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Dreams, dreams, dreams. Buffy the Vampire Slayer has consistently used dreams to reveal important information within the series (“Restless” being the most obvious example of this). Usually the important message is obvious, though; sometimes there are some deeper meanings that are more convoluted, but usually the really important message is right there on the surface.

In the article we read, “Spirit Guides and Shadow Selves: From the Dream life of Buffy and Faith,” Donald Keller writes, “dreams tend to give a symbolic representation of the dreamer’s current state and suggest what the dreamer needs to do next: not a prediction but a prescription.” He continues “the function of the dream in Buffy: dramatizing internal attitudes, symbolically representing crucial interrelationships, summing up episodes or longer narrative arcs and oracularly hinting at events to come; in short, it is a crucial and unique narrative tool for presenting a maximum of information in the briefest and most resonant manner.”

So, what is the role of Spike’s dream in “Showtime?” The blatant meaning doesn’t seem that important. Spike loves Buffy; we’ve known this for several seasons now. His need for her is no great realization that requires some special dream sequence to relay, and the dreams didn’t use any thought-provoking symbolism to remind us of this. It doesn’t predict what will happen because Spike never is able to break free on his own. Buffy has to come to cut him free and carry him out. The dream doesn’t exactly provide a lot of quick information either; it’s just his tortured, pain-enhanced hallucination. Why do they show it then? Why not just cut that scene and let us hear him chanting his belief that Buffy will come? That would have showed us his love and belief in her faster than the dream.

Perhaps than the dream is a prescription after all. Spike has clearly been having some issues since he got his soul back. Things didn’t turn out the way he had expected; there hasn’t been that perfect happy ending, and he doesn’t seem to know how to deal with it. Maybe the dream shows us what he needs to do to be able to find himself again. Maybe Spike’s unconscious doesn’t like the idea of being the, ah...vampire in distress; maybe he needs to do some rescuing of his own in order to order to gain his former strength.

Death's Lessons

A girl is stabbed in Germany. Another drops dead of a heart attack after being saved from sacrifice and flying arrows. Twelve more die of a hyperbole-ified wish. The last is the death of an ignorant friend in place of a fatal penance. There is no obvious common thread in season seven’s rise in the death of innocents except one thing. Death has a message. Be it lesson or warning, there is something to be gleaned from these casualties.

The girl in Germany is one of two young women so far stabbed by cloaked men with curved knives. They’ve both been part of the introduction scene of the episode, and they’ve both been alone, running and fighting alone. Whoever or what ever these cloaked, masculine figures are, the women have a strong resemblance to slayers, and they are being tracked down and killed one by one. Like all slayers though, their death is not without meaning; Buffy receives messages from their last moments through her dreams: something is coming “from beneath you.”

Cassie’s death is the most disappointing to the audience. After all that Buffy did to save her, all the evils she staves off, the girl dies of natural causes anyway. She too has a few meaningful last words, but they are not exactly epiphany worthy. We all could have figured out that Buffy will save the world yet again. Cassie’s real lesson is that there are some things Buffy can’t control. There are some things no one can control. Throughout all the previous seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the idea of a higher plan or power has always been... inconclusive at best, if not entirely unrepresented. With the death of Cassie, fate is proven. It was her time to die, and neither Buffy nor anyone else could do anything about it. It proves there is some kind of higher plan that can’t be changed, not even by the Scoobies.

The 12 students may not be entirely innocent, but their actions hardly warranted their gruesomely painful death. So remember friends, be careful what you wish for! Actually, that lesson has already been learned previously in the series on multiple occasions. What their deaths teach is the difficulty of the kill, for Anya and for Buffy. Anya learns that killing isn’t always the answer, and Buffy learns she has to be willing to kill her friends, and she has suddenly realized the need to accept it. I think it is ironic that this realization comes in the form of Willow, the friend who tried to win the world and was stopped only with words of love. (Or is it a message that she needs to rethink the idea of killing those who might help? Maybe the lesson is the same for all there of them.)

Then there is the end of a vengeance demon’s life in exchange for the undoing of the death of the 12 boys. Again, it is proven that there is a plan, of which we are unaware, that we cannot control or change. It was not Anya’s time yet; she couldn’t just use the role of self-sacrifice as an excuse to give up. We are not the ones who choose are own path; something else determines our purpose at critical moments.

It seems to me that this season is one of higher powers. There is a great power beneath us, and a higher plan we cannot control. For once, Buffy the Vampire Slayer may finally answer the God question. So far, that answer has come on the lips of death.

The Circle Circles Back

I was originally going to title this blog “You are Your Own Greatest Enemy,” but I thought that would be just a tad too unoriginal, perhaps even cliché, in fact not at all unlike the ending of the finale for season 6. Everyone has seen some major hero brought back from the dark side by hearing the words “I love you” at least once if not a dozen times. Seriously, if you didn’t see that one coming, then you haven’t been exposed to enough mythology and popular culture. I was really hoping for a finale that was a little more...new. I guess they just couldn’t best the death of the main hero.

Anyway, whether the ending was creative or not is beside the point. I am not trying to analyze the series according to whether it makes a good show but as literature, as art. Art has meaning and reason, and those pre-requisites were definitely present in the three episodes we watched.

One of the articles we read for class said, “fiction represents [things] as they might be and ought to be.” I think that is what this scene was trying to do. We all struggle with a darker side of ourselves. We might not all submit to the level of addiction that Willow has but we are often the ones we must fight most strongly against; I hate to use this line but, we are our own greatest enemy. What saves us, what prevents us from giving in to ourselves is the people we love or, more accurately, those who love us. All of season 6, has been about fighting yourself and fearing who you are or might become; it is only right that the finale depicted how we are rescued when we lose this fight. Personally, I think Whedon could have shown us a little better style in his presentation of this point, but the point was clearly made.

Beyond this though, season six has been about life. There is no great evil; there are only humans, criminals yes but still just human. It has been about trying to find your place in the world, about where we all fit into the grand scheme of life. I think that the end of season six and the beginning of season seven really show that it’s all just a circle, and we journey along the wheel.

When Xander saves her, Willow reverts not to who she was right before Warren killed Tara, not even to who she was before the magic started to become an addiction, but to who she was at the very beginning. She looks like the Willow we knew in high school. She isn’t the only person we see circling back to her roots; Dawn has become who Buffy was complete with her own version of “Xander” and “Willow.” Buffy has even finally found her own place in the world, right back at the high school where her journey began in a position where she can guide others along the same (or at least similar) path.

Can we say crone, anyone?

Rape! OR It Happens

I have to ask, what possible necessity drove the writers of BtVS to ruin Spike’s character and the audience’s love for him by turning him into a rapist. The fact that Buffy was able to fight him off doesn’t negate his attempt. According to Webster’s College Dictionary, the denotation of the word “rape” is the crime of using force to have sexual intercourse with somebody; that is what Spike did. Whether he succeeded in achieving the end result or not does not matter; it is his abuse and violation of trust, Buffy’s and ours, that has us horrified.

However, “Rape” can also mean the violent, destructive, or abusive treatment of someone or something. This is what happened to Willow, Buffy, and Tara in the other two episodes covered in this blog. There is not some big, bad evil trying to bring about the next apocalypse. It’s a much more present evil this time. A member of the Trio has raped each of the above characters in some way. That is all, yet it is more terrible than anything we have seen so far in the series.

What the Trio did to Buffy with their demon’s poison in “Normal Again” goes beyond the normal evil magic we have seen; it was a rape of her mind. They violently destroyed her sense of sanity and self, abused her reason, until she no longer knew what was real and what was fantasy.

What Warren did to Willow and Tara also constitutes as violent and destructive treatment. In “Seeing Red,” he murdered an innocent bystander right in front of her lover. He violated her sense of security. As we learn in “Villains,” this is something she cannot get past. It’s not a spell or a demonic power. It’s just man; it’s life.

Part of what bothers us so much about these scenes is that they were normal. It’s not a demonic force or some inhuman evil that’s attacking these girls. What Spike and Warren did are things that happen everyday in normal life; it’s not fantasy anymore.

The writers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer are using date rape and drive by shooting to show us that evil is not just fantasy. It’s real, and it happens everyday in the very world in which we all live. I think “Normal Again” really helps to show the writers’ intent: you don’t need to live in Sunnydale to see evil; bad things do happen in real life.

Mind Games, It's a Trip

An accident that's not, a geek, a nerd, and a shadow, the big bads in Buffy the Vampire Slayer have traditionally been... well, big and bad, but season six has something different. This time the enemy is a few, lame males (I say males because they hardly count as men, and they are too old to be boys.), yet they have wrecked more havoc than any other villain in the show. (That is not to say they have caused the most harm or evil. It is merely havoc they cause, not apocalyptic destruction.) So what is it about the Trio that makes them so much better?

In actuality, it is not the Trio that is stronger than the rest of the evils the gang has faced; it is Buffy who is weaker. The Trio is merely clever. They do not attack the slayer with strength; they would quickly lose. They have gathered a whole horde of information on the slayer, and they are using it play tricks with her mind. Buffy is lost and Vulnerable, and the Trio is using that to their advantage.

For instance, in “Dead Things” they managed to convince the slayer that she had murdered an innocent. Such a ploy never would have worked in previous episodes when she was more sure of herself and her goodness, but having been yanked out of Heaven, there must be something wrong with her; she must be receiving punishment for something, right? Buffy is so convinced of this that she is willing to believe that she has killed an innocent girl in need of her help even though she never even touched her. Buffy is vulnerable, and the successes of the Trio only serves to highlight her weakness and insecurities.

Slayer, Crone, Addict

Addiction has been a common theme in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Vampires are addicted to blood; Riley was addicted to passion and blood houses; Willow is addicted to magic. There is no doubt that addiction is evident in the show, but what about the slayer? In the episodes addressed in this blog, we see Buffy as the crone and the first slayer (“Bargaining Part Two”), but we also see her as an addict.

Previously in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spike informed Buffy that the secret obsession of every slayer is death, specifically her own death. Whether it is killing demons, determining the role of the slayer as killer, fulfilling her duty by stopping the death of innocents, or hating the life that has been returned to her, this obsession has become an addiction for Buffy. She cannot let go of her relationship with death, even when given the opportunity, which Dawn offers her.

This is an addiction that has been passed down since the first slayer. In “Restless,” we see that the first slayer is so obsessed with her relationship with death that there is no room in her life for anything else; it all falls beneath addiction, and she expects all slayers to follow in her footsteps. This addiction gets in the way of the slayer’s ability to live, and, as Spike said, it will lead to Buffy’s downfall as it always has in the slayers before her. It causes her to be reckless, and, now that she is unable to accept life and become attached to the things within it, there is nothing keeping her from her death wish, which though it has lost its curiosity seems to have grown all the stronger because of her knowledge of the afterlife.

Class Discussion Questions

Here are all the actual questions I had prepared to ask for the class discussion. Feel free to use any of them in your blogs.

1) What is emotion? What is it's worth/purpose as an aspect of humanity?
2) Was Ben innocent? How do we determine innocence?
3) In "Weight of the World," Glory claims that "Gods don't pay [they're not supposed to feel anything." Are gods above guilt? What is guilt?
4) How can gods feel guilt if they can do no wrong? Think about the biblical myth of Noah and the Arc (God promised never to kill so many again) and the ancient Egyptian myth of Ra who regretted separating Nut and Geb. Hercules too felt guilt and he was half human like Glory.
5) What role does guilt play in the slayer's world?
6) Why does Dawn say Buffy isn't guided by her emotions when Buffy has proven on multiple occasions that she is very emotional? (refer to her discussion with Kenya, her search to gain emotion in "Intervention," and how Giles puts her heart as her greatest asset in "Spiral") Does Dawn believe what she tells Glory? Has Buffy perhaps harnessed her emotions so she is no longer controlled by them?
7) There are a lot of allusions to the Christ image in these three episodes. She is portrayed as the savior, sacrificed, and resurrected. Is she really the savior though, or is she just giving up? Some of her last words to Dawn are "It's harder to live in this world than to die for it."
8) How is worship portrayed in BtVS?
9) Compare Buffy to other heroes and superheroes. How is she different from them? From Christ?
10) Buffy has fulfilled the death wish Spike said would destroy her. Is she now unbeatable? She's no longer curious; she's been dead for three months.
11) At the end of "Buffy vs. Dracula," Buffy set out on a quest to learn more about where she comes from. By the end of "Bargaining Part One" has she accomplished this?
12) There has been a lot of character development with both Willow and Xander. How have they each matured in season 5?
13) These episodes make it pretty clear that Willow is second in command. She becomes the leader when Buffy is out of commission. One of the essays we read talked about how the structure of the scooby family allows each person to develop on their own. We've spent a lot of time talking about where Buffy is on the female hero's journey, but what about Willow? How has she progressed on this path?
14) In "Bargaining" when they are arguing about resurrecting Buffy, Xander tells Willow, "It's done. She's buried." and Willow responds, "That was just her body." How does the series usually look at death? Do they associate the person as the body, the mind, or the soul? Is it different when it's Buffy?
15) The show has consistently used demons as metaphors for everyday issues? What might Ben/Glory symbolize? What about the Buffy bot?

We've learned a lot more since the first episode of season six so some of these questions might no longer be applicable, but these are what I have.

Sound, Scene, and Symbolism

The atmosphere “Hush” created has been tripled if not quadrupled in “The Body.” In “Hush,” our attention was on the background noise, the music. In “The Body,” there is no music, no background noise at all; in fact, all sound (meaning voice, since this is very nearly the only sound) has been hushed in this episode.

It is dramatic; it is eerie, it is significant of an end, but most importantly, it rivets the audience’s attention. We as the viewers are glued to the screen. So used to listening to the music to clue us in to what is happening and how we are supposed to feel about it, without sound we are left searching every inch of the scene for clues. We pay attention to every detail due to the lack of the usual atmosphere...

Such as the fact that all the windows are open. In Buffy house, when she leaves the body the window by the back door is left open and we hear the fist sound that is not vocal since she found her mother’s body... wind chimes. Faint, delicate, moved by a touch of the air, this Romantic harp has often been used in poetry as a symbol of the spirit or soul.

Perhaps the idea of these little details that we, as viewers are now so focused on is the release of Joyce’s spirit. Open window let her pass out of their lives, but they don’t shut them on her as she leaves. Buffy opens all the doors she passes (the back door of her house, the front door at Giles’s entrance, the door to Dawn’s classroom) and leaves them open, almost as a sort of goodbye she doesn’t want to accept.

Dawn, in her denial and search for closure, closes all the doors and bars them shut. She won’t accept her mother’s death, won’t let her leave. When she slips away from the Scoobies to sneak into the morgue at the hospital, she closes and locks the door behind. Our thought is that she doesn’t want anyone getting in, but really a little bolt isn’t going to stop the slayer. The lock is a symbol that the young fourteen-year-old girl/key does not want her mother to leave her; she doesn’t want to let her go.

She can’t win against death though as we see when she fails to fight off the hungry vampire lying on the surgical table near her mother’s own deathbed. Buffy has to help her, but Buffy isn’t going to battle against the forces of nature and she won’t let anyone else either (symbolized by her smashing the locked doors off their hinges). Dawn has her closure, so she no longer needs to close her mother in. She can let her pass away.