PassionBecoming
Minuscule Redheaded One
So, this isn't really "news" or an interview with a cast member, so I thought I would post it here. I have had a subscription to Glamour for many years and much to my enjoyment an article in their December 2011 there was a Buffy reference! I found myself thinking "That's me!" when I was reading about her Buffy experiences. On page 240 in the story titles "Just Once in Life, Every Woman Should..." there is a section titled "Be a fan of Something - Anything" by Emily Nussbaum.
"When I was younger, I had my share of passionate moments. In high school, I fell for Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I cut out Emily Dickinson poems and pasted them into a notebook, read every Doonesbury comic twice and listened with obsessive attentiveness to Joni Mitchell and Sondheim and the comedy duo Nichols & May. I was also sufficiently fascinated by everything Woody Allen ever did that I once had an anxiety dream in which I brought him a tin of butter cookies and was worried he's think they were store-bought, not hand-baked.
But it wasn't until one night in 1997 that I actually became a fan. The trigger was a Monday-night episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show that had started airing on the WB. Now, I'm not trying to make a case for Buffy as the single most perfect work of art ever made - I guess someone could argue for Middlemarch or Tootsie - but that sort of "top 10" thinking is beside the point. Buffy was perfect for me. Despite the show's goofy title, I could tell from the start that here was something slyly revolutionary, feminist by deeply romantic and also very funny. The first episode I watched wasn't even one for the all-time greats (It was "The Pack," in which teenage bullies turn into hyenas and eat the principal), but within an hour, Buffy had lit a pathway through my frontal lobe, the rope burn of the obsessional, a form of brain damage that led me to mention the show whenever possible for the next six years, take any excuse to refer to it in print and spend hours hashing out the minutest details online under an assumed name. Happy and crazy are no contradiction when it comes to being a fan.
In retrospect, I can see that my Buffy fanaticism was a kind of virginity loss, delayed until adulthood. I'd always been perfectly enthusiastic about enthusiasm, at least in theory. And yet somehow I'd never made the full-on leap into Trek or Narnia or Bowie or the Chicago Bears. And now that I'd jumped in, I wondered why I'd waited. Because just as falling in love with a person can make you notice the other lovable things in the world (singing birds, particularly delicious cannoli), being a fan of Buffy made me far more sensitive to other art. I plugged in to the coolness of comic books, horror films and teen dramas. I began to adore the Internet, which was transforming into the best possible forum for fans. And in the real world, I found Buffy lunatics in the most surprsing places: cocktail parties, say, arguing in the corner about season six. Best of all, I could see the potential of television itself, that historically low-self-esteem art form, just as it made its own leap into ambition, from Buffy to The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Friday Night Lights and 30 Rock.
So if you haven't become a fan yet, don't worry. It will happen. But you have to allow yourself to be more than just an audience, leaning back and watching. You need to lean in - it's the best way to feel joy, outrage, betrayal, the full range of geeked-out excitement beyond the simpler pleasures of thumbs-up and thumbs-down. And when your obsession finds you (whatever it is: Lady Gaga, Game of Thrones, the Mets), you won't be sorry. You'll know enough to take that leap.
Emily Nussbaum is the TV critic at The New Yorker magazine.
"When I was younger, I had my share of passionate moments. In high school, I fell for Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I cut out Emily Dickinson poems and pasted them into a notebook, read every Doonesbury comic twice and listened with obsessive attentiveness to Joni Mitchell and Sondheim and the comedy duo Nichols & May. I was also sufficiently fascinated by everything Woody Allen ever did that I once had an anxiety dream in which I brought him a tin of butter cookies and was worried he's think they were store-bought, not hand-baked.
But it wasn't until one night in 1997 that I actually became a fan. The trigger was a Monday-night episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show that had started airing on the WB. Now, I'm not trying to make a case for Buffy as the single most perfect work of art ever made - I guess someone could argue for Middlemarch or Tootsie - but that sort of "top 10" thinking is beside the point. Buffy was perfect for me. Despite the show's goofy title, I could tell from the start that here was something slyly revolutionary, feminist by deeply romantic and also very funny. The first episode I watched wasn't even one for the all-time greats (It was "The Pack," in which teenage bullies turn into hyenas and eat the principal), but within an hour, Buffy had lit a pathway through my frontal lobe, the rope burn of the obsessional, a form of brain damage that led me to mention the show whenever possible for the next six years, take any excuse to refer to it in print and spend hours hashing out the minutest details online under an assumed name. Happy and crazy are no contradiction when it comes to being a fan.
In retrospect, I can see that my Buffy fanaticism was a kind of virginity loss, delayed until adulthood. I'd always been perfectly enthusiastic about enthusiasm, at least in theory. And yet somehow I'd never made the full-on leap into Trek or Narnia or Bowie or the Chicago Bears. And now that I'd jumped in, I wondered why I'd waited. Because just as falling in love with a person can make you notice the other lovable things in the world (singing birds, particularly delicious cannoli), being a fan of Buffy made me far more sensitive to other art. I plugged in to the coolness of comic books, horror films and teen dramas. I began to adore the Internet, which was transforming into the best possible forum for fans. And in the real world, I found Buffy lunatics in the most surprsing places: cocktail parties, say, arguing in the corner about season six. Best of all, I could see the potential of television itself, that historically low-self-esteem art form, just as it made its own leap into ambition, from Buffy to The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Friday Night Lights and 30 Rock.
So if you haven't become a fan yet, don't worry. It will happen. But you have to allow yourself to be more than just an audience, leaning back and watching. You need to lean in - it's the best way to feel joy, outrage, betrayal, the full range of geeked-out excitement beyond the simpler pleasures of thumbs-up and thumbs-down. And when your obsession finds you (whatever it is: Lady Gaga, Game of Thrones, the Mets), you won't be sorry. You'll know enough to take that leap.
Emily Nussbaum is the TV critic at The New Yorker magazine.
