b
The Meta Arsenal:
Stakes, Fangs and Other Symbolic Weaponry in
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer"
by Lostboy
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
"Being a vampire sucks!"
- Harmony Kendall, "The Harsh Light of Day"
A short while back, my LJ friend blackfrancine advanced a theory about the use of the stake as a phallic symbol, both in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and within vampire lore generically. We had a fun conversation about it (during the course of which we stumbled upon some very interesting territory regarding a different symbolic weapon in Buffy's arsenal - more about that later), but I left it still thinking that the notion of the stake as meta-wiener was a case of Freud missing the forest through the phallic trees.
There are a couple of reasons for that, but before I get into them, I wanted to talk about the novel, Dracula, a bit. During our weapons discussion, she noted that part of her reasoning behind stake-as-phallus was that the vampire's fangs were themselves phallic, and that the biting of the throat therefore symbolized sexual penetration. That notion struck me as a bit hypotactic, since the mouth is itself a sexual organ, and one that is gender neutral. After all, both men and women use their mouths in erotic ways: to kiss, to lick and suckle, to nibble and bite. During puberty, we sometimes even ritualize this mouth play; I surely wasn't the only boy in the world to receive the dreaded “hickey” from a girl who was subtly marking me as her sexual property.
So, when Dracula bites Lucy Westernra, it's maybe sufficient but surely not necessary that he “penetrates” her with some sort of metaphorical dual-penis in his mouth. In fact, the mechanics of the sex act itself aren't important. The transformation that occurs in its wake is what matters; Lucy herself becomes a “biter”, complete with a set of fangs. If we tried to see Dracula as a symbolic male penetrator with phallic fangs, the metaphor would fall apart completely. Lucy's fall is not that she becomes a penetrative "man"; it's that she becomes a sexualized woman. This is the sexual danger of Dracula; not that he penetrates, but that he sexualizes, and his victims therefore become similarly dangerous new viral transmitters of his lust and moral decay.
Anyway, I don't want to get into a whole thing on Dracula. I've read some scholarly work on the book, some of which I found to be pretty good, other of which I think is postmodern folly. My personal take on the novel is somewhere on the level of “epidemiological real estate thriller with twinges of xenophobia and sexual panic,” but even that probably falls short of what Stoker was fully after, and it's not like he's around to defend himself. But I think the interesting connecting thread, the one that sews together all vampire pop mythology since its publication, is this notion of dangerous, sexy mouths and wooden stakes as a potential method to defeat them.
It would be pretty easy to look at a stake and claim that it's phallic, as many Freudians seem apt to do with any object that is longer than it is wide. But in the Dracula source material (and in most pop interpretations that followed), the stakes are actually wielded in a way that lends itself more to Christian imagery of the crucifixion than to anything sexual, reminiscent of the legionnaires pounding nails into the hands and feet of Jesus Christ. The stake method is a perversion of that image, just as the immortal vampires themselves are perversions of the risen Christ. You might even say that the stake by itself is not the weapon; the method requires a hammer as well, and one without the other is useless. And while it's true that the vampires who are killed with a stake are females (Lucy, Dracula's harem), they are fully sexualized females at that point. As I said, I think that phallic fangs beg the question. But, even if we accepted the theory that what Dracula is doing to these women is a phallic proxy, and that only Dracula's fangs are phallic (i.e. not Lucy's or the other female vampires'), why would more sexual penetration of Lucy and the harem be the cure? The evidence of religious crucifixion imagery far outweighs any Freudian reading. On this subject, the weapon of choice might actually be Occam's Razor.
It's worth noting that, in the novel, Dracula himself is not actually killed by a wooden stake, but rather by the combination of two knives: Johnathan Harker's Kukri and Quincey Morris' Bowie. This has always struck some readers as strange, given how the novel's resident expert Van Helsing insists Dracula can only be defeated by particular methods, including the method of driving a stake through the heart, lopping off his head and then stuffing it full of delicious garlic that worked so well for Lucy and the Count's harem. Some people have surmised that Stoker was simply leaving room for more story (i.e. Evil never dies; it only shape-shifts in order to trick the Good into believing it is gone), while others point out that the sun had not yet fully set, perhaps leaving Dracula vulnerable to more mundane tactics. The creators of "Buffy" seem to side with the former group, given their own memorably funny interpretation of Dracula's “death” ("Buffy vs. Dracula"). But in either case, whether Dracula's was an actual death or the illusion of death, the fact that the vampires are penetrated (in Count Dracula's case, both slashed and stabbed) doesn't seem to be the most important part of what is going on.
*Hopefully a helpful chart.
What does seem to be important - and lasting, in the pop mythology - is that vampires can't be defeated with “normal” weapons. Most of the weapons in the anti-vampire arsenal seem to have Christian allegory written all over them (wooden stakes, holy water, crucifixes, silver); others have the tint of pseudo-medical quackery and pop-psychology (garlic, mirrors, blood transfusions). The most important thing is this: if you have a vampire problem, you need to consult an expert to learn about these weapons, and then recruit a gang of star-crossed, romantically-interpolated Monster Mashers to wield them.
Enter Rupert Giles, Buffy Summers, the Scooby Gang and “Mister Pointy.”
The first vampire we are introduced to in BTVS (in the very first scene of the show, no less), is the female vampire Darla; the matriarch of a gender-mixed gang of vamps popularly referred to as the “Fanged Four”. As with many elements of the comedy-horror series, Darla's introduction is an old gag upended; the teen boy is leading the teen girl into an abandoned place, where something terrible will happen. You already know from the title that the “something terrible” has to do with vampires, so when the boy acts suspicious (“Yeah, you can count on it.”) we are introduced to our first examples of what would become hallmarks of the series in the years to come: trope-flipping and the mockery of its audience's facile expectations.
The show contained many female vampires, but, like Dracula and his harem, the problem with them didn't seem to be that they were metaphorical converted males, or symbolic of male power. The main problem posed by the Buffyverse vampires (and perhaps the problem posed by the entire series) had to do with souls: losing them; finding them; having them thrust upon you; winning them back.
What are souls? Well, that's a whole other mess, especially in the Buffyverse. It is clear they don't have anything to do with gender or phallus symbols, and while individual episodes and seasons are often dissected by academics in accordance with the precepts of various “isms” (gnosticism, feminism, racism, militarism, altruism, etc.), it's worth noting that all of these “isms” are, at one point or another, subjected to textual ridicule by the show's creators. This is especially true in the fourth “college” season, when even the kind of scholarship of the show I'm attempting here is itself poked fun at and subverted. The self-parody is so obvious that I've found it impossible to take the allusions to various academic theories any more seriously than the characters on the screen who are, often explicitly, making fun of them.
The same holds true for Spike's poor neutered mouth. It was fodder for a couple of good impotence gags (“The Initiative”; “Pangs”), but the allusion is so obvious that it doesn't have any thematic heft to it, and is never mentioned again. In that sense, it comes off as a sort of a highbrow fart joke (“It's true. He had trouble performing.” Rim-shot). It's funny, facile stuff, but it's also the same pop semiotics that the writers are always nudging us with, usually to lampoon them for our entertainment. Meanwhile, the real world corollary of the chip isn't "medical castration", but rather “A Clockwork Orange.” What the chip actually does is introduce us to the very serious and real question that persists for the rest of Spike's arc: Can external conditioning and behavioral modification really change what's inside a person's heart? The show is full of semiotic bluffs and misdirections like this. Buffy's stake gets a similar dose of anti-Freudian lampooning in season four (“Hush”; “A New Man”), playing off the old phallic meme. In the Buffyverse, this sort of goofing is always a signal to me that there's something deeper going on behind the scenes, a meta-metaphor that's lurking back in the shadows and fog beyond the stage.
But if the stake is not a phallus, what is it? It's definitely not a sexualizing mouth, and it doesn't seem to work as crucifixion imagery either. Buffy doesn't wield the stake like a parody of those Romans at Golgotha, pounding it into prone, undead Reverse-Jesus vampires in a ritualistic manner. Rather, she wields it like Johnathan Harker and Quincey Morris wielded their knives in their pitched final battle with Dracula. Buffy doesn't hunt vampires in their crypts while they lay dormant and sleeping like Van Helsing; she chases them out in the open and battles them hand-to-hand. She must get close to them to kill them; putting herself simultaneously in the same kind of physical peril that Quincey Morris did and the same kind of moral peril that Lucy Westernra did. In this closeness, I think we find a clue to not only what the stake really symbolized, but to what the show's main - or, at least its most successful - theme really was.
Back to Dracula, and to mouths, for a moment: there is a scene in Dracula when the Monster Mashers walk in on him “forcing” Mina to drink blood from a wound in his chest. I've seen academics tap-dance all around this scene in the past. This avoidance is shocking to me given the directness of the image, which is mirrored by a similar perversion of the act that undead Lucy visits upon her child victim. After all, once you accept that the mouth is a gender-neutral sex organ, it is worth digging a little deeper, and tracing the origins of our oral fetish surrounding love-bites, suckling and both male and female oral sex.
What's the first thing that we all put into our mouths without intending to devour it? It's a nipple, of course. It is our first source of nourishment, and perhaps our first experience with intimacy of any kind. Before we are born, there is no such thing as intimacy. We are just floating around in a some sort of automated goo machine, solitary except for perhaps the occasional sensation of the ghosts dwelling beyond the machine's walls. Once we emerge, and the umbilicus is cut, we are completely at the mercy of an alien world, and when we are hungry or afraid or alone, the mother's milk is our only succor. Note that this part of us has little if anything to do with gender; we all fed from the teat.
As with Dracula and Mina, the vampirism of the Buffyverse represents a perversion of this first urge - this primary intimacy we all experienced. The show even gives us subtext that supports this read (“Lies My Parents Told Me”), and not in the winking “highbrow fart joke” way that seems designed to sabotage many of the show's misdirection-metaphors before they can gain traction. The vampires feed upon us the way we fed upon our mother's milk, sucking out the nutrients. Like the infant, they can't flourish without it. However, unlike the infant, they have a choice in the matter. A vampire can drink blood without killing, and can even survive on the blood of animals. So, why do they drink our blood?
Gender-coding of vampires to males and humans to females can't answer this question satisfiably, and therefore needs to be set aside. Good and evil are gender-neutral concepts in Sunnydale; there are far too many instances of that to cite, and it might be more useful to search for episodes where this is explicitly not the case. Besides, phallic penetration would imply not only that penetration is the most important aspect of sex, but that sex is the most important aspect of biting. Sexuality isn't sublimated in the Buffyverse; humans have sex with other humans, vampires have sex with other vampires and humans have sex with vampires. What is important about the Buffyverse vampires isn't what they are doing, but why they are doing it. They bite us not for sexual release, but to feed, and they feed on us not to nourish themselves but to... what?
I suspect their motive is the same motive that all of the monsters of the Cain Tradition have. It's the same complaint, for instance, that motivated Grendel's bloodfeud with Heorot. They bite us because they hate us, but it is a special kind of hatred. It's a hatred born of envy, and that envy itself is born of the loneliness that a lack of empathy both breeds and enforces. Without the self, there are no others, and without others there can be no intimacy, let alone all the special pleasures that derive from it. Vampires of the Buffyverse are brains without minds, purely reactive beings that are neither fully alive nor fully dead. They don't know themselves, and they can't know; the mirror holds no reflection. Without the tools to self-examine, they are alone inside the hollow prisons of their bodies, and don't even have the ability to understand why they are lonesome, let alone how to resolve the condition. They feed not to nourish and grow, but because they are empty and have a hunger for vengeance that even they aren't equipped to comprehend, only to service via their natural weaponry - their fangs.
It's not all gloom and doom, of course; the nihilistic Buffyverse vamps are often crass and funny, and happily snark along with the rest of the cast. But something important is missing in them, and they aren't capable of knowing what it is, because their third eye has been blinded. Violence seems a sensible way to address this situation, because the alternative is unbearable: drifting through a world filled with living mirrors of what you once were, who seem to mock you with all the connections they are able to make - to family, to friends, to lovers, and to themselves. In this way each vampire is Nietzsche's proverbial “last man”; each is an island unto his or herself, too distant and apathetic to perceive a moral universe, let alone create or interact with one. They lack what Nietzsche called the "will to power", and so by being rendered incapable of action and creation, they can only react and destroy. Everything else is stasis for them... like never aging, or sleeping in a tomb, for instance.
The lead vampires of the show's reality (Angel, Spike, Drusilla, Darla, etc.) sometimes conflict with and occasionally subvert this amoral arrangement in various ways, but the broad message is clear: the vampires of the Buffyverse are not primarily perverts who want to fuck us and turn us into fellow perverts; they are primarily nihilists who want to murder us and turn us into nothingness. There are many real individuals, groups and ideologies that fit this mold, and the metaphor works well precisely because of its broadness.
So, we need to return to the stake - that close range weapon our heroine uses to protect all us ordinary folks from the monsters who want to destroy us. In effect, the stake is her “fang”; Buffy is a predator who must get close to kill her physically and morally dangerous prey. The dramatic irony of this is clear in the character's arc, for while she is very strong and brave when it comes to bashing monsters and physical combat, she retains her most grievous wounds in the realm of intimacy that the vampire bites mock. A pattern emerges over the course of the first six seasons of the show, in which Buffy continually risks her heart only to have it wounded (Angel), held cheap (Parker), underestimated (Riley), or utterly deceived and betrayed (Ben). This process - a sort of scarification of the heart - is coupled with her growing fears of losing the ability for intimacy, and thereby becoming different from a vampire only in function. She begins her path down this road early on, but her experiences with Faith and Angel mark hard lines in the sand for her, past which it becomes increasingly difficult for her to see herself any other way. Her third eye is looking inwards, but it doesn't like what it sees.
For an example, consider this exchange from the fifth season's, “Intervention”:
BUFFY: Strength, resilience ... those are all words for hardness. (pause) I'm starting to feel like ... being the Slayer is turning me into stone.
GILES: Turning you into stone? Buffy-
BUFFY: Just ... think about it. (gets up, paces) I was never there for Riley, not like I was for Angel. I was terrible to Dawn.
GILES: At a time like this-
BUFFY: No.
GILES: You're bound to feel emotionally numb.
BUFFY: Before that. Riley left because I was shut down. He's gone. And now my mom is gone ... and I loved her more than anything ... and ... I don't know if she knew.
GILES: Oh, she knew. (gets up, puts his hand on Buffy's shoulder) Always.
BUFFY: I don't know. To slay, to kill ... it means being hard on the inside. Maybe being the perfect Slayer means being too hard to love at all. I already feel like I can hardly say the words.
GILES: Buffy...
BUFFY: Giles ... I love you. Love ... (robotically) love, love, love, love, Giles, it feels strange.
Notably, this is also the episode that begins the new arc of Buffy and Spike's relationship. But, by the time Buffy begins her physical romance with Spike, she has lost that sense of self-connection that differentiates her from him - or, rather she believes she has lost it. In other words, she thinks she has fallen into Nietzsche's monster trap, and imagines that she's finally become one of the monsters she fights. This is reinforced by her relationship to the "Hellmouth" itself - the physical manifestation of the abyss she gazes into, and which gazes back into her. This abyss is the primary enemy of the Buffyverse, embodied by its final villain, “The First Evil”. The First Evil is not the usual personal, political, social or gnostic bogeyman of previous seasons, but rather nihilism itself - the vast emptiness that Nietzsche called “the danger of dangers.” That is why, for instance, the First's underlings are represented by "blind" people(The Bringers) and the symbolic perversion of belief (Caleb). This is the battle against nihilism that was always being fought throughout the series, brought to physical form for the finale. By the episode “Grave”, Buffy is convinced she is losing this particular battle, and that she might herself become one of Nietzsche's “last men” before she dies. She's wrong, of course, but the reason she's wrong won't become clear to her until the seventh and final season, when the stake is finally replaced by the Scythe, and that necessary intimacy with monsters represented by the stake is replaced by a weapon that reminds her of her true self, and her real calling.
Buffy uses many weapons over the course of the show: Mister Pointy, The Troll God's Hammer, the sword that pierces Angel's heart, a bazooka, whatever that Scary Laser Shit she pulled on Adam was, etc. But of them all, the Scythe is uniquely fitting. Like the Slayer herself, it seemed poorly named. The word "Scythe" connotes the Grim Reaper, the prosopopoeia of death. But it doesn't actually look like a scythe; something which even the characters themselves seem to recognize (“that axe thing”; “cool axe thingee”, etc). In fact, its color scheme seems to reference a different tool altogether: a fireman's axe. So, by the end of the show the grim fang of the lioness yields way to the tool of the human firefighter who saves lives because she is brave and strong. This is the “hero” boiled down to its essentials in the crucible, and the part of her character that her third eye could not see because it is itself the locus of that heroic strength. That inward-looking eye is the organ that allows us to search for the courage within.
During my conversation with blackfrancine on her thread, when the topic of the Scythe came up, she discovered another really interesting wrinkle about it. In "School Hard", she noted, Buffy is rescued from Spike by Joyce, who wields a fire axe. No, I don't think that the writers were implanting an ingenious seed five years ahead of schedule - nobody's that good! But I do think it was an example of the writers knitting in an old memetic thread that they discovered in their earlier work. It's pretty clear that the image of Joyce, holding aloft the axe, was an intentionally heroic one. It stands to reason that in season seven, the arc of which finds Buffy discovering the hero in herself by rescuing Spike from his own inner blindness, the writers mined the axe from their back catalog of motifs in order to connect Buffy back to her true self, and to connect Spike's redemption to her own awakening. Both of these final arcs begin with that fire axe in the basement of the school, but the characters don't know it yet (fascinatingly, the writers probably don't "know it" yet either). That's why it's ultimately not enough that Buffy can say the word "love"; she must be able to actually do it and know that she is doing it, as she did in her final scene with Spike in the Abyss. It's also important that Spike, having been saved by Buffy in a real and final way, save her back by letting her go. Their long "axe arcs" intersect, burst into flame, and crumble to dust. It's a brilliant theme, wonderfully executed, in my opinion.
In conclusion, I think that: mouths are symbols for, well, mouths; stakes are symbols for the spirtual risk involved with fighting evil directly; the Hellmouth is Nietzche's abyss that gazes back; vampires are people who can't self-examine; vampire bites function primarily as a perverse metaphor for intimacy; Dracula hates Italians for some reason; what the heck was that Laser Shit Buffy pulled on Adam, anyway?; that was awesome!; oh, and the Scythe is a metaphor for the self-actualization that completes Buffy's heroic journey from a jejune Predator who learns to fearfully guard her heart via harsh experience to a brave Protector who owns and understands her scarred and wounded heart enough to let someone else inside of it.
Of course, YMMV, but that's what's so cool about the show. It's so juicily polysemic.