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.

Everyone's a Main Character in their Own Life Story

What struck me most in “Storyteller” was its illumination of Andrew’s character. For those of you unfamiliar to Andrew’s back-story, he kind of filled the shoes of the lame sidekick in The Trio, a threesome of humans who dabble in science and the black arts to try to achieve unclear goals – perhaps wealth/fame or world domination, but the plans always culminated in trying to get rid of Buffy. As lame sidekick, the others predictably bullied Andrew often. He is also kind of flaky, which meant his heart wasn’t really in it. He just got caught up in a bad crowd.

His role of storyteller in the episode ironically brings him to the forefront, instead of the people whose story he’s trying to tell. We see the world through Andrew’s eyes; he tries to soften it and romanticize, glossing over the fact that many of the people he’s interviewing are likely to die.

It’s also his attempt to simplify the world around him, a la his crude diagramming of the situation on the whiteboard. He breaks the story down into it’s sweeter parts: Buffy kicking butt, the Willow/Kennedy, Xander/Anya, and Spike/Buffy romances, and the simple matter of eating breakfast in a house of so many people. We don’t see the true horrors of the world in his video; just as Whedon avoids BtVS ever getting truly scary (except on occasion – cough Hush cough Normal Again cough), we don’t see any of the true awfulness of an ending world in Andrew’s documentation.

This moment comes only after Andrew is forced to put down his camera; when he can no longer hide behind anyone, or his camera lens, he is forced to acknowledge things that he has been trying to deny to himself: the wrongs he committed in killing Jonathan, his self-delusion in believing The First, and his final admission that he “probably won’t survive,” the coming battle. It’s his tears of remorse that close the Seal, making him a central character at least for that moment, and forcing the audience to realize that Andrew (like everyone) has his own story running through the background of the Scoobies’ lives. It’s just waited until now to be told.

On another note, because the gothic is about how horror and fantasy act with the real world, there is always expected doubt on the part of the readers/viewers/listeners. That’s why it’s often told from “evidence” – like the journals and clippings in Dracula, and the journal in The Turn of the Screw. I think it’s also just the nature of the gothic as a “scary story” for one to tell coming through. Regardless, Xander makes a point in the episode, saying “But it is kind of a shame you keep saving the world and there's not any proof;” this grounds the show, making it something not that Whedon tells us, but something the actual players wish to communicate to posterity. In a way, it’s a request for acknowledgment and validation, as well as a subtle nod to the actual audience.

Yay! All caught up! At least until tomorrow.

<3 Lisa

Fear, Itself

In my opinion, Fear, Itself was one of the more interesting Buffy episodes that we have watched thus far because it was in conversation with gothic literature and its intrinsic tropes. The first scene of the episode mocks the constructs of the modern day “goth,” a movement that was inspired by music and literature surrounding the gothic culture. Buffy anthropomorphizes the jack-o-lantern and comments on the fact that it was once happily sitting in the sun until “someone came and ripped its guts out.” The camera pans to a depressed looking Buffy, her hands steeped in the disemboweled pumpkin remains. Whedon is able to turn the usually effervescent and fun-loving blond, into the mold of the “teenage, angsty goth.” A trope that is more harmonious with that of gothic literature is the haunted frat-house. When I a three-year-old at Euro Disney, I was planning on entering the Haunted Mansion until le garcon a dit: “Whomever comes in, never comes out.” Terrifying, right? I think I cried more at that then on the “Snow White’s Scary Adventure” ride and it took me years to muster up the courage to go on the ride (which isn’t that scary, by the way). Anyway, once Buffy and the Scooby gang enter the haunted frat house, they begin to lose their way. The doors and windows seal themselves and they are trapped within the realm of doom, only to be saved by a chainsaw bearing Giles. The sealed portholes are clearly an allusion to previously established gothic norms. Another literary allusion that Whedon makes is to the first gothic text, The Castle of Otranto. Though less obvious than the aforementioned examples, both the episode and the novel have rather anti-climactic endings. There is a huge expectancy for build-up and then resolution at the end of the text, but all that takes place is a marriage between the heart-broken Theodore and the desperate Isabella. As readers, we are expecting something more earthshattering to occur after all of turmoil of the text has been resolved. However, nothing happens. In the episode, Buffy and the gang are sitting around in his living room, binging on Halloween Candy. Suddenly, Giles stands up and says in an anxiety-provoking tone, “Oh no, I should have realized this about [the monster] earlier.” As viewers, we expect that something has gone wrong and that the demon will make a comeback. But, no. All Giles says is “I should have translated the writing under the picture. Actual size.” Right after, the episode ends. It is interesting to consider the intellectual banter between the show and the gothic traditions with which it is constantly engaging.

Am I a bad human being? — Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“The Replacement” and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, both explore the doppelganger as multiple facets of a single personality separated (as opposed to the two interrelated personas in “The Transformation” and “Doppelgangland”). The works suggest that people are made up of many, many different entities—E Pluribus Unum, from many, one. From what I remember studying in psyche, real science is pointing to similar results… or it may have just been a Reader’s Digest article… either way it makes sense.

The Doppleganger is just an overt way of showing this dichotomy. (Gothic conventions use a lot of dichotomy – two opposites that can’t exist without each other and so make one thing—in case you haven’t noticed yet….) Many other devices of the Gothic can explore this same idea—the nature of the soul, fear and overcoming it, the general gray of characters (ex. pity the villain [i.e. Dracula], condemn the hero [i. e. fallen Mina]), and others.

So what do we gain from this device? Another way to fear ourselves, for sure. (Which in turn, is another fear to face.) And how do the two different varieties of doppelgangers we’ve seen change or flavor whatever it is we gain? Any takers?

It’s certainly seemed, most of the time, to allow the “human” who is doppled to step back from him/her-self and acknowledge, notice, or accept who he/she is. Yet Jekyll seems to have done that in reverse—he recognized his different aspects, and then created a double (granted, he seemed to be hoping for the chance that his double would be the all-good part). His story doesn’t end as happy as Willow’s, Xander’s, and Guido’s; a tragic inversion: and still were one to ascribe morals to these four works, they would be markedly similar.

Despite the similarity, there is a spectrum: from “The Transformation,” where Guido is encouraged to get rid of his evil side, to Dr, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where Jekyll tries to separate his evil side. As I reader, I ended up discovering it were better to have exercised one’s “Hyde” normally; not to rid myself of my bad inclinations, but to accept and use them responsibly. This spectrum seems to be a natural progression—and I must say I find the latter idea, while initially against my sensibilities, to be the more appealing one. I wouldn’t describe myself as bad for it, though—and I suppose that is the beauty of what we can gain from the doppleganger.

Gothic "Storyteller"

Storyteller? What’s that—Didn’t we watch that ages ago? (And yeah. Lack of creativity in the title this time... oh well.)

“Storyteller,” I must admit, seemed to me a particularly difficult episode to blog about. How does it connect to the gothic? I mean, there are the obvious monsters and faceing fears elements… but there’ve been better episodes we’ve already watched while exploring those topics. Sheepishly, I must say, it’s only after reading “The Turn of the Screw” that I’ve pieced it together.

In the works we’ve read, the composition of the story is strikingly important: part of the story itself. “Carmilla” and “The Transformation” are told to us, Northanger Abby is narrated. Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Turn of the Screw all feature the use of manuscript and second or third hand re-writings or re-tellings. Dracula even manufactures it’s own publication within the story. And of all the texts we read, The Turn of the Screw most relies on and makes overt the use of storytelling, as we all are aware after that whole class spent on the prologue.

So now it isn’t any surprise that Whedon devotes an episode of “Buffy” to storytelling—it’s not merely a cool device for an innovative television series, but it is deeply rooted in the Gothic. We have that garbled, influenced narrated retelling that Andrew occasionally gives us; we have the direct recording of his camera’s images (Seward would have loved to have one of those!); we even get both of them at once (recorded narration/retelling). There is, of course, more direct action in the episode than in most of the stories we read—Jekyll and Hyde being the main text wherein a large part of it is Utterson directly observed to us in real time, and the telling of the story to the readers is not a large part of the story until we get to the manuscripts. Yet just as in this book Utterson never fully knew through direct action what was going on, but only caught glimpses through other’s accounts and letters, in the episode when we directly follow Andrew with the only thing between us and him the TV—no retellings, narrations, or recordings—we, the audience often don’t know much about what’s really going on (Is Buffy really going to kill him? What’s her plan? What’s going on?). And so that lack of knowledge save by what amount of story is told to us serves to underscore the importance of storytelling in these works.

Jekyll as The Bad Guy / Confidence is Everything

Forewarned is forearmed: the first half is my rant and theories about The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Which I believe are interesting. But if you want, you can skip to my "The Replacement" analysis at the end.

I questioned a lot, while reading this, the extent to which Jekyll could control his actions while Hyde; is Hyde the bad side of Jekyll, or just a mask behind which Jekyll can do whatever he wants? Is there a difference between the two? For example, if I could suddenly change my appearance at will, and use that appearance to act however I like knowing there would be no consequences, this wouldn’t make me a different person. This would just make me, Lisa, doing bad things behind a mask, pretending to be someone else.

When Dr. Jekyll looks down and sees the hands of Hyde, I feel as though implies that he is still completely aware and in control of himself in Hyde’s body. We talked about this in class, how the Hyde feels Jekyll’s presence and how Jekyll feels Hyde’s, but I think they are one in the same, just his impulses whispering to the one mind, rather than distinct personalities. For me, Hyde is just as mask – not a separate entity of Jekyll’s vices, and ungoverned by himself. Instead, I think he can be viewed as a mask that Jekyll hides behind, allowing him to do whatever he wants, but without consequence, since he is able to later return to his true face. I think his consequence in turning into Hyde permanently is that he no longer has a face to hide behind, and that whatever he does as Hyde won’t go away when he changes – he will have to be responsible for his actions, and take the blame. He becomes the outward appearance of his evil, and has to live with it for the rest of his life.

…And now, to connect this to “The Replacement.”

For me, the most interesting thing about this episode was that it was told through the perspective of, for lack of a better term, Lame Xander. Throughout the episode, we see Lame Xander peeking through windows at Cool Xander taking the lead in their life: Cool Xander getting his promotion, signing the lease on his apartment, and taking command of the investigation with the Scoobies. The significance of this point of view is that we feel Lame Xander’s loss, and empathize with him because of our own self-consciousness that we feel in ourselves. We know what it is to be awkward and ungainly, and so place more stock in Lame Xander than Cool Xander. The episode thus plays upon our own notions of self worth: we’d rather believe Cool Xander to be the enemy than think Xander (our ourselves) capable of actually being that Cool, because true confidence is rare; everyone has their doubts.

It also intrigues me that the two Xanders (as halves of the same being) fail to recognize each other as Jekyll recognizes himself in Hyde. The two Xander’s obviously share some traits (such as their sense of humor), so why don’t they realize that their counterpart is not evil?

I think a lot of this speaks to Xander’s internal conflict (had it been Buffy, the two sides of her character would have been the girl and the Slayer, which have been in conflict all seven seasons); he’s always been that guy with potential in the real world, but is always overshadowed by the supernatural capabilities and know-how of his friends. The two sides don’t want to recognize each other, because Cool Xander doesn’t want to admit Lame Xander’s presence, and Lame Xander sees Cool Xander as an impossibility. For these reasons, the two sides refuse to acknowledge one another, seeking the destruction of their doppelganger. But, as these things go, the sides can’t exist without the other – thus Whedon demonstrates that some parts of ourselves are inescapable, but that we do have potential to be the best of ourselves, with just a bit of confidence!

<3 Lisa

The Replacement

During class discussion for this episode, I noticed that people seemed really confused by the fact that Xander's two halves weren't balanced. There is a really simple explanation for it though: No people have completely balanced personalities, that's what makes everyone individual.

This idea of either being one thing or the other, reminded me of being a child. When you're little, you either like hamburgers or hotdogs, ketchup or mustard, coke or sprite... the concept of favoring something is lost on children. Everything is black and white, there is no grey. Of course... thinking about children then lead me to "The Turn of the Screw" and the dopplegangers that can be seen there. If you remember what Janelle wrote on the board the day we started "Turn of the Screw" there was a whole big mess of parallels between the characters. Ex: Douglas vs. Miles... etc. ...

Point of this post is: Oh my God. There are doubles everywhere!

"Not all Goths are Sad"

Ok. So maybe not the most articulate speaker... but her goal is to smash stereotypes (be it through her love love love love love of plushies or her "nice in person" demeanor that apparently contradicts her appearance). I thought it worth a gander. And, she's got my haircut from the early 90s (though my dreads were only in the front -- "dread"ful in the front, charming in the back) and I had green tendril side locks (fyi). :)

Britney Spears and The Governess

Okay, so in our class discussion, I came to a realization. "Crazy"must be about the Governess in The Turn of The Screw. Think about it. "You drive me crazy, I just can't sleep."

Brit would totally agree with the insanity plea.