Televisual Truths
Buffy: "Do we really need weapons for this?"
Spike: "I just like them, they make me feel all manly."
— from "School Hard" episode
Television is predominantly framed by discourses that function to define meanings in support of dominant structures and the empowered groups that benefit from them. The medium is embedded within the processes of social sense-making and therefore resonates powerfully within our culture. Television rarely confines itself to the box. It spills beyond its electronic boundaries in ways that often do not follow distinct patterns or rules.
Some television programs enter into serious and vibrant debate among audiences, before, during and after their consumption. These engagements extend the life of television programs and inject vitality into cultural products. Henry Jenkins has used Star Trek to demonstrate the ways in which television fans appropriate and re-inscribe the meanings within televisual texts in vibrant and resistive ways through textual poaching. Viewers frequently do not conform to mainstream reading expectations mapped out by market projections. They will mobilize a plethora of reading strategies that will embrace, reject and negotiate dominant social frameworks.
Both producers and viewers relish the polysemic potential of television. For industry executives this means a wide scope for interpretation and therefore larger demographics. This quality enables television to act as a social litmus paper — gauging, measuring, and informing social movement and meanings. John Hartley calls it "the bardic function," the ability of television texts to articulate and comment on concerns and issues within a culture. Television is a crucible — a bubbling cauldron of conflicting ideas that mobilize a series of struggles over meaning. In this way, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer is most obviously a product of its time.
The problem with writing for television is that it goes out of date very quickly. Market forces change with social attitudes, and on the cutting edge of these changes are television executives hoping to catch the next social tide. The increasing visibility of competent women within the media has begun to coincide with 'real' changes in women's lives. There is a clear trajectory from Wonder Woman and Emma Peel through Clarice Starling, Sarah Connor and Agent Scully, and onto Xena, Captain Kathryn Janeway, Buffy and now Max from Dark Angel. These women are products of three broad feminist movements that have spanned over a century.
The changing representations of men within the medium have a shorter time-line. Most obviously, when the concerns of a dominant group in a society need to be articulated it takes less time for these to gain space and legitimacy within a culture. The visualization of a contradictory masculine identity has had vague origins in Special Agent Dale Cooper, Captain Benjamin Sisko, and Fox Mulder. Buffy: The Vampire Slayer is, however, perhaps the first popular text to engage in a persistent questioning and deconstruction of male power within our society. This is no doubt a part of its narrative structure. For Buffy to be the hero, the men around her must be largely incompetent. It is Spike who embodies this conundrum most powerfully within the diegesis.
Buffy: "Do we really need weapons for this?"
Spike: "I just like them, they make me feel all manly."
— from "School Hard" episode
Television is predominantly framed by discourses that function to define meanings in support of dominant structures and the empowered groups that benefit from them. The medium is embedded within the processes of social sense-making and therefore resonates powerfully within our culture. Television rarely confines itself to the box. It spills beyond its electronic boundaries in ways that often do not follow distinct patterns or rules.
Some television programs enter into serious and vibrant debate among audiences, before, during and after their consumption. These engagements extend the life of television programs and inject vitality into cultural products. Henry Jenkins has used Star Trek to demonstrate the ways in which television fans appropriate and re-inscribe the meanings within televisual texts in vibrant and resistive ways through textual poaching. Viewers frequently do not conform to mainstream reading expectations mapped out by market projections. They will mobilize a plethora of reading strategies that will embrace, reject and negotiate dominant social frameworks.
Both producers and viewers relish the polysemic potential of television. For industry executives this means a wide scope for interpretation and therefore larger demographics. This quality enables television to act as a social litmus paper — gauging, measuring, and informing social movement and meanings. John Hartley calls it "the bardic function," the ability of television texts to articulate and comment on concerns and issues within a culture. Television is a crucible — a bubbling cauldron of conflicting ideas that mobilize a series of struggles over meaning. In this way, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer is most obviously a product of its time.
The problem with writing for television is that it goes out of date very quickly. Market forces change with social attitudes, and on the cutting edge of these changes are television executives hoping to catch the next social tide. The increasing visibility of competent women within the media has begun to coincide with 'real' changes in women's lives. There is a clear trajectory from Wonder Woman and Emma Peel through Clarice Starling, Sarah Connor and Agent Scully, and onto Xena, Captain Kathryn Janeway, Buffy and now Max from Dark Angel. These women are products of three broad feminist movements that have spanned over a century.
The changing representations of men within the medium have a shorter time-line. Most obviously, when the concerns of a dominant group in a society need to be articulated it takes less time for these to gain space and legitimacy within a culture. The visualization of a contradictory masculine identity has had vague origins in Special Agent Dale Cooper, Captain Benjamin Sisko, and Fox Mulder. Buffy: The Vampire Slayer is, however, perhaps the first popular text to engage in a persistent questioning and deconstruction of male power within our society. This is no doubt a part of its narrative structure. For Buffy to be the hero, the men around her must be largely incompetent. It is Spike who embodies this conundrum most powerfully within the diegesis.