The Afterlife of Genre: Remnants of the Trauerspiel in Buffy the Vampire SlayerCould there have been television without California? California without
television? The one shows the other: the ostentatiously novel
singularity of the place and the seemingly self-effacing transparency of
the medium. Yet if television and California both promise again and
again to offer us something new, young, immaculate in its transience - a
pure surface that will never get caught in the ditch of time - they are
also both haunted through and through: by the itinerant contents of the
past that they cannot banish, by memories of the infantile-perverse
utopian fantasies that taunt us in constant replay ("If you're going to
San Francisco...," "two girls for every guy"), by the contradiction
played out in the very gesture of dismissing history and leaving the
dead to bury the dead. California and television, as it were, conspire
in a vampirologic: the forever-young is what has been there the longest,
what really "takes us back." And so we also will take ourselves back:
to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, already almost charmingly quaint, and
Walter Benjamin's magnum opus The Origin of the German Mourning-Play.
What can come of this improbable conjunction? It will not seem too
strange that Benjamin, posthumous wanderer across the textures of
Americana, should again take up lodging at the Hotel California. But
more is at stake than just another hapless visitation from the on high
of high theory: reading Buffy as the remediated afterlife of the
dead-on-arrival genre of the baroque German mourning play, Adler's book
records the first broken, awkward steps toward a project that, with the
recent rise of "quality television," seems more urgent than ever before:
a political-theological characteristic of the television series. |