoy Buffy. This could be because Buffy is gendered female due to its lead character being a woman, the soap/melodrama/emotional elements or because it is classified as teen age drama and therefore not serious enough or because it was on the WB, a more marginal network. All of these reasons endanger Buffy's status as "quality" television and therefore make it wrong to like the show.

Point two assumes that such liking is bordering on a scary kind of teen girl screaming fandom that has lost rationality. Buffy becomes an excess, something liked "too much." Heaven forbid an academic critique a show that is pleasurable and blatant about its lack of pretension- or a show that embraces cheesy sci fi effects and fights are always accompanied by snappy one-liners.

point three assumes that one cannot actually link mcluhan (the stand in for Academia with a capital A, although Mcluhuan's Wake may disprove that point) and Buffy, that to do so would be an allowance, another indulgence- you are doing it b/c the students like it rather than its relevance in one authorized cannon or the other. the contrast again marginalizes Buffy as a show that girls/teens/fans watch and therefore it cant be taken seriously.

Well, Buffy is taken seriously and should be. and so should Veronica Mars. I've read books and books (and more coming out) by academics on Buffy. These two shows are rare shows that engage with academic, film and feminists texts/theories. but more than that, there is something to their pleasure- pleasure can be academic, it can be productive, and it is NECESSARY for work. i am so tired of people automatically dismissing television in the old tired thread of the "vast wasteland"; of defending soaps because they are taking over tv (aren't soaps just the purest form of television, always have been, and everything else is diluted?); or people who dismiss "girly" shows as unimportant fluff. this is most definitely a rant, and perhaps not all that logical, but there you go.

my point is you can't just throw around the B-word or an angry feminist will go after you. if that isn't unpc, i dont know what is.

No comments:

Post a Comment