Lie to Me and Subversion: the Bangel Edition
I have a peculiar way of reading BtVS, and the root of that reading is the episode Lie to Me, which was written and directed by Joss and which occupies that all-important #7 slot in the season. The upshot of the tale I will tell here is that in this episode Joss pretty much explicitly tells us to not trust the storyteller in a way that’s an invitation to read against the surface meaning of the show. It's going to take a few parts to get the whole tale out. Part one is a bit of a warm up that also goes to recent discussions on gabrielleabelle's LJ journal on Bangel and subversion.
I’ve always taken Lie to Me as a license to read BtVS as having subversive meanings below the surface of the text. Specifically, I’ve had in mind Giles’ last exchange with Buffy, which is worth printing in full:
BUFFY: Does it ever get easy?
(casually stakes Ford who rises from a grave behind her)
GILES: You mean life?
BUFFY: Yeah. Does it get easy?
GILES: What do you want me to say?
BUFFY: Lie to me.
GILES: Yes, it's terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after.
BUFFY: Liar.
Two things to notice here. The first is that Giles points at the basic lie of most of our simple stories, and that’s that they present reality as much more simple than it actually is. In particular, they do so in a way that put “us” on the side of the good and noble and “them” on the side of the evil and mean. The comforting fiction that things turn out well for the good guys is thrown in as an added bonus. These two things are what most of us want from our stories at some gut level, which brings us to the second thing to notice. Buffy stands in for us - and she wants to be lied to; but then deep down she also knows it’s a lie. I think that’s pretty much the text Joss delivers. He gives us the pretty lie, but he does so in a way that reminds us (if we want to be reminded) that he’s lying.
But that final conversation is really just the beginning. It’s worth going back and rewatching the whole episode with the idea that in addition to exploring a huge variety of straight-up lies we tell one another, the episode is a meditation on our use of fiction as a way to lie to ourselves about ourselves and about the world. Notice that Ford, the big fat liar at the heart of the plot, is addicted to Hollywood. We see him watching movies and quoting the lines by heart. When he goes to Spike with his deal he insists on setting up the scene as, well, a scene - the sort of thing you’d see in the movies. He’s selling the Hollywood romance with the idea of dying young and staying pretty. Indeed, a huge part of the reason he’s living in this fantasy world is because he actually is dying, and in the world dying young is not romantic or glamorous. Instead, Ford is going to end up bald and shriveled and smelling bad. Ford may be lying to Buffy, but even more so he’s lying to himself - by choosing a fiction that allows him to dodge the hard reality and pain of his fate.
In case we’ve missed the point, Buffy explicitly calls Ford out on it: “I think this is all part of your little fantasy drama! Isn't this exactly how you imagined it? You tell me how you've suffered and I feel sorry for you. Well, I do feel sorry for you, and if those vampires come in here and start feeding, I'll kill you myself!”
Ford’s not the only one with a dangerous preference for fiction over reality. The vampire wannabees are clinging to their own fictions. Once again, the theme that people might choose to cling to fictions because reality hurts pops up explicitly:
ANGEL: I've seen enough. I've seen this type before. I mean, they're children making up bedtime stories of friendly vampires to comfort themselves in the dark.
WILLOW: Is that so bad? I mean, the dark can get pretty dark. Sometimes you need a story.
ANGEL: These people don't know anything about vampires. What they are, how they live, how they dress... (sees someone dressed exactly like him)
The wannabees are so into their fantasy they not only fail to see what danger they are in, they actively refuse to believe Buffy when she tells them they’re in danger.
All of this is interesting, but there is no theme that doesn’t connect with Buffy somehow. And so that invites us to take another step back and look at what else is going on in this episode. In particular, the episode starts with Angel’s encounter with Drusilla. Let’s leave aside the fact that she’s out preying on children and Angel makes no move to dust her. Let’s leave aside the fact that Angel’s concern is that if Dru stays it’ll go bad for all of them. The scene is pure foreshadowing of what’s to come for Buffy. First in a minor key, Drusilla calls the boy she’s hunting a “lamb” exactly one episode after Spike called Buffy a lamb. Second, in a major key with exclamation points, Dru tells Angel:
DRUSILLA: The girl. The Slayer. Your heart stinks of her. Poor little thing. She has no idea what's in store.
ANGEL: This can't go on, Drusilla. It's gotta end.
DRUSILLA: Oh, no, my pet. This is just the beginning.
The whole arc of the season is Buffy’s failure to see the danger presented by Angel. In this opening scene that danger is foreshadowed. More to the point for this essay, Angel goes on to lie to Buffy about having encountered Drusilla. He doesn’t want Buffy to know about the nature of Angelus - which means that his first inclination is to mask the danger he presents to Buffy. This is one episode after Halloween, where Buffy’s romantic fantasies about what Angel wants (a damsel) nearly get her killed. Nor is she completely over those fantasies, as she notes that the mystery woman talking to Angel had a pretty old-fashioned dress. So against the backdrop of Buffy’s fantasies about her dark and mysterious boyfriend we have the truth about what he is, which is quite horrifying.
In a key scene in the episode, Buffy confronts Angel about having lied about Drusilla. To repeat the theme of the episode, Angel tells her that some lies are necessary because the truth is worse. But he does go ahead and give Buffy the truth - he tells her what he did to Drusilla. The description of Drusilla as chaste and innocent matches Angel’s view of Buffy now. And in the second half of the season, Angelus goes after Buffy the way he went after Drusilla by first terrorizing and killing people close to her. So while this sounds like a description of something that is in Angel’s past, it’s also a direct forecast of what Angel is going to do to Buffy in this season. There is truth here. But will Buffy heed it? Or will she be more like Ford and deliberately put on a fiction to avoid the truth? Part of that fiction is the romantic fantasy dealt with in Halloween. A more lasting part of that fiction is the fiction that Angel and Angelus are distinct entities. That fiction not only makes her blind to the dangers lurking under Angel’s surface, it sets up her inability to deal with the events of season 2 in season 3.
To get there, though, we’re going to have to look at the way Lie to Me deals with the fiction about vampires. I’ll do that in a second part to come. Meanwhile, the bottom line for now is that this episode is about the temptation to avoid hard truths by covering them up with pleasant fictions. That the same episode shows Angel coming clean about something that he’s going to go on and blindside Buffy with tells us that while a part of Buffy sees the truth about Angel, it’s only a part. Buffy is the girl who can both beg Giles to lie to her and then call him out as a liar. Insofar as she’s standing in for the audience we have to ask whether we, too, would prefer the lie (seeing Angel and Buffy as an Epic Twu Wuv 4eva Romance) or the truth, which is much more complicated and disturbing.