Roads through Fantasy Last Longer than Maps (or, L. Frank Baum, Oz, and the Ephemeral Nature of Utopian Dreams)

Sunday night, we're going back to Oz again. Actually, this time it's not Oz. It's the Outer Zone or the O.Z. (As in "Welcome to the O.Z., bitch"? Well, those in mourning for Seth and Summer can dream, can't they?) Apparently, though, the Road that runs through this new country is still pretty much the same as the old Yellow one we already know and love, as are the quartet who go down that road, not to mention the humbug and the frightfest they have to face down at its termini.

Since it was published 107 years ago, L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has inspired, not just countless passing references, but several dozen distinct adaptations and retellings. These began in 1902, with the original musical stage adaptation (which Baum himself had a hand in), through at least three literal film adaptations (in 1910, 1925, and 1939, as well as one very clever Muppetification a few years back that hewed surprisingly close to Baum, right down to the inclusion of a wonderfully Kalidah-like Statler and Waldorf), as well as the 1970s stage and film versions of The Wiz, and any number of would-be prequels and spinoffs, most notably Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel Wicked, its print sequels, and its 2003 musicalization.

In many ways, Baum's story has become exactly what he wanted it to be: the classic U.S. fairy tale, an American work that can stand on the shelf next to such British classics as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, not to mention such post-Baum perennials as The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, or even the recent Harry Potter books. In another sense, though, Baum's story has failed over time to achieve its goals, because for most of its fans Oz is only a story and not a world, at least not in the sense that Baum intended.


Between 1900 and 1920, Baum wrote fourteen books about Oz, as well as at least a dozen other fantasy novels for children that were eventually revealed, through overlapping characters and landscapes, to take place in the same "universe" as the Oz books. Incredibly, he did this before comic books and the golden age of the American pulps, about twenty-five or thirty years before all but the geekiest fanboys talked about universes or crossovers. (When you think about it, it was probably before either geeks or fanboys too.) According to pulp historian Jess Nevins, crossovers were more popular in Europe than the United States during these years, and when they did appear, they occurred more in passing than as a self-conscious construction. Quite often, they were simply sales gimmicks. Before Baum, the most lasting authors to have thought of their works as taking place in a holistic "universe" were such French writers as Honore de Balzac, Emile Gaboriau, and Jules Verne, and none of them were as interested as Baum in creating a fully imagined world that was starkly alternate to our own. For a time at least, Baum's vision was so powerful that it was regularly continued after his death by Ruth Plumly Thompson and John R. Neill, with one new Oz book appearing every year through 1942, for a total of 36 books over 42 years.

There are at least a half-dozen reasons why what Baum called "The Royal History of Oz" petered out after this point, dissolving from this increasingly detailed chronicle of an almost palpable universe into miscellaneous pastiches and apocrypha. But I don't think it's accidental that the decline of literary Oz almost exactly coincides with the rise of cinematic Oz. 1942 was just three years after the initial release of the famous MGM musical adaptation with Judy Garland. In those days before annual TV screenings and repeated VHS and DVD viewings, the movie didn't acquire instant cult status, but the story had been sufficiently reimagined in this mid-twentieth-century version that in retrospect it seems clear that it had now taken a new form. The Old World balkanization of Baum's Oz into four distinctly colored countries--purple Gillikin in the north, blue Munchkin in the east, red Quadling in the south, and yellow Winkie in the west--had been replaced by the simple cultural dichotomy of sepia Kansas and Technicolor Oz. Oz is not as foreign and resolutely monarchist in its MGM incarnation as it is in Baum, but rather a signifying dreamscape that inevitably refers back to our own grounded world. Noel Langley's screenplay for the film makes Dorothy's journey a comfortingly roundtrip one, making sure in the film's last scene that even the youngest members of the audience understand that, although it's fun to visit the colorful Emerald City, you would never really want to live there.

In Baum's books, though, that's exactly what Dorothy ends up doing. Having first arrived there in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), she returns in Ozma of Oz (1907), Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908), and The Road to Oz (1909). In The Emerald City of Oz (1910), when Uncle Henry defaults on the mortgage for his Kansas farm, Dorothy finally decides that she, Henry, and Em should move to Oz permanently and live in the palace with Princess Ozma. Granted royal status, they can work there as they choose, to be helpful to others, but they will not need money and will never grow old or sick. In that wonderfully odd little book, Dorothy and her family take a tour of Oz to see if they want to live there, visiting such unique sequestered enclaves as Fuddlecumjig, Utensia, Bunbury, and Bunnybury. As Henry and Em discover, Oz is a nation the way Queens or Los Angeles is a city. The more we learn about Oz beyond the original Yellow Brick Road, the more we realize that it is a centrifugal aggregation of distinct, barely connected little villages that are somehow all benevolently presided over by a girl princess who will never age beyond about 10 years and who had previously lived for a time as a boy.

Baum's books are too imprecise to ever be considered science fiction, but they are what some scifi authors like to call speculative fiction. They imagine an alternate mode of social or cultural organization, in which the author retains the features of our world that s/he prefers, and corrects those that s/he believes cause our most obvious social ills. At its early twentieth-century peak, the Oz series falls in that chronological gap between the high tide of the American utopian novel and the so-called Golden Age of American science fiction. Baum's universe, however, obviously lacks the articulated sociological background of Howells' Altruria, Asimov's Foundation, and the like. It imagines a possible community without laying out the practical steps of how to build it.

Neither as rigorous a plan for the future as a nineteenth-century utopian like Edward Bellamy might have imagined, nor as mere a dream of the mid-twentieth-century present as Louis B. Mayer might have wanted us to believe, Baum's Oz is no more or less than a wish, a desire for a land in which children rule with the Romantic wisdom that precedes social theory, and each community is allowed to live on its own terms as long as its inhabitants do not threaten others. Famously inspired by the "White City" of Chicago's 1893 World Columbian Exposition, Baum's Emerald City is much more like the sort of necessary evil of a metropolis that regionalist writer Hamlin Garland imagined in his 1893 collection Crumbling Idols: a nexus through which unfettered provincial creativity may pass from one safely isolated community to another. So much a part of its time, Baum's dream of a rationally ordered large nation is a fantasy of antimodern Progressivism, a unique but telling vision of monoracial cultural pluralism. Seen from the perspective of its own time, Baum's Oz is in some ways a lovely little dream: a quirky if not necessarily practical alternate U.S., with a resolutely agrarian lifestyle no matter how much magic or technology may enter its borders, and a capital city that sits rather sensibly (like Chicago) in the middle of its geography and not off to one side or the other.

But that's not the Oz that most people seem to have wanted for the last seven decades. While such esteemed fantasists as Walter Murch, Philip Jose Farmer and Tim Burton may have tried over the years to relaunch Oz as a fullblown mythos, most audience members don't want to explore Baum's whole land in all its ramifications. They simply want to retell the same story again and again. Even within Baum's lifetime, he almost went broke trying to make a varied series of films about Oz during the 1910s, while continuing stage and film adaptations of his first Oz book flourished.

Moreover, the farther away we get from Baum's time, the more outlandish his dream of an alternate America seems, as impractical as Henry George's land tax scheme or the economic reorganization of the U.S. advocated by a contemporaneous socialist like Eugene V. Debs. In the years after Baum's death, the spread of mass media became so complete that the idea of discrete, culturally isolated villages making up a world, let alone a country, has become as quaint as a day in Bunnybury with the Whiskered Friskers. Tellingly, the transformative 1939 film of Baum's most well-known novel changed the cultural geography of its protagonist's journey, with the all-consuming Emerald City serving as a counterpart, not to the rural sections of Oz, but to Dorothy's own Kansas farm. For the Dorothy Gale of 1900, Oz is a country, with a fairly varied topography. For Judy Garland's Dorothy, however, Oz is a city surrounded by sparsely inhabited land that has been cleared and cultivated to varying degrees. In MGM's latter version, Dorothy's journey is thus from the country to the city and back, reinforcing the neotraditionalism of the period in which the film was made.

But what is so important about Dorothy's journey anyway? In some ways, it resembles the classic monomyth that Joseph Campbell was famously outlining in the same years during which cinematic Oz was waxing and literary Oz waning. Dorothy has a quest, a magical talisman (or two or three) that she must obtain, helpers, opponents, and a descent into darkness if not a literally submerged underworld. In the MGM version, The Wiz, and several other late twentieth century versions of the story, Dorothy even arrives home with the sort of boon of knowledge that good mythic heroes are supposed to attain. Some spin even wilder theories of what the telos of Dorothy's journey signifies, with two characters in the MGM commissary in film scholar Stuart M. Kaminsky's period detective story Murder on the Yellow Brick Road offering rival theories that the novel's most famous film version speaks symbolically of either a girl's discovery of her own menstruation or the United States' imminent entry into World War II.

In traditional mythology, though, the knowledge that a mythic hero gains is supposed to change things, to help her heal the wounded land to which she has returned at the end of the journey. By contrast, when Dorothy arrives back in Kansas, everything is just as bad as it was when she left. She has not come back with knowledge that will improve her world. She hasn't even brought back the beautiful slippers that she acquired during her journey. In nearly every version of the story, it is legitimate to ask why Dorothy wants to go back, when she can have so much more fun in Oz than in the home we have seen. In most versions--but not in Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's highly graphic novel Lost Girls--we may even wish in vain for the sort of self-consciously rebellious protagonist for the story that the late Jonathan Larson imagined in one of his lyrics for Rent: "Why Dorothy and Toto/Went over the rainbow/To piss off Auntie Em/La vie boheme!" In Geoff Ryman's wonderful novel Was, the multiple protagonists go to various versions of Oz for almost exactly those sorts of reasons, most of them escaping violent or stultifying home environments.

But most versions' Dorothys are not bohemians or rebels, not bold girls wishing to escape the fatalistically grey (or sepia, if you must) landscape of environmentally precarious and economically challenged Kansas. They're tourists, albeit ones taking a vacation that is a little dangerous for girls of their tender years. And in most instances of Oz, so are we. What makes The Wizard of Oz satisfying in most of its mediated forms is not its destination but its journey--its Road, if you will, and the sights that we can see along its way. We don't want to live in Oz, in the way that some of Baum's original child readers might have wanted to, but we do want to visit it, again and again, to take the journey and see the sights, to stop at our favorite scenic overlooks.

Past a certain level of familiarity, Baum's narrative doesn't even matter at all, except as a touchstone that must not be thoughtlessly contradicted. (This is especially easy if one only knows the first book in the series.) The settings and characters serve their own functions, become their own archetypes, and can be spun off to form entirely different stories. This has happened most famously in the print and stage versions of Wicked, in which two characters that seemed to signify the traditional fairy tale good mother/bad mother dichotomy in the original story now come to serve as types of contrasting passages from girlhood to womanhood.

For Baum, though, I think the journey did matter, especially the reiterated journey that Dorothy takes across all of those early books. His Dorothy is the one version who seems to have most unequivocally had her consciousness raised. She knew she wanted to live in Oz and not in early twentieth-century Kansas, even if it took her five trips to figure out how to get her green card. The ending Baum chose for Dorothy's fifth and final trip, in The Emerald City of Oz, is quite touching. After Dorothy and her family have definitively decided to stay (and the book's nominal villains have been defeated), Glinda the Good seals off Oz, making it invisible to the outside world. "But Toto and I will always love you," Dorothy writes in a final note to Baum's readers, "and all the other children who love us."

For a Progressive-era story for children, this ending is rather stark. It suggests that once your consciousness has been raised enough to see that your surroundings don't necessarily have to be so unpleasant, your only responsibility is to save your immediate family, not to improve the impoverished world from which you came. Not surprisingly, this intended ending didn't stick, anymore than Arthur Conan Doyle's attempt to drown Sherlock Holmes in the Reichenbach Falls a decade or so before had stuck with that author's readers. Baum, like Doyle, ended up returning to the mythos that had made him so popular, but his later stories in this universe were as unsatisfying when compared to the originals as Doyle's post-return Holmes stories are when compared to Watson's pre-Reichenbach Adventures and Memoirs.

And yet the two endings are not exactly comparable. Professor Moriarty was a deus (or demon) ex machina: he was a wholly unanticipated narrative function that Doyle hoped would rid him of a character of which he had grown tired. For Baum's most perceptive readers, though, his story of Dorothy Gale had been tending toward this conclusion from the very beginning. In the original edition of Emerald City, at the top of the page on which the text of Dorothy's letter is reproduced, there is a picture of a plane very like the Wright Brothers'. "I am told," Princess Ozma remarks in another late chapter, "that the earth people have invented airships that can fly them anywhere they want to go." For Ozma and her creator, the arrival of the airplane, among other inventions, means that even fanciful connections between Oz and our world must soon come to an end.

In the long view of modern history, the articulated organization of society changes much more rapidly than any hegemonic notions we may share of the self. Consequently, the alternate societies that we imagine have a much more limited shelflife than any technologies of self-improvement that our latter-day myths may produce. Dorothy, Aunt Em, and Uncle Henry did need a map to Oz, as did many of Baum's original readers. 107 years later, most of us don't need a full map anymore. We just need to know the one road that will get us where we want to go.

Opening Acts, Narrowcasting, and Whether Our Music Really Says Who We Are (or, Porter Wagoner Plus Nick Cave Kinda Does Equal Jack White)

The White Stripes played Madison Square Garden Tuesday night, which in itself might be worth a post--e.g., Can two people make a sound big enough to fill a place that large? Yes, if they're divorced and sound like concentrated Led Zeppelin--but what fascinated me most were the opening acts.

I got an email the day before the concert telling me that the Stripes would be going on after 10. I noticed that Porter Wagoner was opening for them, backed by Marty Stuart and his band, but my eye skipped over the fact that there was a second opening act, Grinderman. Only when the frontman of the band started singing did my friend say, "Oh my god that's Nick Cave." The juxtaposition of the tidily entertaining Wagoner and Cave's willfully chaotic new band was odd to say the least, but most of the audience probably didn't notice. The seats were half empty at 8 and barely more filled at 9. At 10, though, everyone was in their places and on their feet for the next two hours. Clearly, they had gotten the email.

I actually look forward to opening acts. (Yes, as a matter of fact, I do like the trailers before the movie too.) I like the fact that I got a chance to hear three different styles of music in one long evening. I was especially happy to hear Wagoner, a number of whose songs I like--especially "The Cold Hard Facts of Life"--but whom I never would have gone to see just by himself. Nevertheless, I was reminded again that I would never want to be an opening act. I've performed in restaurants while people are eating, and even that threw me off my game. When you perform, there's a certain expectation that the audience at least wants to pay attention. After all, they came there to see you. If they're not paying attention, then you work harder to make sure that they do. But when you're an opening act, there's a built-in resistance that must sometimes seem insurmountable: I do know who I came to see, mister, and it sure as hell ain't you.

There seem to be three or four theories behind the selection of opening acts. Sometimes, they're mostly there to provide variety, the way Frank Sinatra and other old school Vegas singers would have comedians open for them rather than musicians. Other times, the opening acts are meant to serve as more obvious stylistic appetizers for the star attraction. Over the years, the Rolling Stones have caught at least a dozen rock bands just before they were about to break wide and gotten them to open for them, most notably Guns N Roses in the late 1980s. Many times, the not yet-broken acts are on the same record label as the main attraction, and the label is using various opening slots to simply get them known outside of their familiar regional base. Back in the early 1970s, for example, between his first and second albums, Bruce Springsteen opened for The Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, Blood, Sweat, and Tears, Paul Butterfield, Chicago, The Eagles, Hall and Oates, Richie Havens, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Lou Reed, Sha-Na-Na, and Stevie Wonder, all in the space of a few months. One can argue that Springsteen's music shared specific traits with each of those acts, but the sheer musical range of the performers within that list, particularly within the popular music industry back then, is a little daunting. This was obviously about exposure pure and simple, about getting him on the road and in front of people who wouldn't listen to him otherwise.

My favorite opening acts, though, are the ones that the main attractions themselves choose on purpose in order to educate their audience. You like us, we like these people, why don't you see if you like them too? This is especially true in cases like Tuesday night when the stars are trying to get their audience to listen to something a little bit different. The most infamous case of this was back in the 1960s when the Monkees asked Jimi Hendrix to open for them for a number of dates. (Eyewitness accounts suggest that Davy Jones fans were in fact not yet ready to kiss the sky.) Even if the artist is established, however, mixing genres can still meet with audience indifference at best or hostility at worst. One of the hardest working performances I've ever seen was Kanye West opening a stadium date for the Rolling Stones last fall. Unlike the Wagoner/Grinderman/Stripes bill, I'm not sure that West has much in common with the Stones musically, but he openly embraced the challenge of performing for an audience that almost certainly knew his name more than they knew his songs. He saved the one they were sure they'd know ("Golddigga") until about 2/3 of the way through the performance but alternated styles and arrangements for over an hour, building his act as the stadium filled. I'm not sure how many fans he won over that night, but if he didn't he sure went down swinging.

The truth is, most successful musicians have more eclectic tastes than their fans. In the late 1970s, when rock fans were shouting "Disco Sucks" and burning truckloads of allegedly offending vinyl in public, many of the acts to which they pledged their allegiance (like the Stones or Springsteen) were listening to, loving, and openly promoting dance records, even wondering whether the 12-inch remixed single was a format that might enhance rock music too. When a hip-hop performer like Nelly collaborates with Tim McGraw, fans of both acts may scratch their heads. What the typical country fan prefers is not an open collaboration between generically separated artists but rather a more stereotyped usage of markers from one musical genre in another, as when Big & Rich positioned themselves several years back as ersatz "country rappers."

Think how often people listen to music without listening to it: they catch a repeated phrase, a rhythm, a combination of instruments. The impression matters more than the substance, especially the first impression. For the last twenty-five years, our whole system of radio stations in the United States has been based on this premise. For the most part, satellite radio has not represented an advance over these conditions. Fans of satellite radio praise it as a way to find music that you'd never hear on terrestrial radio, but your options are inevitably divided up by genre, by sound.

Except for rare personality-based radio shows (like the one Bob Dylan has been doing lately on XM), you don't get the sort of mix that was more common on radio in the 1960s and 1970s. Those madly eclectic shows, vestiges of which you can still find on some college stations, flourished in that accidentally golden age that fell between the time when television made radio seem irrelevant and the time when demographic breakdowns taught ad executives how you could make money off niche culture as well as mass culture.

But it's not just The Industry that is to blame. The same complaints, I believe, could be made about Ipods. Yes, people have all this music at their fingertips, but how generically varied are the contents of most of the Ipods you've seen, particularly of users aged over 35? We find our niches, be they generic, chronological, or both, and they all too frequently become ruts. Our musical taste, to a certain extent, is betrayed by our guilty pleasures, not the patently good stuff we embrace in all genres but the mediocrities we still enjoy even though we can't defend them. Like our larger lifestyles, all our music appears to fit together; we accept that Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, and books by refugee African child soldiers all fit together with strong coffee; and I'm not entirely sure that all this assumed neatness is such a good thing.

Particularly when dealing with older audiences, our popular culture frequently perpetuates the myth that all subcultures are separate and somehow individually "pure," but the truth is that all American mass culture springs from common sources and reflects the presence of multiple strains. Even though so many commentators have insisted for the last forty years that ideology trumps all, Clint Eastwood can direct Tim Robbins and Sean Penn in a film like Mystic River and everyone can get along famously, because familiar forms and genres can contain and even dilute ideology. At their most widely popular, male-dominated crime films can enlist both conservative and liberal sympathies to their cause. In fact, many of the most successful works of all kinds of American popular culture bind seemingly opposed ideologies together within singular mythic structures.

In an aesthetic form like film, this sort of ideological containment occurs on the level of story, mixing characters, scenes, and narrative outcomes. In a more abstract form like music, the containment is much harder to tease out. Sometimes, lyrics and music can appeal to different segments of the audience, as in Martina McBride's 1994 recording of Gretchen Cryer's "Independence Day," a song that mixed a familiarly rousing country arrangement with an ironically patriotic title to tell the story of an abused wife who stands up to her spouse. At the time of its release, the song didn't meet with the backlash that would greet the Dixie Chicks' "Goodbye Earl," which dealt with the same theme, five years later. The Chicks rocked murder in self-defense a little harder and made it sound like a blast. Cryer's music and McBride's performance on the earlier track, however, gave the clear impression that this was a solemn business. The lyrics were different on the two tracks, but the music was more different, and that made the controversial subject matter more or less respectable.

Most of the time, I love my country and I love its culture in all its varied messiness. As I hope for its future, I dream of a nation where that messiness is clearer. I'm not talking about "diversity" here or "multiculturalism," two words that have lost their initial utility as each has come to mean "pluralism" rather than something more wonderfully swirling and mixing. If we are a rainbow, it is not the sort of rainbow you see in a kindergarten classroom, in which each of the seven colors (ROYGBIV, remember?) is sharp and distinct. We are a rainbow as it exists in nature. Each shade blurs into the next, and when you truly see it, you know it's not seven things but one thing. You can't see where one of its supposed segments ends and the next one begins. To say that we're one is not to say that we're monochromatic, but we're not just two colors either. We're all the shades, and we are always modulating into each other.

If, as my musician friends keep telling me, the old New Orleans will probably never exist anymore, then we need the virtual equivalent of that world, maybe even in cyberspace. We need people bumping up against each other and listening to each other's music, whether they want to or not, finding the lost root chords and the potential for counterpoint. Culture may be based in ideology but only in stasis. When ideology changes, it is usually because it is following culture's lead.

Is it too much to think that a revolution like that can begin with listening to Porter Wagoner, Grinderman, and the White Stripes in one sitting? Maybe all you need to listen to is the Stripes' version of "Jolene," one of the greatest songs by Wagoner's even more talented ex-wife Dolly Parton. I don't know where the Stripes' version would find its proper home, but I can tell you it's not in a red state, and it's not in a blue state either. The way I hear it, it's pure purple.

Harry, Buffy, and the Post-1980s Adolescent Hero (or, The Boy Who Lived and The Girl Who Died--a Lot)

Let me get the most automatic business out of the way first, and lay out my still unspoiled predictions in advance of 12:01am Saturday: Harry dies. The lightning scar on his forehead is the last of the horcruxes that needs to be destroyed to turn Voldemort mortal again. Snape went undercover with the Death Eaters at the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and was acting on Dumbledore's orders all the while, even when he killed him at the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. (There could be some fudging here with Dumbledore's eventual resurrection via his phoenix Fawkes, but I hope not, for reasons that should be clear after you read what follows.) Depending on how far forward Rowling takes the story in the last chapter, I also expect that we may learn that Hermione eventually becomes a teacher at Hogwarts, possibly of Transfigurations, and maybe even Headmaster.

As I said, that's all the automatic business, but aside from the sheer mechanics of tying up the plot, what does this all mean? Over the last few weeks, journalists have been pouring over the last decade of Pottermania, deciding that it really didn't permanently change adolescent reading habits as much as many had hoped. They have also discovered, most tellingly, that much interest among younger readers dropped off after the first three books--which are, after all, the shortest, least grim, and most self-contained stories in the series. Even allowing for all this hedging, though, the books do seem to have created a sizable cult. In my own lifetime, I think only the world of Star Trek has achieved this level of widespread aesthetic communion, but unlike the Star Trek universe, which stretches across centuries and lightyears, the world of Harry Potter remains within very distinct boundaries of time and space. If Star Trek in all its incarnations captured for its adherents a particular vision of the perfect society, the Potter novels, even with all their shadow governmental agencies and extended backstories, ultimately trace the transit of a single life. Somehow, the books that relate that life have resonated with readers, particularly with the generation of readers who have grown up with them since the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 1997. The depth of that resonance should make us wonder where it comes from.

In that regard, the most useful comparison to Harry Potter may not be any of the members of the United Federation of Planets, but Buffy Anne Summers, more popularly known as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from the film (1992) and television series (1997-2003) that bore that name. I'm not sure if anyone has ever noted it before, but Harry and Buffy are almost the same age. Based on information given in J. K. Rowling's books and the Joss Whedon-supervised television series, Harry was born 31 July 1980, and Buffy was born less than six months later, on 19 January 1981. Although Buffy is younger than Harry, she seems older, in part because her story was told earlier, and in part because the key events in her life happen at later ages than those in Harry's. As every loyal reader knows, Rowling's novels tell the story of Harry's development from age 11 to age 17. By contrast, the core of Buffy's story covers an almost exactly later period, from age 16 to age 22. In other words, Rowling's last two Potter novels cover the same period as the first two seasons of Whedon's television series, both in terms of historical chronology and in terms of their protagonists' ages. Yes, I know both protagonists are fictional, but somehow I find it oddly fitting that in the spring of 1997, just about a month before Harry Potter witnessed Dumbledore's tragic death at Hogwarts, Buffy Summers herself died (for the first of three recorded times) in the caves under the Hellmouth-ridden town of Sunnydale.

The similarities between the two heroes are fascinating--both created by authors writing across gender lines, both seconded by clever witches who made it cool for girls to be bookworms, etc.--but it's that age difference that I think is probably most telling. In a sense, Buffy's story begins when Harry's ends. Harry Potter's story is a story of adolescence. It almost functions as the English equivalent of many of the early Marvel comics (Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, X-Men), asking the question: what would you do with powers if you had them? The strongest attraction of such fantasies always lies in their underlying emotional reality. This is what adolescence feels like to the vast middle of teenagers, neither under- nor over-privileged, in a relatively affluent society. If fairy tales offer younger children fantasies of alternative households and parents, superhero stories offer adolescents fantasies of alternative talents and fates: this is what I'm really like, the consumer thinks, I'm just killing time while I wait to fulfill my destiny. Rowling is obviously keenly aware of this and has made her characters' choices of eventual vocations within the magical world a minor but compelling subplot in her series. In the early books, the characters are just having fun with the discovery that they can do magic. As they advance though their education, however, the magic moves beyond mere play, and they begin asking: What do I want to do with this ability?

If Harry's story details a process of adolescent discovery, Buffy's traces her slow acceptance of adult responsibility. One of the most reiterated situations in Buffy's story is her refusal to take on the duties that come with her unique position as Slayer. From her initial awareness of her powers and move to a second high school at age 16, through her running away from home at age 17, to the aftermath of her unwilling resurrection from the dead at age 20, right down to her eventual comfort with her role as counselor, leader, and teacher at age 22. Buffy's path to full adulthood is persistently stymied by a longing to be "normal." She regularly dreams of what it would be like not to be special, not to have powers, not to have a unique destiny. She longs for the sense of play that Harry left behind around the time of the Tri-Wizard Tournament, just as he longs for the clear sense of purpose that she gained around the time that she graduated from high school.

Yet even though these two stories focus on different parts of growing up, they share a common historical grounding. There have been repeated attempts to determine the historical referents for the major events in Rowling's world--from 1930s homegrown fascism, to the rise of Thatcherism, to Tony Blair's role in the war on terror--but the genius of Rowling's creation is that this world is not merely a one-for-one allegory for ours but rather comprises its own internally consistent alternate reality. To my knowledge, there have been no analogous attempts to find historical referents for Buffy's Sunnydale, but even without a specific historical peg on which to hang a sociopolitical analogy, there is always the most accidental thing that the two heroes have in common: their birthdates. Both grew up in the world of the 1980s and 1990s, and their careers and separate paths through adolescence and young adulthood suggest that they are shaped by a shared generational psychology that is apparently transatlantic rather than national in origin.

As generational heroes, Harry and Buffy most clearly stand apart from the analogous characters who preceded them in popular culture by how they regard authority. In Buffy's case, this attitude is perhaps not so striking. In western society, we expect stories of the late high school and college years to entail a certain amount of vague "rebellion." But as parents who have read Harry's adventures to pre-teen children will tell you, it is striking how many rules Hogwarts students break in Rowling's books. When Dorothy Gale broke rules, there was always a consequence. Tom Swift, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys would never even have dreamt of breaking a rule to reach their goals. From their very first adventure, however, Harry, Ron, and Hermione have to break rules, to undermine the authority of nearly every adult around them (up to and including Albus Dumbledore) in order to achieve a satisfactory conclusion. This is not to say that they don't get in trouble for breaking some rules. It would be more accurate to say that one of the most important skills that Harry and his friends acquire over the series is learning which rules you should break and which rules you shouldn't. Unlike earlier adolescent heroes, the students of Hogwarts are not being taught to conform by their adventures.

They are not being taught to rebel either, though, and neither are Buffy and her friends. Rebellion and isolation inevitably lead to bad results, as nearly all of Whedon's characters realize during their first year of college. The appropriate response to oppressive, blind, even destructive conformity for both sets of heroes is not pure independence but the building of new societies: the creation of the armed resistance group Dumbledore's Army in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; the student-led counterattack at Sunnydale High's 1999 graduation ceremony, which ends up being a dry-run for the slayer army that Buffy trains in the last season of the television series and after. The rules cannot be trusted, and neither can the adults who made or enforce them. You can listen to these adults, you can learn from them, but ultimately you have to make your own world from the pieces that they leave you.

This ambivalence toward adults and what they might have to offer adolescents by way of example is the most compelling aspect of the two series' shared emotional world. Barring anything we might learn Saturday morning from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, with the exception of saintly Albus Dumbledore, no adult in either series can be fully trusted. Politicians and parents prove consistently unreliable, but even the characters' most valued mentors lose their tempers, drink to excess, and can practice unthinking cruelty unless prevented from doing so by the stories' more responsible adolescents. One episode from the third season of Buffy, entitled "Band Candy," showed this perhaps better than any other, when enchanted chocolate made the teachers and parents of Sunnydale revert to their own high school years. If anything, they acted worse than the members of Buffy's generation, with Buffy's usually buttoned-down mentor Rupert Giles being the worst offender of the lot. He slacked off on his Watcher duties, smoked marijuana and had sex with Buffy's mother, stripped down to his tshirt, and began inflicting casual violence and vandalism any chance he could get. The voice of order had reverted to his secret origin: a sneering punk who was only interested in the quickest kicks.

Sirius Black serves as a similarly ambivalent mentor for Harry Potter. In emphasizing that Black was wrongfully imprisoned is Azkaban for over a decade, many readers ignore the hints that he was something of a juvenile delinquent before he got in there: a darkly born, flying motorcycle-riding, unregistered Animagus who played a prank on Severus Snape during their own time at Hogwarts that almost got his classmate killed. Along with his friends (including Harry's father James), he felt that the rules did not apply to him, and that the magical world was made for his amusement. At least once, he seriously considers killing Peter Pettigrew, the man responsible for his imprisonment, in cold blood, and it is only the more responsible Harry who can talk him out of it. Both Giles and Black have a great deal to offer as mentors, but part of their mentees' maturation requires that they learn to do as they say and not always as they do.

Around the time that both Harry and Buffy were born, there was a considerable vogue for wearing tiny buttons with ironic messages. Like many other subcultural tics of the late 1970s and early 1980s, these buttons were both an inheritance from and a refutation of the counterculture of the 1960s. To be precise, the buttons were a continuation of the proudly declared politics of that earlier era, but their ironic messages were clear signs of the more alienated, less forthright era close at hand. My favorite button from this period you can still see around, although I sometimes wonder how many people got the joke. It bore only two words: QUESTION AUTHORITY. When I wore it, I was always surprised how many people read it as if it was a straightahead hippie message. Yeah, man, they thought it meant, don't let the establishment get away with anything, man. When I bought it, though, I had assumed that the first thing people were supposed to notice about the button was that it bore a direct order. Who's telling me to question authority, I thought it meant, and why should I do what they say?

I can't know for sure, but my sense is that if you were born after 1980, you don't need to have the irony of that button explained to you. The most lasting children's fantasies of the 1960s, stories like the film version of Mary Poppins and Roald Dahl's original novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, suggest that all a displaced child needs is to be taken under the wing of nice countercultural types and everything will turn out fine. Even their families will eventually get turned on. But the story changes once the countercultural types become the parents: then rebellion itself can become authority and even a form of legacy. Once you buy your five-year-old a tshirt with an anarchy symbol on it, cultural radicalism is now coexisting side by side with psychological conformity. That kind of unresolvable contradiction is exactly the sort of condition that is ripe for the creation of new pop myths, not just the ones I've traced in Harry's and Buffy's stories but those in a number of other post-1980 books, films, and TV series too, perhaps most arrestingly in Wes Craven's original Nightmare on Elm Street and Richard Kelly's film Donnie Darko.

Joss Whedon and others are currently writing a series for Dark House Comics that is frankly labelled Buffy: Season 8, but for me, the final episode of the TV series four years ago was the only ending I needed. J. K. Rowling has built up enough good will with me that I trust that her seventh book will round out her protagonist's story just as well, even if I'm wrong and he doesn't definitively die. As time goes on, it will be interesting to see if the stories of these characters prove powerful for new readers or simply remain touchstones for the generation that grew up with them. From all reports, the currently rising generation is less worried about having an embarrassing ex-hippie or ex-punk for a parent than they are about the rise of a form of blank conformism that is very different from the kind that ruled during the 1950s. Somewhere right now, someone is glimpsing precisely how different the conformity of our own time is from that of the earlier era. If we're very lucky, they'll use that sense of difference as the cornerstone of a brand new, fully imaginary world, one that finally helps us to clearly see what's going on in our own.