Thursday, November 21, 2002
Sarah Michelle Gellar: A Star for the New Millenium
Originally presented as a paper at 'The Buffyverse' Symposium, The University of Melbourne, 21 November 2002.
A couple of years ago, I was watching Scream 2 with my brothers. In the opening scene, Randy (the film-geek of the trilogy) is in his college film class. There is a rapid-fire exchange of witty dialogue typical in Kevin Williamson scripts. But me and my brothers didn’t care about what was going on in the scene, we were too busy shouting over each other to identify the parade of teen stars that had just appeared on screen. There was Pacey, there was the guy from Go, and, most importantly, there was Buffy.
We were talking in a sort of teen code about Joshua Jackson, Timothy Olyphant, and Sarah Michelle Gellar.
My mother, who was reluctantly watching it with us, had no idea what was going on. She was trying to hear the dialogue, having found nothing else in the film to engage with. But what we were enjoying about the film was not the narrative, or the dialogue, or even the characters. What held our attention was the way Wes Craven took our favourite TV stars – Pacey and Buffy – and made them different.
Here was SMG, known to us as the high-kicking, vampire-staking, all-action Buffy, and she was running screaming from a twit with a knife. Buffy! Buffy who fights gangs of vampires and demons with nothing to defend herself but high kicks and a quick wit. And here she was, helpless.
It was fantastic. Craven was toying with us by taking the icon of teendom in the 90s, a hero for everyone everywhere, and turning her into nothing more than another screaming blonde who, like Neve Campbell in the first Scream, ‘ran up the stairs when she should have run out the front door’.
And we loved it.
We loved having our expectations played with, we loved seeing Buffy in a different context, and most of all, we loved the way Craven showed Buffy no respect, leaving her to bleed by the wayside as the killer cut a swathe through Woodsboro.
This paper is about that play, about the way the contemporary teen text toys with the expectations of its audience.
Particularly, it is about the impact of Buffy on the persona of SMG. As Buffy, Sarah Michelle has become an icon for the teen-focussed demographic of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a position that she has encouraged by appearing in a number of teen texts like Cruel Intentions, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scream 2 and Scooby-Doo, as well as hosting events such as the fabulous MTV Movie Awards, soon to usurp the Oscars as the most glittering event on the Hollywood calendar.
This paper will focus on the manner in which Sarah Michelle, through her roles, encourages audiences to read across these texts, drawing meaning from both intertextual and extratextual information, and using Buffy as an ‘official role’ around which repetition and variation occurs.
In other words, Sarah Michelle texts are all about Buffy in the way they refer to and play off that character.
The nature of television series like Buffy is that, over their lifetime, they allow far greater character and plot development than a feature film, and thus encourage audiences to develop deeper relationships with the characters and with the show itself.
Buffy has run for six seasons, in the course of which Buffy has undergone more trials and tribulations than the average teenager, even the average television teenager.
Buffy has died, twice, swapped bodies with Faith, the evil slayer, developed a sister out of nowhere, found her true love in a vampire with a soul, had violent sex with another, been the model for a sex-slave android which was eventually drawn and quartered, saved the world from annihilation numerous times, been through countless hairstyles, and now flips burgers at a fast food restaurant. And that’s not even a complete catalogue.
On top of the exhaustive list of Buffy’s achievements, there is even play on Buffy within the series.
Remember the recent episode where the Scoobys lose their identities, and have to construct them from what clues they have. Buffy ends up as Joan, and, memorably, Spike as Randy Giles. In ‘This Year’s Girl’ (Ep #415 for the buffs, no pun intended), Faith and Buffy swapped bodies, and all of a sudden we, as spectators, were forced to identify with Buffy in a different way.
Buffy did not look like Buffy nor did she act, speak, or move like Buffy. Giles knew her by her eyes, but I wonder if we would have known if we weren’t told?
We’ve had a musical episode, and an episode without music. We’ve had one without dialogue, and one with an invisible Buffy.
And intertextually, Buffy has demonstrated that, as a program, it is aware of its position in an array of contemporary texts.
Think back to when Spike, planted in front of the television, shouts impatiently: ‘Pacey, you stupid idiot! Can’t you see she doesn’t really love you!’
Intertextuality aside, character play is a hallmark of the long-running television series, and it is one of the elements that draws the audience closer to the characters.
For example, the Seinfeld gang’s encounter with their bizarro selves. Because of the six seasons’ worth of memories we share with the Scoobys, we are far closer to them than we can possibly be to the characters in a 100 minute feature film.
The television series as a medium offers opportunities for character development that the feature film can only dream about.
And with this character development comes a deeper relationship between the character and the audience.
Sure, we’ve all seen Sarah Michelle’s films, but it’s a rare Sarah Michelle fan who feels a closer connection to Cruel Intentions’ Kathryn, or Helen in I Know What You Did Last Summer. I conducted a small poll on the website About TV/Movies for teens, and Buffy was the overwhelming favourite Sarah Michelle, polling a whopping 76% of votes. Next best was the anti-Buffy, Kathryn from Cruel Inentions, who only polled 14% of the vote.
Good is stronger than evil, it seems. You may prefer Sarah Michelle outside of Buffy, but there is no arguing with the fact that Buffy is the character with whom SMG is associated. She is often referred to in public discourse as ‘Buffy’ or some variation on ‘slayer’. An article announcing her romance with Freddie Prinze Jr was entitled ‘Buffy the Bachelor Slayer: Sarah Michelle (no surnames necessary) lands her own Prince Charming, Freddie Prinze Jr, in a bloodless coup’. Let’s face it. Sarah Michelle fans are Buffy fans at heart, or else what’s the point?
What I am getting at is the unique nature of Sarah Michelle as a teen star: her primary character is so prominent that everything else she does is read in relation to it. And given the contemporary teen cinema’s love of self-reflexivity, this often manifests itself in a conscious and deliberate subversion of the Buffy character. In the realm of cinema, it seems that filmmakers are falling over one another to create the ultimate anti-Buffy.
There was the previously mentioned Ce Ce, a hapless victim, gutted on the balcony in Scream 2 and left for her sorority sisters in a pool of blood on the concrete below. There was Helen, the selfish beauty queen and aspiring Broadway actress in Jim Gillespie’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, spectacularly slashed with a fish hook only metres from the town parade. Then we had my personal favourite Sarah Michelle, Kathryn, the cruel, vindictive, coke-snorting bitch of Roger Kumble’s Cruel Intentions. She gambled on her step-brother’s ability to take a young virgin’s cherry. And if this wasn’t bad enough, Kumble even had the nerve to turn Buffy’s golden locks into an offensive red-brunette bouffant, and dress her in that horrendous gold number.
And, most recently, while I’m talking about Sarah Michelle fashion crimes, we had the 70s camp disaster that was SMG in Scooby-Doo. Notable, if not for its script, then certainly for Sarah Michelle’s first appearance alongside now-husband, the gorgeous Freddy Prinze Jr (sporting an equally offensive bleach job), and for her wardrobe, notably her knee-high pink PVC boots.
As well as character roles, there is Sarah Michelle in public life. Public being the MTV Movie Awards. Here’s what Buffy can do when she gets a chance, here with Jack Black.
All of these characters are different.
But what is even more important is how they are different from Buffy. Not only are we watching Cruel Intentions’ Kathryn try to seduce her step-brother, we are also watching SMG, as Brian Johnson described it ‘drive a stake through her righteous TV image’. Again with the slayer reference.
This is what I mean when I talk about SMG being a star for the new millennium. Today’s teen audience is so hyperconscious (to borrow Jim Collins’s phrase) that just as much meaning is drawn by the manner in which a text plays with its star’s persona than from the text itself. More even. Remember the Scream 2 story, with my brothers and I screaming at each other.
We were more excited by the presence of television stars than we were by the narrative.
To indulge in academic language for a moment, SMG is symbolic of an intertextual exchange between film and television texts based on an authoritative character. Meaning is now created more than ever by the spectator, and with Sarah Michelle, it is often almost exclusive of any narrative. Just her hair and clothes in Cruel Intentions contain enough variation and entertainment to satisfy Sarah Michelle fans. For a while anyway.
Sarah Michelle’s Buffy characterisation is such a prominent aspect of her star persona that it infiltrates any text she appears in.
And her potency as a teen icon is such that she brands as ‘teen’ any film she appears in, almost regardless of its generic framework.
Think back, she has moved from Buffy, a postmodern, apocalyptic soap opera, to I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2, slashers, to Cruel Intentions, a remake of Dangerous Liaisons, and to Scooby-Doo, almost a live-action cartoon.
And all of these films were marketed to, and appealed to, the same teen demographic.
When Sarah Michelle appears on screen, she carries with her the burden (or gift) of six seasons as the Slayer, because she appears on screen to a cinema full of teens who know her as Buffy. And if they don’t, then they run the risk of missing out on much of the meaning contained in Sarah Michelle films. Cruel Intentions is fun on its own, but enjoyment levels skyrocket once you are aware of what Sarah Michelle is doing to her image as Buffy. Whereas classic Hollywood stars had (or have, still) recognisable personas that they carry with them into their films, Sarah Michelle’s is based around one ‘official’ character, with every other role playing in some way on this characterisation.
But that’s how we want it, isn’t it?
I think I’m safe enough saying to a room full of Buffy fans, that when we see Sarah Michelle, we think Buffy.
Many of us hold Buffy very dear to our hearts, and while we enjoy the contemporary teen text’s playful variation on the most recognisable Sarah Michelle, she will always be Buffy to us.