Deconstructing Buffy

They're writing theses, calling conferences and compiling essays... The academic world can't get enough of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'. But it's a kids' show, isn't it? Not quite, says Robert Hanks, who knows why Buffy has the critics by the jugular

It used to be that a vampire was easy to deal with: you ate plenty of garlic, you waved a crucifix at it, you stuck a stake in it – if you wanted to be fussy about it you could go the whole hog and cut its head off and scatter millet over the corpse, so that if it should happen to reawaken for some reason, it would have to count all the grains before it came after you. These days, though, nobody does anything as straightforward as just killing a vampire: they have to go and deconstruct it too.

Specifically, they go and deconstruct Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the American television series created by Joss Whedon. In October this year, the School of English & American Studies, and the School of Language, Linguistics and Translation Studies at the University of East Anglia will be playing joint host to a two-day conference entitled "Blood, Text and Fears: Reading Around Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (it was originally planned as a one-day conference but, apparently, interest from academics in Europe and the US was so intense that it had to be extended). Last year saw the publication of Reading the Vampire Slayer, a collection of essays edited by the critic Roz Kaveney, with such titles as "Entropy as Demon: Buffy in Southern California", "Vampire dialectics: Knowledge, institutions and labour", and "'They always mistake me for the character I play!': Transformation, identity and role-playing in the Buffyverse (and a defence of fine acting)". You can find out more about these things at Slayage, "the online international journal of Buffy studies" (www.slayage.tv), where you will also be invited to submit contributions for a planned new collection, Monsters and Metaphors: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The renowned orientalist Robert Irwin is a fan; so is the anti-science polemicist Bryan Appleyard.

There's nothing new, now, about academics treating popular culture with a slightly absurd seriousness: large swathes of North America have been deforested to provide paper for theses called "Meep! Meep! – Roadrunner, Wile E Coyote and the Auditory Dynamic of Despair", and suchlike. But nothing has generated the quantity of commentary that Buffy has, and in a comparatively short time (the first episode was broadcast in early 1997).

A little essential background: Buffy is Buffy Summers, a pretty, fluffy-headed Californian teenager who discovers that she is the Chosen One, the Slayer – latest in a long line of young women endowed with preternatural strength and fighting skills and charged with the task of slaying mankind's supernatural enemies – chiefly vampires. The town where Buffy lives, Sunnydale, is inconveniently sited over a Hellmouth, a portal to other dimensions which acts as a magnet to all kinds of demon. She is assisted by her schoolfriends Willow (a computer whizz and, later, trainee witch) and Xander (whose main qualities are a gift for snappy one-liners and dogged loyalty); by Rupert Giles, her English-born "Watcher", appointed to guide her with his knowledge of the occult; and by a variety of friends, lovers and allies of convenience – notably Angel, a "good" vampire who is the love of Buffy's life, and has been rewarded with his own spin-off series.

Many people are put off by the fact that Buffy is genre fiction. Some Buffy fans complain that this is snobbery, but I think it is quite understandable: genres are defined by a set of expectations, and knowing what to expect is a dubious pleasure. But Buffy rarely settles for satisfying expectations. The scripts regularly add ingenious twists; the expectations are absorbed and transformed. For example, in "Buffy vs Dracula", the first episode of the fifth series (the most recent series on terrestrial television in Britain), Buffy found herself unable to resist the Count's wiles – seduced less by his saturnine good-looks and his ability to control minds than by his sheer celebrity. Knowing what to expect from a Dracula story became the programme's subject.

Tried and trusted tropes of the horror genre crop up on a regular basis: werewolves, fish-men, murderous mummies, human sacrifices; but they are integrated into a larger drama of characters and relationships. Often, the supernatural subplot serves as a neat metonym for the wider drama: when Xander and a group of louder, rougher kids were turned into human hyenas while on a trip to the zoo, a comment was being made on the pack mentality of adolescent boys, the need to get in with the in-crowd. When Oz, Willow's cerebral boyfriend, struggled with lycanthropy, wasn't that just the universal struggle with physical urges writ large?

It's not all just adolescent sex, though. In recent episodes, Buffy's "darker side" has become a focus of attention – a sense of kinship with the monsters she combats, and also an underlying desire to have done with the fighting and killing, an urge for oblivion that culminated, at the end of series five, with her (temporary) death: the tombstone read "She saved the world. A lot". To begin with, the series rested on the contrast between Buffy's night-time life as world-saviour and her daytime life as teenage girl, worrying about boys and clothes and school. But now what is at stake – the pun isn't easy to avoid – are the larger questions of what makes us human, how to be good and why we should bother, and why we should stay alive at all. The bleakness of the themes puts the series closer to Philip Roth, even Samuel Beckett, than to Anne Rice.

All this makes it sound pretentious and heavy-going. But the other point to make about Buffy is that it is deliciously competent. More than 100 episodes have now been broadcast, plus 50 or so of Angel (which is somewhat inferior): that's over 100 hours of screentime now. Over that time, the dialogue has been unvaryingly slick and witty, often up there with the best Hollywood screwball comedies; the story-lines have been brilliantly laid out, within episodes but also over long spans of time. And the characters have grown in ways that are recognisable from life, while wholly unfamiliar to television – Xander has developed from classroom clown to believable builder; shy Willow, who used to worship Xander, has turned out confident and gay.

This is what attracts the intellectuals: the fact that Buffy the Vampire Slayer allows you to choose whether you are going to wallow in mindless, soapy action, or indulge yourself in the luxury of thought. Either way, it is wonderful.

Well, maybe not always wonderful. But four or five episodes of Buffy would be on my list of the 10 best pieces of television drama ever made: "The Zeppo", in which Buffy, Willow and Giles save the world from apocalypse in the background, while in the foreground a neglected, self-pitying Xander is thrown into a maelstrom of demon-slaying and sexual experience; "Hush", in which demons steal everybody's voices, and most of the dialogue is conducted in mime; "Superstar", in which a local nerd bribes a demon to transform reality, turning him into a fearless vampire-slayer and all-round sex-god; and "The Body", which followed the aftermath of the death of Buffy's mother – slow-moving cameras, oddly miked sound and long silences made for the most acute portrayal of the isolation of grief I've ever seen. At its best, the intelligence and compassion on display in Buffy can make you glad to be alive. Or at any rate, undead.

The first five seasons of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' are being shown on Sky One at 6pm, Monday-Saturday, from today. 'Reading the Vampire Slayer', IB Tauris, £12.99