maggie2 | Lie to Me and Subversion: the Vampire Myth Edition

Lie to Me and Subversion: the Vampire Myth Edition

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.

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Pardon me while I *heart* this essay.

I have to admit this is the concept that has always most fascinated me regarding the series, and the one that the majority of my fic has focused around Of course, it's harder to keep to the middle-of-the-road in fic than in meta like this--I tend to lean toward vampires-as-people rather than vampires-as-issues.

I'm eagerly awaiting what you have to say about Bangel in this regard...I hadn't expected you to come this way after the first part.

Oh, you're always free to heart my essays! Interesting point about how hard it is to do teh "middle-of-the-road" in fic. I'm guessing it'd be hard for most writers to deliver a text that really doesn't add up.

I've tried hard not to fall too far onto one side, because I'm really not aiming at "Buffy is a racist murderer" here, but it seems that the more I write, the more I sympathize with the vampires! I suspect most people who don't like my fic don't comment, but I had one visitor call me out for being too hard on Kendra (when she leaves Angel to roast, and we see later that he's been left weak as a kitten by the experience).

One of the delineations I tried to make: Buffy doesn't go from "basic slaying" to "torture for fun" till after she's been turned. But then, on the other hand, it's not as though anyone seems to have a problem with beating up demons for information. (Though that's rather common in TVland regardless....)

Very interesting read, Maggie. Again, I think that Joss would be thrilled if he could read this, because so often these layers of meaning only become apparent to the creator in retrospect too - which is not to say he didn't intend any of the things you highlight, but that sometimes with writing as good as his, the layering is sort of instinctual and probably even he only noticed some of it afterwards, when he must have thought to himself, "D**n, I'm good."

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.

Yes, and yes. For the reasons you state, this scene is almost unwatchable for me.

Again, I think that Joss would be thrilled if he could read this, because so often these layers of meaning only become apparent to the creator in retrospect too - which is not to say he didn't intend any of the things you highlight, but that sometimes with writing as good as his, the layering is sort of instinctual and probably even he only noticed some of it afterwards, when he must have thought to himself, "D**n, I'm good."

I think this is exactly right -- and it's my best guess at how to deal with the authorial intention question. Am so delighted I'm not the only person who thinks this is probably how a lot of the goodness of BtVS happened.

Yes, and yes. For the reasons you state, this scene is almost unwatchable for me.

I had read old meta by *you* on this scene and it left a big impression. I'd had always seen it as a dark reflection on Xander, but you helped me to see just exactly how dark it was.

That's how I view it too. The instinctual writing, that his brain creates the layers of meaning naturally and not always with conscious thought. It just happens this way because that's how his mind works - he sees relationships reflecting all around them and turns them on their ear.

I had read old meta by *you* on this scene and it left a big impression. I'd had always seen it as a dark reflection on Xander, but you helped me to see just exactly how dark it was.

Eh dear! A lot of my old meta reads to me now as if it was written by someone in a state of permanent hysteria. However, this one scene - yeah, I was speaking from personal experience there, and I haven't changed my mind about how it comes across. I would love to ask Joss or one of the writers about it - whether it really was intentional.

Uhhh...wow. Meta that belongs on the reading list at a university course on BTVS.

Thank you! A lot of these ideas are floating around in the fandom -- this is just the way I put them all together. It's why I love the fandom so much!

Very interesting second part. I definitely agree with you that the mythology of the show that casts vampires as "it" and not people is definitely subverted, more and more as the show goes on. It's interesting to see it presented this early on when, I would imagine, there was still a pretty strong dichotomy between souled and soulless in the minds of the writers.

It's also interesting that you use Spike as your example, given that he was originally intended to be a disposable villain and killed off after a few episodes. That would have been reinforcement that vampires, no matter how charismatic and person-like they seem, are still here just to be killed. The fact that he not only survived the season, but went on to be the prime example disproving the Council's party line, makes me wonder if what you're talking about here is something that was discovered gradually by the writers as they developed the character.

While I'm sure some of the writers had a pretty strong dichotomy between souled and soulless, I'm not sure that Joss ever did. But see Shapinglight's comment below -- which gets closest to what I think might be going on with authorial intent.

As for Spike the disposable villain... Or Spike, the Cordelia replacement in season 4 for that matter ... I'm just not sure I believe what we've been told on that stuff. Joss (who can be relied on to contradict himself in interviews) has also said that Spike was introduced with the intention of complicating things. Perhaps it took a bit to see what that really meant, but the disposable villain idea, assuming it ever existed at all, was plainly short-lived. Again, I think Shapinglight has a good point about how the creative process works.

Actually, Shapinglight's comments are above. I forgot I was working up the list and not down!

Excellent read, Maggie.

I think whether Joss was aware of this or not around Lie to Me, he's very aware by Doppelgangland:

First we have this exchange undercutting the Vampire Myth:

Willow: (appalled) It's horrible! That's me as a vampire? (Angel closes
the door) I'm so evil and... skanky. (aside to Buffy, worried) And I think I'm kinda gay.

Buffy: (reassuringly) Willow, just remember, a vampire's personality has nothing to do with the person it was.

Angel: (without thinking) Well, actually... (gets a look from Buffy) That's a good point.

Then later on when they're trying to determine vamp!Willow's fate:

Willow: (penitently) I just can't kill her.

Buffy: (regretfully) No. Me, neither.

Willow: (hesitantly) I mean, I know she's not me. We have a big nothing in common, but... still.

Buffy: (understandingly) There but for the grace of getting bit.

Willow: (resolutely) We send her back to her world, and she stands a chance. It's the way it should be anyway.

Vamp!Willow is Willow as a vampire. Not a demon using Willow's body, wearing it the way you wear a mask. A mask doesn't determine personality.

Very thought-provoking essay, Maggie. Thank you!

Thanks! And total word about Doppelgangland. That Angel line tells us everything we need to know. And what's brilliant about it is that it's just subtle enough that people who don't want to see the ambiguity can not see it.

Guh. You're so brilliant. I've often had the vague thoughts about the conflict between the party line about vamps as espoused by the Council and how things are actually depicted on the show, but I never have been able to articulate it or pin it down with canon examples of that split.

*bookmarks this*

Me, blushing. Thanks! I should say that I've gleaned a lot from others... the fandom is so full of good insights.

I agree. You are very brilliant. *nods* And even if the thoughts were sparked from others, the way you've articulated the idea is all you, hon.

At best it distinguishes between “good” people and “bad” people.

It barely does that much, I think. Before Warren, there's Faith, the Mayor, and Pete, all in season three. Also Tucker. Excluding Ford, I want to say that there was someone in season two that showed a human who willingly turned to evil doing while having a soul...maybe that one police lady from The Three (she was a human, right?). And as you point out, all that's going on in "Lie to Me," where essentially, the leads are in a way lying to themselves and the audience.

Also, the whole "vampires are a bunch of unfeeling things" bit was proven a farce in "Angel," where Darla admits that she loves Angel. There's no "you can't love" retort from Buffy either.

DARLA: Do you know what the saddest thing in the world is?
BUFFY: Bad hair on top of that outfit?
DARLA: To love someone who used to love you.
BUFFY: You guys were involved?
DARLA: For *several* generations.

And the way she says Angel's name before she dusts...yeah, I think that was the moment for me where I started viewing vampires as, well not people, but not as pure evil, unfeeling "things" either. Spike, and the first time we see him interact with Drusilla, reinforced that for team unsouled, and the humans I mentioned above and a few others reinforced that it's more to it than just having a soul or not.

Great essay.

Great comment. I should have laid stress on the "at best" ... the best version of the argument about the soul is that it distinguishes "good" people from "bad" people, but it's still not a very good argument, as you point out.

I didn't want to sidetrack in my essay too much by bringing in the fact that Darla already showed some of this ambiguity. She's also a vampire we see in a human face, which is part of it. But she was there so briefly that I don't think the force of the point was nearly as strong as it was when Spike and Dru take the stage. Through in the fact that *Darla* is the first character we encounter in the entire series, and I think you could make the case that there never was a time when Joss thought vampires were completely inhuman.

This is brilliant. Thank you for writing it, and thank you for posting it.

Thanks!

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.
Yes, this exactly. This is what makes the show so complex, and often very fraught, but ultimately so rewarding.

I see that someone already mentioned the Doppelgangland line, but there's also Willow's unwillingness to dust Spike in 'Doomed' 'because they know him' - essentially acknowledging that he is a person.

Most heartbreaking is of course Buffy setting off to fight Anya in 'Selfless', when none of them can deny that Anya is just Anya, whether human or demon, and Buffy still has to do her job - but without being able to indulge in any kind of lie. And we see how desperately she wants there to be an explanation for Spike's murders a little later in the season...

Actually, this suddenly makes a whole new kind of sense of having Turok Han (proto-vampires with no humanity whatsoever) as the baddies to fight, since the line between human/vampire/demon has been so thoroughly blurred at this point that it would be hard to justify demonizing them (ordinary demons) enough for a big end-of-the-world battle.

*ponders* It's only in the first two seasons we have straight 'evil vampires' as villains. The Mayor is touchingly human, but becomes a pure demon before he is slain (and still retains part of his humanity, which provides his undoing). Adam is of course a human-created monster. Glory is a *God*. Both Willow and Warren are human, and S7 of course has the *concept* of evil as the Big Bad.

Hey - you made me think. Thank you. Looking forward to your thoughts on bangel! :) (And sorry about all the editing. Clearly it's too early to write meta...)

Edited 2009-08-20 08:22 (UTC)

Doomed is a great example of the point. I used to think that the non-stakage of Spike in season 4 and early season 5 was just a plot device we'd have to forgive the writers for, cause how else were they to keep Spike in the show. But now I think there's more to it than that -- precisely because of this point.

I hadn't thought of the Turok Han in that light -- but you're exactly right. They are just monsters with masks. I'm still not sure what to make of the fact that it was the two "demons" (formerly or otherwise) who lost their lives in the final battle.

Thanks for your thoughtful comment -- I'm a big fan of your meta so it means a lot!

I'm still not sure what to make of the fact that it was the two "demons" (formerly or otherwise) who lost their lives in the final battle.
I think it's significant that both Spike and Anya were demons with human faces, and they both (when evil) used that to their advantage. But then they were both forced to live as humans (more or less, you know what I mean), and the masks became real.

So... the show that started out by subverting the classical 'blonde girl is the victim', by turning her into the hero, ended up changing the *monsters* into heroes. Which is pretty neat. :)

I'm a big fan of your meta so it means a lot!
Aw, thank you. *blushes* (I once wrote a LONG LONG essay on souls and redemption, which touches on some of the things you talk about here. You, however, have mastered the art of conciseness, something that is still rather elusive for me.)

So terrific! Everybody else has touched on the pertinent supporting arguments (Darla, Vamp!Willow, racist Xander, Totally Demon Turok Han) and I'm brimming with admiration for you AND your f-list. This goes into memories, f'sure.

Hi Maggie. Brilliant meta. Vampires and their status in the verse are definitively complicated. Opposite conceptions are living together in the verse. It reminds me of an article in slayage which analysed how opposite conceptions of the soul were used in the verse. As for J Whedon seeing the vampires as complicated and not so far from human beings as some like to claim, an interview I read some years makes it clear: when asked what separated the vampires from the humans, he answered "not much". You talk about a fractured text and I think it's an excellent way of seeing Btvs: very often you can't use the story (at least with the vampires) about a character A to understand the story about a character B because the fact is the metaphores are different, they don't speak about the same subjects so wanting to put all this characters in the same mould is useless.

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Lie to Me and Subversion: the Vampire Myth Edition

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