Buffy the Vampire Slayer 20 Years of Slaying by Christopher Golden

Author:Christopher Golden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse

JOSS WHEDON

Joss has said that Buffy “is the most personal work I’ve ever done. Which is funny. The opportunity to mythologize my crappy high school experience makes it extremely personal, but also sort of exorcises it. It isn’t just reliving it, it’s sort of reinventing it, so it moves me more than anything I’ve ever done. The opportunity to keep developing the characters and finding out what’s going to happen to them and how they’re going to grow apart or together is . . . the more it goes on, the more personal it gets.”

With all that soul-searching, one would think that Joss would begin to change his feelings about his high school years. Joss disagrees. He also notes that, contrary to popular opinion, “my high school years were not all terrible. There was that Thursday. . . .” He laughs.

“No, I did have a couple of friends, and I had a lot of good times, but all the bad high school stuff definitely went down. This lets me come to peace with that. But really, I’m at enough of a distance, and it’s not like ‘That girl, and I’ll get her. . . .’ There’s nobody I harbor any particular malice toward from high school.

“I think that’s part of why I like doing the show so much. I’m able to look at high school and say, ‘There’s the dumb jock who was mean to me. Well, what’s his perspective? He’s going through something too. There’s the teacher who flunked me.’ I suppose in that sense, it is sort of revelatory. It’s nice because I can go to the pain, but at the same time, I have a much more pleasant view of it, because I am seeing it from a bit of a distance.”

That pain, in fact, has become almost more important to the series than the horror or the humor of the characters.

“When we realized how much we could really live these characters’ lives, we found that we could go to that dark place,” Joss says. “I made a joke that, ‘The key to the show is to make Buffy suffer.’ Sarah said, ‘Why do you do this to me? Another crying scene? Do you know what I go through here?’ and I said, ‘America needs to see you suffer, because you do it really well.’ ”

Joss laughs, but he isn’t really joking.

“We’re doing these sort of mythic-hero journeys in our minds,” he says. “A lot of times, the story doesn’t make sense until we figure out who’s suffering and why. Including the bad guy. If the bad guy’s not hurting, not relating to her, then it’s just a cardboard guy to knock down. And the same thing goes for the audience. If they’re not feeling it, if her relationship to what’s going on isn’t personal, and if ours isn’t, then it’s just guys with horns running around and some good jokes, but it’s not going to resonate.”

It’s amazing, given how personal a project this is, that Joss ever got to do it at all.

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