Immortal Teen Drama

As I make my way through Buffy the Vampire Slayer season five and the show becomes more and more about Spike, I keep finding myself thinking about this recent interview with James Marsters:

Yeah, apparently Michael Rosenbaum, Lex Luther from Smallville, has a podcast. Anyway, I love how he and Marsters seem to be tuned into two different realities on the interview. Rosenbaum clearly wants Marsters to divulge juicy details about Joss Whedon terrorising women and Marsters either doesn't see this or quite convincingly pretends not to. He's stuck on talking about Joss the Genius and laughing about what a hardass Joss could be. This is a follow up interview, too, in which Rosenbaum is trying to get clear on Marsters' earlier statements about Joss pushing him up against a wall, angry about the fan reaction to Spike. Rosenbaum keeps trying different ways to ask, "But was it real?" and Marsters keeps laughing and saying, "Yeah!" And you can see the smoke starting to come out of Rosenbaum's ears, probably because he knows exactly the situation Marsters is talking about but is trying to decide if he's supposed to be morally outraged about it now.

But I've been thinking about it because I've been trying to decide if Whedon's idea of the vampires as an allegory for teen problems really works. In the first couple seasons, yeah, I can see it in some moments, especially when Buffy was keeping her identity as a Slayer secret. All the dialogue she and her mother had about Buffy dealing with issues her mother couldn't help with did work a bit that way. A teenager watching who, like most teenagers, sees their individual problems to be about the size of the whole world would probably be quite ready to accept the Vampire Slayer drama as relatable. But I would say it operates most obviously in terms of Angel and Buffy's relationship, the relationship Whedon apparently only established reluctantly. It makes me wonder if he planned for Angel never to return from Hell in season three.

Frankly, if things had panned out in the way it seems Whedon originally wanted, according to Marsters, it would've been a deeply unsatisfying show, maybe even a slightly creepy one. So the world is divided between good people and soulless, irredeemable wanderers? That's pretty puritanical for someone who calls himself an atheist.

I suspect Whedon grew a lot as a writer over the course of the series, though, so maybe he abandoned the allegory idea as it made less and less sense. Allegories do, generally, have very limited utility.