Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 91

B u ff y t h e V a m p i r e S l a y e r 87 are and do is worthwhile and central. I don’t ride war-horses and fight dragons and wear armor. I’m sick of books that make women heroes by turning them into men. (144) After acknowledging that “myths in which the hero is male dominate the canons of both traditional literature and scholarship” (145), Altmann claims that McKinley is not simply welding brass tits onto the armor of her heroine; she is reclaiming the metaphor of the heroic quest for women. I would suggest that Buffy does the same for our young television viewers. This view is affirmed by a reading of the electronic conversation of Bujfy fans on chat lines. I asked participants of my daughter’s Bujfy chat line to respond to questions related to Buffy’s image as a role model. A typical response was as follows: “I consider [Buffy] a very good role model for young people. I can relate many things that happen to her to things that have happened to me in real life. She helps show girls, as well as guys, how to handle situations and the possibility of things that can happen. She shows that you have to use your brain more than your muscles.” My discussion of heroic females has focused on print texts; however, since Bujfy is part of the visual medium, an examination of film narratives may prove valuable. We celebrate those rare exceptions to the typical strong male and only partly visible female roles, however rare. Recent Disney-type animated versions of fairy tales and myths come packaged with stronger and more assertive female characters; for example, M ulan, The Little M ermaid, and Beauty a nd the Beast. Although these examples may offer testimony to marketing more than a raised level of consciousness, nevertheless, the films have offered young males and females stories with stronger female characters than many in the past. Linda Mulvey applies a psychoanalytic framework in her chapter, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” to explore how the pleasure we tend to experience with film is reinforced by the way that the “unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form” (585). Her analysis revealed that, traditionally, women’s presence in the film narrative tended to stop the action while male characters advanced the action. She also discusses the double pleasure of looking at another person as an erotic figure (scopophilic instinct) and the pleasure of identification with the characters (ego libido instinct) as contradictory processes. This process is enhanced in film where the image of “woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of the male [audience and characters] reinforces the patriarchal ideology of contemporary society. And finally, she reinvokes Freud’s vision of threatening woman as icon to males. “Ultimately, the meaning of women is sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visually ascertainable, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the organization of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father” (591). The threat of castration constantly interferes with the narrative.