Old stuff

[chani]

Digging in my computer I found old Buffy analysises...Good times!

I'm pretty upset because my Restless DVD is scratched and I can't watch the episode anymore. Yet it's such a masterpiece!

Restless was the first episode that made me realize how Lewis Carroll's works influenced  Joss Whedon, then I used to seek any connections between Buffy and Alice. Behind the cut you'll find a digest of boring thoughts about those connections...But for me it was fun and Joss told us that everything was connected.

 

Buffy is somehow Alice not in Wonderland but in Freakland! As Giles says in Restless “it’s all about the Journey”, the journey of a little blond heroine…Alice is a very young girl but also full of energy and brave. Giles the English librarian of the High School is Buffy’s mentor…Charles Dodgson, alias Lewis Carroll was a mathematician but also an assistant librarian in a British college (the real Alice was the dean’s daughter!)…Is it a coincidence? Maybe…

But, in Primeval, Spike compares Buffy to Lewis Carroll’s heroine : “Alice heads back down the rabbit hole” he says to Adam! Hehe!

Buffy’s journey is, as Alice’s one was, mostly in The Underground! The Master was located underground, Hellmouth is underground, and so the Initiative was…In “OMWF”, Sweet wants to take Dawn to the Underworld. Besides, Buffy is often falling or jumping down in holes (at the end of “The Gift” of course but also in “Anne”, in “Grave”, and in “Lessons”, etc ) like Alice! In the end, Buffy decided to go into the Hellmouth.

 

 

Maybe the Slayerverse is all dream and fantasy (=> “Normal Again”) like Alice’s dream. By the way, “Restless” echoes “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-glass and what Alice found there”…

First Willow’s dream in Restless starts pretty like “Through the Looking-glass” with a kitten playing with a ball of yarn! A coincidence, again…The cat is called Kitty in Lewis Carroll’s story. Eventually Alice asks Kitty to help her, to tell her the truth…During her journey through the looking-glass, Alice hears about the Red King who is dreaming about her! Two characters Tweedledee and Tweedledum (they could be swinging Giles and Spike in Restless because of the Tweed!) say to her she isn’t real, she only exists in the King’s dream! Alice begins to cry. She thinks she is real because she is crying, but Tweedledum says, mercilessly, that doesn’t prove anything because she’s crying fake tears! Alice would be a faker! It’s all about subterfuges as Giles says in Willow’s dream! And Buffy calls Willow “Big faker!”.

Poor Alice…She experiences an identity crisis here, as Buffy does in “Normal Again”. When Alice wakes up she still wonders who did the whole dream. Was it her or was it The Red King since she was herself in the Red King’s dream? It’s about dreams inside a dream! By the way Buffy talking to Tara, at the end of Restless, mentions the dream that Faith made in “This Year’s Girl”! There is a dream inside another dream there.  In Restless we can wonder who does all those dreams…The Scoobies? The cat doesn’t answer in “Alice”, and in Restless Miss Kitty Fantastico doesn’t want to give her real name according to Tara. Cats always know more than anyone else, above all concerning the dreams!

Who does control the fourth dreams in Restless? The First Slayer? Buffy? The Cheese Man? Miss Kitty Fantastico? I would bet for the cat!

 

Giles is like the White Rabbit of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” with the same “props”: the watch (=> he uses a pocket watch in Buffy’s dream, plus  he is her watcher!) and the glasses. In Alice, the white rabbit wears glasses and seems to be obsessed with the fact of being late. The white rabbit is also supposed to be old. Giles is the oldest member of  the SG. Why was Anya so afraid of rabbits in BTVS? I don't buy the pseudo-explanation we got in Selfless. I do think that the characters were often avatars of Buffy herself, or at least they represented some features of the leading character. Who is Anya if not a lost little girl who got stuck in a world she didn't understand, a world whose rules got her so confused? And because of whom? Giles who broke her talisman in The Wish!

 Later in Tabula Rasa, Anya alone with Giles kept making rabbits.

 

Restless's weirdness sounds like Lewis Carroll’s  jokes in “Alice”. Restless is the realm of nonsense like Lewis Carroll’s wonderland. Sometimes the language is incomprehensible in “Through the looking-glass” (the famous poem “Jabberwocky” is filled with invented words) just as Giles’ French speech that Xander can’t hear.

Plus, the time also seems to be a constant obsession! The white rabbit is always running because he is late, the Mad Hatter’s watch is two days slow. In “Through the looking-glass”, time is reverse!  We can see many similarities in Restless. Willow thinks she is late, Principal Snyder tells Xander his time is running out…And what does Giles say in his own dream when he arrives at the Bronze? “I’m so sorry, I am late”!

Buffy looks at her alarm clock and gets worried but Tara says it doesn’t work, “that clock is completely wrong”. Time is twisted. Buffy remembers she has just made the bed with Faith but she hasn’t. She made this bed in Faith’s dream seven episodes ago! Tara says to Willow that the play has already started, and just afterwards Buffy tells her it’s long over!

 

In Restless, the Cheeseman appears and disappears unexpectedly and suddenly like many creatures in “Alice”, and above all as the Cat of the Cheshire does!

 

I don’t know if JW loves cats as I do, but he portrayed them on various occasions in Buffy, and his cats were often metaphors…since the undead cat that Buffy found out in her basement at the beginning of season 3 to the kittens that Clem and Spike played for in season 6 and that the Sharkman claimed in TR. Those kittens were a stake between poker players, and some people saw them as the future SiTs. The devil wants to devour them, but a bunch of these kittens has been protected by Buffy in season 7 and she released them eventually in “Chosen” by giving them the slayer power that is the freedom to be what they could be, like she had released the kitten in Life Serial….The Shark’s prophecy happens: “Time, time, time! Is what turns kittens into cats!” The kittens grew into cats indeed!

 

By the way, the cat has often been regarded as a metaphor of the Slayerhood itself : Buffy is guided by a big wild cat in the desert, and in their shared dream, Faith told her that the cat will take care of herself. But as for this dream and Willow’s one in Restless as well I still see the cat as the metaphor of Dawn. Faith announces her coming in the Graduation Day dream.

 

Of course Miss Kitty Fantastico who appears in The Yoko Factor is also a quite smutty wink to Willow/Tara relationship…but I’ve checked the season 5, and the cat has never been shown again on screen after Restless, ie Dawn’s coming in season 5. So I am still thinking that Miss Kitty Fantastico stood for Dawn in season 4. It isn’t a coincidence if Dawn is supposed to have killed the poor cat according to the last “scoop” given in  “The End of Days”, because she metaphorically killed her indeed by taking her place! Dawn killed the proof that she, once, hasn’t been a real girl….But I wouldn’t worry because we know that  cats have nine lives!

 

Cats are also meaningful in Carrollverse. First the famous Cheshire Cat! To many readers, it seems to have an outsider's perspective on Wonderland in a way that no one else, except Alice, does.  The crazy behaviour of the Wonderland people baffles Alice, who is always trying to figure out why they do what they do; but the Cat understands that Wonderland operates on dream-logic, and that its people's actions don't make any sense.  As it explains calmly to Alice in Chapter 6, "We're all mad here.  You're mad.  I'm mad."  And it gives her perhaps the best piece of advice that a human child can have for navigating Wonderland: It doesn't much matter where you go, since, if you walk long enough, you're sure to wind up somewhere.

This Cat has a peculiar power -- its ability to fade away, leaving just a disembodied grin (which makes me think of Spike’s smirk suddenly…. Spike who is like a big cat himself….ok not going there…!). Is it doing something like teleporting from place to place, or just becoming invisible?  Either way, this ability makes the Cat seem even more like an intruder in Wonderland, someone who -- like the narrator, the dreamer of a dream, or the reader of a book-- exists on some meta-level, aware that he is in a story and able to pop in and out of it at will. Just like the Cheese Man who kept appearing suddenly then vanishing in everybody’s dream in Restless (and lately in Storyteller)!

I remember that AnInstant from the C&S had a great theory about The Cheese Man being a “Vice” character according to the drama rules. I agreed with him, but I disagreed when he said the Cheese Man foreshadowed Caleb. Late medieval morality plays used allegory to dramatize the struggles between good and evil that Christianity believed went on in each person. The morality play was usually presented on religious festival days to a wide audience, and indulged in a fair amount of humor. The various devils of the old morality plays became a single, usually comical character named "Vice." Vice was a comedic character, whose goal was to corrupt the Mankind or Everyman figure. In order to do so, he would take the audience into his confidence in order to illustrate his plans.

So I think that the Cheese Man was a Vice but so was the First in season 7, not Caleb.  Caleb had still lost the battle and embraced the devil (hence the metaphor of the merging), he was just a Big Bad who could be defeated by the Slayer. The non corporeal and oh so metaphorical FE is more qualified to be a Vice IMO.

The Cheschire Cat also is kinda a non corporeal character since only a grin is left floating in the air (“a grin without a cat!”) so he cannot be beheaded! By the way the references to death and violence are constant in Alice, like the Red Queen's habit of shouting "Off with his head!" (Actually, in this way she condemns nearly all of the main characters to death at one point or another, including Alice.). I wonder if JW thought of this Red Queen when he created the character of Glory (who often wears red !)….

 

Through the Looking-glass is prefaced with a chessboard and the dramatis personae presented as chess pieces. Carroll picks up on the chess metaphor in various places in the story (Alice becoming Queen, or the countryside arranged as chess squares), and is emphatic that the chess puzzle is "correctly worked out, as far as the moves are concerned", and that the final 'checkmate' of the Red King will be found "to be strictly in accordance with the laws of the game".

BTVS can be seen as a huge game with good team (the SG) against various bad teams. Buffy knew the rules through/thanks to what her Watcher told her, the rules given by the Concil of Watchers. Buffy started as a pawn, like Alice in Carroll’s book. Of course she was a strong pawn but she was supposed to be used against the Villains and she could be sacrificed and replaced by another pawn (another Chosen One is to be called). But like the Kings who thought to be the rulers in the book (Alice still wonders if she wasn’t actually inside the Red King’s dream in the end…), the CoW happened to be outclassed in BTVS …( I am still wondering about that though)They seem to have been also only chessmen inside the game actually!

It’s about a journey. In Through the Looking-Glass, the chess metaphor functions as a device that symbolizes how the central female character, Alice, become stalemated in her effort to achieve autonomy. The girl's progress towards womanhood is like a pawn's promotion in chess. Buffy was a new Alice….I won’t tell you if the White Knight in the book is Angel or Spike in “Chosen”, actually I think it could be both. Anyway he says to Alice: `I'll see you safe to the end of the wood -- and then I must go back, you know. That's the end of my move.' So, because of the game rules, she remains alone without a Champion by the end. Buffy’s loneliness echoes Alice’s one.

 

However Alice was trapped within a game in which Victorian society designates her as a player of only secondary importance. “Chosen” was supposed to give emancipation to Buffy and thus to provide a feminist metaphor.

Buffy smiles, she isn’t a pawn anymore. The calling of a chosen one has been broken, the Hellmouth has been destroyed, the Potential were fulfilled, the kitten were released and free to turn into cats at last!