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Sometimes You Need a Story:”American Christianity, Vampires and ”Buffy”
Sometimes You Need a Story: copyright: WB Television Network American Christianity, Vampires and Buffy A special television news flash announces that several "frightfully disfigured, almost inhuman" terrorists have barricaded themselves in a church with the congregation. In reality, it is three vampires that hold the group of hostages, and Buffy Summers and her friends race across town to stop them. The parishioners fearfully await what seems to be certain death, or worse, as the vampires stride amongst the wooden pews inside the small, traditional, stone church. With the cross prominently in the background, one of the vampires looks around, admires the stained glass, approaches the altar, and shouts arrogantly, "I’ve been avoiding this place for so many years, and it’s nothing. … Where is the thing I was so afraid of? You know, the Lord?" (episode "Who Are You?"). The question, although phrased by a vampire, is essential to understanding the popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Where is the Lord? Where, indeed? Is there any God for these vampires to fear? The question is, of course, much bigger than this moment. Is there, in fact, a relationship between our popular culture and our popular religion? What God do Americans bring to and get from popular culture? Where does a cultural phenomenon like Buffy fit into our spiritual epistemology?
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
For those who need an introduction: Buffy Summers, the chosen Slayer, and her friends live in Sunnydale, a fictional southern California town situated on a "Hellmouth," or a "mystical center of convergence." This allows all sorts of demons and vampires to pass through and also serves as a constant reminder that adolescence is literally Hell. Buffy constantly struggles with fulfilling her appointed role and living a normal life. She must live up to her responsibilities as the Slayer, pass a math test, and try to get a date for Saturday night: "If the apocalypse comes, beep me" ("Never Kill a Boy On the First Date"). She can viciously snap the neck of a hellhound, pull a formal dress out of her weapon bag, and calmly walk into the senior prom, where her date is Angel, the 240-year-old vampire with a soul ("The Prom"). As Buffy and her friends have grown older and entered college or the work force, they continue to face the typical traumas of youth with a twist. Buffy’s annoying dormitory roommate turns out to be a demon, her boyfriend works for a secret military operation, and the gang’s first return to the old high school is to close the mouth of Hell and (yawn) save the world ("Doomed"). As critics have noted, Buffy both questions and fulfills traditional modes of cultural thought, and the space it allocates to religion likewise pulls in both directions. In the opening of one episode, Buffy, wearing a crucifix given her by Angel — a crucifix that has saved her life in the past — answers the question: "Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?" with "You know, I meant to and then I just got really busy" ("The Freshman"). Like many quotes from Buffy, this is both humorous and meaningful. We laugh, but also sense the cultural "in-betweeness" that the show embodies. Watching the show is a more complex experience than we might think. As Rhonda Wilcox writes in the Journal of Popular Film and Television (1999): "Viewers must understand both the language and the symbolism to see the reality. Life and language are not so simple as problem-of-the-week television would suggest, and Buffy acknowledges that fact.” Behind the witty dialogue and the engaging characters, behind the metaphors of monsters and demons, the show occupies a space between belief and disbelief, between an absolute morality and nihilism.
Buffy and American Christianity
In tracing the history of the vampire, we can find in the relationship of the European aristocratic vampire to the American everyday vampire a parallel to the relationship between the Christ of Europe, whom St. Augustine in his Confessions saw as "an enigma and as through a glass,” and the American Christ who "walks and talks with you" and is a "friend." American culture, like all culture, creates its own supernatural, and in this context, vampires in movies like Near Dark or The Lost Boys are just trouble-making kids who happen to be undead. The established "otherness" of vampires is completely dissolved by the time we get to Buffy, who even has conventional human sex with a vampire; or, as fellow slayer Faith says to her in admiration, "you’ve boinked the undead" ("Revelations"). On Buffy, vampires have the memories and personalities of humans but the souls of demons, and anyone — good, bad, rich, poor, handsome, ugly, old, or young — can become or be a vampire at any time. What had become a morality tale is instantly deconstructed by a world where rational (read: adult or Great Tradition) systems are ineffective. Both American Christianity and American vampires exhibit similar traces of, and shifts away from, their European roots. As Anne Rice’s character Louis says in Interview with the Vampire, "I had met the European vampire, the creature of the old World. He was dead.” The American vampire, like the American Christ, is a new creature created by a new culture. In summing up his book, American Originals: Homemade Varieties of Christianity (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), Paul Conkin characterizes indigenous American Christianity by its lack of stress on the issue of a trinity; by a lack of commitment to Great Creeds; and by the creation by American prophets of new and different gods. In looking at the recent American vampire, and specifically at the vampires on Buffy, we see reflections of these ways of thinking: This American originality manifests itself in the creation of new ways of creating and killing vampires as much as in the creation of new scriptures. In folklore, the most important thing is to cut off the head and burn the vampire’s body. The staking was intended to keep the creature in the grave rather than to kill it. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, you drive a stake through the heart, fill the mouth with garlic and cut off the head; blood spurts everywhere, the creature shrieks and moans, the soul is saved. In recent movies, vampires are killed by exploding trucks and slashed by chain saws. On Buffy it is different — more ambiguous and ironic.
In the first of many battles at the teen club "The Bronze," we see vampires killed in ways that reflect traditional methods but also parody them. Buffy beheads a vampire by flinging a cymbal from a drum set Frisbee-style across the room; the Jewish Willow shyly throws a jar of holy water on a vampire; Xander impales one with a wooden stake, but only by accident when he is bumped from behind. The climactic kill comes when Buffy fools the head vampire into thinking that a lamp is really daylight and then stabs him from behind ("The Harvest"). While traditional methods are used, they are each given a twist and a new attitude. Vampires killed on Buffy explode neatly into powder, leaving no corpse, no unpleasant trace of death. The hateful revenge of recent films, like From Dusk Until Dawn, is gone. Also missing is the horror, spurting blood, and Christian angst in Stoker’s Dracula, as Lucy Westron’s lover drives the stake home to give her soul eternal life. In a similar incident, with a characteristically ironic reversal, Buffy must kill Angel after he has reverted to being an evil vampire. But far from putting his soul at rest, she kills him just after his soul has been restored and sends him to suffer in hell ("Becoming" Part II). In this scene, revenge and salvation are subverted, and good and evil are not so clearly defined.
Theology: Weapons, Symbols, and Crosses
In Buffy we see no heaven, no God, no Christ. There are no functioning churches and there is no serious prayer. There are occasional references to the sacred/pagan nature of humans versus demons and vampires, but the creatures of the night are the only ones who get to quote the Bible. The Christian symbolism of holy water and crosses is left unstated. The presence and effectiveness of both have lessened throughout the run of the series, and by the third year a vampire looks at a cross and a vial of holy water, sneers "Whatever" and walks away ("Doppelgangland"). As Nietzsche says, however, it was Christianity that established the Devil in the world, and Buffy has a fully developed world of Hell, evil, demons and devils. What does this "mean"? Montague Summers, a vampire-believing scholar, states, "For the haunting of a vampire three things are necessary: the Vampire, the Devil, and the permission of Almighty God.” Does a demonic presence require at least an implied Christian one? Can we have an evil without a sacred? Buffy’s cross is never related to Christ, but a vampire says, "This is the most fun I’ve had since the crucifixion" ("School Hard"), and a church is used by a vampire in a mock crucifixion ritual to restore another to health: "From the blood of this site she will rise again" ("What’s My Line" Part II). As Quincy, the Winchester-toting American member of the male posse in Stoker’s Dracula might say, "Just what in Hell is going on here?" To begin: What does the cross signify on the show? It appears to be neither Christian nor non-Christian. It is constantly present — in the opening credits, around Buffy’s neck, and in her bag of weapons along with holy water, a cross bow and a collection of wooden stakes, knives, and axes — but it has no privileged status. Although Buffy symbolically removes her crucifix when she temporarily resigns her position as Slayer ("Prophecy Girl"), the cross is no more a weapon than a crossbow, a broken pool cue, or a well-placed karate kick. The ambiguity of the cross is emphasized by Buffy’s first great nemesis, the Master, who defiantly calls it "two pieces of wood," even as it sizzles under his touch. By contrast, in Stoker’s Dracula, we have the same combination of physical and Christian weapons, but the Christianity is always emphasized. A prayer always accompanies the stake. The truest cross in the whole of Buffy, in any traditional sense, is the burned image of the cross pressed into Angel’s skin from when he embraces Buffy. Here, in Angel, and only here, in the negative image of a symbol burned into the skin of a tormented vampire, does the cross stand for anything remotely Christian. Angel, the eternal soul, has given the gift, and the cross represents his suffering and sacrifice. In current American culture as well, as present as the cross is, what it signifies is ambiguous. No longer the space of Christ’s suffering, or a sign of religious opulence, the American cross, says Harold Bloom, author of The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (Simon and Schuster, 1992), is the empty cross, from which "Jesus has already risen." "Resurrection," he says, "is the entire concern of the American Religion." As Bloom interprets it, American religion quests for the 40 days when the disciples were with Christ following his ressurection. The Bible says little about this period: There is no text, just company. No theology, just power. No dogma, just friendship. Buffy’s cross, as well, is a simulacrum — a copy with no original — a sacred and powerful sign, signifying nothing.
Demons and Reality
As Buffy’s friend Willow says, "The dark can get pretty dark. Sometimes you need a story" ("Lie to Me"), and the creative role of fear is clearly a connecting thread between vampires and Christianity. Theories of vampire folk tales point to the fear of death, the fear of what happens to a body rotting in the grave, and fear of disease as related to a belief in vampires. According to Laurence Rickels in The Vampire Lectures (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), the crosses on gravesites were originally put there, not to commemorate, but to keep the dead person in the grave. In Stoker’s Dracula, there is obviously a fear of sexuality and, as has been pointed to by many critics, a fear of strong sexual women. In Buffy, vampires and demons stand for, among other things, fears faced by young people: fear of sex, fear of becoming adult, fear of not fitting in. Obviously, fear plays a role in the history of Christianity, but in looking specifically at American popular religion, Bloom asks: "When people frighten themselves into faith as millions of Americans do, what ought religious criticism to do with that fright?" At the same time that the American vampire has moved from Near Dark and The Lost Boys to Buffy, there has been another and perhaps related movement in the American imagination. A growing number of Christian evangelicals have been engaging in what they call "spiritual warfare," by which they mean active battle with evil demons. In his book, Warfare Prayer: How to Seek God’s Power and Protection in the Battle to Build his Kingdom (Regal Books, 1992), C. Peter Wagner explains that since "Satan can be in only one place at one time" he must "delegate the responsibility" by maintaining a "hierarchy of demonic forces to carry out his purpose." Outside of some pretty blatant racism, there is much in Wagner’s book that would work in a Buffy episode. He describes in detail the physical characteristics of demons, and he even writes of a rift in a town that allowed demons to come in and take control of a city. He calls it the "Devil’s Corner" and Buffy calls it the "Hellmouth," but it is essentially the same thing. These beliefs are not as marginal as we might want to think. Wagner’s books sell in the millions, and articles on demons have appeared in mainstream Southern Baptist publications, such as The Commission (February-March 1991) and Christian Single (October 1999). How "real" are these beliefs in demons? What does it mean to call them "real"? To call them "beliefs?" Does a practicing Catholic "believe" he is drinking blood? Do I "believe" that my hand is made out of atoms, and is therefore mostly empty space? As shows like Buffy seem to take the literal role of vampires and demons less seriously, at the same time we have books like Wagner’s, proclaiming a real demon presence that most of us are supposedly unaware of. Is there a connection? Do all of these gods and demons come from similar imaginative spaces? These questions lie at the heart of the American consciousness, popular and spiritual. As any good postmodernist knows, absence and presence are not, and have never been, opposites, and the experience of American Christianity involves both.
Postmodernism: Fragments and Margins
So finally, after all this, I want to think about how Buffy the Vampire Slayer is truly a postmodern American religious experience. The American relationship to "God" is in many ways one of negativity, a nothingness we can see in contemporary urban and cyber culture. Could we say that popular culture and vampire tales create a subjective or absent God that reveals the American soul? This absence is the imaginative space for our art, our religion, and our vampires. Our fear, belief, disbelief, conservatism, and innovation exist both at the center and in the margin and fragments of this imaginative space. Vampires, according to Nina Auerbach, author of Our Vampires, Our Selves (University of Chicago Press, 1995), "may look marginal, feeding on human history from some limbo of their own, but they have always been central: What vampires are in any given generation is a part of what I am and what my times have become." As represented on Buffy, none of this feels rebuilt from old scraps of stories, but, in the spirit of American Christianity, it is an experienced conversion; Dracula is born again as Angel, the good-hearted avenger with a cross seared into his skin, one sexual encounter away from becoming evil again. And, as we have seen, Buffy implies a divine presence and seeks a transcendent G(o)od at the same time that it denies this existence. What is Buffy’s cross for? Where does Buffy get her powers from? Why is Angel allowed to return from Hell? Why is there a Hell? Questions like these are suggested, but are left generally unasked and always unanswered. During the fifth season a more mature and introspective Buffy becomes more aware of some of these issues, asking the librarian Rupert Giles to become her Watcher again to help her work out answers. But as she experiences the loss of another boyfriend, the death of her mother, and her most powerful opponent yet (a "god," not a demon or vampire), any sense of a divine presence or a transcendent purpose evades her.
Buffy creates a world of absence/presence, immortality/mortality, sacred/secular, where the experience is always on the edge or in the gaps of perception. It is an ironic world just this side of literal belief in demons, but one that is also close to the spiritual experience –praised by medieval Christian mystics and contemporary theologians — of gazing upon a space where God isn’t. While America has often been characterized as simplifying God (and vampires) there is another side that is constantly slipping, full of tension and contradiction. The characteristically American phrase "I know that God exists," can be read to say just the opposite. (If we can know, then God becomes of this reality, an empirical object that we can posses, and therefore is not God.) Somewhere in all of these images of demons, the death and life of vampires becomes hopelessly (or hopefully) reversed. The postmodern God is desired but not found. The American Christ both is and isn’t. Negation and affirmation can never be separated, and in this world of hypertext Bibles and Buffy chat rooms, of spiritual warfare and vampire Web sites, the virtual becomes real and the real virtual. We create, in our monsters, in our gods, and in our theories, reflections of who we are. Yet, like vampires, we cannot always see ourselves in the mirror. As Auerbach says, "There is no such creature as ‘the vampire.’ There are only vampires.” And although it is perhaps our historical insistence on a monotheistic theology that has created the need to be one autonomous individual, in looking at American religion we see that there are many Gods and many Christs, just as each of us is endlessly fragmented. If one of the purposes of monsters has been to help us define who we are, a show like Buffy, where the categories and boundaries are constantly blurred, can help us to further understand the confusing and complicated stories we continue to tell ourselves. Enter the Culture Clash Related Sites
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