Buffy the vampire slayer and soaps.

Essay by iamweaselHigh School, 11th grade January 2004

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Describe the ways in which different television fictional narratives appeal to their audience, refer to specific texts in your answer.

The narrative of a television programme is the way in which the storyline unfolds, the narrative shows how meaning is constructed in order to achieve the audiences understanding. Narratives unfold differently in television texts and are constructed through the camera work, sound and mise-en-scene, it refers to all the events, explicitly presented and inferred to tell the story.

As narratives vary from text to text they appeal to their audiences in different ways. One such television programme is the hybrid text 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' which falls in the teen drama and horror genres. 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' uses a self-contained narrative with each storyline beginning and ending within the same episode. The text also uses re-gendering of characters within the narrative to make it more interesting to its target audience.

The lead character Buffy Summers is an active female character rather than the traditional passive female who is helplessly killed in horror or there only for the male characters. Buffy therefore is a post-feminine heroin; she is physically fit and strong offering a positive female role model for many females within the audience. The character appeals to the female audience furthermore as she is the primary casual agent, driving the narrative and breaking past stereotypes of previous females in the horror genre.

'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' also offers viewers scopohilia. According to the theorist Laura Mulvey, Buffy offers three levels of scopic pleasure. Firstly it offers voyeurism, where the audience can lawlessly observe female characters where no one else knows this is taking place, through a dual process; firstly by watching the females from outside the text or secondly within the text where...