Notes on Buffy 3.11: Gingerbread
Standard disclaimer: I'll often speak of foreshadowing, but that doesn't mean I'm at all committing to the idea that there was some fixed design from the word go -- it's a short hand for talking about the resonances that end up in the text as it unspools.
Standard spoiler warning: The notes are written for folks who have seen all of BtVS and AtS. I'll be spoiling through the comics as well. Basically -- if you are a spoiler-phobe and haven't seen or read it all, read further at your own risk.
Standard Credits: I've written the material in black; Strudel (aka my Bro) writes in blue; local_max writes in purple. Or at least, that's what they've done when I finish editing and formatting.
Buffy 3.11 Gingerbread, in Which Buffy Gets Burned at the Stake.
Some fairy tale snow saved Angel’s bacon last week. This week a fairy tale very nearly gets Buffy killed. The fairy tales in the two episodes work in very different ways, but it is interesting that we are given magical snow and then immediately reminded that fairy tales can be very dark. Helpless arguably continues the theme with Buffy as Little Red Riding Hood. Because the fairy tale meta is most interesting, let’s start with that. Max, any thoughts on that?
Fairy Tales Are Real. Or rather, stories have real power. By posing as the eponymous protagonists of Hansel and Gretel, in a sense the baddie of the episode effectively is a fairy tale. It has a spell at its disposal, but that spell just reinforces the power the fairy tale already has. And we see the destructive power of the tiny narrative the demon supplies: “two dead children linked to a witch” is all the information needed to galvanize the townspeople into vigilantes willing to kill their own children. This episode follows up on the themes developed by Lie to Me to show that not only do the stories we tell ourselves and are told matter, but that it is possible to create stories to manipulate others into achieve specific ends.
Not all stories are bad, of course. The episode comes down hard against censorship, or one party controlling the words that another has access to. Buffy draws strength from the “finger in the duck” story, and draws even more strength when Angel helps bring her closer to its true meaning. Words and stories matter, but we have to choose which narratives we accept, and expose those that are false. Buffy defeats the demon only after its spell is broken, by Buffy making the breakthrough to consider the parts of the story not being told, and Giles and Cordelia expose the story as a lie. Now, let’s consider more closely the fairy tale the demon represents.
Hansel and Gretel. The baddie paints witches as the bad guy of Hansel and Gretel. But the actual fairy tale is a little more nuanced. In brief, Hansel and Gretel’s evil stepmother (in some cases mother) either convinces or tricks their hapless father into abandoning Hansel and Gretel in the woods, because they can’t/won’t feed them. So Hansel and Gretel run away, and, starving, they stumble upon a gingerbread house. Therein, the evil witch fattens them up with treats, planning to eat them, before Gretel kills her by burning her in her own oven. So however much the witch is the obvious villain of the piece, the parents’ failure is what to the story. By failing to provide food and shelter, the parents drive their children to the nearest person who turns out to be a predator. The mother figure is truly villainous, and the father figure is so powerless to stop her as to be nearly absent.
Within the episode itself, “Hansel and Gretel” are introduced as two victims that make the parents in town--but in particular mothers--decide to crack down on witchcraft. But none of the “witches” the parents try to attack are other adults; Giles is knocked unconscious but is spared. In fact--the parents (Joyce & Sheila) nearly kill their own children in order to “protect”/avenge two false children. So we have two different interpretations of Hansel and Gretel running up against each other. In one, the demon children play Hansel and Gretel while Buffy, Willow and Amy are, collectively, the evil witch. In the other, Buffy, Willow and Amy are Hansel and Gretel, neglected/abandoned/starved by their parents Joyce, Sheila and Catherine (with ineffective, absentee fathers), lost in the woods and hungry for magic gingerbread to feed them emotionally and physically. We can also say that society at large has failed to protect these kids--that’s why Buffy is needed, because there is no institutional system in place to deal with demons.
And so seeing the full story of the fairy tale helps us understand the part of the story that our characters are missing. The whole episode reads as parents cracking down on a youth culture they abhor but fail to understand. [Joyce connects magic with being “cool,” the warlock Michael is queer-coded, Cordelia has her black nail polish removed. Buffy’s slaying, Giles’ books and Willow’s magic are treated as the cause of problems in town, rather than the solution (similar to how the big evil symbol on the children turns out to be for a protection spell), in the way that (e.g.) violent TV shows about vampires, which might actually help kids deal with their real emotional demons, are taken by parents as the cause of those demons.] Joyce and Sheila see their daughters as some demonized Other who threatens the image of the perfect, innocent children that, perhaps, they really want. (“I wanted a normal, happy daughter and instead I got a slayer.”) But those innocent children who were seemingly destroyed by imperfect, troubled teens don’t exist and never did (much like no child is as sweet and perfect as they might seem). And to the extent that some aspects of youth culture really are dangerous and worrisome--Amy’s already moving into position as a bad witch, Willow’s not far behind, and Buffy’s about to try out being a “bad girl” very shortly--it’s in part because of the failure of their parents and the older generation at large. The mothers are punishing their children for their own mistakes. With that in mind, let’s turn our attention to the main mother of the hour.
Joyce as a Bad Parent. It’s difficult to make much of Joyce’s arc through the series, because she is mostly written as a plot device. That said, there are two things of note. First, there’s an interesting inversion in roles. Right at the top of the episode, we get Joyce wandering into Buffy’s world to “bond”. It’s particularly ineffective and out of touch. More to the point, when she sees the dead children she lapses into a childlike demand to be comforted, echoing her plaintive “what about the babies” schtick from Band Candy. Buffy sees this and takes on the role of comforting her mother. Joyce’s refusal to deal with the dark matter her daughter has to struggle with leaves Buffy as the grown-up in that sphere of her life. Although a theme of the season is “graduation,” Buffy has arguably already graduated with respect to her mother.
Of course, her concession of parental authority to Buffy doesn’t sit well with Joyce, which lead us to the second thing of note. We are allowed to say the spell causes Joyce to behave in a completely out of character fashion. But a lot of what she does has grounding in the story thus far. We know Joyce was angry at Buffy for keeping secrets; angry at Buffy for being a slayer; and angry at Buffy for running away. (We also know she actively suppressed knowledge of Buffy’s life as a Slayer, so her difficulties coping with this recent “discovery” can’t be easily washed away). It all bubbles up here as she turns on her daughter. (The reading that it’s not just a spell is amplified by the gratuitous way Joyce talks about taking back the town from the monsters … and slayers. That connection she makes is so full of resentment and misunderstanding that it positively screams out. It may be one of the most chilling moments in the series.) Granted, it takes a spell to get Joyce to want to burn Buffy at the stake. But her arguments about the ultimate ineffectiveness of Buffy’s battle with the darkness and her association of slayers with the dark forces that need to be opposed fit with her standing antagonism to and lack of comprehension of Buffy’s calling. (She is also echoing one of the themes of Amends: the need to continue the fight despite any prospect of final victory). At root her beef is that it doesn’t matter what she wants -- she’d wanted a normal daughter but got stuck with a slayer instead.
In addition to this, there’s anger at having to start a new life in Sunnydale because Buffy’s slayer-ness originally got Buffy kicked out of school. And there’s anger at the fact that the supernatural keeps crushing what little chances Joyce has to make a life for herself. It’s unclear whether Joyce now knows that Ted is a robot, but she might well make the connection to the Hellmouth. And the one friend we’ve seen her make became the Queen Zombie and had to be killed. Both of these adult connections Joyce has made had to be killed by Buffy. And the tentative steps toward forming a rapport with Giles may have been torpedoed by the band candy pushing them into an unwanted sexual relationship. Parents are expected to sacrifice and be understanding of their children, but to a degree it’s expected that they may have at least some life of their own to lean on, in order to muster the strength to parent well. Joyce has her gallery, and she has Buffy; otherwise, the supernatural world that Buffy represents just takes and takes and takes.
It’s interesting (and perhaps disappointing) that the episode doesn’t directly resolve any of these issues. The spell is broken, Joyce is upset at what she’d done--and then there’s a cut away to Buffy and Willow and newly ratted Amy. We even get some exposition about Willow’s mother, but none about Buffy’s. We’re left to puzzle over how and whether Joyce adapts to the supernatural world and to Buffy’s calling.
The one thing I’ll add here is: poor Joyce. No other character looks as bad as she routinely is made to look. Speaking as one closer in life stage to Joyce than Buffy, her treatment as a character is one of the unfortunate by-products of watching a series pitched to the younger demographic. Giles is under-written too, but at least he gets some better dimensions. For Joyce, the good scenes are few and far between. But even those don’t really add up, since she’s not written consistently... which is the fate you’d expect for someone who functions mostly as a plot device.
Authority Bad. We can read Joyce’s response as a sort of playing at being an adult. She isn’t thinking about how to deal with the darkness she doesn’t understand. Instead, she calls for a vigil, bans books, and begins a movement to violently suppress that inchoate darkness that she finds so threatening. Joyce explicitly formulates this as a move for the adults to step in and take charge. The basic theme here is the desire for structure in the face of the unknown, even if the structure is meaningless. (The mayor’s appearance at the vigil to offer a few platitudes serves to remind us that those meaningless structures can be taken up by malevolent forces and used for their own purposes.) At the end of the day the dark forces are more than happy to manipulate adult authority for their own purposes.
We get a similar pairing in the other two mothers. Willow’s mother resorts to science rather than organisation or law to give herself an illusion of mastery over the world. (It’s ironic that all her academic learning about psychology becomes a substitute for any actual psychological insights into her daughter, cutting off any possible connection with Willow.) Amy’s mother, who isn’t explicitly present, previously demonstrated a malevolent use of adult authority for her own purposes that mirrors what the mayor is up to.
Anti-Authority is Good? Thus far we have a morality play in which young people are willing to look into the heart of darkness and fight the good fight are unjustly thwarted by the faux-grown ups. It’s a rather neat trick to tease Willow as bad (revealing her as a witch working with the symbol that showed up on the childrens’ hands), only to quickly reassure us that she’s really good -- in that we know there’s a larger reversal to come with Willow succumbing to the dark herself as her power grows. (Hats off to the writers for pulling off a triple head fake!). It’s no good to simply side with the teenagers against the adults. The world is just more complicated than that.
Along that note, we get some foreshadowing of Willow’s upcoming darkness with Amy as a dark mirror. Willow facetiously calls for the Prince of the Night to fill her with the dark, naughty evil, but Amy, at the episode’s end, actually calls for Hecate to transform her. We’re misled into expecting that Amy will do something dangerous, but in the end, she only transforms herself--but while leaving Buffy and Willow behind. In season six we’ll learn that Amy has let herself become even darker than we’d expected, though, to be fair, the Amy we saw last in Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered was already using magic to cast love spells and to cheat on essays. Amy is only restored to human form once Willow ‘catches up’ to Amy in power and in darkness.
Along similar lines, the children cry out “Kill the bad girls,” and “bad girls” are exactly what Buffy and Faith will try on for size in that eponymous episode--fighting against the daylight world.
Buffy’s Two Worlds. Ultimately Buffy is going to have to find her place in both orders of reality -- in the darkness of slayers and vampires, and in the light of day of ordinary society and its structures. Her discomfort with Joyce’s intrusion on school turf and the catastrophe that follows Joyce’s effort to bond with Buffy on slayer turf represents how disjoint Buffy’s two worlds really are. Her fundamental task continues to be that of finding a way to integrate her role as a slayer into ordinary human life. The ongoing discomfort between Joyce and Giles works to remind us how uneasily the two sides of Buffy’s life fit together. In season four, Buffy will try to choose the daylight and social structures, only to find that it doesn’t work. In seasons five and six, she’ll swing into the dark, before arriving at a semblance of balance in season 7.
Cordelia. Cordelia, who has chosen to go back to social convention in the wake of being gored by Xander, reveals that she’s not ready to opt for one or the other either. She gets in some digs about Buffy and the cost of hanging around losers. But she also ends up doing her part to save the day. She’s not in denial about the darkness, and that’s part of what allows her to grow as she does in Los Angeles. In any case, she represents a sort of intermediary position here.
Bangel. In a way, Bangel likewise slots into a sort of intermediary position. Angel takes on the voice of wise council with Buffy, basically supporting her by repeating to her what she’d taught him back before the snow. What matters is the fight, and not the outcome of the fight. He comes across as adult and sober, but also as in touch with the darkness. On the other hand, Angel observes that the town is more riled up than usual because children were killed and they are innocents, thereby failing to pick up on what’s really going on. It’s Buffy who realizes the import of the question of why people are so concerned about these deaths and follows up on it. So Angel may play the role of wise counselor, but it’s Buffy who still does the work.
It’s particularly interesting to watch this takedown of stories following the overtly, unabashedly storybook ending to Amends; Angel and the audience are being manipulated into position for his spin-off and champion-ness by Joss/the Powers That Be. This episode is a dark take on that type of story. Further, we see that while Angel does have some insight into stories--he corrects Buffy on the boy with his finger in the dike thing--but he doesn’t fundamentally question the story of this week, whereas Buffy does. Cynically, we could read this as commentary on Angel not questioning the stories he’s being fed, which leads him to fall into the various narrative traps AtS (and powers like the Powers That Be, Wolfram & Hart and Jasmine) lay out for him. But to be fair, Angel isn’t exactly alone in not running background checks on the dead kids.
Willow. We get a rather chilling look at just how empty Willow’s own home life is. Her mother simply does not see her as a person, but rather as an age group with age-appropriate developmental issues. Willow’s invisibility to her mother explains why Willow thinks she can’t be seen, why she has so little self-awareness about the gap between the mask she wears (age-appropriate good child here, please hug me now!) and the girl she actually is (someone with understandable anger issues and a strong desire to have control and recognition). With parenting like that she can’t possibly have a safe space inside where she trusts that she’s loved for herself. She never was. Ergo the endless masks and re-masks. She never had her real self recognized or reflected back to her. She doesn’t even recognize that that’s what Tara wants to offer her. It also explains why the loss of relationship is so devastating to her -- deep down she thinks it is inevitable.
Interestingly, Willow’s father is not even present for this episode, and there’s a vague sense that he’s even less of a figure in her life than her mother is. Despite being resigned to her mother’s utter lack of involvement in her life at the episode’s beginning, Willow lets herself feel some excitement when her mother gives her the talk about magic; she tries, for (according to her) the first time to do something that her mother wouldn’t want, and to impress her mother in a subject (“I can do spells!”) her mother might not have expected. It’s clearly a rebellion for attention, a deliberate, self-conscious cry for help when she talks about how bad she is and how she asks the devil to come fill her with his evilness, and it’s interesting to ask how much of Willow’s increasingly dark and dangerous and reckless behaviour really is a plea for others (especially Giles) to take notice of her, both because of her impressive skills and because of her rulebreaking. (She mentions Oz during her mini-rebellion, and it’s a reminder that some of her interest in him is related to the status and sense of coolness and danger he conveys as a musician and a werewolf, albeit about the least threatening of either imaginable.) And even her claim to dark powers doesn’t let her be heard, but only results in her being grounded. Later in the episode, once someone else confirms to her mother that she really is a witch, Willow lets herself feel excitement for a moment--she’s believed! her mother sees her!--and then her mother promptly takes her away to kill her. It’s an impossible situation: the mask(s) she wears keep her stuck invisible and unloved, and she wants desperately to be seen for who she really is. But if she lets the mask(s) slip, she expects to be punished and explicitly recognized as worthless. It’s so ingrained she can’t even let the mask(s) slip for herself.
Despite failing to provide Willow with love, there are hints of the way Willow’s mother has shaped her. Like Sheila, Willow is highly academically inclined, and her inability to handle even small academic failures (missing 60 points on the verbal SATs) probably has some link to a belief that what little signs of love and affection she gets are dependent on that academic success. Sheila shares Willow’s tendency to the abstract; Sheila knows what ‘teens’ are expected to do as a concept, and has strong moral convictions about the evils of the patriarchy (and, as we later learn, the treatment of Native Americans) but has zero interest in owning up to her (moral) responsibilities to her own daughter. We see something similar in Willow’s moral feeling all being about following the rules she believes exist as closely as possible and not about some deep-in-the-gut feeling about what is right; no one was ever there to help her distinguish between the two. Sheila is also deeply manipulative in a way that rubs off on Willow in ways that we’ll see more and more as the series goes forward; she uses language to rewrite Willow’s genuine pain and complaints against her mother as “acting out to portray her specialness” and thus silences her.
Xander. Xander’s overt role in the episode is small. He joins Oz in an ineffectual effort to rescue Buffy and Willow. But we get some odd behavior from him in the margins. Twice he assumes people are accusing him of continuing a clandestine relationship with Willow. When the locker raid happens, he wants special concern for his fears about being discovered with Playboy magazines, while it’s clear to all that Willow is the one in real danger. Finally, when Willow is taken to the Principal's office, Buffy and Oz square their shoulders and go with her. Xander lags behind and then veers off down a different hallway. I think all of this speaks to Xander’s fear of marginalization. Partly out of guilt about what happened with Willow. But partly also due to the loss in standing he’s just suffered in the group. Xander is a bit at sea here, and we’re setting him up for The Zeppo.
Giles. He’s the one who (along with Cordelia saves the day). He is the parental figure encamped in the slayer/demon side of Buffy’s life, and he defends her against the backlash from the daylight pseudo-adult world. (Small aside: back in Band Candy, Giles seemed like he was about to slip in as a natural father figure to co-parent with Joyce. I guess since that little bit of awkwardness on top of the police car, the tag team parenting idea went by the wayside, leaving Buffy with just the one real parent who does not and cannot get the whole picture of Buffy).
But, alas, Giles is the instrument of the authorities that inhabit the slayer side of Buffy’s life, and thus it makes sense that in a season that ends in Buffy’s graduation, she must be betrayed by this parental figure as well. And so we turn to Helpless.