Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Myth, Metaphor & Morality

by Field, Mark

  Unlike DMP, Xander and Willow are not the moving force here. Their comments are not directly critical of Buffy, they just conspicuously fail to defend her. That’s a betrayal in its own way, but not nearly as bad as what we saw in S3. And it’s somewhat understandable after the events at the hospital. We as viewers can see how broken Buffy is by her guilt over Xander’s injury, but that probably wouldn’t have been as clear to Willow and Xander.

  I’ve noted before that Giles lacks confidence in Buffy’s decision-making (meaning, metaphorically, that Buffy lacks confidence in herself), and it showed in the mutiny. Putting metaphor aside, just 2 episodes ago Giles was urging her to be the General and saying that everyone was expendable. Now he’s against her, even as she recites the principles he’s been advocating all year, because “This is a hell of a lot to ask”. And disclosing to the entire room her private doubts about trusting others, which she overstated in her anger at him for sending Spike away, was a gross and unfair breach of confidence.

  The most controversial line was undoubtedly that of Brutus Dawn: “This is my house too”. This struck most viewers as preposterous. While it’s true literally, it’s just not right literally. No child believes she has the right to tell her parent to leave the house. Metaphorically, however, it works perfectly. Dawn IS Buffy; that is, she’s Buffy’s non-slayer part, what Buffy sees as her better half. Thus, the scene plays out metaphorically as Buffy’s human, compassionate part telling her Slayer half to step down and stop dominating. In this sense, Dawn is indeed a joint occupant of Buffy’s (metaphorical) house, and fully entitled to exercise her rights.

  So there's plenty of fault to share in EP. The way I see it, though, Buffy is "more" right. Though I’m not going to analyze her statements in detail, everything she said was factually true. She took a position consistent with her behavior over the previous seasons, with what her mentors have been telling her since BotN, and with the existing paradigm of the Slayer. The mutineers, in contrast, had no real solution. They didn't want to follow Buffy's advice, but they found themselves trapped in the same situation except for a different name at the top of the firm resume. To make such a minor change at the cost of betraying Buffy seems much less defensible to me.

  One last fact to note about the mutiny, and it’s an important one. The Potentials and the SG may have kicked Buffy out, and they may have done so for bad reasons, but they haven’t deserted the battlefield. They’re still prepared to fight, they just don’t know how yet.

  So why did they kick her out, instead of just getting up and leaving en masse? I think that the metaphor is driving the plot here. All of Sunnydale is now deserted, but Buffy’s house is crowded with her hopes, her dreams, her thoughts, her confusion, her insecurities. She needs to get away from all that in order to regroup. In addition, as Allie pointed out in comments, it would be logistically difficult as well as dangerous for everyone else to move.

  I have to admire Buffy’s attitude on the porch at the end, both forgiving Faith and giving her the chance to make a difference. In a way, it’s what Faith told Wood before the meeting: “WOOD: Why didn't you fight back? FAITH: Other things matter more.” And props to Faith, who’s the only one to come out of the whole scene looking good.

  Trivia notes: (1) Clem asked Buffy if she could “believe this mishegas”. That’s a Yiddish word meaning “craziness”. (2) Willow and Giles pretended to be from INTERPOL, the perhaps unfortunately named International Criminal Police Organization. (3) Xander mentioned his Halloween costume, meaning his pirate outfit from All The Way. (4) Faith likes to remind Anya that she had Xander first, which she did in The Zeppo. (5) Caleb’s mocking words about Buffy’s tears recall Buffy’s nightmare about her father in Nightmares: “BUFFY: Why are you saying all these things? (a tear rolls down her cheek) HANK: Because they're true. I think that's the least we owe one another. She begins to sniff and cry. HANK: You know, I don't think it's very mature, getting blubbery when I'm just trying to be honest.” (6) Andrew used the phrase “called dibs”, which is American slang meaning that he asked for it first. (7) It’s very hard to see on screen, but what Giles and Dawn see in the photo is an imprint of Caleb’s ring. They could recognize it because of Shannon’s burn mark in Dirty Girls. (8) There’s a joke in the location of Spike’s mission. Giles told him to go to Gilroy (CA), which advertises itself as “The Garlic Capital of the World”. Having second thoughts about Giles’s motives now? (9) Giles suggested that Andrew bring his “Pan flute thing” along on the trip with Spike. In Greek mythology, the god Pan played the flute. (10) This is the last episode to feature a scene at the Bronze, so the band was Nerf Herder, who wrote the Buffy theme music. (11) While riding the motorcycle, Andrew wears the same helmet Dawn wore in Bargaining 2. (12) Spike mentioned the “onion blossom things” at the Bronze. We learned that he liked those in Triangle. (13) The inscription on the wall in the monastery is in Latin, but written in Greek letters. (14) Giles suggests that Buffy is leading them to find “windmills”. The phrase “tilting at windmills” means to fight a non-existent foe. While the phrase isn’t precise, he means she’s chasing after nothing. (15) Buffy’s claim that Faith tried once before to “take everything she had” refers to the body switch in Who Are You. (16) Rona’s “ding dong, the witch is dead” comes from The Wizard of Oz.

  Touched

  “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

  Continuing the point from Empty Places, the chaos of the teaser drives home the logical necessity that someone has to be in charge. The group was incapable of even having a discussion, and both Xander and Kennedy suggested that not everyone should participate (without, of course, including themselves out, to quote Samuel Goldwyn):

  XANDER

  You know, I'm thinking that everyone here shouldn't have a say.

  KENNEDY

  I just wonder if those of us who have been here longer should have more of a say.

  The follow-up group discussion in the basement emphasizes this conclusion. As was apparent in Empty Places, Buffy had succeeded in isolating herself from everyone else over the course of the year. That’s what the role of General entails. The Potentials thought that switching to Faith would change things. Kennedy states this expressly: “I thought things would be different now, but you keep shutting me out”. What Kennedy’s missing is that she can't function as an equal because Faith has power that she lacks. Given that ineluctable fact, Faith will always be the one who decides who to slay and who not, just as Buffy was. The logic of the situation demands a General.

  Faith’s reaction to Kennedy in the basement builds on this premise, and states expressly the logic of the situation which demands Kennedy’s obedience to Faith’s orders: “Look, you guys, I'm not Buffy. I'm not the one who's been on your asses all this time, but I'm not one of you any more, either. I'm your leader, which means I go first, and I make the rules, and the rest of you follow after me. Is that clear?” My emphasis. Nor does Faith treat others any better, as witness her curt dismissal of Wood. Thus, one point of Touched is to make it clear that the problem is not individual to Buffy, nor to Faith, but to the existing system.

  Turning now to Buffy, we see that events all season have been preparing us for her admission that she is responsible for cutting herself off. Indeed, as Buffy herself says, she’s done so from the beginning. As an example, go back 130 episodes to When She Was Bad:

  JOYCE: Did she manage to stay out of trouble in L.A.?

  HANK: She did, yeah. She was, um... you know, great.

  JOYCE: But?

  HANK: She was just, I don't know, um... distant. Not brooding or sulking, just... there was no connection. The more time we spent together, the more I felt like she was nowhere to be seen.”

  Not so much connected, as she says in CWDP.

  In Lessons, the manifest spirits told Buffy that she had failed to protect them. In Help, Buffy was faced with what she should do when she couldn’t help, and in subsequent episodes she felt that she failed in her duty to protect
the Potentials. Her very understandable reaction was to cut herself off in order to avoid the pain, as she tells Spike: “That's my problem. I say the word, some girl dies...every time. … These are girls that I got killed. I cut myself off from them...all of them. I knew I was gonna lose some of them and I didn't….”

  This reaction became more pronounced after she had to face down Xander over Anya in Selfless, and after she kept losing Potentials (Annabelle, Eve, Chloe, Molly) and saw Xander horribly wounded. We could see how distant she forced herself to become in the hospital scene in Empty Places. In turn, the loss of lives meant that the Potentials would no longer accept her harsh commands in a trade-off for safety.

  All of this background we now understand as essential to explain why Buffy seemed so distant to the Potentials and to her friends. Now that Buffy herself has recognized it, she has the ability to take the next step and find another answer to the question she posed at the end of Help:

  BUFFY

  … I failed her.

  DAWN

  … I guess sometimes you can't help.

  BUFFY

  So what then? What do you do when you know that? When you know that maybe you can't help?

  Never did I like Spike more than in this episode, first calling out the SG over their betrayal, then with his inspirational talk to Buffy. Without spoiling, I can also say that his dialogue with Buffy, like that of Faith and Wood, provides a major clue to Buffy’s intuitive solution in Chosen.

  Two quick points about the paralleled love scenes with Heather Nova’s “Only Love” playing in the background. Not surprisingly, Joss had to fight to get Standards & Practices to permit the Willow/Kennedy sex scene. It was, AFAIK, the first lesbian sex scene ever shown on network TV. Since you all know that I don’t mind Kennedy but that mine is a distinct minority view, I’ll let Masq give her verdict on that scene:

  “I think we all wish that when a network television program finally decided to show two women making love the way they always show a man and a woman making love, that it would Willow and Tara. Because we all felt the love of Willow and Tara.

  But when Joss and co. decided to push that envelope, and when UPN had the cajones to show it, it was Willow and Kennedy.

  And I, for one, thought it was HOT, and I want to applaud Joss, ME, and UPN for doing it.”

  Willow didn’t need anything more than sex to reassure her that her sexuality was not the source of darkness in her, nor was it the cause of Tara’s death. Local-max added in comments: “She's always associated her sexuality with evil, at least subconsciously …" IMHO, rather than being a mistake, the shifting of the metaphor of magic from lesbian sex to power generally [not getting into the drug stuff here] actually emphasizes something real about Willow, which is her deep-rooted fear that being joyful, acknowledging her desires and love, being empowered (which are all related), make her a bad person. For Willow, magic represents power first, and secondly I think it represents the...transgression of social boundaries -- which is why it's appropriate that it is a gateway to *both* her non-normative sexuality and her darkness.”

  While the sex has meaning for Willow in this sense, the scene where Spike just holds Buffy pretty clearly establishes an important distinction between love and sex – only love makes a true connection to others. I see the scenes as running a spectrum from B/S to W/K to X/A to F/W to Caleb/First. The three human couples were (mostly) just having sex, Buffy was trusting Spike. It turns out Buffy was right when she told Giles in Empty Places that Spike is the one who has her back. She’s connected to at least one person.

  And that’s the double meaning of the title. Someone “touched” Buffy. That enabled her to defeat Caleb by the simple expedient of not letting him touch her, just as the First can’t be touched. She circumvented it using its own strength.

  Since the consequences of Faith’s turn as General and of Buffy’s discovery of the cool axe-thingey spill over into the next episode, I’ll discuss those topics in my next post.

  Trivia notes: (1) Giles thought the phrase “power to the people” sounded like something from the ‘70s. It was actually from the ‘60s. (2) Anya’s metaphor (?) of Girl Scouts trying to make quota refers to the fact that Girl Scouts sell cookies door-to-door to raise money. (3) For the Model UN see the link. (4) Faith said the people from the power company “got the hell out of Sunnydale”, playing off the expression “got the Hell out of Dodge”. It’s American slang meaning to get away from a situation. (5) Spike recited the “I spy with my little eye” line when he first saw Giles as the Fyarl demon in A New Man. (6) After Giles congratulated Kennedy for her “performance as a disgruntled minion”, Kennedy said that she was “method”. That refers to a school of acting, but it’s also a joke. Method actors try to put themselves in the actual thoughts and emotions of their characters. Kennedy’s response said, in effect, that she was a disgruntled minion. (7) Anya didn’t think the Bringers were Rhodes Scholars, for which see the link. (8) Andrew was thrilled to ride on Spike’s “hog”. That’s a slang term for a large motorcycle, but not the one Spike has. (9) Faith told Spike that Buffy had him “whipped”. The full phrase is “pussy-whipped” and it’s American slang for a man dominated by a woman. (10) Spike’s reference to the comfy chair as a diabolical torture device is a reference to Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition. (11) I’ve seen it suggested that there are echoes of Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King in the Buffy/Spike scenes. I can’t confirm that, but it seems reasonable. (12) Faith asked the Mayor if he was a shrink now. That’s an in joke. Harry Groener played a psychiatrist in the Roswell episode Who Died And Made You King?,which aired in April 2002, i.e., about a year before Touched. (13) The Mayor previously called Faith “firecracker” in Graduation Day 1. (14) Faith said a “whole lot of Jack D” killed the pain. She’s referring to Jack Daniels Whiskey. (15) Heather Nova’s “Only Love” was the last vocal music on the show. It’s pretty obviously Joss’s taste in music, and I hear it as a valedictory. (16) Iyari Limon (Kennedy) didn’t really have a pierced tongue; that was a prop. (17) Given my previous comments about Wood’s Oedipal issues, the fact that he and Faith have sex in Buffy’s bed is, well, kind of icky. (18) The First’s desire to be corporeal in order to feel a neck crack is the same explanation Moloch gave in I Robot, You Jane. (19) It’s unclear what Caleb means when he refers to Buffy as the “prodigal Slayer” when she enters the vineyard. The word “prodigal” is often misunderstood to mean “wandering”, and he could mean it in that sense because Buffy has left her friends. However, the word actually means “spendthrift”, so he might be taunting her about her supposed willingness to risk the lives of her friends in Dirty Girls. (20) Buffy’s reference to Caleb as a “woman hating jerk” was apparently originally written as “woman hating prick”. For some reason, Standards & Practices objected to the latter phrase.

  End of Days

  Having reached End of Days, it’s only fitting that we finally discover the (symbol of the) Ultimate Boon. In my post on Grave I said that S7 would cover the stage of the Hero’s Journey known as the Ultimate Boon. Wikipedia describes the Ultimate Boon this way:

  “The ultimate boon is the achievement of the goal of the quest. It is what the person went on the journey to get. All the previous steps serve to prepare and purify the person for this step, since in many myths the boon is something transcendent like the elixir of life itself, or a plant that supplies immortality, or the holy grail.” My emphasis.

  Here in End of Days Spike tells us that Buffy’s found it (my emphasis again): “And you did it. Fulfilled your mission. Found the Holy Grail.” The quest for the Holy Grail is, symbolically, a quest for the deeper meaning of life. At different times that might mean Christian salvation or, more generally, spiritual progress. We might see it in more secular terms as seeking wisdom or the meaning of life. Success on the quest involves asking the right questions. Buffy’s conversations with Spike and Faith are leading her in the right direction, but she has one more step to take.

 
Since I referred to the Scythe as a symbol, that means that it isn’t itself the Boon, just as Excalibur wasn’t the kingship, but a symbol of Arthur’s right to be the true King in one version of that story. There’s a good reason why this particular symbol takes the form of a Scythe. From the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols (via Rufus at ATPO): “sickle: Curve weapons generally relate to lunar symbolism and to fertility. They are the mark of female nature. The sickle may thus symbolize the harvest-cycle, self-renewing, and death and the hope of rebirth......... The sickle is also the attribute of Death and Time, which destroys all things (see also SCYTHE)…. In this context the sickle is the symbol of decisive resolve, of determined differentiation on the path of individual or collective evolution. It is the sign 'of temporal progress and of evolutionary necessity itself', the sprouting of the primeval seed.”

  The actual Boon, and the relationship of the Scythe to the Boon and to the solution to Buffy’s seasonal challenges, will appear (duh) in Chosen.

  Now let’s complete the discussion which began in Dirty Girls and consider Faith’s performance as General. She got that job as a result of the decision to evict Buffy in Empty Places. Now that we’ve seen the full consequences of her actions, we need to understand what Faith did wrong in the context of the debate over generalship in order to understand the point being made.

  In my view, the whole point of the attack on the “arsenal” was to refute the belief that the problem was that Buffy was a bad General. Regardless of how you evaluate Buffy’s Generalship, Faith was, if anything, worse: she risked a good many lives to attack an arsenal, which would be a very low-value target compared to the Hellmouth or the vineyard; Faith had every reason to believe the whole setup was a trap, and it was (unlike Buffy); she did no reconnaissance at all (unlike Buffy), instead spending her time having sex with a subordinate; she had no idea who or what might be guarding the weapons; she had no idea what was there; she left the house and the most defenseless Potentials unguarded by Willow (unlike Buffy); she had no backup or reserve force (unlike Buffy); and she took the Potentials to a location with no lights, giving the Bringers a huge advantage (unlike Buffy).