Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Myth, Metaphor & Morality

by Field, Mark

  Joyce really annoyed me on first watch when she told Angel to leave town. In retrospect, though, she was right. The “Buffy & Angel 4ever” scribbling should have clued me in. Angel may be forever, but Buffy isn’t. The Mayor was right about that among other things. Even the teaser shows them as incompatible beneath the cuddling. Angel’s dream reinforced this by showing him that his desire for Buffy would consume her. He really shouldn’t have needed Joyce’s push; he should have left on his own. Still, credit where credit is due – when push came to shove, he did make the right call.

  Buffy’s desire to be with Angel actually prevents her from growing up. Her own words condemn her: “Buffy: Don't what? Don't love you? I'm sorry. You know what? I didn't know that I got a choice in that. I'm never gonna change. I can't change.” Inability to change is what freezes someone into childhood; it’s the condition of a vampire, not of a person. Earlier in the conversation Buffy said she was supposed to be growing up. Moving past her crush on Angel is an essential part of that.

  Note the similarity between their conversation here and that of James and Grace in IOHEFY:

  IOHEFY: Buffy: Then tell me you don't love me!

  Cut to 1955.

  James: Say it!

  Ms. Newman: Is that what you need to hear? Will that help? I don't.”

  The Prom: “Buffy: …. I want my life to be with you.

  Angel: I don't.”

  In both cases, that’s what she needed to hear. Buffy admits it and Willow confirms it in their conversation afterwards.

  Angel’s decision to break up with Buffy left her in a situation similar to that of Tucker Wells, who was rejected when he asked a girl to go to the prom. The contrast between Buffy’s reaction and that of Tucker could hardly be any more obvious. Killing the hellhounds Tucker unleashed out of his resentment metaphorically killed her own resentment about Angel and paved the way for his later appearance at the dance.

  In its own way, The Prom could be called “Amends”. Xander makes up with Cordy. Angel makes up with Buffy. The whole school makes up with Buffy. As we’ll soon see, that latter step is essential to the story.

  The award to Buffy is heart-warming of course, but the way Jonathan began the presentation was perhaps a bit odd: “We’re not good friends”. In one sense this statement comes from his confrontation with Buffy in Earshot: “JONATHAN Stop saying my name like we're friends! We're not friends!” (Original viewers missed the resonance of this, and the significance of having Jonathan make the presentation, because Earshot didn’t air on schedule. h/t deidre) It goes beyond just Jonathan, though -- it’s true for all the other students as well. There is a reason for saying it in my view and we’ll see it in the finale.

  Trivia notes: (1) Buffy’s “miles to go” quote is from Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. (2) The marriage service in Angel’s dream is from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. (3) When Buffy and Angel meet at the butcher’s, behind Angel it’s possible to see the logo on the truck of the meat company. It’s the Culver City Meat Company, the slogan of which is “You can’t beat our meat”. Really. (4) Buffy’s phrase “pulling a Carrie at the prom” refers to the classic 1976 film by Brian DePalma based on the book by Stephen King. (5) Buffy says she’s “going to party like it’s ….”, leaving off the “1999” from the Prince song. This episode aired in May 1999. (6) Buffy’s description of her class protector award as a “little toy surprise” comes from the toy in every box of Crackerjack. (7) Sarah Michelle Gellar once listed The Prom as her favorite episode.

  Graduation Day 1 & 2

  The Changing of the Guards

  “Gentlemen,” he said,

  “I don't need your organization,

  I've shined your shoes

  I've moved your mountains and marked your cards

  But Eden is burning

  Either get ready for elimination

  Or else your hearts must have the courage

  For the changing of the guards.”

  Graduation Day ties together what I see as the three principal themes of S3. The most important theme involves Buffy’s acceptance of the absurdity of the world. For Joss, that’s a key insight in becoming a true adult. I’ll summarize that below and explain how the events of GD2 fit in with that theme and with Camus’s concept of rebellion as an important response to absurdity. The second theme, related to the first, involves the corruption of adult institutions represented by the Mayor and the Watcher’s Council. The teenage years are a natural time for rebellion and corrupt adult institutions are proper targets to rebel against. Lastly, we have the Faith arc, which involves both Buffy’s reconciliation with her shadow self and the existentialist quest for authenticity.

  I’ll take these in order, starting with absurdity and rebellion. I last discussed this topic in my post on Gingerbread. That episode showed us that Buffy had accepted the absurdity of the world, building on what we’d previously seen in Lovers Walk through Amends. Gingerbread also showed us the wrong way to rebel, the way the absurdist philosopher Albert Camus criticized in The Rebel. Joyce wanted the adults to “take back” the world, but her solution was the wrong one precisely for that reason. Monsters and witches and Slayers are intrinsic to the world and the world therefore can’t be “taken back” from them. Joyce’s solution denied the absurdity of the world represented in metaphor by monsters, witches and Slayers. She was attempting a revolution in trying to remake the world. That road leads to tyranny. Buffy’s actions in GD2 demonstrate the correct form of rebellion.

  Camus described the correct form of rebellion both in The Rebel and in his novel The Plague, in which he “describ[ed] collective action against the evil threatening the community”. Cite. I believe we got a clue to this latter work in Gingerbread when Joyce gave her speech to the crowd at city hall: “I-I was supposed to lead us in a moment of silence, but... silence is this town's disease. For too long we-we've been plagued by unnatural evils. This isn't our town anymore. It belongs to the monsters and, and the witches and the Slayers. … I say it's time for the grownups to take Sunnydale back.” My emphasis. [The fact that Amy becomes a rat – rats spread the plague – may also be a clue. h/t Catherine McKenzie for the idea]

  Now let’s look at The Plague. Very briefly, the novel describes a plague in the city of Oran in Algeria, at that time a French colony. Because of the plague, the citizens of Oran feel isolated, not just from the world but from each other: “The ravages of the plague in Oran vividly convey the absurdist position that humans live in an indifferent, incomprehensible universe that has no rational meaning or order, and no transcendent God. The plague comes unannounced and may strike down anyone at any time. It is arbitrary and capricious, and it leaves humans in a state of fear and uncertainty, which ends only in death.” (Quote is from the Wikipedia entry on the novel.)

  That’s the condition of the people of Sunnydale as Joyce described them in Gingerbread (“silence is this town’s disease”), and it’s the condition of the students at Sunnydale High as we saw them in Earshot: “Every single person down there is ignoring your pain because they're too busy with their own. … If you could hear what they were feeling. The loneliness. The confusion.”

  If Camus had really been describing just a disease, it might be more difficult to see the connection between that and Buffy’s world. However, the plague in his novel was a metaphor for the German occupation of France during World War II – Camus was in the Resistance. This makes the situation in the novel much more similar to Buffy’s world, which is occupied by monsters and witches and Slayers. The point of the novel is to identify the correct way to respond to life in such a world.

  At this point, think back to Joyce’s comment to Buffy in Gingerbread that her fight was “fruitless” and to Buffy’s dialogue with Angel in which they both acknowledge that they can never win (both quoted in my post on Gingerbread), and consider Wikipedia’s description of the main theme in The Plague:

  “In the face of this metaphysical reality, what mus
t be the response of individuals? Should they resign themselves to it, accept it as inevitable, and seek what solace they can as individuals, or should they join with others and fight back, even though they must live with the certainty that they cannot win? Camus's answer is clearly the latter, embodied in the characters of Rieux, … and Tarrou. Rieux's position is made clear in part II in a conversation with Tarrou. Rieux argues that one would have to be a madman to submit willingly to the plague. Rather than accepting the natural order of things — the presence of sickness and death — he believes one must fight against them. He is aware of the needs of the community; he does not live for himself alone. When Tarrou points out that "[his] victories will never be lasting," Rieux admits that he is involved in a "never ending defeat," but this does not stop him from engaging in the struggle.” My emphasis.

  As the passage states, the correct response is joining with others and fighting back; Camus’s solution can be described as “solidarity and participation” (quote from link). Buffy’s decision to involve the entire student body is therefore the key to victory:

  “It is at first, like The Myth of Sisyphus, a single individual's rebellion, but now Camus stresses that revolt creates values, dignity, and solidarity. “I revolt, therefore we are” is his paradoxical statement. But how can an I lead to a we? How does “we are” follow from “I revolt”? How can the individual's experience of absurdity, and the rebellion against it, stem from, produce, imply, or entail the wider social sense of injustice and solidarity? … Acting against oppression entails having recourse to social values, and at the same time joining with others in solidarity.” (Quote is from link above and applies to The Rebel, but Camus had already written The Plague at that point and the idea is the same.)

  In The Prom Buffy acted on her determination to save the other students and give them their special night. The other students recognized that quality in her in their presentation; that was an essential step for their cooperation here. Buffy’s individual determination became a “we” in Graduation Day as they all joined with her in solidarity, a response we saw prefigured in Anne when Buffy joined with Lily to escape Hell. “The idea of the whole school coming together was, thematically, a big part of the arc of that season. It’s like in Earshot … the idea that they all had their own pain, we sort of took that and said ‘now they’re all going to band together, they’re all going to fight together’….” (Joss DVD commentary.)

  In my post on The Prom I asked you to consider why Jonathan began his presentation to Buffy with the words “we’re not good friends”. As I see it, the situation is somewhat like Dead Man’s Party. There, Buffy stopped fighting with her friends in order to save them from the zombies. In GD2, Buffy works with students from whom she’s been pretty isolated (or at least felt isolated) for the past 3 years. In each case, the danger, and her sense of duty, guide her to overcome that isolation and lead her peers in the struggle against evil. She began her Slayer duties at Sunnydale as an “I”, but the result of her actions is that by GD2 that “I” becomes “we”.

  While the destruction of Sunnydale High was fun, it wasn’t the point of the episode. There are, after all, lots of high schools in the US, every one of them a big square building filled with boredom and despair. And Buffy didn’t even destroy the school, Giles did (though she made the plan). The defeat of the Mayor certainly was one point of the episode, but not, in my view, the most important one. The most important theme was one previewed in Anne and The Prom, namely that Buffy could and did empower her fellow students. What distinguishes Buffy’s response from that of Joyce in Gingerbread is that Buffy has accepted the absurdity of the world and didn’t try to remake it or to deny its inherent absurdity. This was no global revolution or even an attempt to remake Sunnydale itself. It was a rebellion against a particular evil, and Buffy’s revolt created the social values of dignity and solidarity. Buffy’s actions were those of the true adult.

  In defining what they defeated in their rebellion, we need to consider the second major theme of S3 and to ask, What does the Mayor represent? As I see him, he represents adult society, certainly patriarchal given the Mayor’s general attitudes, the fact that he became a giant snake, and that Buffy tauntingly referred to him as “Dick”. He wants to devour young people, metaphorically what society tends to do to us when we become adults. It’s an abuse of power (which Joss describes as “the” theme of S3), a form of social control, which is why the Mayor told Mr. Trick in Homecoming that “Do you have children? (Trick just smiles) Children are the heart of a community. (walks around his desk again) They need to be looked after. Controlled. (sits on his desk) The more rebellious element needs to be dealt with.” My emphasis.

  This also explains why the Mayor bonds so closely with Faith: because the way society corrupts us is through our dark sides. It provides for our needs at the cost of demanding that we submit to its control and give up our own power of choice (again, see Anne). We saw examples of that control in Choices when he threatened to take away Faith’s present; when he forced her to take her feet off the desk; when he commanded Faith to leave Willow alone; and when he ordered her to his side as they left the cafeteria. The inevitable consequence of that surrender of control by Faith is evident in her stunning admission to Prof. Wirth when he asks her why she’s about to murder him: “you know, I never thought to ask.”

  Buffy rebelled against not just the Mayor, but the WC as well. The WC is also a controlling, top-down organization less interested in the Slayer than in its own power. As became apparent in Helpless, the WC wants to control the Slayers and isn’t all that morally concerned about how that’s accomplished. It used its power to refuse her request for help for Angel in an effort to enforce its control over Buffy. She rejected that control on the Slayer side just as she did with the Mayor on her human side. Again, though, she didn’t try to undo the whole Council structure in some revolution. That’s why she made it clear to Wesley that there was no “mutiny”, just graduation.

  In short, I see the season theme as the one prefigured in Anne: the need to rebel against a tyrannical, controlling society in which no one is free to create an authentic life. Graduation – escape from the control of high school – represents an opportunity to do that.

  That leaves the third theme of the season. Buffy had to deal with her “dark side” as part of the process of growing up. FH&T (see below), BatB, and Homecoming all prefigured the “dark side” theme. This was explored at length in the episodes from Bad Girls through the finale. Consistent with the other existentialist themes, it demonstrated the correct way to create one’s authentic self by showing the contrast between Buffy’s actions and the “bad faith” conduct of Faith.

  Before she could defeat the Mayor, Buffy had to integrate her shadow self, just as she’d had to do with Cordelia in Out of Mind, Out of Sight. First Buffy had to take control of her shadow, which she did in the fight at the end of GD1. Paraphrasing from my post on Oom, OoS, Buffy then integrated her shadow when she and Faith shared the dream in GD2. Faith told Buffy to “take what you need”, metaphorically offering her whatever was in Faith’s mind. When she touched Buffy at the end of the dream, Buffy thereby reincorporated the shadow into her personality, producing a stronger, wider consciousness than before. As with every such instance (and remember, this is a constant process throughout life in Jungian theory), this gave Buffy a launching-pad for further growing up.

  Metaphorically Buffy had to confront Faith, but we still need to analyze that in terms of the storyline. Was Buffy right when she went after her? In my view she was, so let me explain why.

  In his commentary on Bad Girls, Doug Petrie refers to Faith as “Buffy’s evil twin”. This should remind you of what Buffy said when Faith first showed up in FH&T: “I’m the one being single white femaled here.” It should remind you of that movie because the movie involved a young woman who had lost her twin sister and tried to create a new twin out of her roommate. The movie plot served as the outline for this portion of the
season. Here’s a summary of the plot of the movie Single White Female which I edited and quoted from Wikipedia in my post on FH&T:

  “Allie has recently broken up with her boyfriend and advertises for a new roommate. She eventually settles on Hedra, whom she immediately nicknames "Hedy", and they become friends. Hedy says she had a twin sister who died … After a few weeks, however, Hedy reveals her true nature: secretive, manipulative and deeply disturbed. Fearing she will be kicked out of the apartment in favor of [Allie’s boyfriend], Hedy does everything possible to make [the boyfriend] look bad, even killing a puppy and making it look like it was his fault. Hedy then copies Allie's appearance, right down her hairstyle [i.e., creating a twin]. … [Allie] follows an unaware Hedy that night to an underground sex club, and witnesses her passing herself off as Allie. Hedy, posing as Allie, sneaks into [the boyfriend’s] hotel room and performs oral sex on him. Afterwards Hedy attempts to blackmail [the boyfriend] but he insists on telling Allie the truth. Hedy kills him by gouging his eye with her stiletto heel. As she leaves his apartment complex, the doorman mistakes her for Allie. …Hedy takes Allie captive at gunpoint and threatens to frame Allie for the boyfriend’s death. … She is about to execute Allie, when Allie pleads "don't make me leave you". Hedy is convinced that Allie has come to realize her place as a twin, and plans to run away with her, until she catches Allie making another attempt to escape. A violent fight ensues,…. The struggle ends with Allie stabbing Hedy to death. The film ends with a close-up of a photograph presumably made by Hedy of their faces superimposed into one.”

  I summarized the plot at some length because I think it bears a resemblance to the Buffy/Faith relationship over the season, and that this was signaled from the very beginning. Specifically on the plotline I’d note that Buffy had recently “broken up” with her boyfriend (Becoming); the Slayer line had a vacancy after Kendra died (same); the disturbed nature of Faith (FH&T); Faith attempted to frame Buffy for the death of Allan Finch (Consequences); the attempt to seduce Buffy’s restored boyfriend (Enemies); the attempt to “blackmail” Angel in Enemies; Faith told Buffy in Enemies “kill me and you become me”; Faith attempted to kill Angel (GD1); Faith took Buffy captive (Enemies); Buffy stabbed Faith and Faith told her “you killed me” (GD1); the dream in which Faith offered her stuff to Buffy, metaphorically offering her what’s in Faith’s mind, IOW a merger of the two. (There’s additional evidence which supports this reading, but it’s a spoiler for S4.) Now, the equivalence is not perfect, but in outline the plot elements are there, even if in somewhat different order. The reason this works is because SWF reads as though Hedy was a metaphor for Allie’s shadow self.