Graeber on Buffy

Traditional vampire movies are a variation. In a way, they are ultimately
about the failure of the French Revolution--which was supposed to kill off all
those bloodsucking aristocrats in their castles and usher in a rational world of
liberty, equality, fraternity and enlightened commercial self-interest. Of
course it didn't work. The Count refuses to stay dead. Because deep inside, the
movies suggest, we don't really want him to. Eroticized cruelty and domination
keep resurfacing because they are rooted in the very nature of our desires.
Again, the proof is in the audience.
Yet Buffy not only avoids such sadistic
pleasures, it openly mocks the underlying morality:

Buffy: (Trying to bluff her way into a fundamentalist church) You
know, I just... I woke up and I looked in the mirror and I thought, hey! What's
with all this sin? I need to change! I'm... I'm dirty. I'm... Bad, with the sex,
and the envy and that loud music us kids listen to nowadays. (Blank stares.)
(Sigh.) Oh, I just suck at undercover. Where's Ken? (Kicks down door.)

In fact, its moral premise is precisely the opposite. Vampire-slaying has
to be kept secret. As a result, almost everyone in Sunnydale believes Buffy and
company are juvenile delinquents: violent, lazy, irresponsible, disobedient.
Bad. In reality, they are almost unimaginably self-sacrificing and good. In this
sense, Buffy is a kind of anti-horror.

The godless cosmology is something that's been developing for a long time,
across anything from superhero comic books to Dungeons and Dragons. What I
really want to draw attention to, however, is the underlying ethic. It would be
hard to imagine a healthier one. People--most people, anyway--mean well, but
being good is difficult (Buffy characters are always fretting over whether they
really did the right thing) and power tends to make you stupid or insane. It's a
difficult ethos to maintain in an adventure fantasy. After all, the whole point
of such fantasies is, usually, to fabricate a situation where there is an
obvious right thing to do--even more, where that right thing involves sorts of
violent behavior that would otherwise be wrong. Therein lies the pleasure. It's
not that Buffy doesn't do this: We are still talking about a show about
teenagers killing demons. But even the fantasy element has a sort of wistful
quality.

If nothing else, Buffy reminds us how much '60-style youth rebellion was
premised on an assumption of security and prosperity: Why put up with all this
stodginess when life could be so good? Today's rebellious youth, rather, are
reduced to struggling desperately to keep hell from entirely engulfing the
earth. Such, I suppose, is the fate of a generation that has been robbed of its
fundamental right to dream of a better world. The very notion of being able to
take part in a relatively democratically organized group of comrades, engaged in
a struggle to save humanity from its authoritarian monsters, is now itself a
wild utopian fantasy--not just a means to one. But cynics take note: If the
mushrooming success of Buffy means anything, it's that this is one fantasy which
surprising numbers of the Slacker Generation do have.

-In These Times, 1998