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99 All Those Apocalypses Disaster Studies and Community in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel L I N D A J . J E N C S O N The interdisciplinary field of disaster studies is one aspect of the social sciences that takes the power of mass media very seriously. You will not hear “it’s only entertainment” from disaster researchers. When viewers watch real people on the news or fictional characters in films and on television, they are unconsciously absorbing role models for their own future behavior. Popular media help people to think the unthinkable, giving them a repertoire of potential responses available to them should the unthinkable come to pass. Scholars in the field of disaster research are quite clear on the power of mass media to promote the resilience of communities and individuals, or, conversely, to promote dysfunctional behaviors that can literally befuddle people’s response to disaster, befuddle those people to death. In this chapter, I take a look through the lens of disaster studies at Joss Whedon’s apocalypse-filled creation Buffy the Vampire Slayer and to a lesser extent Angel, the spin-off series about Buffy’s vampire lover. What kind of messages are Whedon and the other screenwriters who work with him putting out for the potential victim/survivor of natural and humanmade disaster? As is well known, Whedon hopes to empower girls, women, and nonsexist men through his texts. Can Whedon manage to empower the potential victim of disaster as well? Can the way that his characters respond to monster attacks, the collapse of a city into a giant crater, or the imminent end of the world give us any clues about how to respond in real-world mass crises? Or do his words and images succumb to the lethal myths of disaster so often portrayed in American visual media? I will approach the question by examining how media portrayals of disaster can influence disaster response in the real world. 100 ✴ Buffy the Vampire Slayer Disaster depictions come to consumers through both fiction and nonfiction , primarily the news industry. A study done by disaster researchers affiliated with the University of Colorado, published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, sums up mainstream disaster reporting through an examination of coverage in the aftermath of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. Bluntly, they found the media reports to be “highly oversimplified and distorting” (Tierney et al. 2006, 73). For example, incidents of violence among evacuees in the Superdome and the city at large were grossly exaggerated, and a widely repeated quotation from Governor Blanco gave law enforcement the false impression that the city of New Orleans was under martial law, when in fact the Constitution of Louisiana has no martial-law provision. False reports and interpretations were so influential that Tierney’s group concludes, “Media stories influenced officials to adopt unproductive and outright harmful response strategies during the emergency” (63). Harmful responses included pulling National Guard and law enforcement off search and rescue after the second day and the use of troops to entrap flood victims in New Orleans while preventing outside aid volunteers and agencies from entering. These acts ensured that no one except Fish and Wildlife officers and the Coast Guard could legally rescue survivors still trapped in attics and on rooftops, essentially leaving an unknown number who could have been saved—perhaps hundreds—to die. Supplies were withheld outside the city, while even the Red Cross and Salvation Army were barred from New Orleans for days, causing even more unnecessary deaths (Tierney et al. 2006; Brinkley 2006; Solnit 2009, 247–66). There are even documented instances of law enforcement fatally shooting innocent flood victims (Solnit 2009, 258–64; Kunzelman 2011). Disaster coverage compounded preexisting ineptitude by falsely confirming leadership’s paranoid fears, promoting the mistaken belief that the more than ten thousand survivors trapped in New Orleans (trapped not only by water but also by government troops and law enforcement) were a danger to anyone entering the city as well as to residents of outlying areas above the water line. With few members of the news media having learned from Katrina, a similar case can be made for media distortions contributing to aid delays after the earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 2010 (Jencson 2010a, 2010b). Tierney’s analysts point out common media misconceptions that lead reporters to overlook what really happens in disaster situations. The analysts state further that reliance on certain myths commonly leads...

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