Vampire slaying for grown-ups. Ultraviolet.

Vampires triumphantly crossed the Atlantic twice in the late 1990s to colonize television screens on each side of the Pond.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was imported into Britain in 1997 to the obsessive delight of the teenage and young adult viewership. (Not to say to the prurient joy of large numbers of middle-aged men). In return, the UK’s Channel Four sent Ultraviolet westwards to no less critical acclaim and equal commercial success with older audiences in the United States in 1999. Vampires were hot television property and audiences from Hawaii to the White Cliffs of Dover wanted a piece of the action.

Ultraviolet is proudly broadcasting its ninth season this autumn with fresh ideas and the biggest budget yet and the release of the third film will be the cinema event of the festive season. Blade in Britain, the spin-off series starring Idris Elba and his sidekick Eric, played by Wesl…Oh. Wait a minute. Bollocks. That all happened in the same parallel universe where Angel and Firefly and Dead Like Me weren’t cancelled and American Idol and Eastenders never survived their pilot episodes.

Sorry. Back on Earth Prime, Ultraviolet didn’t even do too well in Britain. It was broadcast, if memory serves, on Monday nights at 10 PM. Not exactly a prime viewing time of week and day; even on one of our then-only four nationally available TV channels. It lasted one series. Six episodes. One unaired US spin-off. Then zip. Nada. Tumbleweeds cross the screen. Crickets singing in the otherwise silent night.

Damned pity that.

Ultraviolet was a fab series.

‘Fab’ as in ever-after outdated and awfully self conscious but briefly state-of-the-art or at least 'with it' British science fiction. Call it cutting edge.

The vampire story was brought bang up to date with their conspiracy to achieve secret domination of the human race before it destroys itself, the Earth and the vampires themselves. ‘Our free-range days are over,’ says the Inquisition’s UK commander to his new potential recruit, honest copper Michael Colefield. Aids; BSE; the destruction of rainforests; the First Gulf War; Chernobyl and nuclear winter: all are grist to Joe Aherne’s then-topical mill. These vampires don’t inhabit crypts or castles, though they do secretly build plumbing-free hideaways into modern buildings. They operate hospices which are actually medical laboratories researching into the nature of blood and they conduct hybridizing operations on unsuspecting women. They organise forgery rings and invest heavily in the futures markets and they have facilities in South America for experimentation on humans.

They keep themselves secret because they want to be and because they have suborned a number of human beings. The good guys keep them secret because they are afraid of mass panic and a theocracy established to defend against the vamps. ‘I don’t want to live in Iran.’

The good guys are secret themselves. Loosely supervised by the Vatican and funded by the British government’s embezzlement of health and defence funds, they work from an ultra-modern stock-shot office building in London. They are armed with automatic weapons that fire reinforced graphite rounds and which have UV mirror sights which show human beings but not vampires. Vampires do not show up on TV or video, and are inaudible on telephones as well as the traditional mirrors. The eyes have it. If you can see them, that is. They are faster and stronger than humans. Lead bullets don’t work. The organisation’s rules of conduct are shoot first and you might live to ask questions afterwards. Even when the garlic-gas drops a vampire - ‘Code Five’ from the Latin numeral - to the ground, the masked special forces boys shoot him until he explodes and leaves a heap of smoking ashes to be scraped up and incarcerated in a UV- blasted high-tech crypt. Incarcerated. They can regenerate.

All three of the frontline officers: Mike (Jack Davenport); Angie March (Susannah Harker*); and Vaughan Rice (Idris Elba) - have lost people precious to them to Code Five violence or as a result of their plotting, and the leader, a spiffy-modern Catholic Priest called Pearse Harman (Philip Quast), is not without his vulnerabilities too.

But for all their wealth and hypnotic power and immortal strength, the vampires’ greatest weapon is their skill at manipulating human emotions.

Firstly they use love. The prospect of gaining a lover or the hope of winning a lost one back turns the bravest heart weak and the firmest resolve traitorous. They subvert or intimidate people through family loyalty and pride, through the desire to have children or the fear of losing existing ones, and through offering the chance to avoid senility and, of course, death. Joining the vampires’ ranks can be a refuge from illness or justice or a life of crippling pain and disability. Helping them and staying mortal can satisfy greed or perverted sexual desire or offer hope to a dying relation.

Most awfully of all, they use human beings’ sense of right and wrong. They confuse. They create straw men. They draw false parallels. They claim to be victims and to be morally equivalent to the human defenders. Surely, says one, we do terrible things, but so does God. (They irradiate HIV/AIDS sufferers beyond legal limits looking for a supposed cure.) If we’re so similar that our lovers can’t tell us from humans, are we that different? (This while trying to blackmail a widow into releasing a particularly valuable vampire prisoner.) They don’t have fangs or glaring eyes or claws, and so they seem quite human and reasonable (as they try to blackmail a dying man into betraying humanity.) They look human. They speak softly. They know what people care about and what they fear. Vampires use human goodness as a shield. Consequently, when the former policeman Mike sees his ex-army partner roughing up a paedophile in order to find the identity of a child-molester who might be working for the vampires, he visibly cringes and tries to ignore the interrogation. When the chief scientist takes a scalpel to the uncomplaining captive who is supposedly immune to pain, Mike’s conscience sees a good person turned into a soulless torturer. Organisations like yours never want peace, says the vampire who is exploiting Mike’s longed-for girlfriend; they keep the war going so that they can continue to exist. They speak softly. They hide amongst the virtuous and the sinners and the sordid alike and you can’t tell them easily apart. Poor Mike. He starts to feel uncertain about the organisation’s rightness when he accidentally shoots an innocent man. His horror at the prospect of killing the innocent (or at least the non-vampire enemy conspirator) casts doubts in Mike’s mind over the justice of the whole war.

This was 1998, and yet, and yet…Self-delusion. The honest desire for peace. An unwillingness to cause harm, no matter what the costs of defeat and slavery might bring. Preferring to believe that both sides are equal than to bear the emotional and other costs of taking the side that causes the least harm…

Aherne has written a work here that will last and be meaningful for centuries if it survives censorship or destruction in war, because its moral themes are central to the ideals of our civilization. Who shall guard against the guardians? Which ends justify which means? Can aggressors sometimes be victims too, and even if they are, should we offer up our throats to them rather than use force which, even as an instrument of goodness, is still bloody and hurtful and cruel? Damn me, but these ideas seem kind of topical. Not that Aherne would thank me, I imagine, for pointing it out. I could be wrong.

Which is, in the end, what Mike has to deal with. He might be wrong. The finale is messy and uncertain, and each of the heroes has been way out on a limb and nearly fallen and it is far from certain that any of them can come in again. At last, in a war against those who plan to use natural catastrophes to put themselves into power and to make fresh new disasters to march the whole of humanity into slavery or death, then sides have to be taken. Losses must be mourned but also compared to the world which would otherwise come to be. The Beast must be recognized for what it truly is and judged; not by its golden words or by decent peoples’ fears, but by its iron deeds.

They never made a second series, but I’d like to think that Mike and Co are out there, bloody and unbowed, with enough steel in their wills to see the fight through for the sake of the rest of humanity.

Or should that be ‘Bronze?’
Sigh.

AB

*Oh, yes indeed.

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Defending the Slayer

I’m here to praise not to bury the slayer. I scoff at your peevish dismissals of the glories of Buffy, that tiny blond creature, the defender of civilisation and humanity itself, who beset with all the feminine adolescent doubts and fears, simultaneously battles the horrors of high school and the creatures of the night. All this and her lip gloss is always perfect. It’s no wonder some people find her irritating. I diagnose a tragic case of envy and have no pity. Go look in the mirror and try persuading yourself you would not like to be a woman warrior with super powers and a cute undead lover. You re not convincing me otherwise.

And then of course there is the show itself. I need hardly point out what a serious fan base it possesses. However what is worthy of note is the diversity in age and situation amongst these fans, teachers, financial advisors, computer programmers, schoolgirls, Christians and pagans. This ability to please so many is an indication of the special qualities Buffy holds.

So what have we got? Bernard F Dick in his ‘Anatomy of Film’ discussing myth as an element of film subtext describes how

‘Myths are ultimate truths about life and death, fate and nature, God and humans. For this reason they can never be false even though the characters they portray may never have existed.’

Buffy amusing, entertaining and tear jerking in turn, is truly imbued with this mythic quality with its themes of love and death, good and evil, the dark against the light. These groupings present primal mythic conflicts which occur within the mythology of mankind and the individual unconscious. The search for meaning and ethical validity within the chaos of existence is an ever present human quest. Drown out your fears in a squalid heap of consumerism and greedy entertainments – the cracks will still show. Humanity is a nobler and far more terrible creature than this, not to be satisfied by trinkets. We hunger for wisdom and understanding in our lives. Buffy reminds us of this. The relentless defence of the world against ever increasing and new evils is a core element of the show. The striving against the dying of the light, the belief that good must overcome the nightmares of the world, or at least die trying is too a myth, a dream worth cherishing.

And myths have power – Carl Jung believed the spirit of Wotan reigned in wartime Germany. How marvellous it would be if every fearful young woman could put aside her self criticism and anxiety, face herself inspired by the spirit of Buffy and become all that she truly could be. Surely that was the final lesson of the show, perhaps a little cheesy but still beautiful, that all little girls are not just princesses but also warriors, each special though she might not know it till a little goddess magic told her so.

Parker Taylor described film as the ‘daylight dream.’ It allows us away from the fabulous realms of sleep to examine our anxieties and needs and attempt to subdue or satisfy them in our waking hours.’ A television show cannot work miracles but it can try to make us think. Buffy illustrates significant human concerns in an imaginative and dramatic context. Take for example the nature of regret. When one has done terrible unforgivable things as Angel has, how can one face the future – is there any possibility of redemption or self acceptance. We have all done things we regret, caused pain and anguish to those we those we love. This is a genuine common grief which Buffy magnifies and attempts to deal with in a hopeful and sophisticated way. For Buffy despite the shows monsters and maniacs does not demonise those perceived as evil. It recognises the monstrous in humanity and the humanity in what we may deem monstrous, demonstrating that we are all capable of love and hate, good and evil and that simplistic definitions of human nature fail to recognise its complexity.

Those we despise cannot be defined in black and white terms in the world of Buffy. They laugh and cry like us, become frustrated at failure like us and become broken hearted like us. Spike bewailing his abandonment by Drusilla is no less worthy of compassion than Buffy mourning her star crossed separation from Angel. Emotional loss is a wound which lacerates all hearts equally. Indeed it is when we forget or deny the emotional validity of our fellow creatures it becomes all too easy to slaughter them and ourselves become the monsters. Recall Willow's rage at her lover’s death transforming her and almost destroying the world.

It seems pertinent here to affirm that Buffy is not some big white hunter who kills all she encounters – her purpose is to destroy those who commit evil. Spike is a good example of this. Once he becomes incapable of harming others he ceases to be a target, whilst Angel once more becomes Angelus transforms from the object of her love to a killer who must be stopped at whatever cost. The emotional subtexts of Buffy are enough to make one’s head and heart spin with painful recognition. Who has not believed themselves safe and happy in the arms of love only to have the mask ripped off, and discover ourselves callously abandoned? We may not have been stabbed through the heart by those we have trusted, our old loves do not necessarily turn out to be fiends from hell but frankly it can feel like it. And that is what I love about goths. Why take emotional distress on the chin when you can drink a whole bottle of tequila and write a six page poem about Cupid being a vampire.

I have digressed gentle reader, but the ebb and flow between life and death, love and hate which pervades the world of Buffy inevitably brings this meditation to the classical world of gothic literature. A world filled with strange sorrows and delights. I shall quote Tennyson just because I can

Love art thou sweet, then bitter death must be:

Love thou art bitter, sweet is death to me:

O Love if death is sweeter, let me die.

Sweet Love, that seems not made to fade away,

Sweet Death, that seems to make us loveless clay,

I know not which is sweeter, no not I.

Braver souls than I have tried to pin down the mysterious fascination which gothic literature holds and it would take a great more time than I can give to attempt to even sketch its charms. Suffice to say that Buffy has the right to claim fellowship alongside Edgar Allen Poe, Bram Stoker and Sheridan La Fanu. Our superstitious belief that the dead just live in another country, have generally better dress sense and can haunt our dreams poetically and physically litters Buffy the show with morbid and darkly erotic motifs.

And don’t those erotic motifs cling to one’s imagination. To quote an old adage reformed rakes make the best husbands, and in a similar vein who better to explore ones burgeoning sexuality with than a centuries old lover who has to put it delicately been around the block a few times. Buffy’s vampire lovers are Georgette Heyer regency heroes made undead. We know they re really, really bad men but we just can’t help fancying them anyway. There is something about coffin chic which is more universally appealing than one might first presume judging by the number of apparently conventional people with crushes on the shows undead darlings. Unfairly I have not mentioned the vampire women but I attended a sci fi convention and the actresses who played Drusilla and Darla were treated like rock stars.

I find it cheering to my liberal sensibilities that Buffy managed to get through college with two sexual relationships(one undead)and a one night stand under her belt whilst still very much being defined as a nice girl. Willow her friend also portrayed as a thoroughly nice girl until provoked beyond endurance, had what appeared to be a dream romance with another woman. Xander dated a demon, and Giles had a mixed race relationship –all these examples show Buffy championing love as a basic human right – whatever form it takes. And in a world all too full of prejudice and fear of the outsider I am glad at least one popular television show affirmed the freedom to follow the dictates of ones heart. Not I must add that it promoted careless snogging or trusting a potential lover too soon – far from it. Faiths callous one night stands were used to demonstrate her damaged state and similarly Buffy’s own disastrous date with a college stud show that prudence and caution are as necessary in relationships as in vampire hunting.

Lucy B

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