10.19.2011
The Differences Between Andrew and Catherine
Maybe it was because I am less familiar with the sixth and seventh seasons of Buffy, but I really didn't like the episode "Storyteller." What I have appreciated so much about Joss Whedon's scripts in the past is how literary they are. There was something about this particular episode that felt more concerned with action, blood-drawing, and sort of "C" grade humor, than staying true to Gothic literary traditions. Where I did find strengths in the episode was when Buffy says to Andrew, "Stop telling stories. Life isn't a story." I completely agree with the comparisons that Katherine draws between Northanger Abbey's, Catherine Morland and "Buffy's" Andrew. Katherine has already done a very good job describing the similarities between these two characters so I am going to attempt to point to some of the marked differences. Andrew is not a blank slate, a "tabula rasa." He retreats to the world he creates behind his camera, being on the "side" and not a player in life's action, because he is hiding from his guilt. Andrew murders his best friend/lover? because Andrew was seeking greatness. Throughout the episode, he says that he is looking for redemption. By befriending Buffy and the "Scooby Gang," and by memorializing Buffy's "good" through video footage, Andrew is finding a mechanism to cope with this guilt. However, it is not until he is confronted with the seal, when Buffy is threatening the coward's life, that he finally seeks repentance. There is obviously something manipulative in Andrew. He was once a super-villain, sure, but even though he has supposedly reformed his evil ways, it is evident that he still manipulates those around him to make himself appear in the most favorable light. Catherine Morland, like Andrew, gets in trouble when she relies more heavily on "stories" than her limited, real life experience. An integral difference between these two characters is that Andrew is inhabiting a fictional world to escape the actual crimes that he has committed, whereas Catherine is not intentionally living in a storybook world to avoid living in the real world. But because Catherine has so little experience, the fancies of fairytales become what she understands as experience and universal truth. There is obvious irony in me starting out this blog post by saying that I don't like this episode because it isn't as self-consciously literary as the other episodes I've seen, and subsequently connecting the episode to literature, but it is necessary to allow for small blips of hypocrisy in a person from time to time.
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I understand that you haven't watched or read into Buffy outside of what we see in class, but I think if you do a little research on the story line of Andrew, you might see him in a different light. I think that you are right in saying that Catherine and Andrew find trouble in their personal integration into stories, but I disagree with your reasoning. Andrew fabricates the truth, sure, and in that way inhabits a fictional story. However, I think that his motive is to take himself, his real self, out of the actual story rather than place himself in one. You say that, "Andrew is inhabiting a fictional world to escape the actual crimes that he has committed," and though I agree that he is trying to escape, I think that taking himself out of the story is his tactic rather than placing himself in a story. Only in the end of the episode does he start narrating his purpose to the story as a whole, and that is when his crimes are revealed and when he begins to fall apart. If you understand the history of Andrew and read maybe a wikipedia entry or a summary somewhere about him, you will see that he is actually a really big part of the story, and he wants to take himself out of it. By highlighting other parts of the story, like the action, the romance, and the heroism, he can write his importance out of it. Sure, he is the narrator, but he calls himself the "humble host" and takes himself out of the story except when the camera is off and Buffy and Willow force him to place himself back amidst the action. Catherine, like you said, places herself in the action, wanting to be part of something that she is not to add excitement to her life at the Abbey, but Andrew contrarily works hard to take himself completely out of the picture and take his place, like you say, on the sidelines.
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