by Joshua Gryniewicz

Stronger Stories, 
Stronger Community

copyright (c) 2003 by Josh Gryniewicz

In present day American society, community is a somewhat obscure concept. Our drive for efficiency and the celebration of the individual has left us isolated. Without external support systems the family structure collapses. Without a mythology our culture becomes flooded with a sense of loneliness and despair. As Rollo May argues in his book a Cry for Myth a longing for mythology is actually a hunger for community.

Television is the antithesis of a storytelling community. It owes a great responsibility for excising the mythic portion of stories, the tale telling tradition of passing folk wisdom, history, culture and social values in narrative form from one generation to the next. Instead it demands the manufacturing of mass-produced stories to fill tidy half-hour slots and sell coveted advertising space. Our society has sped up to function at the height of efficiency and stories have been tailored to meet this accelerated demand leaving no room for the sacred. The communal atmosphere of telling has been reduced to a private experience where individuals loose themselves in mind-numbing stretches of superficiality and entire families sit side-by-side incapable of effectively communicating with one another. The formulaic drama, comedy, and action provide a superficial presentation that appeals to the basest human emotions and provides nothing more than entertainment, which often becomes mind numbingly addictive.

This month Happy Feet Productions announces its comprehensive national list of storytelling guilds, groups and organizations throughout the country - these groups represent "formal" storytelling communities. In celebration of its release Mythic Heritage announces a three-part series on storytelling and community. We begin here with an ironic exploration of an informal storytelling community that formed around the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it is a storytelling community in the most informal sense and an exception to TV's role in deconstructing the emphasis of stories in our culture. In August, MH will dig deeper to ask, is America is a land without myth as some academics and writers contend? We will investigate this question and its impact on the concept of community. Our series will conclude in September with suggestions on developing a sense of community with a storytelling tradition.

Storytelling at its finest is a living entity, a physical space, it doesn't simply entertain or engage, but envelops its audience into an experience. It is an event where the audience feels as though they are living the plot and acting as the character. Television is usually not equipped to deliver phenomena; it demands mass-produced stories to fill tidy half-hour slots devoted more to coveted advertising space then to its viewers. The result is entertaining at best, and even that is pretty rare effect. Buffy, however, was one exception to this rule (no wonder it never won an Emmy).

Joss Whedon, the show's writer/ creator stated in an interview, "...that's sort of the point of Buffy...it's about adolescence, which is the most important thing people go through in their development, becoming an adult. And it mythologizes it in such a romantic way-it basically says, 'Everybody who made it through adolescence is a hero.' I wanted people to embrace it in a way that exists beyond...I wanted people to internalize it, and make up fantasies where they were in the story, to take it home with them, for it to exist beyond the TV show. And we've done exactly that."

Though not every episode captured this essence, for us and hundreds of other groups across the country every week served as the source of a ritual event for six of the seven years it ran - pizza, beer and a gathering of friends took on greater significance at this regular observance. Our group ranged from as few as three to as many as twelve hunkered down in front of the box (sometimes packing full a studio apartment!) Unlike the festivities of a Superbowl Sunday, or rooting on your favorite Survivor, these events contained the components of a storytelling tradition. As Whedon proposed, our community did embrace it. We perpetuated the mythology in the form of spoilers discussing where we felt romantic relationships would lead, how the characters would overcome the big bad and where the story would actually go. Sometimes our plots were more interesting than the way the events actually played out, but the true significance lay in where these dialogues led. We felt like obsessed "soap opera" fans chattering away about the characters as though they were close friends, but these conversations inevitably would become about us, about real events and real things that were happening in our lives, which may not have been a topic otherwise.

Rollo May in his book Cry for Myth writes that in our present day society, the hunger for myth is in fact a longing for community. May asserts that stories provide a sense of personal identity by telling us who we are and bonding us to a community - they reinforce our value system and help us cope with the life's overwhelming mysteries. Stories traditionally served as catalyst for introspection and self-analysis by addressing the concerns of a community while reassuring a person's role in the group.

In the book Killing Monsters, Gerard Jones writes of Buffy specifically, he argues that she has been a source of empowerment and inspiration to countless youth. Her destiny and the powers she held isolated her from her closest friends and family, just as every teen has felt cut-off, alienated, alone, confused and misunderstood by the rest of the world. Even as adults, many of us faced with overwhelming choices or various crisis experience similar feelings. Buffy in the tradition of mythic hero counterparts perseveres thereby, motivating us to overcome the adversity in our own life. Furthermore, what teen has not suspected at one time that Dean's are demon spawn and their High School a gateway to hell? I can personally attest to the fact that my freshman year gym teacher was probably capable of rotating his head 360-degrees and puking pea soup.

This is more than an academic theory. As a counselor, I witnessed first hand Jones' assertions, as the Slayer helped more than one youth grapple with issues of identity. The most extreme example, however, was the role that Buffy played in helping me uncover a suicide pact. In a discussion about one episode in session a youth confessed that he'd made the pact and that he was afraid that his girlfriend was going to follow through with it, he had changed his mind, but if she died he was obligated to follow through with it. He agreed to make a contract with me to not hurt himself (which rendered his other contract null and void) and let me help arrange therapy for his girlfriend as well.

The show's metaphorical context further helped me to survive the emotional fatigue and burnout of my job, it will be missed by many, but its mythology will live on.        

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