Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 92

88

Popular Culture Review

B uffy offers a point of departure for Mulvey’s work in classic films. Rather
than stopping the action of the nanative, Buffy, as the female lead, drives the
action. The male characters act as background and plot fillers for her action.
Although Buffy, as well as all the other characters in the show, is attractive and
confirms Mulvey’s points about the pleasure principles at work in film, the image
of woman as passive and man as active is contradicted in each episode. “...Buffy’s
body is a site of considerable struggle in the narrative. She is recognizably coded
as slim, youthful, fit and stylish; her body is a billboard for American [youth].
Sometimes her face and body are dominated by the camera; sometimes she fills
and dominates the frame. But there can be little doubt that Buffy’s agency drives
the narrative and saves the world” (Owen 25). While the term “passive” may apply
to Giles and Xander, it would be inappropriate for Buffy. And finally, the most
interesting aspect of considering
in light of Mulvey’s work is the concept of
woman as castrating figure. Although none of the interviews or articles with and
about the creator and writers of the show have fully analyzed a psychoanalytic
underplot to the show, the image of Buffy hunting men with a sharpened stake
lends some interesting potential to such a discussion. However, rather than
interfering with the narrative as Mulvey predicts, Buffy’s actions are the point to
the narrative.
Is Buffy a hero and feminist icon? The following describes the opinions of
three different voices: the writer and creator, a feminist critic, and a popular culture
critic. Joss Whedon, the original creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, responds to
the question this way:
Absolutely. The idea was, let’s have a feminist role model for
kids. What’s interesting is you end up subverting them. If she’s
an ironclad [see Altmann] hero— T am woman, hear me
con sta ntly roar’—it gets dull. Finding the weakness and the
vanity and the foibles makes it fun. From the beginning, I was
interested in showing a woman who was [take-charge] and men
who not only didn’t have a problem with that but were kind of
attracted to it. (Tucker 44)
A. Susan Owens, a feminist critic, answers the question from a critical perspective:
A postfeminist perspective is contrasted with her mother, Joyce.
Although Joyce and Buffy clearly enjoy benefits from the first
and second waves of the American feminist movement, little is
ever said about the history of women’s struggle in American
culture. More to the point, Joyce is emblematic of parental and