The Fabulous Destiny of Marked Accordingly

In one of his Aberystwyth novels, I can’t remember which, Malcolm Pryce describes the sensation of eating a whelk as that of biting down on a salty little rubbery knot which tastelessly dissolves as soon as your teeth clamp down on it. The culinary equivalent of popping bubble-wrap, in other words; pointless and strangely satisfying. Guess where this is going? Buffy is exactly like that; it is basically addictive nothing. You know, like, in sci-fi, where the astronauts or whoever eat these little cubes of nutrient jelly, stripped of every additive except the ones the body needs to keep working? And it’s always meant to make some kind of point about the inhumanly utilitarian efficiency of the future, because depriving food of its taste would rid humans of the base and basic failing of appetite, to which all mortal defects can essentially be reduced. (Discuss.) Not me, though. I’d shovel that shit down, futuristic packaging and all, both hands working like a juggler’s just to chow down on a few more cubic centimetres of protein paste. And why? Why, because it wasn’t doing me any harm, because my mechanical desire to eat is stalled only by such prospects as obesity and nausea and probably gangrene, and if none of those things were off in the wings then, well, who cares, who the hell cares?

Yeah, Buffy. Within 12 hours of seeing an episode of it I cannot remember a single thing that happened in it, except through application of the most melodramatic brow-creasing and bottom-lip-biting. There are no after-effects whatsoever; no intellectual revulsion, no melancholy reflection, and, most importantly of all, no disappointment. Ever! Sometimes The West Wing is weak, Futurama fails it, Homer nods. Buffy, on the other hand, is only ever as good as it is. It is rarely boring, and almost never a waste of time, if only because you’re not aware, when you’re watching it, of time having passed. How could it have? Nothing has happened! You were sitting exactly here the last time you checked, and maybe the clock has turned another hour and the pizza box is empty now but, hey, you sure don’t feel any different.

Because the problem with having interests -in short, with caring- is that you could always be doing something better with your time; reading, writing, listening maybe. But you can’t always be doing something better with your time, not always, and the thing about mindless activities is exactly that, that they leave your mind free to reflect on what a stupid abnegation of intellectual responsibility it is, this is, to be wasting that wonderful brain of yours on hours and hours of Super Mario Kart. Buffy strikes exactly that right note, the one that alchemists throught would turn lead into gold, reliably engaging you juuuust enough to stop you from mental self-flagellation over unfulfilled potential. I suppose this means it’s all just a matter of degree, doesn’t it, with gradation but no distinction between Thunder in Paradise and Twin Peaks, and that all that separates us from each other is the minimum level of stimulation we need to keep our little minds a-ticking on and on. Mine is teenage vampire slayers. What’s yours?