If there's anything I got from my massive rewatch of all seven seasons (1997-2003) of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, it's a recollection of the days when it was fun to be Liberal.
Not that I think I was ever a hard-and-fast Lib. When I saw Spike Lee's DO THE RIGHT THING on DVD, probably shortly after its 1989 debut, I knew it was not genuine drama, but political agitprop. I don't know when I read Laura Mulvey's essay on "the male gaze," but I recognized it as ultra-feminist garbage. Though the essay came from the 1970s and the movie from the very late 1980s, both represented politicized myths that had a great deal of influence on American entertainment in terms of the depiction of race and sexual nature. Both were harbingers of the Progressive credo known as "wokeness," even though the term predated both works but did not become a mainstream concept until the 2010s. The metaphor of wokeness depended on a simple binary opposition: to be woke was to be vigilantly aware of the many abuses that mainstream American culture inflicted upon the marginalized, while, implicitly at least, to be asleep would mean passively (and foolishly) accepting the status quo.
Similar metaphors of vigilance surely appeared throughout American history and other national histories. But the concept of eternal vigilance (paging JFK) does not capture what the appeal of Liberalism was for a baby-boomer like myself. Classical Liberalism wasn't just figuring out how to keep Evil Conservatives at bay, it seemed to be about an embrace of plurality across the board. And Liberalism of the Sixties was much sexier as well-- which brings me back to BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, which might be the last great fictional proponent of Classical Liberalism of the 1990s.
Now, if I was being paid to write this essay, I'd probably research all the complex and varied ways that the TV show renounced the sort of simplistic concepts of good and evil beloved by both Far Left and Far Right. But since I'm not, I'll confine myself to a BUFFY episode that's one of the lighter stories, even though it concerns the near-extermination of a marginalized race: the Chumash Indians of California.
"Pangs" (no idea what the title signifies) premiered in 1999, the eighth episode of the fourth season, which means that a lot of soap opera has gone down the pike at that point. I'm not breaking down any of the characters or their multifarious relationships; that's what the Buffy wikis are for. Some quick points though. Xander has just started dating former demon Anya, but Willow's first major love-interest departed for parts unknown. Buffy's mother has gone to a relative's place for the impending Thanksgiving holiday, and though there's a potential new romance in the Slayer's life, she's still fairly bummed about former Great Love Angel, who decamped from the show at the end of Season 3 for his own series. Buffy talks her friends and her sometime teacher Giles to put together their own Thanksgiving, which of course makes for lots of comic chaos. Angel, by the way, shows up for the first BUFFY-ANGEL crossover, while Buffy's perennial enemy Spike manages to intrude on the holiday cheer as well.
The main threat to the Clan Scooby is a vengeful Chumash Indian spirit, name of Hus, accidentally released from a subterranean tomb by Xander. But even before Hus starts killing people for the wrongs done to his people, Willow's first scene includes her reading the riot act to her White ancestors, remarking upon the hypocrisy of Thanksgiving, the status quo's coverup of a racial holocaust. The scene notes that Willow is "channeling" her academician mother, but the script doesn't make fun of the actual evil deeds done to the Chumash by past ancestors. Most of the humor flows from Buffy's frenetic attempts to celebrate a favorite holiday, political implications be damned. She does sympathize with Hus more than most of the foes she fights, and she joins Willow in using the preferred term of "Native Americans" over "Indians"-- even when Hus and some other vengeful spirits show up to crash the Thanksgiving party for an old-fashioned massacre.
Had anyone tried to remake this episode in the 2010s, all the comedy elements would have been gone, and Willow would probably have become a Black Women's Studies major, dissing the Evil White Patriarchy. And there would have been no room at all for Spike, whose primary purpose in "Pangs" is to provide a discordant voice. He snidely laughs at the Scoobies' desire to find a peaceful solution, and he's entirely justified-- as Willow herself eventually affirms-- that the situation is one of "kill or be killed." He also remarks that "the history of the world is not people making friends," and even the most empathetic Liberal can recognize some truth in this statement, even if it's coming from a bloodsucking monster who boasts about his own murderous history at the drop of a hat.
By itself "Pangs" does not prove my claim that the BUFFY show could be the last major Liberal work of the 1990s, or an additional claim that it's far superior to most Liberal works of the next two decades. Most Liberal entertainments became increasingly infected with the disease of Woke, full of a smug confidence that there were only two clear sides, and that the Wokesters were on the right one. There have been some setbacks to Wokism in pop culture during the last five years, but I've seen no indications that anyone's managed to get back to the humor and pluralism seen in the original BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. This suggests that the rumored reboot from (of all corporate entities) Disney will probably be a shit-show of the first order. But whatever the sins of Joss Whedon might be, they'll never even come close to the driveling banalities of the Disney Corporation.