Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Myth, Metaphor & Morality

by Field, Mark

  Bentham was one of many reformers who wanted to move away from this system, particularly the number of executions. In his view, the prisoners could be reformed – made into proper subjects of the King – if held in the proper sort of prison. In Bentham’s view, the prisoners could never misbehave because they were always under observation and the authorities could intervene to prevent or punish misbehavior. (Those who’ve seen Joss’s show Dollhouse may recognize the concept from that show.) This would eventually train them to behave properly. The connection to the behavior modification strategy of A Clockwork Orange should be obvious.

  This is where The Initiative gets very clever indeed. Spike’s chip acts as an internal panopticon (h/t manwitch). It’s constantly monitoring his behavior, preventing him from ever harming another living creature. Extrapolating backward, we could say much the same for Alex’s behavioral conditioning in A Clockwork Orange.

  Is this a good thing? Well, on the one hand an extremely dangerous vampire is now controlled and can’t harm people any more. That seems like a pretty big factor on the plus side. On the other hand, the chip could be seen to diminish Spike’s essential nature in some way; we could easily say that the chip has robbed Spike of his identity. It deprives him of the power of choice, forcing him to be “normal” (well, not really normal, but you get the idea). The chaplain at the prison objected to the modification of Alex, a pretty close real world comparison to Spike, considering it as a violation of something very basic to human beings. Then again, Spike’s not human.

  I’ll give you one possible clue to Joss’s attitude by quoting Doug Petrie:

  “Also we had a big argument - not really an argument, but a discussion - about how heroic Spike should be. And I was dead wrong, because I was saying Spike was going to escape from [the Initiative] later in the episode, and I thought, "Well, this is hard to do because it makes him seem heroic." And Jane Espenson at the time was saying "No, no, he should seem heroic!" and I was like, "No, Spike's the villain, he shouldn't seem heroic." And Joss Whedon came in and said "Newsflash: he's heroic in this scene. He's gigantically heroic. He's James Bond escaping from Blofeld."

  Infer from this what you will. Before you jump to any conclusions, I’ll add that there are multiple ways to interpret Joss’s instruction here, one being that Spike’s escape foreshadows events later in the season. Which it does.

  I raise these issues not to decide them, but to think about; I’ll have much more to say about the idea of the panopticon when we get to Goodbye Iowa. In my view, Joss is taking these three themes – identity, mind control, and social indoctrination – from A Clockwork Orange, The Prisoner, and Bentham, and is using them to raise basic questions about human identity and the extent to which we should be able to construct our own identity as part of our existential project. Such questions are closely related to Buffy’s journey in S4, as I’ll explain in my post on Goodbye Iowa.

  Speaking of season themes…. I’m going to let Doug Petrie explain one of the seasonal themes at this point: “We're also trying to point out this guy [the commando] is just a guy. It's not part of Buffy's world. She turns down the assignment of going to look for this guy because it's not supernatural. And that really sets up the whole season; these guys are just human beings delving in the supernatural world. And that's not part of Buffy's world and not part of Buffy's responsibility. And that's the tension throughout the season…. Season 4 is all about Science versus Magic.”

  As I interpret this, the words “science” and “magic” stand more generally for things coded masculine and feminine. Thus, “science” is rational, hard-headed, military. In contrast, “magic” is natural, organic, mysterious. Please don’t confuse these characteristics with individual persons. A woman can have “scientific” or “masculine” qualities, just as a man can have “magic” or “feminine” ones; we all tend have some of each. It will help you keep the ideas straight if you think of the traditional stereotypes of these qualities and how they were associated with gender. (In addition, “magic” will be used metaphorically in another, related way in S4 and S5 which I can’t discuss yet because of spoilers.)

  If you recall, I mentioned in my post on WTTH/The Harvest that the very first thing we see on the show is Darla and the boy breaking into the science room at the high school. I suggested that there was a metaphor there, namely the intrusion of the bewitched world into our rational, scientific one. Season 4 is, in part, an expansion of that.

  Now let’s move on to the obvious possible romance. Viewers watching the first time through weren’t entirely sure, until now, that Riley was being set up for Buffy. A lot of his early interaction came with Willow, and it was plausible to think that they might be a couple after Oz left. This episode negates that possibility.

  Riley seems quite normal, and we’re obviously supposed to like him after he punched out Parker and was so thoughtful to Willow at the party. At the same time, though, he’s involved with the Initiative and, depending on your view of the conditioning and the experiments, that may be an issue.

  In The Freshman, Buffy told Willow that “Giles said I have to be secret-identity gal again.” Now we learn that Riley has a secret identity too. This not-so-coincidental fact suits the seasonal theme of creating one’s own identity, and I’ll have more discussion as events develop. One question you might ask now is whether it’s morally proper to “court” someone while concealing a major part of who you are, and at what point there might be a duty of disclosure. I’ll have more to say about Riley’s identity when we get to Goodbye Iowa.

  To this day I can’t quite figure out how the show managed to turn a rape/murder metaphor into one of the funniest scenes in the whole series, but it did. AH and JM are just fantastic.

  Trivia notes: (1) Doug Petrie’s DVD commentary tells us that the big white balloons we see in the Initiative are an allusion to The Prisoner. (2) The vampire we see next door to Spike was the one from Sunday’s gang captured at the end of The Freshman. (3) Only now that Oz has gone do we hear his full name: when Willow mentions “Daniel Osborne” to Riley. (4) The phrase “semper fi”, used by Xander, is an abbreviation of the Marine Corps motto, Semper Fidelis (always faithful). (4) We learned that “Mr. Gordo” was the name of Buffy’s stuffed pig in What’s My Line 1. The same episode and Helpless gave us Buffy’s love of ice skating. (5) When Willow got depressed at hearing the Dingoes song at the party, we got this dialogue: “Riley: …Associations? Willow: Big. Riley: Bad?”. The obvious third word would be “wolf”, as in Big Bad Wolf. It’s an allusion to Oz. (6) The dorm list Spike uses to find Buffy’s room contains the real names of many of the Buffy crew. (7) The scene where Riley and Forrest take the elevator to the Initiative was taken from the movie True Lies. (8) Willow suggested that Spike wanted her to do a spell because that’s what he wanted when she last saw him in Lover’s Walk. (9) The fight scene in the corridor was an homage to The Matrix.

  Pangs

  Pangs gets my vote as the funniest episode in the whole series. “You made a bear” cracks me up every time.

  As Richardson and Rabb point out in The Existential Joss Whedon, p. 162, the vampire’s comment to Buffy in the teaser – “Why don't you just go back where you came from? Things were great before you came.” – gives us the perspective of Hus. The fact that a vampire and Hus share this view may suggest how we’re supposed to view Hus’s crusade. No matter how sympathetic the original victims may be, the show will never justify vengeance, as we saw in Innocence, as we see here, and as we’ll see in the future. There’s probably a message in the “bickering and confusion” over what to do with Hus: vengeance can’t be justified, but it’s nevertheless true that Buffy faces serious moral dilemmas when she makes her decisions to slay and those can’t be simplified.

  Pangs continues the “science v. magic” theme which Doug Petrie mentioned in his commentary on The Initiative. The anthropology department delved into something without truly understanding the circumstances. It wasn’t even aware that the bu
ried mission still existed, and perhaps not of the meaning that mission might have had to the Chumash. The intrusion into the mystical without true understanding led to tragic results, foreshadowing events later in the season.

  We see multiple examples of pangs in the episode, both metaphorical and literal. Hus suffers metaphorical pangs for the loss of his people. Angel suffers metaphorical pangs of loss for Buffy, as does Willow for Oz. Spike suffers literal pangs of hunger, and metaphorical pangs of loss for his identity as a vampire. The old Spike would have taken his share of the meal instead of staring wistfully through the window. He might even have driven the others off and taken the kill for his own. His trip to the vet means he’s no longer a member of the pack.

  This brings us to Buffy. Spike wanted to participate in a feast with his fellows, but couldn’t. He did end up at a feast, but of course didn’t really belong there. Buffy desperately wants a family Thanksgiving, just like Spike wanted to join in the vampire feeding fest. Why? In my view it’s for a similar reason – she doesn’t feel as secure in her relationships. “Everything’s different now,” she told Willow. Giles and Xander aren’t as much in her life as they were before; her spirit (Willow) is still depressed at the departure of Oz. We saw in Fear, Itself that she feared being left alone and the dinner is her way of reassuring herself that she isn’t.

  The bickering about what to do with Hus interferes with this goal and foreshadows later episodes. Then, at the end, she finds out that her friends kept a very important secret from her. “Wasn’t exactly the perfect Thanksgiving.”

  Trivia notes: (1) Buffy’s “we have a counterpoint?” refers to the segment on the TV show 60 Minutes called Point/Counterpoint. (2) Willow’s description of the buried mission as similar to the church the Master was in, refers to The Harvest. (3) The Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh cut off his own ear, which is why Willow mentioned him to Buffy. (3) The Chumash were indigenous to the Santa Barbara area (the real life model for Sunnydale) prior to the Spanish settlement. The Chumash still exist today, though their population is small. (4) The visions Angel mentions were seen by Doyle in the AtS episode Bachelor Party. (5) Riley’s home town of Huxley, IA is a real town outside Ames, IA. No snark about Ames – I was born there. (6) The artist Grant Wood was born in Iowa and grew up there. His paintings look like, well, Iowa. (7) Riley’s quote about home being the place they have to take you in is a line from “The Death of the Hired Man” by the poet Robert Frost. (8) Buffy’s description of how she likes her demons (and her men) – “Tied to the train tracks, soon my electro-ray will destroy Metropolis" – references the Superman comics (most likely Lex Luthor) and (probably) Snidely Whiplash. (9) As Spike said, Caesar didn’t feel bad about any of his conquests. In Latin his famous saying is “veni, vini, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered). (10) For those of you who don’t live in CA, casinos are illegal except on Indian reservations. The Chumash operate one in Santa Ynez, CA, not too far from Santa Barbara. That’s why Buffy told Hus, “uh, you can have casinos now.” (11) Spike’s “sorry about that chief” was a line from the ‘60s TV comedy Get Smart and therefore a pun. (12) Gentle Ben – what Xander called the bear – was a movie about a bear of that name. (13) Does anyone not know the story of Custer? Well just in case, he was an American general who incompetently got his entire command killed in combat with the Sioux in 1876. Custer is infamous for his enthusiasm for “removal” of the Native Americans.

  Something Blue

  Something Blue is a fun episode, and it works very well to advance certain plot points (Buffy/Riley) and to deal with Willow’s pain from Oz’s departure. The problem I have in writing this post is that the episode has no apparent relationship to any of the season themes. I’ll therefore deal with the episode on its own.

  I’ll start with Willow’s spell. Like most spells, the secret is in the exact (and frequently ambiguous) wording. The key language is this: “Out of my passions, a web be spun. From this eve forth, my will be done.” The spell called for her will to be done “out of my passions”. That’s why only some of her wishes came true – she had to say them when she was feeling emotional.

  I’ve seen criticism of Willow for casting spells on her friends without their consent. She’s attempted such spells in the past (Lovers Walk, Wild at Heart), though she’s never carried through on one. This spell was different. At no time did she try to make Oz come back or punish him. The whole point of the spell was to enable her to control her own emotions, that is, to enforce her will upon herself. Her very first words after casting the spell were “It is my will that my heart be healed. Now.” Only when she thought the spell had failed and didn’t realize the impact of her words did she say something which affected others.

  For this reason, D’Hoffryn’s effort to recruit her as a vengeance demon was never likely to succeed. Willow really didn’t intend to hurt her friends. She wasn’t calling out for vengeance, she was expressing her pain.

  There are a couple of ways to look at the issue whether Willow was justified in her pain. One is to compare her reaction to that of Buffy over Parker. It took Buffy 2 episodes to get her catharsis with Parker in Beer Bad. It’s taken Willow 3. That doesn’t seem excessive given that Oz was much more important to Willow than Parker was to Buffy. Indeed, the real comparison should be Buffy/Angel, and as Buffy herself told Giles in The Initiative, she ran away for months and went to hell. If we’re grading on a curve, Willow comes out far ahead.

  Because Buffy/Angel is the obvious comparison, I’m inclined to think that Willow’s experience here was intended to serve as a message for Buffy as well. She told Willow in the teaser,

  Buffy: I don't know. I really like being around him [Riley], you know? And I think he cares about me.. but.. I just.. feel like something's missing.

  Willow: He's not making you miserable?

  Buffy: Exactly. Riley seems so solid. Like he wouldn't cause me heartache.

  Willow: (Fake worry) Get out. Get out while there's still time.

  Buffy: I know.. I have to get away from that bad boy thing. There's no good there. Seeing Angel in LA.. even for five minutes.. hello to the pain.”

  Since the remainder of the episode deals with Willow’s pain, I think Buffy is supposed to take the hint and get over Angel, just as Willow needs to move past Oz. This is all the more true because Buffy has a potential relationship with Riley; she can’t hold on to Angel at the same time.

  That said, the two situations are different in ways that make it more understandable for Willow to grieve for Oz than for Buffy to grieve for Angel. Among other things, Angel has been gone for much longer already. In addition, Willow has always been very supportive of Buffy in her grief, as we’ve seen in, for example, The Prom and in S4 regarding Parker. Buffy is more supportive in Something Blue than Xander is, but that’s a low bar. Willow probably deserved a little better.

  Buffy and Willow tend to cope in different ways. Buffy avoids other people, while Willow tries to eliminate the pain. In my experience, people are inclined to see their own coping strategy as “normal” and to be less sympathetic to different strategies, even to see them as “wrong”.

  Trivia notes: (1) The title comes from the old “folk wisdom” rhyme about weddings: the bride should have “Something old, something new/Something borrowed, something blue”. Here it has a double meaning, referring both to Buffy’s “wedding” and to Willow’s mood (“feeling blue”). (2) The first transition in the teaser contains very subtle foreshadowing of a spoiler point. (3) Buffy saw Angel in the AtS episode I Will Remember You. (4) The Zagat Guide which Spike mentioned is a restaurant guide for major cities around the world. (5) Willow referred to Spike as “the undead English patient”. The English Patient was a 1996 movie. (6) Spike’s favorite soap opera was Passions. (7) Riley suggested taking Buffy for a ride “past the vineyards”. The area just north of Santa Barbara has many vineyards. (8) Xander’s description of Willow as a “brave little toaster” referred to the movie The Brave Little Toaster. (9) Xander’s w
istful mention of a “fuzzy bikini” referred to the outfit worn by star Raquel Welch in the movie One Million Years B.C. (10) The movie Steel Magnolias might make Willow feel better in a “there but for the Grace of God” way – one character in the movie died from the complications of diabetes. (11) Xander may think they’re not all doomed to relationship badness, but remember the ending of IRYJ: “Buffy: Let's face it: none of us are ever gonna have a happy, normal relationship. Xander: We're doomed! Willow: Yeah!” (9) If you’re used to the Centigrade scale for temperature, the blood Buffy handed Spike was 37 degrees (human normal). (10) Foreign viewers: American couples register their preferences for gifts at department stores so that wedding guests have some idea what to get them.

  Hush

  Regardless of the success or not of the seasonal arc, S4 contains two of the most innovative episodes of any TV series ever. Hush is the first of these. It’s a very popular episode, regularly appearing on Top 10 lists and often cited by fans as their favorite episode. There are so many great little details and great scenes that I can’t even try to describe them all.

  Worse yet, from my perspective, there’s been so much discussion about Hush that it’s hard to come up with anything new to say. Note, though, that it fits right in with the theme of identity I’ve been discussing, particularly when it comes to Buffy and Riley, but also for Willow as I’ll explain later in order to avoid spoilers now.

  Joss explains in the DVD commentary that he had wanted to do a silent episode for some time: