Buffyverse 2002: The Buffy Symposium

University of Melbourne, 21 November, 2002

There was a screening room showing episodes of Buffy and Angel, a lecture hall full of fans who cheered the Buffy/Spike kiss in "Once More, With Feeling" and booed when it was suggested that Spike ought to ‘clock Xander one’. There was a lookalike contest, five blind round robin fanfics, and the Buffy X-Box game available to be played during breaks. And there was a whole group of people who would run, screaming, with their hands over their ears, at the slightest mention of season seven.

But this was not a Buffy Convention. This was day-long Symposium run by the Cinema Studies Department of the University of Melbourne. And it was a great day. It was a Con with brains. Over the course of the day, fifteen papers were presented, by academics from all over Australia, ranging from a discussion of the use of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in Buffy episodes, to the starpower of Sarah Michelle Gellar, to the portrayal of lesbianism and lesbian sex in seasons four and six. The Symposium was massively overbooked: probably 100 people had to be turned away, and the lecture theatre licensed to seat 350 had people crammed into the aisles. More people watched the presentations on closed-circuit TV from the foyer. The Symposium was covered in Melbourne’s main newspaper, and the organisers received inquiries from overseas. For something that had started as an idea for an internal symposium for staff of the Cinema Studies department, it grew phenomenally.

Anyway, before I get into summarising each of the fifteen papers, I want to mention the clips that were shown within some of the papers. Over the course of the day, we saw clips from the following episodes: "What’s My Line, part 2", "Anne", "The I in Team", "Who Are You?" "Superstar", "Real Me", "Checkpoint" and "Once More, With Feeling". (That’s at least one episode from each season except season one.) We also saw clips from season seven episodes (which won’t be broadcast here until February, and then only if we’re lucky), from the original Buffy movie, the titles from the X-box game, and a clip of Sarah Michelle singing and dancing at the MTV Movie Awards.

On to the Session One summary…