Chaos at the Mouth of Hell: Why the Columbine High School Massacre had Repercussions for Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Gothic Studies

Volumn 2, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 119-135

  McConnell, Kathleen ^a  

^a DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

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EID: 84855424536     PISSN: 13627937     EISSN: 2050456X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.7227/GS.2.1.10     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. Intro voice-over for Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes, Warner Brothers, 1997.
2. In In the Name of Love: Feminism, Masochism, and the Novel, Michelle Massé notes that an ‘often conservative resolution’ is one of the ‘formal characteristics of the Gothic’ (Massé, In the Name of Love: Feminism, Masochism, and the Gothic [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999], p. 2). Diane Long Hoeveler disputes this otherwise well-established tenet of the Gothic mode: her Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998) advances the premise that the female Gothic novel represented women who ostensibly appear to be conforming to their acceptable roles within the patriarchy but who actually subvert the father’s power at every possible occasion and then retreat to the studied postures of conformity whenever they risk exposure to public censure. (6) However, since most Gothic novels end with the heroine practicing one of those ‘studied postures of conformity’ safely within an encompassing patriarchy, I would support Massé’s thesis of a fundamental conservatism.
3. ‘Don’t Blame TV, says Buffy Vampire’, Halifax Chronicle Herald, 27 June 1999, p. C8; and Joanne Ostrow, ‘Interview with Sarah Michelle Gellar,’ Denver Post, 17 July 1999.
4. ‘Banned “Buffy” on the Internet’, E! Online Headlines (URL: , 3 June, 1999).
5. Chris Taylor, ‘Digital Dungeon’, Time, 3 May 1999, p. 37.
6. Nancy Gibb, ‘Special Report: The Littleton Massacre,’ Time, 3 May 1999, pp. 20–34.
7. Patricia Chisholm, ‘Lessons of Littleton’, MacLean’s, 3 May 1999, pp. 22–3.
8. In fact, when I went to the MLA CD ROM, and typed in ‘Buffy’ I got nothing. I then tried the Education CD ROM and was similarly rewarded. So too with psychology. But when I moved to the sociology CD ROM got nine ‘hits’ showed up. ‘Pay dirt’, I thought to myself … and was wrong. Apparently the ‘Buffy Headed Marmoset’ is a popular experimental animal among sociologists. I have since found articles, most of which concern Buffy and the advent of the female warrior. Michael Ventura’s Psychology Today article ‘Warrior Women’ draws direct connections between the horror fantasy which is Sunnydale High and non-fictional high-school culture in North America: The symbolism is dizzying. Drugs, alcohol and gangs are conspicuously absent from Buffy’s high school, but it’s clear that these are Hell Mouth’s vomitus. Demons are the gangs. The surreal transformations in gullible kids victimized by demons – that’s your brain on drugs. And the helplessness of grown-ups in the face of this hell – that’s life. (Michael Ventura, ‘Warrior Women’: Why are TV Shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, La Femme Nikita, and Xena: Warrior Princess So Popular, especially among Teens?’ Psychology Today, Nov./Dec. 1998, pp. 59–60) Ventura groups Buffy with other strong heroines like with Xena and Nikita, ultimately suggesting that ‘America isn’t ready to accept sexual ambivalence in its male action heroes. America still wants them to make clear moral choices, even if they have to struggle to get there. None of this half-angel, half-devil stuff. In a man, that’s still seen as somewhat sinister; in a woman it’s seductive’ (63); ‘Humphrey Bogart, trapped in Buffy’s high school, would get drunk and stay drunk’ (62). In contrast, Barbara Lippert’s ‘Hey there, Warrior Grrrl’ – which calls Buffy a ‘Gothic drama for the Clearasil nation’ – doesn’t fall into the patriarchal habit of defining women by their difference from men. Unfortunately, nor does it really analyze the implications of women warrior heroes on popular television. Instead, Lippert’s article ends by posing a couple of the questions that I had originally intended to answer before my Buffy article was co-opted by the events at Columbine: ‘So is Buffy an epochal figure for independent women? Or is she simply Donna Reed with cleavage and a gift for impaling?’ (Barbara Lippert, ‘Hey There, Warrior Grrrl’, New York, 15 December 1997, p. 25) Most conclusive are a series of mentions in feminist magazines like Sojourner (Jennifer Pozner, ‘Thwack! Pow! Yikes! Not Your Mother’s Heroines’, Sojourner 23/2 [1997], cited from Fulltext version of Contemporary Women’s Issues CD ROM; Nicol Ostow, ‘Why I Love Buffy,’ Sojourner 24/3 [1998], p. 20), Hues (Anamika Samanta and Erin Franzman, ‘Women in Action’, Hues 4/3 [1998], cited from Fulltext version of Contemporary Women’s Issues CD ROM); Pia Guerro, ‘Loveless in the Media’, Hues, 5/1 [1999], pp. 24–5), and On the Issues (Debbie Stoler, ‘Brave New Girls: These TV Heroines Know What Girl Power Really Means’, On The Issues, 7/4 [1998], p. 42). These tend to applaud Buffy as providing positive role models for young girls, though not without serious reservations. Hues’s Anamika Samanta and Erin Franzman cite the discon-tinuity most strongly: There’s nothing wrong with using a pretty actress, and Gellar is great as Buffy. It’s even fair to say that kickboxing in platform heels is pretty fierce … But the show takes one step forward and one step back in objectifying its star in this manner. No one notices that Buffy is the smartest, strongest (literally and figuratively) teen role model television has seen in ages. Instead, the show gets attention for its Lolitaesque star’s abundant cleavage. (Samanta, ‘Women in Action’, cited from Fulltext version of Contemporary Women’s Issues CD ROM)
9. Andrew Phillips, ‘Lessons of Littleton’, MacLean’s, 3 May 1999, pp. 18-19.
10. Pointing the finger at the NRA are people like Buffy regular Seth Green who states, ‘Well, if you want a target, let’s look at the gun lobbies that have so much power in Washington that they keep the Congress, the president and the people from really addressing the situation’ (Quoted in ‘Don’t blame TV’), and Richard Corliss who writes in Time: ‘Flash: movies don’t kill people. Guns kill people’ (Richard Corliss, ‘Bang, You’re Dead’, Time, 3 May 1999, p. 42). In direct contrast, the firearms lobby ‘was leaning hard … on the theory that guns don’t kill people, kids raised on blood-drenched movies, shoot-em up video games and death-obsessed Internet sites do’ (John Geddes, ‘Is Gun Control the Solution?’, MacLean’s, 3 May 1999, p. 23). While not defending gun lobbies, others also feel the blame should be shared with the promulgators of violence in the poplar media: ‘As one junior student said, with a reference to a Keanu Reeves film; “One of the guys pulled open his trench coat and started shooting. It was a scene right out of the movie Matrix”’ (‘Lesson Nobody Learns,’ The Economist, 24 April 1999, p. 25). A number of writers from the media want to deflect attention away from their means of making a living by suggesting that obvious scions of counterculture like Goths are at fault: The initial assumption that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were Goths – simply because they wore black trench coats, painted their fingernails black and listened to Marilyn Manson music – got real Goths everywhere hot under the black leather collar. ‘Teenagers tend to go after the most powerful images they can’, explains Seth Baker, a Los Angeles Goth. ‘They put together a lot of images. Real Goths have nothing to do with violence.’ Still, if Klebold and Harris were wolves in Goth’s clothing, there was plenty to identify with. ‘We romanticize the darkness of Humanity’, says Peter Stover, 21, a photography major at Chicago’s Columbia College, who has midnight blue hair and regulation pale skin. ‘We’re creatures of the night.’ (Chris Taylor, ‘We’re Goths, not Monsters’, Time, 3 May 1999, p. 37.) Compared to the NRA, and the entertainment and news-casting industries, Goths have few resources with which to defend themselves. Then there are those who feel that the responsibility ultimately rests not in the culture, but on the shoulders of people responsible for censoring that culture in the home, namely parents. Sarah Michelle Gellar – the actor who plays Buffy – states: ‘Those who seek to blame television should look closer to home. TV’s job is to entertain’, she said, ‘not to teach children their lessons’ (Quoted in Ostrow, ‘Interview’). Linked to the conservative trend towards strong family values is the idea that ties within communities need to be strengthened, especially where criminals are concerned: Harley Phillips [the former police chief and current Mayor of Tabor Alberta, site of the copycat killing on 28 April] … says he is far more concerned with what he describes as the lax treatment of young criminals by the courts. He also sees a need for families and communities across the country to reflect on their priorities. (Benjamin Bergman, ‘Tragedy in Tabor’, MacLean’s, 10 May 1999, p. 23) Finally, there are those who effectively despair of ever understanding an event such as Columbine or Tabor. Alberta Education Minister Gary Mar said: ‘No rational act can ever overcome irrational behaviour’ (Bergman, ‘Tragedy’, p. 23). Thus, attempts to assign blame for the Columbine tragedy run the gamut from pinpoint finger-pointing at the NRA to amorphous generalizations about irrationality. However, the threat to the officials and reporters quoted above cannot be overstated. Each appears to be motivated as much by the need to defend his or her livelihood as by any desire to question the basic tenets of the culture upon which those livelihoods rest. According to Fred Botting, the very multiplicity of possible reasons for the Columbine shooting renders the tales we choose to tell about it Gothic: ‘[u]ncertainties about the nature of power, law, society, family and sexuality dominate Gothic fiction. They are linked to wider threats of disintegration manifested most forcefully in political revolution’ (Fred Botting, Gothic [New York: Routledge, 1996], p. 5): shootings in North American high schools are another manifestation of social disintegration.
11. Lance Morrow, ‘Coming to Clarity about Guns’, Time, 3 May 1999, pp. 43.
12. N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 9.
13. Jan Frøyland states: ‘Even if the motion is chaotic the orbit may nevertheless be bounded in all directions in phase space and attracted to geometrical objects called strange attractors with strange and unfamiliar properties’ (Jan Frøyland, Introduction to Chaos and Coherence [New York: Institute of Physics Publishing, 1992], p. 3). The concept of the strange attractor was developed by empirical scientists to describe movement among molecules: however the idea has proven to be useful beyond its initial genesis, and has been transferred to situations in which multiple elements operate in an apparently unpredictable manner, though with partially predictable results.
14. Joss Whedon, ‘Interview’, Welcome to the Hellmouth [video] (Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 1988). Whedon’s statement ends: ‘People out of high school respond to what’s going on because I don’t think you ever get over high school’.
15. Quoted in Tod Olson, ‘Friends … and Enemies’, Teen People, August 1999, p. 123.
16. Michael Bütz, ‘The Vampire as a Metaphor for Working with Childhood Abuse’, The American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 63/3 (July 1993), p. 426.
17. Kelsey Bane, ‘Starting Over’, Teen People, August 1999, p. 126; emphasis retained.
18. Gibb, ‘Special Report’, p. 27.
19. Robin McDowell, ‘Students “Take Back” Their School’, The National Post, 17 August 1999, A15.
20. William Patrick Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 192.
21. R. Gottlieb, ‘The legend of the European vampire’, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 41 (1994) p. 469. Gottlieb goes on to complete his patient’s vampire tale: ‘Above all, it was a story of revenance, of a return from the dead, from the grave, of a loved person who had been unscathed by the experience of burial and decay. In this way it also became a story of immortality, a story in which permanent loss was not possible’ (p. 469; emphasis retained).
22. Cyndy Hendershot, The Animal Within: Maculinity and the Gothic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), p. 23.
23. Donald R. Morse, ‘The Stressful Kiss: A Biopsychosocial Evaluation of the Origins, Evolution and Societal Significance of Vampirism’, Stress Medicine, 9 (1993), p. 183. R. Gottlieb states that a primary aspect of the vampire tale as we tell it today is a ‘need for nutriment or sustenance’ (‘The legend of the European vampire’, p. 469) taken to destructive extremes: certainly the most uncanny food imaginable is the lifeblood of another human. The Buffy mythology exploits this tradition: in one episode, Buffy calls a hospital blood delivery truck ‘Vampire meals-on-wheels’ (Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Watcher’s Guide [New York: Simon & Schuster Pocket Books Media Tie-In, 1998], p. 16). The notion of blood as food first became integral to the myth of the vampire with the 1897 publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Prior to that ‘European vampires … sometimes sucked blood, but not always. Some did not suck blood at all’ (Gottlieb, ‘The legend of the European vampire’, p. 469). Instead, ‘vampire’ was one of the names given to a revenant who returns to haunt familiar abodes and in so doing, destroys loved ones by sapping their energy – an rationalization for a decline in health due to grief (p. 470).
24. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 147.
25. Morrow, ‘Coming to Clarity’, p. 43.
26. Morse, ‘The Stressful Kiss’, p. 183; see also Gottlieb, ‘The Legend of the European Vampire’, pp. 469–70.
27. Gibb, ‘Special Report’, pp. 25–6.
28. Morse, ‘The Stressful Kiss’, p. 192.
29. Ira Livingston, Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Postmodernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 5.
30. In Illness as Metaphor Susan Sontag tells a cautionary tale about using illness to describe societal problems, since illnesses are in some sense ‘natural’, and so imply that human social problems too are ‘natural,’ that is to say inevitable. However her book was written in 1978, before the World Wide Web rendered information instantly replicable. The metaphor of viral replication is so apt to the episteme that its appropriation was virtually inevitable. Furthermore, the idea of vampirism as viral dovetails with the idea that a strange attractor operates within high-school culture, since the concept of the strange attractor was developed to explain the movement of small, mindless things like molecules or viruses, rather than supposedly self-determined human-beings-become-monsters.
31. Hayles, Chaos Bound, pp. 169–70. Given Hayles’s description of chaos theory as not concerned with individual units, Morrow was misguided in his tossed off comment that ‘The uniqueness of individual evils owes something to chaos theory’ (Morrow, ‘Coming to Clarity’, p. 43). Furthermore, Whedon was more perceptive than Bütz in assigning abusiveness in Buffy not only to maladjusted individuals but to an iterated cultural locale – the high school.
32. James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987), p. 103.
33. ‘Lesson Nobody Learns’, The Economist, p. 25.
34. Andrew Phillips, ‘Lessons of Littleton’, p. 20.
35. ‘Schools are enormously safe’, says Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University. ‘These events get a lot of attention only because they are rare’ (‘Getting Past the Fear’, Teen People, August 1999, pp. 125-7, emphasis retained).
36. Eugenia C. DeLamotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 24.
37. DeLamotte, Perils of the Night, p. vii. DeLamotte later elucidates her concept of ‘deadly iteration’ in relation to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing: Hawthorne’s sinners are afraid of revealing their secrets and therefore fear the intrusion of others into their private world. Thus they are cut off from other people, from nature in its true aspect, and from God. But their nightmarish separateness is, paradoxically, also a nightmarish unity. The whole world is a terrible oneness for them because it is a deadly iteration of their own perceiving minds, a multitudinous echo of the self. (pp. 98–9)
38. Joss Whedon and Nancy Holder, ‘Lie to Me’, The Angel Chronicles, Vol. I (New York: Archway, 1998), p. 196.
39. Joss Whedon, ‘Interview’, Angel [video] (Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 1998).
40. Joss Whedon, ‘Interview’, Angel. Similar concerns provided the overt motivation for the cancellation of ‘Graduation Day, Part II’. Warner Brothers worried because the episode depicted students bringing weapons to school (‘Season Finale Postponed’, BTVS Script Club, URL , May 27, 1999). Whedon’s other reasons for the explosion of desiccated vampire bodies – because it’s convenient (‘you don’t have to clean up bodies for twenty minutes at the end of every show’) and because it ‘looks really cool’ (Whedon, ‘Interview’, Angel) – indicate that Buffy’s violence is not of primary importance to him.
41. Quoted in Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder, Buffy, p. 12. In ‘Inca Mummy Girl’ a similar exchange takes place between Buffy and Xander: buffy: I wasn’t gonna use violence. I don’t always use violence, do I? xander: The important thing is, you believe that. (Quoted in Golden and Holder, Buffy, p. 22)
42. Joss Whedon, ‘Interview’, Welcome to Hellmouth.
43. Elsewhere Whedon more caustically explains ‘that a pretty girl isn’t expected to be anything but a bimbo. That’s why she keeps dying in horror movies. She has no skills! To take that character and expect more from her is what makes it tick for me’. (Quoted in Barbara Lippert, ‘Hey There’, p. 25)
44. Sarah Michelle Gellar issued the following statement after the cancellation of ‘Graduation Day, part II’ which indicates a depth of unease with the social phenomena dealt with by her character, Buffy: I share the WB network’s concern and compassion for the recent tragic events at Columbine High School and at academic campuses across the country. I am, however, disappointed that the year-long culmination of our efforts will not be seen by our audience. Buffy the Vampire Slayer has always been extremely responsible in its depiction of action sequences, fantasy and mythological situations. Our diverse and positive role models ‘battle the horror of adolescence’ through intelligence and integrity, and we endeavor to offer a moral lesson with each new episode. There is probably no greater societal question we face than how to stop violence among our youth. By cancelling intelligent programming like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, corporate entertainment is not addressing the problem. (Sarah Michelle Gellar, ‘Statement on the Season Finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, URL , June17, 1999) Gellar’s articulate defensiveness is partially explained by the fact that this is not the first time such a situation has arisen in her career. Gellar had a cameo role in Scream II, a movie which allegedly inspired a sixteen-year-old Lynwood, California boy [to] stab his mother to death with the help of two of his cousins, 14 and 17. Apparently the boys had planned to wear Grim Reaper masks and carry voice-distortion boxes like those in the films, but they couldn’t raise enough money to buy the items. ‘They’re saying the movie made them do it,’ says Gellar angrily. ‘I don’t buy that. Scream is the excuse they are using to get off. It’s horrible, but these people should know better. Murder is wrong – people know that. We don’t say, “Do this.” Not everything is a public service announcement’. (Jancee Dunn, ‘Love at First Bite’, Rolling Stone, 2 April 1998, p. 44) According to Fred Botting, however, the persistence of Gothic narrative elements in both fiction and lived life renders Gellar’s stance naive: ‘Producing powerful emotions rather than aesthetic judgments, effects on audiences and readers rather than instructions for them, narrative forms and devices spill over from worlds of fantasy and fiction into real and social spheres’ (Botting, Gothic, p. 168). Furthermore, Gellar’s statement that ‘Murder is wrong – people know that’ implies that those who murder are something other than ‘people’, a textbook example of the societal desire to describe perpetrators as monsters.
45. Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. I, p. 148; emphasis retained.
46. Botting, Gothic, p. 177.
47. Bane, ‘Starting Over’, p. 126.
48. Isaac Tylim, ‘The Vampire Game’, Psychoanalytic Inquiry 18/2 (1988), p. 282.
49. Day, In the Circles, p. 177.
50. Dunn, ‘Love at First Bite’, p. 44.
51. Here I paraphrase Nancy Gibb who wrote of Columbine: ‘Among the many things that did not survive the week was the hymn all parents unconsciously sing as they send their children out in the morning, past the headlines, to their schools. It can’t happen here, Lord, no, it could never happen here’ (Gibb, ‘Special Report’, p. 26).
52. Hendershot, Animal Within, p. 23.
53. Quoted in Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder, Buffy, p. 241.
54. Phillips, ‘Lessons of Littleton’, p. 21.
55. Day, In the Circles, p. 177.
56. Bütz points out how physically abusive individuals are most likely to prey upon their loved ones, just as the traditional vampire myth concerns a loved one’s return from death to prey upon his or her family (‘The Vampire as a Metaphor’, p. 428; see also Gottleib, ‘The Legend of the European Vampire’, p. 469).
57. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Wood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p. 126.