Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Myth, Metaphor & Morality

by Field, Mark

  Beer Bad

  There are worse episodes than Beer Bad, but not very many. If you ask a random Buffy fan to name the worst episode in the series off the top of his/her head, Beer Bad will come up pretty often. The problem is not that the point is obscure, as was true of, say, IRYJ. To the contrary, the episode beats us over the head with the message, even more than Buffy beat Parker. Emotionally satisfying that may be for her, but less so for us. At least I can discuss the point of the episode instead of stretching to find one as I did with IRYJ or Go Fish.

  Immediately after Buffy’s dream, the camera panned to a shot of Parker and his next conquest-to-be chatting in Prof. Walsh’s class. We then hear Prof. Walsh tell us about the id, the ego, and the superego:

  “These are the things we want. Simple things. Comfort, sex, shelter, food. We always want them and we want them all the time. The id doesn't learn, it doesn't grow up. It has the ego telling it what it can't have and it has the superego telling it what it should want. But the id works solely out of the pleasure principle. It wants.”

  This all sounds very familiar from S2, and it arises in the same context: sex. The transition from the shot of Parker to the lecture hammers home the point that Prof. Walsh is talking about Parker here. He’s a slave to his id; sex is all he wants. “Willow: This isn't sharing. This isn't connecting. It's the pleasure principle. That's right, I got your number id boy. The only thing you're thinking about is how long till you can jump on my bones.”

  The episode’s metaphors, heavy-handed though they may be, reinforce the message. Beer, even if not enchanted, strips us of our inhibitions, that is, our superegos. The “cavemen” represent the stereotypical instance of that. They’re pure id. CaveBuffy wants too, but not sex. She wants revenge on Parker. She gets that metaphorically in three different ways: when her metaphorical spirit exposes the shallowness of his pick-up routine, revealing his true self; when the metaphorical ids (the cavemen) hit him over the head immediately after Willow finishes; and when she herself hits him over the head at the end.

  You might have sensed another case of id on display. We’ll see that play out next episode.

  The episode also fits in with the seasonal theme of identity theft. The beer robbed Buffy and the other students of their true selves. This was similar to the identity theft we saw in Living Conditions, in that something essential was taken away. Keep in mind that there may be other ways to steal someone’s identity.

  Trivia notes: (1) Xander may have seen the movie Cocktail, but perhaps that wasn’t the best model. (2) A fugue state (Xander’s description of Buffy’s mopey sadness) basically involves temporarily forgetting who you are. (3) The arrogant guy who wanted to conduct sociometry was looking to use numbers to describe social relationships. The scene is an homage to the movie Good Will Hunting. (4) In case you missed it, there was a very brief scene with Veruca in Living Conditions. Veruca’s band, Shy, was actually the band T.H.C. Sarah Folkman was the lead singer – Paige Moss, who played Veruca, didn’t sing. (5) Thomas Aquinas was probably the most important Catholic theologian. He lived in the 1200s. His theory of divine providence – what one of the students wanted to discuss – states that God actively supervises Creation rather than just creating the universe and then sitting back and watching it. (6) Buffy was watching Luscious Jackson on MTV when Willow thought she’d had group sex. (7) Xander described the boys affected by the beer as “questing for fire”. Quest For Fire was a 1981 film about the discovery of fire by archaic humans. (8) Xander described Giles as “Mr. ‘I spent the sixties in an electric Kool-Aid funky Satan groove’”. The “electric Kool-Aid” refers to the book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

  Wild At Heart

  I love Wild at Heart, but many viewers (including me) were very disappointed that Oz left. There was no secret about it at the time so it’s not a spoiler now to say that his departure was caused by an outside event. Seth Green had a movie offer which he badly wanted to take, so they let him leave. By all the public statements, the departure was amicable and BtVS would have been happy to have him back. The fact that he left was one of the factors I had in mind in my comments on S4 in the post on The Freshman, and Oz leaving will have extremely important and long-lasting ramifications both on the show and perhaps for the show.

  One consequence of Seth Green’s departure is that Wild at Heart is unique among the episodes. It’s not really about Buffy in any meaningful way, though it does fit in with the season themes as I’ll discuss below. Joss: “I remember we spent a long time trying to figure out - we broke the story [meaning outlined the episode], we had it down, but we were like, we don't know what the Buffy is. … I remember when we broke it we were just like, ‘We've gotta figure out how Buffy's agenda completely relates to this one.’ This is the first time we went, you know what? We don't, actually. It's like, Buffy can be strong and interesting in the episode and save the day, but this one is about Oz and Willow, straight up, and let's deal with that.”

  The events of Wild at Heart were foreshadowed in Fear, Itself. I deliberately held off discussion of Oz’s fears, and one of Willow’s, for that reason, but I’ll review them now. Both of their fears in Fear, Itself come true here. Oz feared that he would lose any control over the werewolf part of himself, hurting Willow in the process: Oz: “…I won’t lie about the fact that I worry? I know what it’s like to have power you can’t control. I mean, every time I start to wolf out, I touch something –deep – dark. It’s not fun.” Later, in the house, that fear manifested itself when he began to wolf out even with no full moon. After Oz clawed her and ran away, Willow feared that he’d leave her: “Oz! – Oz, don’t leave me!”

  Similarly, the events of Beer Bad set the stage for Wild at Heart. In my post on Beer Bad I quoted Prof. Walsh’s words about the id, and we were introduced to Veruca not long afterward when Oz and Willow sat in the Bronze listening to her. The werewolf is a metaphor for the unrestrained id (see my post on Phases), and we got strong hints of that in Oz’s reaction to Veruca’s singing both in that episode and in this one.

  Oz is in denial that his true self includes his id. We see this when he denies to Willow that anything is amiss, and when he denies to Veruca that he’s “really” a wolf:

  “Veruca : Maybe. Or maybe you just don't wanna admit what happened to you. Maybe you just wanna pretend like you're a regular guy. (She walks over to him.)

  Oz : Well, I am. I'm only a wolf 3 nights a month.

  Veruca : Or you're a wolf all the time and this human face is just your disguise. You ever think about that, Oz? …

  Veruca : I can help you, Oz. You're scared. I was, too. But then I accepted it. The animal, it's powerful, inside me all the time. Soon, you just start to feel sorry for everybody else because they don't know what it's like to be as alive as we are. As free.”

  Veruca’s presence, and Oz’s reaction to her, bring him eventually to decide that Veruca was right: “The wolf is inside me all the time, and I don't know where that line is anymore between me and it.” Marti Noxon, who wrote both episodes, compared Wild at Heart to Beauty and the Beasts, saying "What is our basic animal nature? How much of that should be fulfilled and how much do we have to resist and say no, that's a dangerous impulse? Many of the problems we have between men and women are based on the fact that we deny a lot of these impulses and blame other things. The question of how much of me is animal and how much is man and how to control that is a big reason why Willow and Oz end up breaking up.”

  Oz’s concern about who he really is fits in perfectly with the theme of personal identity which, as we’ve seen, is one of the principal themes of S4.

  A few other points worthy of note. First, Xander got it totally wrong in his advice to Willow:

  “Xander : Well... Have you asked Oz about it?

  Willow : Well, I thought about it, but then he'll think I'm all jealous and worry.

  Xander : But you are. And odds are, he feels it. I'll bet that's all there is to the weird you're feeling. You g
uys should talk things out, Will. You'll both feel better.”

  The reason he got it so wrong, I think, is that this is not a standard case of romance gone wrong. It’s a more basic question of Oz’s fundamental identity. Xander, in fairness, couldn’t have expected that so he gave the standard advice: talk about it. The problem was that he suggested that Willow’s failure to talk to Oz had caused Oz to react to that failure. This was true, up to a point – it contributed to the awkward lunch, and Willow knew it. However, it wasn’t the real problem; that was internal to Oz and unrelated to Willow. Thus, Xander’s advice, well-intentioned though it was, made things more painful for Willow when she caught Oz with Veruca the next day because it would have left her with the sense that it may have been partly her fault.

  Second, Oz’s behavior in bringing Veruca into the cage was obviously wrong, though he probably got the idea from Buffy. She told him that if she found the other wolf, he “might have a roommate in there”. She, of course, was concerned only about safety and had no reason to think that something else might be going on. Oz did, and both Veruca (before) and Willow (after) called him on it. Even more than the sex, Oz was sharing a fundamental part of his nature with Veruca, something Willow couldn’t touch. As Marti put it on the DVD commentary, “And the wolf, to me, is the part that both men and women have that can destroy relationships even when people love each other.”

  Third, Willow’s uncompleted spell was emotionally understandable but just as impossible to justify as Oz’s behavior. The difference is, Willow stopped herself. Unfortunately, by the time she was ready to talk to him about it, Oz had come to his realization and had made the decision to leave. We can even understand what Oz was going through. Seth Green (speaking to Joss and Marti): “my favorite thing about working on the show was just how well you guys handled every character ‘cause no one was just a bad guy, even the people who were doing the horrible things, like Spike. Everybody had a reason. Everybody had their own emotional agenda that was no - it was undeniably valid. You could really understand everybody's point of view, and it made the audience unable to choose sides. And that was my favorite thing about this episode was that - even though Oz is the bad guy, doing the bad things and being the ill character, it's like you understand where he's coming from, and you can see why he thinks leaving is the right thing and how he feels, like he's protecting Willow in a way. And you can see the selfishness, but you can understand from everybody's point of view why things happen the way they do.”

  But Willow never got the catharsis when she dropped the spell and then Oz left without her having any say in it.

  William B added a good point about Willow’s magic use: “Willow also nearly does the spell because it's part of Willow's character at this point in the series to go closer to that edge. And she is devastated by the idea that, in her manifest goodness and wholesomeness, she is cut off from whatever animal instincts that attract Oz and Veruca. It's another motivation to keep exploring the dark arts, as protection from this sort of thing happening.”

  So, what’s up with those commando guys? We’ve seen them several times now, but they remain mysterious. Having them completely undercut Spike’s (over)dramatic monologue in the teaser just whets the appetite, as does Buffy’s collision with one on her way back to rescue Willow. We’re about to find out.

  Trivia notes: (1) Oz mentions having seen Giles’s album collection, which refers back to to The Harsh Light of Day when Oz noticed his Velvet Underground album. (2) Buffy described Veruca as “quell Fiona”, referring to singer Fiona Apple. (3) It pains me no end to include this as trivia, but Oz’s reference to the “extreme Jerry Garcia look” requires me to note that Jerry Garcia was the lead singer for The Grateful Dead. (4) Willow’s mention of the wicca group meeting sets up a very important plot point later in the season which is directly a consequence of Oz’s departure. (5) The game show Giles was watching on TV asked about the treaty which ended the Thirty Years War. Giles’s answer – the Peace of Westphalia (1648) – was, of course, correct. (6) Veruca scornfully called Oz’s cage a “Habitrail”, which is the set of tubes and “houses” used to create more interesting environments for a hamster or mouse. (7) Barabbas was a robber who was freed instead of Jesus during Passover (h/t Isaac P.). Willow called on Barabbas as part of her incomplete spell. (8) Willow also called on “the Saracen queen”. “Saracen” was the Roman word for the Arabs. There are several “Saracen queens” in history and literature, so it’s hard to say which one was meant. (9) It’s pretty much true: “Joss: Well, it's also a rule on Buffy: If anybody ever has sex, the person that they - the reason they shouldn't be having sex will walk into the room.”

  The Initiative

  The Initiative is the seventh episode of S4, and by now we know that the seventh episode is a very important one. The previous 3 such episodes were Angel, Lie to Me, and Revelations. Each of those addressed the most important issues of their respective seasons, so we should be on the alert for something of equal significance here.

  The most important line of dialogue in The Initiative occurs near the end. Riley told Prof. Walsh that “The implant works. Hostile 17 can't harm any living creature, in any way, without intense neurological pain.” There’s a metaphor here which it’s critical to understand in order to follow what’s going on with Spike and with the Initiative itself. Writer Doug Petrie tells us in a phrase: “we 'Clockwork Oranged' Spike”.

  A Clockwork Orange is one of the most important novels of the 20th Century (and a fine movie by Stanley Kubrick, even if the book’s author, Anthony Burgess, hated it) and lots of people read it in high school or college. If you haven’t read it, I didn’t say that to make anyone feel bad, I’m just noting why the writers used it here. I’ll summarize the plot because it’s very important to understand it. For reasons I don’t need to go into now, but will later, there are two versions of the novel, one published in England (the original) and one in America. I’m giving you the American version, again for reasons I won’t go into now but will later.

  The short version is that Alex is a teenage sociopath who loves brutal violence and engages in it whenever he gets the opportunity. After a series of horrific rapes and murders, he’s arrested for murder and taken to prison. There the prison authorities force him to undergo a form of behavior modification therapy in which he’s conditioned to be nauseated by violence. The prison chaplain accuses the authorities of stripping Alex of his free will, but the authorities continue with the treatment anyway. After a while they consider him “cured” and release him. He’s helpless when released because he can’t fight back when anyone abuses him, and he has lots of enemies who proceed to do just that. Eventually his conditioning wears off and he begins the cycle of violence again.

  So, the idea with Spike is that now he’s been given an “implant” (a chip, as we’ll soon learn) and can’t harm anyone without suffering “intense neurological pain”. This is a form of operant conditioning, the topic Willow asked Riley if Prof. Walsh would cover in The Freshman. I hope the comparisons to Alex are pretty obvious at this point, and the question is what will be the consequence of this behavior modification “therapy”. Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange to explore the moral issues involved in behavior modification, which he strongly opposed. The fact that the Initiative is engaged in behavioral modification therefore might be a clue that it’s not a force for good.

  Wait a minute, though. There’s a serious difference between behavioral modification on human beings (even one as depraved as Alex) and behavioral modification on a vampire. Whether vampires actually have free will is iffy. Because they lack a soul, they don’t really understand all the ramifications of their actions. This makes them fundamentally evil in a way that most humans (maybe all humans) are not.

  Before I go further into that discussion, though, there’s another, related metaphor going on here as well. The Initiative got its inspiration from the English TV show The Prisoner. If you’ve never seen it, writer Doug Petrie describes it as a �
��very creepy, very existential” show. The plot involves a former secret service man who is held captive and referred to only as “Number 6” (hence the references in the episode to Spike as “Hostile 17”). Wikipedia describes the show as featuring “themes includ[ing] … identity theft, mind control, … and various forms of social indoctrination. …. A major theme of the show is individualism versus collectivism.”

  These issues are very similar to those raised by A Clockwork Orange. Alex’s behavior modification was seen by the chaplain as a form of identity theft. In Living Conditions and Beer Bad we saw identity theft take the form of depriving someone of an essential part of their character (either the soul or the superego). The prison officials took the opposite approach in Alex’s case, because they added a conditioned reflex. Either way, the original person has been changed into something different.

  Other themes from The Prisoner also appeared in A Clockwork Orange. The mind control theme is obvious in both. The behavior modification naturally served as a form of social indoctrination for Alex, and that brings me to the next point.

  Now let me throw in yet a third related theme from the philosophical tradition. The Initiative as we see it is what’s called a panopticon (h/t manwitch). That’s a combination of two Greek words meaning “sees all”. The concept and the term were invented by the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late 1700s. Bentham’s basic idea was that a prison should be constructed so that the prisoners could be watched at all times by a watchman who remained unseen. Before Bentham, they really didn’t have prisons in the sense of a long-term place to hold criminals after conviction of a crime. Most crimes were punished physically, either by execution (all felonies were, by definition, death penalty cases) or by methods such as whipping or the stocks for misdemeanors. Prisons existed to hold the accused prior to trial, not to punish them afterwards.