Session Three - Monsters, Witches and Robots

Dr Matthew Sharpe - Is Buffy a Lacanian?: Sunnydale, or What is Enlightenment?

Okay, folks, bear with me on this one. As you may have guessed from my breezy dismissal of Freud and all his works above, I’m really not into psychoanalysis. Freud, Jung and Lacan all go into one (not very favourably regarded) basket with me. (Except for Lacan’s mirror theory, which will become relevant later.) However, I’ll do my best to give you a reasonable summary of this paper. Please note, however, that we only heard a third of the paper. (The first, analytical, mostly Buffy-less third.) The rest was cut due to time considerations. But I suspect it will appear in Refractory in January as a result.

To quote: "This paper brings the Lacan-informed critical theory of Slavoj Zizek to bear upon Buffy the Vampire Slayer. … The paper has three parts. Part one gives an analysis of Buffy drawing especially on Lacan’s theorisation of paranoia. Part two then raises questions concerning the vampyre [sic] mytheme in its historicity. Following Zizek, the suggestion is that the vampyre should not be read as a premodern mytheme that troubles modernity from the outside, so much as its own internal excess. Part three then raises the question of Buffy and later, or ‘post’ modernity, considering the ironic mediation or distantiation that it brings to its refiguring of the vampyre theme. The concern of this third part is Zizek’s identification of the essential cynicism entrenched in later modern social reproduction. Contemporary power can always laugh at itself, Zizek argues. how this positions Buffy’s light-hearted self-referentiality is my concern."

Despite the above plan, in the first third of the paper we did in fact hear much about the historicity of the vampire mytheme. Given that I wrote a paper on a similar topic (without the Lacanian analysis, naturally), I found that segment quite interesting. Dr Sharpe considered the standard interpretation of the vampire as monstrous, in particular the fact that in Buffy, monstrosity/vampirity is written on the face, usually considered the direct expression of the soul, or in this case, the soulless. Dr Sharpe argued that throughout their history, including at the present time, Vampires have been human society’s best attempt at representing the incomprehendable. For further on this topic, I would suggest reading Stephen Arata’s ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’ (Victorian Studies 33(3) (1990), pp 621-45), and Nina Auerbach’s Our Vampires, Ourselves, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

Finally, Lacan’s mirror theory (referred to above). This theory is that self-awareness comes when a baby is held up to a mirror and realises that they exist, and that it is themselves they see reflected in the mirror. Dr Sharpe concluded his truncated paper with a reference to Zizek, who argues that, having read Lacan, vampires know that they do not exist and thus do not appear in mirrors. (That may have been more amusing at the time. I certainly liked the circularity of it.

Edwina Bartlem - Coming Out on a Hellmouth

Apart from Linda Rust’s earlier paper on fanfiction, this is probably the one I have most to say about, and most to argue with. Whereas I got the distinct impression that no one else had ever thought about the fanfiction angle, however, where this paper was concerned there were plenty of critics. Nevertheless, I think that overall it was a good paper. I would simply take issue with a few of the things argued over the course of the paper. The basic argument of Ms Bartlem was well set out in the summary, and as a result, I’m going to quote the entire summary, then add a few comments from my notes, and then offer my own critique.

"This paper explores the representations of lesbianism and coming out in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It traces the transformation of Willow from a mild-mannered geek girl, to a powerful, magic-addicted dark witch. It will consider how Buffy has, on the one hand, reworked the representations of lesbians the vampire genre, while, on the other hand, has perpetuated some stereotypical and stylistic tropes of lesbian vampire films. Associations of witchcraft and wicca with lesbianism in cinema and television will be considered in relation to the characters of Willow and Tara. It is proposed that Willow and Tara hold ambiguous positions as dykons. Historically, lesbianism was almost invisible in mainstream cinema and television until recently. When it did appear, it was highly coded and the lesbian characters were often depicted as suicidal wrecks, psychotic killers, vampires, satanists, witches and ball-breaking bitches. Imagine the initial delight of lesbian Buffy fans when Willow, one of the main characters in a hip television series, came out. This heroine even rejected the wolfish charms of her cool ex-boy-beau Oz, for the ethereal charms of her new witchy gal-pal, Tara. A very unusual event in mainstream television.

"Buffy still creates a connection between the supernatural and lesbianism through the characters of Willow and Tara. Interestingly though, this stereotype was inverted by the fact that these characters were protagonists, aligned with the vampire slayer instead of the vampires. So, lesbianism shifted symbolically from the realm of evil to the realm of good through the characters of Willow and Tara. This shift was a temporary one, though, as in the latest series Evil-Willow emerged as a powerful new force in the narrative. Associations between lesbianism and social and moral transgression were once again reinstated by this development. Magic, which in the coming out episodes was strongly associated with lesbian sex, was resignified in the last series as a metaphor for addictive drugs. Thus, a symbolic connection was made between lesbian sex and addictive substances. Lesbianism was once again implied to be dangerous and infectious - like the bite of a vampire."

Ms Bartlem noted that, in the scheme of Buffy relationships, Willow and Tara are in fact the most conventional of pairings. For a start, they’re both human (unlike human Xander and ex-vengeance demon Anya, twice-resurrected Buffy and chip-headed Spike). She also noted that, although one character (ie Willow) can never represent a whole group, they end up doing so anyway. I think we knew this already.

The major concern of Ms Bartlem in the paper was the "slipperiness" of magic and witchcraft as signifiers, leading to this transfer of magic from a signifier of lesbian sex to a signifier of drug addiction. On its face, this is a strong argument. During the course of the paper, clips of Buffy/Riley straight sex in "The I in Team" (episode 4.13) were compared with Tara and Willow performing a spell in an episode that I thought was "New Moon Rising" (episode 4. 19), but now I’m not so sure. It’s the one where they float the rose, anyway. Ms Bartlem’s intention was to contrast the portrayal of straight sex as action/struggle, (through the intercut scenes in "The I in Team" of Buffy and Riley battling a demon and Buffy and Riley having sex) with the mysticism with which straight sex is portrayed. A better scene, in my opinion, would have been the one in "Once More, With Feeling" (episode 6.5?), for the simple reason that, although the rose-floating spell has definite sexual overtones, they are not having sex in that scene: they are performing a spell. In "Once More, With Feeling", however, it is a sex scene - really quite an amazing one, if you listen to the words Tara is singing at the time…

This was one of the problems I had with the paper: it didn’t distinguish ‘magic as metaphor’ from ‘magic as simile’, if you catch my grammatical drift. The Evil-Willow season six addicted-to-magic plotline was ‘magic as metaphor’. The Tara/Willow witches-performing-magic (admittedly with vaseline lenses, sensual music, and overtones as subtle as a Mac truck) was ‘magic as simile’, not to mention being the only way that the Tara/Willow plot would be allowed past the sensors. As Ms Bartlem admitted herself, the entire thing is not exactly standard in mainstream television. Which was my other major problem with the paper - a tendency to forget that television is run by network executives, who answer to advertisers, and who are pressured by lobby groups to whom the entire Willow/Tara relationship is more than anathema - it is evil. Nothing these days, not even television, exists in a vacuum. Academics need to remember context when criticising the way in which groundbreaking things are done.

I could easily talk about this for days, and for pages. But I won’t right at this point. Maybe later, once I’ve had a chance to chase up another reference now on my ‘to read’ list, the cleverly titled "Surpassing the Love of Vampires" by Thyra Mendelsohn. (And if you don’t know why it’s cleverly titled, you need to do more reading in the area of history of sexualities.)

Dr Wendy Haslem - ‘I think every home should have one of you’: The Serial Killer Disguised as the Perfect Husband

This paper focused on a single episode of Buffy — "Ted" (episode 2.11) — examining it as a contemporary revision of the Bluebeard fairy tale. To quote: "Crucial to "Ted" and "Bluebeard" is the charismatic but ultimately duplicitous protagonist. Ted appears to be the ‘perfect husband’, but is actually a dangerous killer-robot, a throwback to 1950s values trapped within an obsessive cycle of seduction and deceit. This paper explores the links between Bluebeard and Ted, looking at the interdiction and its violation and the vital role of curiosity in the tales. It identifies the uncanny emerging within characterisation, in the complexity of vision and as it conceals and reveals the secrets of the domestic space." And we all know how dangerous these male throwbacks to the 1950s can be.

Given that Dr Haslem was operating under the same time constraints that had seen Dr Sharpe’s Lacan paper cut by two-thirds, and the fact that Dr Haslem had to recount the Bluebeard story for those unfortunates who had missed out on it during childhood, it wasn’t surprising that she made only a minor reference to the Gothic overtones of both Bluebeard and "Ted". And the Gothic-ness of both these stories is legion. As Dr Haslem observes in the summary, they are both about the uncanny, and its emergence with the familiar. Most of my work on Buffy (and yes, I have done a little academic work on Buffy) has been centred on its employment of Gothic motifs, and its particular use and development of the postmodern Gothic. Which is why I’m harping on about the Gothic. That and the fact that I didn’t take very many notes during this paper. I never watched "Three’s Company", so I have no idea of whether Dr Haslem’s assessment of John Ritter’s performance in "Ted" as a parody of his most famous role is true. Other than that every note I do have is centred on Bluebeard as pre-Gothic gothic. And I won’t bore you with that…

Back to Keynote Address

On to Session Four…