All in Your Head

Though “Fear, Itself” is really not one of my favorite episodes, knowing that I would have to write a blog post about it made me watch it a lot closer. I realized a bunch of things I never noticed before. Though the episode was not very subtle in its gothic mechanism – making the characters face all of their worst fears – there were a few interesting things that gave it (for me) some redeeming qualities.

The first thing I noticed was the transformative element that was being employed, turning harmless things into items that were much less fun – grapes into eyeballs, and plastic spiders into actual spiders. However, it was exactly the fears of the people that warped the nature of these innocuous things, which thus revealed another theme of the episode: the only power that fear has is what you give it. If no one had been afraid of bugs, the spiders would have stayed plastic. This theme is further carried over into the representation of the fear demon, Gacnar (spelling?), in the episode.

When I first saw this episode, once upon a time, I thought that the demon’s small stature and the Scoobie’s reaction to it was just Buffy the Vampire Slayer being quirky and cute as usual. But then, I realized the significance of Gacnar’s insignificant size. For all his fanfare, Gacnar is really nothing to behold – and that is because fear is all in our heads. (And just as a nod to Amelia’s post about Hollywood’s height bias: Hollywood is about sound and image, and what that can convey to an audience. It’s simply easiest to portray something that should be seen as “insignificant” as something physically smaller. Simply put, the less we see something, the less important it is.) Once again, we give our fears the power that they have over us. Fear itself is something insubstantial and inconcrete – we build things up in our heads when they aren’t truly that scary.

<3 Lisa