Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Myth, Metaphor & Morality

by Field, Mark

  Buffy’s speech in BotN was therefore a critical turning point in the season because in calling for an “army” she took the wrong path. We didn’t realize it at the time: the speech was emotionally stirring; we knew there was “only” one Slayer, so it seemed natural for Buffy to take the lead; Giles had pushed her in that direction with his “it’s up to you” comments; and we ourselves structure armies this way. But the whole point of the episodes from BotN through Empty Places is that Buffy is making a mistake. The ability of one woman alone to fit herself into a patriarchal role is not the answer.

  By taking on the role of General and protector of the Potentials, Buffy accepted them in their subservient state rather than recognizing that what they needed was not protection but the ability to protect themselves. It’s like the old proverb “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” It’s not an accident that in the episode titled Potential, Dawn “gives” her power to Amanda even though it wasn’t really her power to give. That’s the solution Buffy adopts in Chosen.

  The choice Buffy offered the Potentials in Chosen was not to be empowered, but to participate in the fight against evil. They will be Slayers – that is, someone who joins in the fight – not because they were Chosen, but because they have Chosen. Those who followed her into the Hellmouth didn’t do so because they had power – Willow hadn’t done the spell yet – they did so because they chose to fight. Given the strong similarities between S3 and S7, it’s worth noting the similar decision at the end of Choices made by Willow, Buffy’s metaphorical spirit. And given that, it’s interesting that it’s Willow who provided the opportunity for Anya to choose her own destiny in Selfless.

  That’s the narrow case for the way empowerment plays out in S7. But I see the theme as much more generally applicable, as I’ll try to explain.

  I know that it's common to speak of Buffy as a feminist icon. Joss has implied this, reviewers cite it in support, authors write books with that as the theme, it's a commonplace on the net. This means something a little different to me than it may mean to others.

  In one sense, having Buffy as a feminist icon may mean that the message we get from her and from the show is directed mostly (exclusively?) to women. That is, that feminism is a way to empower women, to encourage them to work through the specific problems they face. I think that this interpretation of the show is very valuable; certainly I felt my own daughters watched with this perspective and learned from it.

  But the show always meant something additional to me. To me, feminism is a lens, a perspective, through which to view human problems. In my interpretation, the message Buffy sends is for women, but it’s not just for women, it's for all of us, male and female alike. As I said in the Introduction, Buffy may face her problems as a woman, but all of us, no matter our gender, should identify with her as much as we do male heroes. As Joss put it, he wanted Buffy to be “a hero, not just a heroine, but a hero.”

  For me, the Central Metaphor of the show is that Buffy is us, the viewers, and we are her. In this larger sense, she has no color, she has no gender, she has no age; she is a human figure. That’s not to diminish her role as a woman, it’s to universalize it. In the same way, Martin Luther King faced his problems as a black man, but the lessons of his struggles aren’t limited to that; he’s a hero to all of us, black or white. When Buffy empowered the Potentials, I felt she empowered me. And everyone else too. She didn't diminish or reject her own power, she made me aware of and enhanced my own.

  At the end of Chosen, Buffy achieved the thing she’s desired since we first saw her in Welcome to the Hellmouth. She’s “just a girl”. Buffy’s now “normal” not because she lost her power, but because everyone else has theirs back. A “normal” life is not an unempowered life, it’s an empowered life with everyone else empowered too. She is now "normal" only in the sense that we no longer live through her, but with her.

  There’s an inherent tension in the show's Central Metaphor: if only one is Chosen, can she really stand for me as a separate individual? The answer is yes, as long as the metaphor holds. But the metaphor is unstable precisely because it has to focus on a unique individual while simultaneously trying to symbolize all of us. Chosen resolved this dilemma. “Look around”, Buffy says. “If you can be a Slayer, you will be a Slayer. Can stand up, will stand up. You are me after all.”

  In my view, Joss did something incredibly daring in S6-7. Having created the greatest hero in all of American literature in S1-5, he turned around and asked, in effect, “do we really need heroes, or can we all be heroes?” Joss: “It was very important to me to say, ‘Ok great that you've worshipped this one iconic character, but find it in yourself everybody….’”

  Before I review the season as a whole, I need to revisit some points I made in my posts on S3 and explain how the empowerment solution of S7 fits with Joss’s absurdist philosophy. As a brief review, I argued (Gingerbread, Graduation Day) that absurdists distinguish between rebellion and revolution. The former is fine, the latter is not. Revolution is bad because it attempts to deny the fundamental nature of the world, to make it into something it’s not. This leads to violence and terror.

  At the end of Chosen, Willow tells Buffy “we changed the world”. So they did. That, however, doesn’t mean Buffy accomplished a revolution. The reason it didn’t is that the world we saw until Chosen was an artificial construct. The Shadowmen (Get it Done) isolated the Slayer by imbuing her alone with power. All other women were held in subservience. For the Slayer, the fact of her power was a very mixed blessing, as has been apparent for some time (at least since S3). By using the Scythe to unlock the power which had been artificially confined for so long, Buffy didn’t change the fundamental nature of the world, she restored the world to its natural state, one that the Shadowmen – the founding Patriarchs – had artificially corrupted. Buffy restored the balance.

  Now I can review how the themes of S7 were established and played out in the individual episodes. Here’s Joss explaining his idea for the season in an interview in Cinefantastique magazine: “Let's go back to the beginning…. And the real beginning was girl power. The real beginning is what does it mean to be a slayer? And, not to feel guilty about the power, but having seen the dark side of it, and finding the light again.”

  Lessons set that goal: It’s about power. Note that it wasn’t Buffy who said that, it was the First in Buffy’s form. The statement was still true, but not in the way the First meant. To compare the way in which the understanding of power changed over the final seasons, start with Checkpoint, where Buffy asserts her individual power against Glory and the WC. Then go to Two To Go and Grave, where Willow seeks to match her power against Buffy’s, only to be undone at last by Xander turning the other cheek. Here in S7, Lessons gave us the First’s implication that the key issue was the amount of power possessed by one individual; Same Time, Same Place and Potential signaled the shared power theme; and Get it Done had Buffy understand that the amount of power wasn’t important.

  Also in Lessons, Willow told Giles that “It’s all connected”. As we learned in subsequent episodes, “it” might be all connected, but Buffy wasn’t. Connecting to others by empowering them turns out to be what defeats the First, the metaphor for separation, of selfishness. We saw that prefigured in Lessons itself with Buffy’s advice to Dawn at the end (my emphasis): “You guys are gonna be OK. School is intense, but you'll do all right as long as you're careful. And you might want to think about sticking together.”

  Same Time Same Place also gave us the theme of isolation with Willow’s self-imposed separation from her friends. That’s what Willow’s spell did – it shifted her out of the same plane as her friends and left her feeling desolate and alone. Note the similarity of the metaphor with what Buffy told Spike in Touched: “Being the slayer made me different. But it's my fault I stayed that way. People are always trying to connect to me, and I just slip away.”

  STSP also introduced th
e eventual solution Buffy would adopt in Chosen. At the end of STSP, Buffy joins hands with Willow and offers her power because Buffy has so much power she’s giving it away. This theme was reinforced in Potential when Dawn acknowledged Amanda as a holder of the power.

  Beneath You gave us the hint that Buffy’s problem – more generally, the Slayer’s problem – arises in the subconscious, while Help spelled out the psychological dilemma Buffy couldn’t solve while she struggled in the inappropriate role of General. Help also gave us Xander’s hammer analogy so that we understood the necessary balance in using the power we have.

  Selfless and CWDP drove home the theme of the Slayer’s isolation, reinforcing what we thought we knew from the previous 6 seasons – that there can be just one Slayer – and setting up the twist in Chosen. The constant reiteration of Buffy’s status as “the” Slayer left both Buffy and the viewers with no way to break the logical box which confined Buffy as the General precisely because she was the only one.

  BotN and Showtime show Buffy taking the seemingly logically inevitable but wrong path of General. I promised in my post on Showtime to explain what Beljoxa’s Eye meant, and how it fits into the season themes, so I’ll do that here.

  “BELJOXA'S EYE The First Evil did not cause the disruption, only seized upon it to extinguish the lives of the Chosen forever.

  GILES Then what has caused the disruption? What—what is responsible for letting this happen?

  BELJOXA'S EYE The Slayer.”

  As Giles elaborated later, the problem arose because Buffy lives. Anya misunderstood the import of that, blaming herself and the others for resurrecting Buffy. That was a nice mislead. Now we can see the true interpretation: Buffy’s resurrection meant there were two slayers; if two, why not a hundred? Buffy has always been uncomfortable with the idea of another Slayer; she was very invested in the idea of being the One. That’s one reason she was so uncomfortable with Faith’s return:

  FAITH

  There's only supposed to be one. Maybe that's why you and I can never get along. We're not supposed to exist together.

  As it turned out, Faith’s existence was a major clue to Buffy’s solution.

  Get it Done took us to the source of the Slayer’s dilemma. By concentrating power in “one girl in all the world”, the Shadowmen forced every Slayer to operate within the confines of a patriarchal structure. That, in turn, guaranteed the isolation that was inherent in that role, which was essential to preserve patriarchal control.

  We learned in Storyteller and Lies My Parents Told Me that Buffy was trapped in a narrative, and that the narrative consisted of lies told to her, in fact told to all Slayers, by the Watchers ever since the Shadowmen. The basic lie was the one which rested at the very heart of the Slayer line: that there was only one girl in all the world, etc. Buffy had heard that lie before she ever came to Sunnydale, and Giles repeated it in their second conversation in Welcome to the Hellmouth. Other lies flowed from that source, e.g., “The Mission is what matters”. Neither Nikki Wood nor Giles knew that was a lie, but it was. Neither did Giles know that it was a lie that the Mission required that Buffy be the General, but it was a lie all the same.

  Dirty Girls and Empty Places demonstrated the inherent flaws in the structure. They also showed us just how difficult it was to overcome the existing assumptions about the Slayer, to break out of the established paradigm. The problem was not that Buffy was a bad General, though she certainly made mistakes, the problem was that Buffy hadn’t been and wasn’t willing to give up the idea that she was the Chosen One. The line is unstable because we have more than one Slayer (Faith), but one of them is refusing to share the role.

  To give you some sense of how literally inconceivable it was for Buffy to share the power, I’ll re-post one of shadowkat’s comments after Empty Places. Note that she completely got the problem, but even as perceptive as she is, the hold of “ONE girl in all the world” was so powerful that she couldn’t see the solution:

  “They are playing by the old rules. The paradigm. Set up by the Shadowmen, The Council. In the Angel episode Inside Out [which aired between LMPTM and Dirty Girls; no coincidence] - Gunn says something interesting to Fred about how if they are being manipulated, then it's time to flip the playing board. Start your own game. That when push comes to shove? No one knows the final score. You still have a choice.

  Buffy and the SG are letting the FE dictate the rules to them. It sets up a big bad - they go fight the big bad. It opens up the seal, they go off to close the seal. It kills some of their team, they fight amongst themselves, giving it greater power. They don't like one slayer? They choose another slayer to lead them. … I have a hunch Faith is going to inadvertently make the same mistakes as Buffy. Unless she stops playing by the rules. And since she like Buffy has somewhat bought into them...I doubt that will happen.

  The question therefore is - how do you change the rules? What are the SG and Buffy and Faith doing wrong?

  1. Is it that they are fighting the bads the First sends to them in combat? Should they just stop fighting?

  2. Is it that they are fighting amongst themselves?

  3. Is it that they've put the mission above small things like respect, human comradeship, kindness, friendship, compassion?

  4. Is it that they've stopped listening to each other and instead are talking at each other, projecting their worst fears on each other?

  5. How can they flip the board, if they don't even know they are on it? Or how to flip it?

  I don't know.”

  The series closed as it began, with Joss completely subverting our expectations. The opening words in Touched gave us the answer: “Power to the people.” Giles, naturally, rejected the phrase contemptuously. Only later in that episode did Buffy’s path to the solution begin when she recognized her isolation, but the crucial insight doesn’t come until she faces the First in Chosen. What Beljoxa’s Eye told us, in the usual cryptic manner of oracles, was that Buffy was so invested in her role as Slayer that she wasn’t ready to answer the question Faith posed to her in Empty Places: “Can you follow?” Giving the Scythe to Faith in Chosen symbolically marks that moment.

  To put it in the terms of the Hero’s Journey, Buffy used the power of the Scythe to enlighten the world with what she has learned. The Scythe, as I said in my post on End of Days, is merely a symbol, in this case of “female nature”, “the symbol of decisive resolve, of determined differentiation on the path of individual or collective evolution.” The Scythe represents feminine power, “girl power” to use Joss’s phrase. Accessing that power and sharing it with everyone is indeed the Ultimate Boon.

  Since some of the criticism of S7 involves the core members of the SG, which I’ll treat as including Spike, let me talk about them both in story line terms and in metaphor.

  One of the beneficiaries of the Boon was Spike, though not directly. I think Buffy inspired Spike’s road to recovery, though I don’t think he did it for her; he says as much in Touched. He did it for himself, which makes his sacrifice in Chosen all the more meaningful. Of course, Spike has always hankered after the Grand Gesture, and it’s fitting that he got it. Spike’s blood opened the Hellmouth in BotN. His soul closes it. Kind of like Andrew’s tears in Storyteller.

  I’ve seen the complaint that it was Spike who actually did the work of destroying the Hellmouth, not Buffy. This seems to me to miss the point on two grounds. First, the point of the episode was not to destroy the Hellmouth – there’s another one in Cleveland anyway – but to empower the Potentials as Slayers. That was done by Buffy (through Willow). Second, the criticism ignores the similarity to GD2, where it’s Giles who actually kills the Mayor; Buffy merely taunted him and led him to the explosives. In both cases, though, it was Buffy’s idea and her organization which led to the destruction of the symbolic source of evil.

  Spike’s reaction to Buffy’s declaration of love – “No you don’t. But thanks for sayin’ it.” – is perfectly consistent with his words to Wood at the end
of LMPTM. Because Spike still sees slayers as devoted to “the Mission” above all else, he can’t believe Buffy loves him in the only way love is meaningful to him. He loves her that way, but thinks she can’t ever love him. The irony is that the empowerment of the Potentials leaves open the path for Buffy to love someone like that.

  I think it’s also possible that it was Spike’s way of saying "You can go, you don't need to stay here with me." Had he not said that, Buffy might have stayed. Instead, Spike was able to do what he said he wanted in Grave: Give her what she deserved. In this sense, you could see it as the same lie Rick tells Ilsa at the end of Casablanca.

  Giles’s role this year seems to be widely disliked. As I’ve said several times, Buffy’s decision to take on the role of General was a big mistake. In my view, her decision to take this role was a failure of mind, in the sense that her mind was out of harmony with her heart and spirit. Basically, the role of General was an extension of Buffy’s understanding of the Slayer’s role since at least Graduation Day 2. She stated it straight out in Selfless, in the passage I’ve quoted so many times before: “You get down on me for cutting myself off, but in the end the slayer is always cut off. There's no mystical guidebook. No all-knowing council. Human rules don't apply. There's only me. I am the law.”

  If the Slayer is, by default, “the law”, then it only makes logical sense that she should be the one in charge. As a practical matter, the final call will always be hers. She may take advice along the way, just as any General does, but at the end of the day only the Slayer can decide to slay. It’s inherent in the “fact” of there being just one girl in all the world.