"Fear Itself" - Fear Itself

This episode is all about facing one’s fears. Our characters’ fears are each manifested in the haunted house – Buffy is left alone, Xander effectively disappears, Willow’s magic goes awry, and Oz begins to turn into a werewolf. Anya realizes Xander is in danger. Giles doesn’t seem to fear anything, although I may fear him with a chainsaw…that was a little terrifying. Anyway, the point is, the whole first two thirds of the episode is foreshadowing the haunted house, and the part with Buffy and her mother really stuck out to me as the crux of the lesson. Joyce was afraid of new people and a new place, and she faced her fears and is now happily situated in Sunnydale. The haunted house is the effect of the fear demon before he has fully manifested. So really, all of the terrible things happening are like shadows of real fear. It’s the things we can’t see that frighten us, the dark and the scary voices and the heavy footsteps. But when the characters face their fears head-on, in the form of the fear demon, they find that really, their fears only had power over them because they allowed it. There’s something that the Master says in season 1 about fear, I believe we saw this, “Fear is in the mind, like pain, it can be controlled.” (Side note: It’s interesting to see how the things the characters fear have changed since that first episode.) Essentially, the Master is telling us that fear exists only in the mind, and therefore we as humans with advanced mental faculties can quell our fears, thereby removing their power over us. And since fear exists only in the mind, it makes sense that the fear demon is inconsequential. As Xander puts it, “Big overture, little show.” Ironically, the objects that represent / cause fear in Castle of Otranto are the enormous sword, helmet, and this specter that appears to be a giant in armor. But in reality, the things that the characters fear are marriage and prophecies. Anyway, I love the imagery at the end of the episode – fear is so trivial when faced head-on that even Little Red Riding Hood can quash him.

“Gingerbread” and “Normal Again” – Terrifying Reality

In both of these episodes, it is reality that is the most frightening, especially to Buffy and her friends. In “Gingerbread” Buffy’s own mother is the catalyst to a force that nearly destroys Buffy’s fragile world in which she is able to operate as the slayer. This force is human fear, mob mentality, and a man with a key. At the end of the episode, the demon that’s part of Buffy’s world is the easiest thing to kill in comparison with the insanity that stemmed from MOO. A quick spell, smashing a potion on the floor, and a great big stake in the neck, and Buffy wins again against the demon world; like she says at the beginning of the episode, bang boom stake (Whedon foreshadows). But there’s no easy fix to the problems that stemmed from the human world as we see at the end of the episode. Willow’s mother blocked out almost everything from those few days when she abducted her own daughter and tried to burn her at the stake. Once again, Whedon shows us how simple the demon world is in comparison to the ambiguous and confusing human world. I think the most representative still from the whole episode is the shot of Buffy’s face when she realizes her mother’s actually going to burn her at the stake – pure horror. That’s what happens when reality gets mixed up with fantasy, Whedon seems to say. But then, how do we reconcile Buffy, she half in and half out of the world of fantasy? The same is shown in “Normal Again” through Willow’s expression when she’s tied up in the basement – horror at Buffy’s becoming mixed up in this supposedly “real” world. But it’s this world that’s so much more frightening than a waxy demon chained up in the basement. I think that what Buffy finds the most frightening is the concept that she really isn’t any of the wonderful things she’s purported to be throughout the series. Instead of a strong, confident, selfless, and courageous woman, she’s less than ordinary, sick and incapable of living in a comparatively simple world where her greatest responsibility would be taking out the trash. I’d prefer the delusion too.

Another thing to mention: as I commented on someone’s post, I think the reason we’re left with the same old Buffy the Vampire Slayer at the end of “Normal Again” is because that’s the Buffy that we take advice from, that we look up to, that we need. Buffy the hero is the food of our imagination, so if Whedon, as I think Janelle mentioned at one point, had returned to that room with the strapped bed and the sick girl, it would entirely dislodge our belief in Buffy. If we had returned to the sick girl, the idea that in another reality Buffy could have been real and just as strong as she proves herself would disintegrate. It’s important to question the show with episodes like “Gingerbread” and “Normal Again,” but it’s also very important to embrace the unreality of the show so that we may also embrace the very real lessons it can teach us.

Burn Him!!!

In the season three Buffy episode entitled Gingerbread, the viewer encounters the issues that go along with the murder of two children. Distraught over seeing the limp bodies of the two young children, Buffy’s mother starts a witch-hunt in Sunnydale to rid the city of things deemed to be associated with the occult. This episode demonstrates the extreme measures people will go when they feel that the lives of innocents have been unjustly taken. Blinded by the tragedy of the dead children, Buffy’s mother and her torch-carrying horde abandon common sense and attempt to burn Buffy and her friends at the stake, a indication of how far people will go when they are driven by a mob mentality that believes great injustice has occurred. This sort of madness regarding the safety of children also occurs in Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, when the governess, losing her grip on reality due to the fact that she feels as though she desperately needs to protect the two children, smothers the young boy by holding him too tightly against her chest. What I believe the authors are saying about this sort of situation is that it has the capacity to inspire madness if obsessed, making the protection of innocence of a child, very difficult business.

Parents: Who Needs 'em?!

As I watched "Gingerbread" and "Normal Again" and read Turn of the Screw, I was struck by the significance placed on parental roles. Whether they are skewed, emphasized, or utterly absent, influence by parents or parental figures seems to be a reoccurring theme throughout the texts and episodes we study. In "Gingerbread", we obviously see examples of bad parents. Willow's mom shows little to no interest in her daughter's life until completely the wrong time, and then does not even try to fully understand it, and Buffy's mom essentially starts a war against the world her daughter has no choice but to establish. The moment when Joyce adds "The Slayers" to the list of beings taking over Sunnydale, we see that she has turned against her daughter in true bad parent style. But even before that she isn't winning any mom of the year awards. She gets in Buffy's way while she's slaying, and shows dangerously too much interest in her daughter's pursuits. In this way, she's a bit like the Governess, although she far from smothers Buffy in the literal sense.

On the note of the Governess, I have to say I agree with Amelia from our discussion last week that the Governess's interest in the children, while not blatant sexual attraction, borders on perversion. The role of mother has been altered drastically from what we expect and find comfort in, and that's why it disturbs us and why some of us may choose not to accept it. Turn of the Screw is not the first place we've seen this element: in Dracula, Lucy's first victims are children, which she lures to her with motherly affection and then feeds on almost lustfully.

Finally, in "Normal Again" we see parents once more in a world they have been absent from for quite some time. Buffy's mother has been dead for a year, and her father has been off doing whatever he does. Buffy is working a dead end job just to make ends meet and support her sister and friends who live with her, and even Giles has left the picture. She has not parental figure. In the institution world, Buffy's parents are both living, both present, and still married. It follows that Buffy finds this world more appealing because of the presence of these parental figures. Similarly, when Buffy dies she goes to heaven, which to her means she is no longer responsible for and no longer has to worry about her friends and family. She almost chooses the institution over the "real world" because she wouldn't be responsible there either. Even though she chooses the "real world" in the end, it is her mother who gives her the strength to do so.

To sum up, parents are key figures in the Gothic tradition, or so it seems to me. When they play their role properly, they inspire their children to make the right decision or be strong. When they are one extreme or another, overly present or completely absent, or when their role is perverted by others, chaos inevitably follows.

Alternate Realities--Gingerbread and Normal Again

I watched the episode Normal Again this morning, an hour or so before watching Gingerbread in class. I was quite intrigued by the conversation that we had about how Gingerbread seemed especially slow. Many people believed that there was an illusion that the slow was dragging on because, as viewers, we were unprepared to cope in the universe Whedon creates in Gingerbread. When we first entered Sunnydale, we were forced to suspend our disbelief and accept that we were now located on the hell-mouth where people mysteriously disappear and die quite frequently. "Buffy" episodes follow a certain trajectory: 1) normal day; 2) conflict from love/evil monster; 3) battles evil; 4) vanquishes evil; 5) everything returns to normal. However, when we are presented with a different schema, one in which humans become the antagonists and we must root for Buffy and her supernatural (implied evil) friends, there is a certain discomfort that arises in having to adapt to this deviation from the norm. Normal Again perfectly exemplifies how anxiety-provoking the presentation of a new reality can be. Throughout all seven seasons, Whedon's viewers have accepted some basic tenants about life on the hell mouth and what being the slayer entails. We have also accepted Buffy as our hero. We want her to always defeat the bad guys so that all can return back to normal. But when we are presented with the option of understanding Sunnydale as a figment of Buffy's imagination, that all of her friends, her sister, her relationship, everything, is simply made up and are products of a six-year delusion, everything that we have accepted as truth is challenged. What is so difficult about this episode is that as viewers, it becomes impossible to navigate what is truly Buffy's reality. That she would be in a mental institution seems so real, especially considering the information that Buffy divulges to Willow about her past. Normal Again forces us to step back and question whether or not we have been insane to suspend our disbelief by joining Buffy in her delusion for all these years. Both worlds seem so real. Like Buffy, how do we choose? Which is the reality we should accept? As creatures of the era of science and technology, it is hard not to grasp onto the newly presented idea that Buffy has merely created everything and that Sunnydale is an illusion. Ah, we would say, there is a medical diagnosis for all of the crazy events that occur in Sunnydale. It's Buffy's psychosis. That explains a lot. If we can boil it all down to science and "hard" evidence, then we no longer have to suspend our disbelief. So how do we as viewers, viewers who have spent seven years with Buffy Summers in Sunnydale, accepting all along that it is her true reality, reconcile our "reality" with the possibility that our understanding of Buffy's reality is delusional because she is delusional. Whedon is even more tantalizing in that the episode ends with a catatonic Buffy in the mental institution, after she has decided to reclaim her slayer duties. It was just such an unnerving ending because there wasn't any resolution and because the sense of our own reality has been so profoundly altered. The ending of Normal Again is very similar to James', "The Turn of the Screw" because both are steeped in such powerful ambiguity. As readers and viewers, we are offered various interpretations of what has happened, but in both the novel and the episode, the mystery is never solved. These two works beg to be read and watched again and again so that we can gather enough evidence, some sort of proof to tip the scale one way or the other. However, no matter how many times one readers the novel or watches the episode, it seems that there is too much uncertainty for resolution to ever be attained.

Occupy Sunnydale

I know we purposely avoided the topic of Occupy Wall Street in class today, so as not to derail our conversation about "Gingerbread" and The Turn of the Screw, but the Gov minor in me can’t resist, and this is my blog post, so here it goes. I apologize in advance if anyone finds this uninteresting or irrelevant. I promise it won’t turn into (too) political a rant.
“Gingerbread” is by far my favorite of the episodes we have watched so far. (Sidenote: I am seriously a Buffy fan now. I had a 15 minute conversation with my boss about it the other day. We usually don’t talk. All I can say is, thank god Amtrak finally got wi-fi. I have some serious catching up to do over break. ) The images of the police officers raiding lockers and taking away students were scarier to me than any of the “Big Bads” we have thus far encountered. The episode incorporated the cultural fear of the other that contributed to both the Salem Witch trials and the Nazi movement. By doing so, Buffy once again proves it is much more than a typical “teen drama”- it is a legitimate gothic text in its own right.
But I want to talk about “Gingerbread” and Occupy Wall Street. Not about the mob-mentality evident in both, or whether that mentality is positive. I want to talk about books. Specifically, what happens when we don’t have them? When the police took away Giles’ books, I could feel that now-proverbial screw being turned against me. What do we do without books? From books, we get knowledge. We get to try on the world-views of people totally unlike ourselves or those we associate with. Books show us that the world is as messy as we think it is, but that others see it that way too, and there is a beauty in that. Even Buffy, completely action-oriented Buffy, acknowledges the importance of books when she says to her mother, “and maybe next time that the world is getting sucked into Hell, I won't be able to stop it because the Anti-Hell-Sucking Book isn't on the approved reading list!”
Yesterday, protesters saw the 5,554 books from the Occupy Wall Street library being destroyed by NYPD officers as they were loaded onto dump trucks. However, soon after the Mayor’s Office tweeted (yes they have a twitter) a picture of the books at a Sanitation Department garage. Sadly, not all of the books are accounted for today. Over 2,000 (and possibly as many as 4,000) books are still missing.
In today’s episode, Giles pointed out that sometimes it’s not some “Big Bad” we have to be afraid of; we are perfectly capable of destroying each other. It doesn’t matter if you think Wall Street is responsible for all our problems or you think that the Occupiers need to get a hobby. What matters is that, if we have reached the point of disagreement where we are destroying books that parents were bringing their children from all over the city to read (public libraries are seriously underfunded these days) then we may on the verge of destroying each other, just as Giles warned.

Check out the Occupy Wall Street library’s website. Some of the things in their catalogue will surprise you.

http://peopleslibrary.wordpress.com/

“I Get By With a Little Help from My Friends”

In “The Replacement” and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I was struck by the difference in attitudes both Xander and Mr. Hyde/Dr Jekyll had about their doppelgangers. More importantly, I was struck by the contrast in how each of their attitudes changed over the course of their stories. These two men take very different stances on their duality, and that difference is ultimately life or death.

For Xander, he is initially unwilling to believe that the doppelganger is actually just parts of himself. He creates all sorts of fantasies to convince himself of this, for example, the silver disk that he purports as being inherently evil, when in reality is nothing more than a smushed coin. However, as usual, The Scooby Gang comes to the rescue and convinces both Xanders that they are in fact just parts of each other. Suspend your disbelief for the next part where Willow magics them back into one person. But if not for his friends, Xander probably would have killed his other half, essentially killing an important piece of himself in the process.

As we all know, Dr. Jekyll is not so fortunate as Xander. He ultimately kills himself as a way to stop the evil Mr. Hyde from walking the Earth anymore. It is interesting that from the beginning of the story, Dr. Jekyll is well aware of the fact that Mr. Hyde is a part of himself. I don’t mean that simply because Jekyll created Hyde, but also because Jekyll is not so naive (sorry Xander) as to believe that the qualities in both men are not his own. What is so sad for Jekyll, is that much like Xander, he seeks counsel from his friend, Dr. Lanyon. This is interesting because while Mr. Hyde is terrifying the streets, Dr. Lanyon remains a staunch Victorian rationalist. It is this one-sidedness that eventually kills him. Perhaps a blend of old and new, eastern and western would have served him better (hey Van Helsing, how you doing).

So no offense to Robert Louis Stevenson, but if somebody is going to script me a doppelganger, I want it to be Joss Whedon. Xander gets to continue living his life, perhaps for the better knowing that he has a “suave” side buried somewhere deep inside. Jekyll is not so lucky. Granted his best friend wasn’t a powerful witch who could just magic himself back together, but even so, maybe he sought help with his problem from the wrong source.

Moral of the story, make friends with cool, and magical people.