Buffy The Vampire Slayer Analysis

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a popular WB television series that premiered on March 10th, 1997 and had its series finale on May 20th, 2003. Currently the story continues to live on in the realm of comic books, but for the sake of this paper we will only be looking at the first three seasons of the television series. The show is about a teenage girl who is known as the “chosen one”, meaning her destiny is to kill vampires and keep the world, and especially the fictional town of Sunnydale California, safe. Throughout this paper I will be arguing that Buffy does not follow most of the conventional rules of cinema that are laid out in Laura Mulvey’s work Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, she is a character that would be able to stand on her

The conditions regarding him being able to keep his soul, which is the reason he is able to feel love for Buffy and remorse for any bad he has done in the past, is he is unable to have a single moment of pure happiness. If this does occur his soul would be taken away from him, and he would go back to being a blood sucking killer. In the season two episode Innocence, Angel and Buffy make love and once the act is over, it is evident that Angel no longer bears the soul that made him love Buffy. According to Mulvey “The Male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification” (838). Although Angel was not sexually objectified in the moment, since it was something that he wanted, sex is what caused him to lose his soul since he could not bear a moment of pure happiness. Our society teaches us that men only want one thing from women, but this is untrue in the case of Angel and Buffy. They both wanted to be with one another sexually, but held off for as long as they felt they could. Sex often brings couples closer together, but in this case it did the opposite and tore them apart, because of the circumstances regarding Angel having a soul. By having Angel change into a soulless vampire the writers did follow the stereotype of having sex meaning more to women than men, but by doing it in a way that was not Angels fault it did not

Having a female protagonist and a male love interest is still something that does not occur very often in television, though it has become a lot more common in film then it once was, allowed young women and men to realize that they are able to go against gender norms when it comes to their relationships. Throughout this paper we only looked at the first three seasons, and primarily we only focused on two episodes from the series, however if we were to continue to look at the series as a whole the depiction of Buffy as the strong and independent woman that she is at the beginning of the series, continues with other love interests that she has throughout the shows seven seasons. She never completely conforms to the cinematic norm of the damsel in