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Deep in the Heart of Texas – an essay
by Mazal HaMidbar
Topic: What does it mean to be Texan in the Buffyverse? Can we look at Fred, Lindsey, the elder Burkles and the Gorches and find any common strands? Why, of all of the US states, is Texas singled out in this fashion? Has Texas now come to represent to Americans the best and worst features of the US? Requested by Indri for Blood and Weetabix.
Even though ours was a public school, come December that year we nonetheless
seemed to be having a full-scale Christmas party complete with gift exchange
during the regular school day. From what I could tell, it was apparently an
annual tradition in my newly adopted state -- just like the daily readings from
the New Testament and the equally regular recitation of The Lord’s Prayer
that I reluctantly took part in.
So, like my classmates, at the prescribed time I found my assigned present and
carefully opened the tiny, gorgeously wrapped little box. Inside, I found a
finely grained chain -- and the most beautiful pendant I had ever seen in all
my 9 years. It was a multi-petaled flower, rendered in gold, a small, real pearl
at its center.
“I’m so glad y’all like it,” said my classmate, an adorable blue-eyed blonde who had been steadfastly watching over my shoulder. “I picked it out special. You see, we were at the store, and my momma was all set to buy a cross. But then I told her that we had one Jewish girl at school, and so we bought this instead. I’m so glad you were the one who got it.”
“I love it,” I responded. And I did. I treasured that yellow rose of Texas, and I wore it for years -- long after I left the fourth grade, and Texas, far behind.
To my mind, this anecdote from my girlhood aptly sums up the duality of the Lone Star State – small-minded enough to presume that everyone is the same, and simultaneously big-hearted enough to change course dramatically upon realizing it’s not true. To my mind, Texas is the geographic embodiment of Walt Whitman’s famous passage from Song of Myself: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes).”
To my mind, Texas even can be said to symbolize the inherent complexity of the human (and the formerly human), and we can see that clearly in the Texan characters in the BuffyVerse (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its daughter show, Angel: the Series).
First let us consider Fred, aka Winifred Burkle: part-time librarian, physics doctoral candidate, survivor of five years in the hellish Pylea dimension and eventually an indispensable part of Angel Investigations. Smarter, braver and sweeter than Willow Rosenberg, her counterpart on the mother show, Fred is by turns endearing in her naked adoration of the “handsome man” who rescues her, astounding in her lack of fear of his alternate monster visage and brilliant enough to figure out how to open the portal back to Earth dimension.
Yet, this apparently innocent young woman is later revealed, during the regression-to-teenagerhood episode, to have been an enthusiastic “pothead” in her youth. And, despite a likely Southern Baptist upbringing at a school not too different from mine, as she gains self-confidence she becomes engaged in a hearty sexual romance with a younger, dark-skinned high school dropout. “Texas loves the black man,” she tells her colleague whom she alone addresses by his Christian name. Well, maybe Texas doesn’t – I’m not sure that even now blacks are any more loved there than Jews -- but she surely does, at least for a while. And, later yet, she goes after another man as aggressively as any gal in the BuffyVerse, as strongly as she needs to, in a love affair that sadly, likely was never consummated.
Now comes Lindsey McDonald, blue-eyed boy at Wolfram and Hart, the devil’s own law firm. In truth, he is no “tiny Texan” as his nemesis describes him derisively, but, like the actor who plays him, someone who spent most of his life on the north side of the Red River line.
It would take a far longer essay than this one to essay the countless contradictions in this tormented litigator’s character. But the eyes of Texas surely are upon him.
How else to explain the smooth-tongued attorney who coolly represents evil of all sorts for years – then risks a bullet to the head and suffers a savage beating to save three mutant children he’s never even met? Who goes back to serve the firm’s never-seen but seemingly Satanic “senior partners,” all the while wearing a cross hidden under his designer shirt? And who in seconds dreams up a plausible scenario to get a corporate client off a devastating poisoning rap – then gives up a huge promotion to his longtime rival, in the process saving her life? How else, indeed, but to observe that he is not tiny, but large, containing multitudes.
Then there are Mr. and Mrs. Burkle, who in their salt-of-the-earth simplicity have the distinction of being the only truly good biological parent pair portrayed in any season on either show. In a heart-wrenching flashback, they watch their child drive off to her destiny in California -- the ultimate denouement of which none of them could possibly have foreseen.
But upon being reunited with Fred many years later, they fully expect to take
their daughter – who must be at least 30 by that time – back to live
with them at their prairie homestead home.
(It cannot be coincidence that Fred’s first act as lab chief at Wolfram
and Hart is to put up a poster of the Texas-based Dixie Chicks musical trio,
whose first hit, Wide Open Spaces, tells of a girl who breaks from her protective
parents to follow a dream that “takes the shape of a place out West.”
The narrator “needs wide open spaces, room to make a big mistake.”
Ma and Pa Burkle, and Fred, surely never could have guessed just how big a mistake
it would be.)
Then finally we come to Tector, Lyle and Candy Gorch, seen in two early episodes on the mother show as unreconstructed vampires intent on destroying a Slayer or two. Alone among the dozens of “lonely ones” we meet over the years, the brothers are known to have been hardened career criminals even when human. But, despite this and their deep sibling rivalry, they stick together till the end, acting more loyal than most human brothers would be. And, even more touchingly, though vampires are unbound by human convention, it is crucial that the presumed Slayer be made to understand that the honeymooning Candy is not merely a girlfriend but a lawfully wedded wife – in fact, the only fanged spouse the shows ever portray.
If I had the room, or if you, dear reader, had the time, I could give more examples of these complexities, these contradictions, these dualities. But I ask you to allow these little snippets, like my lost-long-ago necklace, to suffice to show the larger meaning of my former home.
I’ll sum up, then, by observing that, as they say, things are always larger
-- and stranger -- in the Lone Star State than elsewhere. The three Burkles,
Lindsey McDonald and the three Gorches are totally fictional Texans. But, in
their attitudes and in their actions, they aptly represent the big, scary, hairy,
complex, contradictory, wild nature of all true human existence. It’s the
same thought expressed a few years back by the Dixie Chicks in Wide Open Spaces,
and earlier by Walt Whitman in Song of Myself. And, in a very real sense, this
essence shows itself in all of us – be we black, Jew, Indian or Southern
Baptist, in Singapore, Israel, Australia or anywhere the BuffyVerse is watched,
dissected and revered. Our similarities outweigh our differences, because --
at least anywhere this side of Pylea – we are all of us warmed by the same,
lone star.