Ch-ch-ch-changes
In which one thought becomes another
Some of the first stories told to young children involve transformations. The caterpillar becomes a butterfly, the ugly duckling a swan and Cinderella goes to the ball. In adolescence such optimism is often rejected as naïve and the grotesque metamorphoses of horror movies find more favour. The changes that produce a potential superhero, a Spiderman or a Buffy the Vampire Slayer, lie somewhere between these two extremes.
In BtVS the title character is not the only one changed. Angel loses his soul, the Mayor becomes a big snake, Ben is Glory or is Glory Ben, Willow goes from crayon-breaky to scary-veiny and the villain to end all villains is a compulsive shapeshifter with half-baked fleshly aspirations. As the series progresses, these transformations act as metaphors for Buffy’s emotional and intellectual development.
The horror!
Joss Whedon has several times singled out the S2 episode Innocence, in which Angel loses his soul, as the point at which his perception of the series changed. However, the specific transformation Angel goes through on the show is not so groundbreaking. BtVS began as a subversion of a horror movie convention, the blonde girl in the alley and here it reverts to type. As in so many horror stories, an ill-advised decision has unexpectedly dire consequences that reveal the monstrosity that lurks within. Angel might have avoided all this had he been a good boy and stayed chaste but a connection between sex and monsters is practically hard wired into the horror genre.
Neither Angel nor most of the other demonic entities encountered during the first two seasons have any real choice about becoming monsters. This lack of agency reflects adolescent fears about lacking control and at this early stage of her journey Buffy too appears to be the victim of her calling. She chooses to accept it in Prophecy Girl but prophecy proves misleading and her choice though heroic has the opposite effect from that intended. In Becoming II she again makes a choice but under circumstances where any other would be both unthinkable and probably futile. Still the monster unleashed by her awakening sexuality has been overcome and in the next season she seems ready to move on from those particular issues.
Plus ca change.
Beneath his conformist exterior Richard Wilkins III is actually quite a revolutionary character. Unlike the previous vampire big bads, evil isn’t a default state for him, it’s a conscious choice. He hasn’t lost his soul, he’s sold it. A second interesting feature is the retention of the human ‘weakness’ that ultimately proves his downfall. This contrasts with previous statements about demons, particularly vampires, having nothing of the original human left in them. Both the element of choice and the humanising of the villain are themes that resonate with the Buffy/Faith storyline. For much of the S3 Buffy seems almost a spectator while her shadow self, Faith, gets to make a series of bad choices that everyone suffers the consequences of. We never really get to see the back story on why the Mayor went evil but the reasons for Faith’s descent are both clearly laid out and not unsympathetic. There but for the grace of god… And so Buffy chooses not to go. It’s a rational decision and in the following two seasons her growth is intellectual as well as emotional.
Reductio ad absurdum
Adam is literally many things. Human, demon, machine, all broken down into their constituent parts and reassembled. To defeat him Buffy and her friends also undergo a chimeric transformation with the hand, heart, mind, spirit spell. Intellectually this could be seen as a metaphor for reductionism, the scientific method to which Buffy, as a freshman college student, should be having her mind opened. But it’s not enough. Adam loses because combo-Buffy turns out to be more than the sum of her parts and the true source of her power is unknowable to him.
Death or cake?
Glory is a god. Presto, changeo and she’s also Ben. If S4 were scientific, S5 is religious and it’s a dualist religion, a Manichaean heresy writ large. Everywhere there are choices, one thing or the other. Ben or Glory, man or monster, demon or daughter, Suave!Xander or feckless loser, mission or mission’s boyfriend, girl or robot, hero or someone like us, my sister or the key to destroying the universe. All leading up to the big one, kill my sister or let the world go to hell. With a final flash of insight Buffy does neither and with her death shatters the mirror of false binary thinking.
Nothing is real
Or does she? S6 is full of wannabe transformations that turn out to be illusory starting with the resurrection, which devalues Buffy’s great sacrifice. The musical episode demonstrates that nothing is what it seems or that nobody’s saying what they mean, since they generally sing something quite different. And although choices are now manifold, Stupid!Buffy, Freak!Buffy, Bored!Buffy, cheating Drunk!Buffy none are worthwhile. In this social constructionist nightmare the least glamorous possible reading of reality seems inescapable. Wrong is a deep tropical subcellular tan, heaven a lunatic asylum, Willow’s a junkie, Xander his father’s son, Spike a failed rapist and Warren a loser who can’t even shoot straight.
Towards the end of the season, however, some hope that things can really change reappears. Both Spike and Anya undergo genuine transformations that they consciously choose, Spike to get his soul back and Anya to become a vengeance demon. Both decisions arguably reflect a desire to recapture past glory rather than to move forward and there’s a similar nostalgic tinge to Buffy’s final epiphanies in Normal Again and Grave. Not for nothing is the last season described as ‘Back to the Beginning.’
Make your choice
In the beginning was the girl. The girl who became the first Slayer. In the episode Get it Done we see that the girl was changed by violation, a forced transformation.
The last Big Bad was also the First and change is what it does its shapeshifting best at. Now, hankering after corporeality, it desires an end to all change but this objective is not made clear until the final few episodes. For much of the season it looks as if Buffy is the one who wants to maintain the status quo. So in Chosen everything flips. And in the final act of transformation the Slayers are not forced, but choose to change their destiny.
Some of the first stories told to young children involve transformations. The caterpillar becomes a butterfly, the ugly duckling a swan and Cinderella goes to the ball. In adolescence such optimism is often rejected as naïve and the grotesque metamorphoses of horror movies find more favour. The changes that produce a potential superhero, a Spiderman or a Buffy the Vampire Slayer, lie somewhere between these two extremes.
In BtVS the title character is not the only one changed. Angel loses his soul, the Mayor becomes a big snake, Ben is Glory or is Glory Ben, Willow goes from crayon-breaky to scary-veiny and the villain to end all villains is a compulsive shapeshifter with half-baked fleshly aspirations. As the series progresses, these transformations act as metaphors for Buffy’s emotional and intellectual development.
The horror!
Joss Whedon has several times singled out the S2 episode Innocence, in which Angel loses his soul, as the point at which his perception of the series changed. However, the specific transformation Angel goes through on the show is not so groundbreaking. BtVS began as a subversion of a horror movie convention, the blonde girl in the alley and here it reverts to type. As in so many horror stories, an ill-advised decision has unexpectedly dire consequences that reveal the monstrosity that lurks within. Angel might have avoided all this had he been a good boy and stayed chaste but a connection between sex and monsters is practically hard wired into the horror genre.
Neither Angel nor most of the other demonic entities encountered during the first two seasons have any real choice about becoming monsters. This lack of agency reflects adolescent fears about lacking control and at this early stage of her journey Buffy too appears to be the victim of her calling. She chooses to accept it in Prophecy Girl but prophecy proves misleading and her choice though heroic has the opposite effect from that intended. In Becoming II she again makes a choice but under circumstances where any other would be both unthinkable and probably futile. Still the monster unleashed by her awakening sexuality has been overcome and in the next season she seems ready to move on from those particular issues.
Plus ca change.
Beneath his conformist exterior Richard Wilkins III is actually quite a revolutionary character. Unlike the previous vampire big bads, evil isn’t a default state for him, it’s a conscious choice. He hasn’t lost his soul, he’s sold it. A second interesting feature is the retention of the human ‘weakness’ that ultimately proves his downfall. This contrasts with previous statements about demons, particularly vampires, having nothing of the original human left in them. Both the element of choice and the humanising of the villain are themes that resonate with the Buffy/Faith storyline. For much of the S3 Buffy seems almost a spectator while her shadow self, Faith, gets to make a series of bad choices that everyone suffers the consequences of. We never really get to see the back story on why the Mayor went evil but the reasons for Faith’s descent are both clearly laid out and not unsympathetic. There but for the grace of god… And so Buffy chooses not to go. It’s a rational decision and in the following two seasons her growth is intellectual as well as emotional.
Reductio ad absurdum
Adam is literally many things. Human, demon, machine, all broken down into their constituent parts and reassembled. To defeat him Buffy and her friends also undergo a chimeric transformation with the hand, heart, mind, spirit spell. Intellectually this could be seen as a metaphor for reductionism, the scientific method to which Buffy, as a freshman college student, should be having her mind opened. But it’s not enough. Adam loses because combo-Buffy turns out to be more than the sum of her parts and the true source of her power is unknowable to him.
Death or cake?
Glory is a god. Presto, changeo and she’s also Ben. If S4 were scientific, S5 is religious and it’s a dualist religion, a Manichaean heresy writ large. Everywhere there are choices, one thing or the other. Ben or Glory, man or monster, demon or daughter, Suave!Xander or feckless loser, mission or mission’s boyfriend, girl or robot, hero or someone like us, my sister or the key to destroying the universe. All leading up to the big one, kill my sister or let the world go to hell. With a final flash of insight Buffy does neither and with her death shatters the mirror of false binary thinking.
Nothing is real
Or does she? S6 is full of wannabe transformations that turn out to be illusory starting with the resurrection, which devalues Buffy’s great sacrifice. The musical episode demonstrates that nothing is what it seems or that nobody’s saying what they mean, since they generally sing something quite different. And although choices are now manifold, Stupid!Buffy, Freak!Buffy, Bored!Buffy, cheating Drunk!Buffy none are worthwhile. In this social constructionist nightmare the least glamorous possible reading of reality seems inescapable. Wrong is a deep tropical subcellular tan, heaven a lunatic asylum, Willow’s a junkie, Xander his father’s son, Spike a failed rapist and Warren a loser who can’t even shoot straight.
Towards the end of the season, however, some hope that things can really change reappears. Both Spike and Anya undergo genuine transformations that they consciously choose, Spike to get his soul back and Anya to become a vengeance demon. Both decisions arguably reflect a desire to recapture past glory rather than to move forward and there’s a similar nostalgic tinge to Buffy’s final epiphanies in Normal Again and Grave. Not for nothing is the last season described as ‘Back to the Beginning.’
Make your choice
In the beginning was the girl. The girl who became the first Slayer. In the episode Get it Done we see that the girl was changed by violation, a forced transformation.
The last Big Bad was also the First and change is what it does its shapeshifting best at. Now, hankering after corporeality, it desires an end to all change but this objective is not made clear until the final few episodes. For much of the season it looks as if Buffy is the one who wants to maintain the status quo. So in Chosen everything flips. And in the final act of transformation the Slayers are not forced, but choose to change their destiny.