Whose Reality Is It Anyway?

Reading Nicole and Madeline’s blog posts inspired me to think about The Turn of the Screw, “Gingerbread”, and “Normal Again” in terms of the juxtaposition of the supernatural, fantasy world and so-called “reality.” Nicole wrote about how in “Gingerbread” and “Normal Again” reality comes across as more disturbing than the fantasy world we’re used to, and Madeline further added that she finds the ambiguity in the episodes and the book to be the most disconcerting element. For the two Buffy episodes, I found it interesting to see how the characters themselves react to the clash of the two different worlds.

In “Gingerbread” Joyce and M.O.O see the threat as stemming from the supernatural world, and try to impose their “new world” techniques and methods on what they view as being “old world” problems. Therefore, we get this clash of a scary, imposed reality on the fantasy world we’re used to. Before finding out about Buffy being the Slayer, Joyce lived in a world grounded in a reality similar to our own: no monsters, no demons, no forces of darkness, and definitely no slayer. Her horror comes from realizing that the world is a much more crazy than she initially believed. However, Buffy sees the threat as coming from the opposite direction since she’s comfortable with her demons and daily apocalypse. Joyce feels threatened by the supernatural, Buffy feels threatened by the onset of normality. From Buffy’s point of view, M.O.O, the police, and the riots are much more scary than the demon she can beat up and slay at the end of the episode because she can’t control and overcome them like she does with the demons.

However, the opposite seems to be the case for Buffy in “Normal Again”. After being brought back to life, her classic crazy world of demons and slaying seems to be too much for Buffy to handle. Thus, when she’s given the opportunity to believe that it’s all a lie, she leaps at it (until she almost kills her friends). She wants to believe that she’s just a messed-up normal girl with mental problems, rather than a badass slayer who’s been killed twice and still fights vampires. In this episode, it’s the fantasy world that comes across as more threatening than the idea of a normal reality where everything falls within the expected rules and explanations.

I think these episodes demonstrate that what we find terrifying is often that which we can’t understand or control. Like Madeline suggested, it’s this sense of ambiguity, of not knowing that we cannot stand. This makes The Turn of the Screw a terrifying text: we can’t get one straightforward answer, and we can’t force out a well-formed conclusion of what happened because we simply don’t know enough. Buffy finds “reality” terrifying in “Gingerbread” because she can’t understand or control it, and wants the simple explanation provided by the demon world; yet she yearns for reality in “Normal Again” when her demon world becomes overwhelming, and her false “normal” reality provides her with a simple explanation that washes away her complicated feelings about being the slayer.