Lie to Me and Subversion: the Vampire Myth Edition

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Part two of my essay on Lie to Me. The first part can be found here.

 

 

So far I’ve argued that Lie to Me asks us to recognize that the stories peddled by Hollywood can be lies. This was directly embodied in the figure of Ford who tries to script his own life as though it were a movie. Less directly, the parallels between Buffy’s romantic views of Angel and the vampire wannabees romantic views of vampires suggested that we should also think about the danger of Hollywood lies about romance.   The rest of the episode is all about the various lies we tell each other all the time. So if lying and Hollywood and self-delusion are the subjects of Lie to Me, what are we to make of the fact that this episode also contains a ringing declaration of the watcher council’s party line on the nature of vampires? The line in question surfaces in Buffy’s confrontation with Ford:

 

BUFFY: Well, I've got a news flash for you, braintrust: that's not how it works. You die, and a demon sets up shop in your old house, and it walks, and it talks, and it remembers your life, but it's not you. (Emphasis added).

 

Of course it’s possible that a straight-up assertion of the fact about the mythology of the show just happens to crop up in an episode where everything else is a lie. But the placement of this statement in this episode strikes me as an invitation to ask whether the show’s own mythology should be seen as a potentially dangerous comforting lie. That the opening scene of the show raises the same point – with Dru telling the little boy that she’s not a person – suggests that this is actually one of the themes of the episode. Persons can’t be referred to as “it”. Notice that in Buffy’s news flash to Ford, she refers to vampires as “its” four times.  That’s how the party line works.   But it’s absurd, full stop, to think of Drusilla is an “it”. Indeed, she is never referred to as it. 

 

The pronoun issue crops up in another scene in the show:

 

BUFFY: (picks up the picture) Who's this?

GILES:  Um, she's called Drusilla, a sometime paramour of Spike's. She was killed by an angry mob in Prague.

BUFFY: Well, they don't make angry mobs like they used to, 'cause this girl's alive. I saw her with Angel. 
 

…

(blond vamp runs out with a book)

JENNY: Are you guys okay?

GILES: A book! It took one of my books!

JENNY: Well, at least someone in this school is reading.

BUFFY: He said he killed it. That's the vampire Ford said he killed.

 

Drusilla is a she, but the anonymous female vampire is an it. Or, at least she is an it to Buffy and Giles. Jenny refers to her as someone, not as something.   The language betrays an ambivalence about what vampires are, and it’s an ambivalence that belies Buffy’s assertion to Ford about the nature of vampires.

 

What’s at stake with all of this? A lot, actually. It has everything to do with how we understand the metaphor of vampires, which is sort of important because there are not, in fact, vampires in the world.   If Buffy were walking around killing people, even bad people, she wouldn’t be functioning as a superhero – because the function of superheroes is not to kill actual real-world-like criminals, but rather to slay our “demons” – the various challenges in life. That’s exactly how the demons work in the first season of Buffy. They are all pretty straight-forward metaphors for a standard set of challenges confronting teenagers. Joss tells us in an interview on the first disc of season one that the reason vampires go “poof” when dusted is exactly because it would be too realistic if Buffy was leaving a pile of corpses in her wake. (Demon corpses don’t dust, but they are few and they don’t invoke the visceral reaction that a human-looking corpse would invoke).

 

It’s good to have a genre like this. It lets us identify with heroes who are people who courageously confront and overcome their obstacles in life. That’s why it’s a popular Hollywood trope.   But there’s a fairly major danger associated with the genre – and that’s that the story might appeal to something else in the audience which is not so laudable, namely our tendency to demonize actual persons.   The verb “demonize” tells us pretty much all we need to know about how this works. There are a lot of bad things in our lives. People do a lot of bad things. That would include us people. But there’s just a huge human temptation to project all that bad onto those other people over there. They are the evil ones. The world would be better without them. They are the sort of people a superhero might properly be called on to eliminate.   Demonization can obviously lead to horrendous human ills, the Holocaust being an obvious example. But we see it in milder forms every day. Check out the political discourse in America these days. Or the latest shipper war on the forums. Not many of us lapse into calling our opponents “its”, but we sure are able to treat other people as though they were “its”.

 

As long as the vampires ran around with the wrinklies, they were probably sufficiently non-person-like to function as metaphors for life’s challenges to be overcome (i.e. slain). Angel was an exception, but Angel had a soul. All that was fine. Until School Hard, when Spike literally knocks over the Sunnydale sign signaling the end to easy metaphors. Because as we immediately learn, Spike is emphatically NOT a metaphor, NOT an it. Spike is a person. He is rational. He has human emotions. He is capable of making deliberative choices. Those qualities are exactly what we mean when we identify someone as a person.   Dru might have sing-songed the myth about vampires as not being persons, but in the same episode Spike identifies himself as a “bad, rude man”. In the context of the Buffyverse, it might still be OK (in principle) to “slay” Spike – because he’s “evil”. But it really is not OK, because the season one metaphor of vampirism doesn’t work in the case of a character who is unequivocally a person. 

 

If Buffy had slain Spike, we could not have seen her as slaying a metaphor for life’s ills. She’d have been killing a person. And then we would have to ask what justified her taking of the life of a person.   The lack of a soul gets invoked at this point. But the soul as defined in the Buffyverse simply does not distinguish between persons and non-persons. At best it distinguishes between “good” people and “bad” people.   But that raises all the big hard questions about what separates the good from the bad, with characters like Warren gumming up the works a great deal.  Once it’s clear that some demons can be better than some humans, or that some demons are redeemable whereas some humans appear to NOT be redeemable, then the whole justification for Buffy’s function is simply that she belongs to one race (human) and is called to slaughter another race (demons).

 

Now, it would be a mistake to read the show as advocating racism. It would also be a mistake to say that the show is subversively suggesting that Buffy is a murdering racist. Most of the demons she slays are the benign sorts of metaphors that stand in for confronting the ills of life. But it is the case that once vampires become persons, as they dramatically do with the entrance of Spike and Dru, the metaphor has a dark side. The show explicitly explores that dark side in season four, with the notion that what the Initiative is up to has crossed some sort of line that slaying properly done does not. The introduction of a human character (Warren) who is as thoroughly and unredeemably evil as any demon could hope to be raises the question, especially in a season which ends with a demon seeking out a soul in a spirit of abject remorse. Selfless offers yet another meditation of just how the metaphor of demon works in the story, once some of the demons have become persons. I’d argue that the text is really split. There is no one reading that captures both metaphors. Either vampires are “inner demons” and the like; or they are standing in for the demonized other. The former is usually ascendant. But when Xander calls Spike an evil soulless thing in Entropy and tells Anya that he is disgusted because she had sex with that thing, we have an exchange that exactly mirrors racism and its fears of miscegenation, and is clearly engaging with the darker side of the metaphor of vampirism. 

 

I think Lie to Me, which comes a mere four episodes after the introduction of Spike and Dru, is calling attention to the coming complications with the show’s central metaphor. The play of words on whether to refer to vampires as “it” or as persons (“he” or “she”) points us right at the problem. So does the scene where Buffy proclaims that vampires are just demons that take over the human host. Right after making this declaration, Spike comes in and begins to feast on the wannabees. Buffy, being resourceful, sees a way to save the herd. She goes after Drusilla and threatens to dust her if Spike doesn’t call a halt. All of that is possible because Buffy sees Spike as a person with human motivations.   Buffy is able to calculate that given a choice between saving his girlfriend and eating a few crazy people, Spike will choose to save his girlfriend. And she’s exactly right. In the scene where Buffy says that demons have nothing of the human in them, Buffy performs her awareness of the lie involved in calling vampires “its”.

 

The last scene is rather chilling in that light (and also brilliant). That last scene is the one where Buffy asks Giles to lie to her. And he gives her the pitch about how we can always tell the good guys from the bad guys and how the good guys always win. Buffy calls him a liar. Having just staked Ford, newly risen from his grave, without a second thought. Vampires are much more complicated creatures to Buffy (just as the metaphor of vampires is complicated for us) than that careless staking suggests. We just saw that in her scene with Spike and Dru. But the complication is also dangerous. Buffy still needs to slay the demons. To do so, she needs the simple myth.  The text is fractured because life is fractured. Our stories and the lies we tell ourselves might often be dangerous oversimplifications. But it might also be the case that we could not function without them.   Growing up is not a matter of getting over our stories. It’s about trying to tell our stories in a way that is as responsible to the truth as we can bear.

 

In the next (and final) part of this essay, I’ll bring these themes back to Bangel.