I'm a fan of TV detective dramas. My wife would say I have an unhealthy obsession. She routinely calls them Murder, Death, Kill as in, "I see you're watching Murder, Death, Kill again" whenever she catches me viewing an old episode of Morse or Lewis or Inspector Lynley or … I think what really annoys her is that I've seen all the episodes so many times that it's incomprehensible (to her) how anyone who is essentially following a dramatic mystery tale, who must surely know the whole who, what, how, where and why off by heart, can get any satisfaction out of so many repeated viewings. She might have a point. Certainly, after months of lockdown during which I'd streamed every episode of every detective show I knew and loved (and there are quite a few), and worked my way through the box sets of all those natty Scandinavian thrillers, and a few other dramas from the continent, I was beginning to wilt. My guilty pleasure was fading into not quite so guilty and no longer quite so pleasurable. A few weeks ago, when the lockdown was still in full force, I decided some drastic action was needed.
My friend, the author, James Christie, was, and remains, a huge fan of the teenage neo-gothic drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He was so devoted he wrote some fan-fiction centred around his favourite character, Drusilla, played by Juliet Landau. Miss Landau was so impressed - James had sent her his stories unsolicited, on a whim - they struck up something of a friendship, mediated mainly through email correspondence. This culminated in James taking a sponsored trip across America, ending with meeting Juliet in LA. The whole story is told in James's brilliant autobiographical work, Dear Miss Landau, published by Chaplin Books, if you're interested.
Now, James is autistic - at the high functioning Asperger's end of the spectrum - which goes some way to explaining his obsession with Buffy. (At least he has an explanation for his obsessions!) But I've long been curious why he was so particularly captivated by the Drusilla character. Being largely ignorant of the show - I think I might have caught an episode or two of it back in the 90s - I resolved to solve the mystery and indulge in a fresh guilty pleasure. Fortunately, you can stream every episode from the ALL 4 website. I think there are seven series in all, and at the time of writing I'm a couple of episodes into Series 4, so around half-way through the whole saga. Well, to some extent I'm feeling guilty (about so much time spent watching) but the pleasure side is a little wanting.
What did I expect? To be pleasantly surprised, I suppose, though I haven't been, and probably won't ever be. Which is not to say the show is without merit. But when all's said and done, the whole point of Buffy is it's a gigantic allegory for Teenage/Young-Adult (predominantly female) Angst, and my personal experience of such matters pre-dates Buffy's first broadcast by more than twenty years and, incidentally, I've never been a member of the gentler gender. So I'm a little short in the empathy department when confronted with all these pretty girls, who look as if they'd be hard pushed to lift a loaded handbag, pounding the crap out of vampires and assorted demons, with the assistance of a few token male characters. To be fair, the chief pounder is Buffy herself, played by the undeniably highly attractive Sarah Michelle Gellar, while her chief side-kick, Willow (Alyson Hannigan) confines herself largely to emotional support and casting spells, after she discovers she's a witch.
The not so subtle point about Willow is that she's made out to be dowdier and somewhat less gorgeous than the stunning star, Buffy. It's a puerile deceit, of course, because it's pretty damn obvious to anyone with half-a-brain that Willow is effortlessly beautiful in her own right, as is every female student in Sunnydale High School. Lucky boys! And the luckiest of them all is Xander (Nicholas Brendon), the most prominent token young male character in the show, who gets to hang out with Buffy and Willow and help kill a few vampires and demons from time to time. His other main function is to hang around being a characteristically insensitive, dopey teenage boy, even if he does look like he's knocking thirty in Series 1, Episode 1.
The most prominent adult characters are Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) and Buffy's mother, Joyce Summers (Kristine Sutherland). Giles is the school librarian and a "Watcher", as in watches over the Slayer (Buffy), guiding, training, advising and generally helping her, until garnering the censure of the "Council" for overindulging Buffy. They sacked him, but he carried on in an unofficial capacity and later lost his other job, as the school librarian, when at the end of Series 3 he demolished the high school with high explosives. All in a good cause - getting rid of a demon hell bent on eating every human on the planet, or something like that. Everyone looks up to Giles, even when they're pissed with him, and his primary function is to reassure the audience that no matter how crazy the kids get, equipped with his clipped English accent and staid clothing, he will always guarantee no real harm can come to anyone (at least the stars, anyway) except for all the kids who do get killed at a bewildering rate in Sunnydale.
Meanwhile it took two full series before Buffy's mum discovered she had a Slayer for a daughter, and then only because a vampire told her. Like mother's the whole world over, she just doesn't get it, blind to her daughter's travails, exasperatingly naïve about her child's needs, and unsympathetic when she occasionally twigs the truth. Personally I do sympathise with Joyce, maybe it's an age thing. It can't be any fun having your daughter running around every night turning vampires to dust and battling other assorted demons, while at the same time said daughter is dating a 240-year-old vampire. It's not as if he, Angel (David Boreanaz), stands much chance of transforming into an upright citizen, never mind become acceptable son-in-law material. Why doesn't Buffy just slay him instead of …? Well he reclaimed his soul and doesn't go around killing people, at least until Buffy unwisely made him so happy by letting him pop her cherry, when he promptly lost his soul again and Buffy had to kill him anyway, sadly. There's got to me some sort of neo-theological message there, classic catholic church, I think: no one is allowed that amount of fun without serious consequences. Never mind, they got him back from hell, where Buffy had apparently sent him, soul once more restored. For the record, because it's important, Angel has only two modes of being: forlorn and lovesick, and raging psychopath. It's enough to keep any girl in a spin, including Buffy, who's almost as forlorn and lovesick as Angel when she's having a break from slaughtering his fellow undead.
So, Angel is Buffy's squeeze, and everyone has to have a squeeze or how would one address the biggest female subject of angst: boys. Willow has Oz (Seth Green), inconveniently a werewolf. But it's a problem they can handle, and at least he'll grow old and die, unlike Angel. The loveable deadbeat Xander proves himself something of a lothario, getting it on with Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter), Sunnydale's rich girl bombshell for the best part of two series. He also finds time to woo Willow and bed the evil Slayer Faith (Eliza Dushku), which puts a bit of a strain on his relationship with Cordelia. Even stiff arsed Giles gets a squeeze of his own for a while, until Angel - in his soulless phase - kills her. And Joyce, divorced lone parent, almost marries a demon possessed robot, though she doesn't know he's a demon possessed robot when she agrees to marry him. Luckily, Buffy's got his number and saves the day, as usual.
These romantic entanglements are every bit as challenging as dealing with the demons and vamps, possibly more so because of the ethical equivocation involved. I mean, a bad guy's a bad guy, a vamp a vamp, a demon a demon, and staking them in the heart or cutting off their heads is pretty much de rigueur. However, the dramatic vehicle for all this soul searching demands more and more enemies of mankind for Buffy & Co to deal with, if only to serve as a breather from much more pressing problems to debate like, Does Angel, Does Buffy, Does Willow, Does Oz … really love me? Or in Xander's case: Does everyone, including my friends, really think I'm a total loser? Therefore, enter the villains.
For the purposes of this blog, two will suffice: Spike (James Marsters) and Drusilla (Juliet Landau). After all, my mate James Christie metaphorically dragged me into this world through dangling the mystery of Drusilla in front of me. To date, there hasn't been much of Spike and Dru, and I'm expecting them to make a return in the not too distant future, along with Angel who also buggered off at the end of Series 3, to save Buffy from herself and the rest of us from his ultra- crestfallen, hangdog look. Please don't tell me what happens next. I must see this through to the end now. But I'll bloody well murder James if the paltry twenty minutes or so of screen time Dru has rung up in the first three series is all there is. There has to be more, surely.
For what there is so far, is this. Spike and Dru are vampires, erstwhile chums of Angel before he inconsiderately reacquired his soul. Spike is sorely smitten with Dru, and who wouldn't be - she's a bit of a dish, like all the prominent female characters, vampire or not. She's also stark raving bonkers, which is the only sane response to being turned into a vampire by Angel a hundred years before, but not before Angel - this is pre-regaining-his-soul, Angel - makes her witness him butchering each and every one of her friends and family. The soulless version of Angel is a bit of a terror. Unsurprisingly, Dru's feelings for Angel are ambivalent, ranging from psychotically devoted to fervently antagonistic.
Her feelings for Spike are less certain, but always demented, of course. The trouble is, Spike doesn't really have his heart in all this murderous guff Dru and the soulless version of Angel really dig. At the beginning of their entry into the Buffy universe Spike spends all his time trying to save Dru's life; she's wasting away in some way only the undead can. (In the Buffy-verse vampires get sick and suffer all sorts of indignities Dracula never had to put up with. And they still turn to dust when spiked, or burst into flames in strong sunlight.) When Dru's fit she turns full on psycho-bitch, which happily coincides with Angel having lost his soul after bonking Buffy. It's a relief to Spike to have Angel back in the fold. He can take the strain of pandering to Dru's high octane vampire predilections. Spike, simultaneously droll and high camp, is all for the quiet life. He was only ever after the Slayer, Buffy, when he thought murdering her would help Drusilla. But now she was back on her feet, what was the point?
Anyway, Dru's bad-ass fantasies turn to dust when Buffy sends Angel to hell and, looking a tad on the sickly side once more, high tails it out of town with Spike, who is more than happy to hit the highway and get the hell out of the constant battle with do-gooders in Sunnydale. I mean, it's simply embarrassing having your butt kicked by a six stone, four foot, nymphet, inexplicably possessed with the power of Hulk Hogan and the fighting prowess of Bruce Lee. Currently there is no sign of Drusilla putting in a fresh appearance, but Spike made a brief return in an eminently forgettable episode, which, frankly, is just about all of them.
Spike and Dru are high camp characters, played (exceedingly well) for laughs by James Marsters and Juliet Landau, or so it seems to me. (If they're not doing it for laughs - oops, sorry - but they really ought to pretend they are.) It's quite an achievement, I suppose, given how bloody camp the whole blinking shebang is. But I shouldn't carp. I'm hardly the demographic the show is aimed at. I doubt the show was aimed at a middle-aged autist like James, either, but it struck a chord with him, especially Drusilla.
I'm determined to plough on with my watching, for I haven't yet spotted the magic ingredient that would explain James's fascination. Perhaps I never will. Perhaps I'm simply incapable of appreciating Buffy in the way James does. In the meantime, I'm getting an insight, possibly a flawed one I admit, into the world of teenage angst, which may be helpful somewhere along the line with my own writing. I'm not quite sure how, but …
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