de Andy Sawyer sobre Buffy, cazavampiros que habla de por qué la serie es tan buena, analiza el interés académico que despierta y comenta los dos volúmenes de ensayo que ya hay publicados sobre la serie:
This audience is smart, knows exactly what the clichés are, and knows how to read metaphor. So we can call it «semiotics and postmodernism», or just being aware that you can say things on a whole lot of levels: the result is the same. Buffy does fascinating things with genre, playing with the High School, teen-show concept and the comic-book type supernatural thriller. A teenage girl who kills vampires and has to account to her mom… how cheesy is that? It also plays around with metaphor: Southern California is plagued by demons: school is almost literally hell and the complex story of series 5 ends with a young girl, blood trickling down her legs, telling her older sister «It?s started» and a final act of redemption. It uses every corny narrative trick in the book, and it works.
Every show worth its salt plays with doubles and we all know that Star Trek?s dodgy transporter has duplicated just about every one in the cast, but it?s up to Buffy to make this not a tired old plot device but part of the structure of the show with, for example, a whole range of «alternate» Buffys (Faith, Kendra), a sudden «duplication» of Summers children, and a wry spoof of the whole concept («The Replacement», Series 5). It?s incredibly referential, not only to itself but other supernatural literature, schlock-horror shows, even westerns («Spiral» Series 5) and High Culture. And it?s all this at once. Dracula appears. There are quotes from Shakespeare, that other snapper-up of previously-unconsidered artistic trifles. And to undercut everything, Buffy?s «gang» dubs itself the Scoobies. It?s so referential in fact, that you suspect virtually any utterance. Spike?s off-hand response to Giles in «The Gift, («we band of buggered») carries on the Henry V reference and deconstructs it to refer to the bunch of losers who are about to slug it out with an omnipotent Hellgoddess… but it?s not impossible to read it as part of the gay subtext which comes to the fore in the extensive slash fiction devoted to Buffy characters. And certainly when the somewhat star-struck female Watcher, in «Checkpoint» Series 5 episode where Spike is being questioned as part of Buffy?s examination by the Watcher?s Council, shyly admits «I did my thesis on you», it?s hard not to have these sometimes earnest examinations of a mass-culture tv show in mind. (But check out the expression on her face. She?s a fan.)
Buffy is silly but not dumb, serious but not stupid. It?s a show which questions and throws into light gender roles (also in «Checkpoint» Buffy switches roles from diffident girl student to kick-ass leader telling them what she wants them to do). So feminists can go ‘rah! rah! rah!’ about it. As can librarians. And in «The Body», when tragedy hits the Summers family, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Michelle Trachtenberg, never take the poignancy over into sentimentality, knocking spots off any «serious» TV drama in town and showing what good acting combined with great scripting can do on TV.
Y por cierto, hemos recibido Reading the Vampire Slayer: an unofficial critical companion to Buffy and Angel. Ya iré comentando.
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