SERIELAND COULISSE - In 1997, Buffy the vampire slayer and her "badass" super heroine, played by Sarah-Michelle Gellar, landed on our screens.
Hundreds of demons slain with pickaxes later, the series has become cult.
This week, the SERIELAND team explains why.
PODCAST
Bloodthirsty vampires, teens with whom it is difficult to identify ... but not only.
This week, in SERIELAND, Clémence Olivier takes you behind the scenes of a cult and deeply avangardist series: Buffy the vampire slayer.
Super heroes have always fascinated me.
I dreamed of flying like Superman, of being as fast as Flash, and more recently I envied Eleven, who in
Stranger Things
was able to move objects by thought… But there is a serial superhero that I have always put above others.
It's Buffy, from
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
.
Buffy is an American a priori ordinary, a pretty blonde who has just arrived in high school.
In a horror movie, for sure, she would have been killed first.
Except that Buffy - which we discovered on our screens in 1997 - is not the naive girl to be saved.
She is a real "badass" chick and her super power: it is to kill vampires !!
This series, it is apart.
She not only dismantles the stereotype of the fragile young girl, it is also a fiction ahead of its time.
Why ?
Because she is a feminist and it is also the first series for teens to feature a serious love story between two women, two witches: Willow and Tara.
A daring bet
At the time, directing a couple of women in a network series was daring.
As a reminder, at the end of the 1990s, gay marriage was still not legal anywhere and lesbian couples were still quite rare on the small screen.
There is the couple formed by Carol and Susan in
Friends
.
But the characters are secondary and the episode in which they exchange a kiss has been censored in several American states.
So when Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy, announces to the producers that he wants to stage a relationship between two women, they are reluctant.
They brake with all four irons.
Whedon, however, does not give up.
He is patient.
And he waits until he has a solid fan base to bend the American channel, The WB.
It will be in 1999, during the 4th season.
The Americans then discover the love story between Willow, Buffy's best friend, and Tara the shy witch.
Whedon suggests ... and goes further
But in this season, he doesn't show anything, he suggests.
No kiss, no physical connection, just hints… And then Whedon goes further.
He offers a kiss to the two protagonists in season 5 and a sex scene to Willow in season 7.
We are then in 2002. The series The
L World,
which describes the life and the loves of a group of lesbian and bisexual women, will arrive on our screens shortly after.
A feminine look
But it's in the way he represents the relationship between the two women that Joss Whedon is most transgressive.
How? 'Or' What ?
By presenting the homosexual relationship as an all that is more normal and even banal.
It is born of a friendship then transforms into a deeper relationship based on mutual respect, on trust ...
Another notable fact.
The creator chooses to place himself from Tara and Willow's point of view to represent their relationship.
This is the point of view of women.
It is not voyeuristic, let alone pornographic.
Yet this is too often the case when you show a relationship between two women on screen.
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Joss Whedon insists on this point in season 4. In one episode, he shows the relationship between Tara and Willow from the point of view of Alex, one of the members of Buffy's group of friends.
And we see that the relationship is totally fantasized.
The two women are dressed in a super sexy way and take lascivious poses, kiss ... like in a porn movie!
The open-mindedness, the transgressive spirit of
Buffy the vampire slayer
, is surely what explains the success of the series with teenagers.
They were many at the time to recognize themselves in the characters!
And this is still true today.