Thoughts on Willow's uncertain Jewishness in Buffy, and a weird attack on Beer Bad
I was sifting through my files and found a couple of pieces. One is a long essay that expresses considerable concern over the representation of Willow as Jewish (because it seems to be so irrelevant to her being when one might expect it to have rather more informing power). I think this was for a seminar series but cannot remember.
The the piece is super short and looks like a companion piece to strong defence of Beer Bad. It's short and the exact opposite of sweet!
Willow Rosenberg, in
the very last episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, saves the world. She
does so by summoning her extraordinary magical powers and performing a spell of
such magnitude that it transforms all of the girls and young women who may have
become the Slayer on the death of the previous one into a Slayer now. In other
words, it alters millennia of (super)-natural law and lore and, in the process,
allows Buffy (the current vampire slayer) to have an army strong enough to
defeat the First Evil. As a by-product, Willow glows in translucent white
light, seemingly become a goddess, and she comments in happy, exhausted
satisfaction at the conclusion of all of this that it was ‘nifty’. A cool Jew
indeed. Except that she isn’t. Or, rather, while Willow’s status as cool is not
in doubt (though it certainly has been), her status as Jew seems much less
assured.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer as
a programme, and as a title, demands, through its frivolity, a high level of
serious consideration. The juxtaposition of the name ‘Buffy’ (with all of its
tremendous connotations of American teenage vapidity, of the blonde and fluffy
mall-worshipping fashion junky) with the phrase ‘vampire slayer’ (which
inspires thoughts of pre-modern forms of existence and relations to the world,
of a supernatural world of threat and promise) alerts us the programme’s
doubleness. Not only is this true in the
sense that different relationships to history are offered immediately
(contemporary, depthless, postmodernity set against Modernity, pre-modernity
and an archaic mythic time), but also in the sense that the show and its main
character accommodate the seeming contradictions inherent in that
juxtaposition. For Buffy is not only an American teenager, she is also the
vampire slayer. Her identity is constantly being renegotiated, re-articulated.
Neither wholly one thing nor the other, Buffy is a complex and purposefully
complicated and difficult character. As the focus of the show, it is her
identity and the problems which surround it which provides the main focus of
most seasons. However, it is a testament to the strength of the series, that Buffy
is also committed to exploring, unravelling and engaging fully in the
development and construction of the identities of the rest of the so-called
Scooby Gang also. While this, in part, is a function of time (the characters
change as they grow up over the seven seasons), it is also a function of an
attitude to identity which the show constantly projects; and this attitude is
an aesthetic one. Identity is constructed as performative in Buffy:
rather than identity being fixed, given and immutable it is open to change and
transformation. In some sense this is nowhere more apparent than with Willow.
As Jess Battis puts it:
Throughout the seven seasons, Willow has occupied many
personas: shy academic; computer expert; budding witch (‘budding’ being a
signifier commonly ascribed to Willow’s magical studies, which holds all kinds
of double-voiced meaning when connected to her name) […] ingénue; agent of the
apocalypse; and, finally, a guilt-stricken, ‘reformed’ addict.[1]
This list is important for a number of reasons. First, it
highlights the range of Willow’s subject positions over the seasons and shows
the transformations from shy geek to would-be apocalypse-inducer to
world-saver. Second, it hints at some of the ways in which Willow’s name can be
read etymologically. This is interesting insofar as Willow has always had an
allusive meaning which relates to notions of pliability[2].
And this is interesting because of what is not mentioned in Battis’s list at
all: Willow’s Jewishness.
The absence
of her Jewishness from the list seems to corroborate one of the concerns raised
by Naomi Alderman and Annette Seidel-Arpaci in ‘Imaginary Para-Sites of the
Soul: Vampires and Representations of ‘Blackness’ and ‘Jewishness’ in the Buffy/Angelverse’.[3]
In this essay, the pair regret the fact that Willow seems either to claim her
Jewishness by virtue of its opposition to Christianity, or, more
problematically, simply not assert it at all; indeed, she seeks to hide it. In
so doing, Buffy loses its claims to multicultural representation, and
promotes, however much it might not want to, a white, Christian, normative
America:
Willow has, in fact, become a reverse-Marrano: she appears
to be Jewish, but has taken on Christian practices, hiding her paraphernalia.
After a fashion, as we have seen, Buffy
the Vampire Slayer and Angel have
similar traits: they appear to be ‘multicultural’ programmes, with characters
of various backgrounds, but the Buffyverse is, in many ways, a distinctly
Christian, ‘white’ place. [4]
I am not sure that Buffy
can have many pretensions to a ‘multi-culturalism’ for the reason of its
refusal to accede to an aesthetic of representational heterogeneity. The
demands on its ‘realistic’ portrayal of Sunnydale deny its multi-cultural
possibilities but instigate very interesting debates regarding a more subtle
(and, therefore, more contentious) notion of ethnicity. Willow’s Jewishness is
one example of this, at least so far as it is contentious.
Buffy’s
watcher, Rupert Giles, is quintessentially English and retains his ethnic
identity even after bouts of amnesia, and his sense of cultural belonging is
ever-present, even when mocked.[5]
Willow appears to have no such sense of her ethnicity as a positive expression
of identity. Indeed, as the above-quoted essay goes on to say, despite the
performative (as opposed to fixed) aspect of ethnicity, it is noticeable that
the performance is itself rather limited. While demons may not be,
categorically, evil, the de-ontologised performance of ethnicity is not
necessarily any less restrictive for that:
We hear of ‘breeds’ and ‘half-breeds.’ Literal ‘non-humans’
come from ‘other dimensions,’ or from South America, ‘ancient Egypt,’ from
Pakistan, the Middle East and so on: in other words, ‘from outside.’ And
vampires do regularly come from England or Ireland, hence ‘from within.’
Various ‘tribes’ of demons and monsters have ‘ancient’ and weird cultural
practices. ‘Doing good,’ for ex-demons, such as Angel, Anya and, latterly,
Spike, is inextricably linked to becoming part of a new, acceptable group, and
giving up old associations. The weird ‘tribes’ and individuals in Buffy and
Angel have to either drop their cultural habits and history to be assimilated,
or remain ‘other’ and face the ultimate sanction of the stake.[6]
And the assimilation is into a Christian world-view,
dominated by WASP sensibilities and cultural expectations, even as the show
seems to be trying so hard to undermine many of these stereotypes and
constructions:
This leaves the non-WASP characters in Angel and Buffy, standing
on ever-eroding ground, unable to access parts of their own cultural background
for fear of being dubbed ‘evil,’ but unable fully to assimilate into the
homogenous, white Christian world represented by Buffy. It seems that even
shows that are produced with an ambition to deconstruct racialised
‘identities,’ may still reproduce them, unable to escape the internalised
forces of the dominant culture.[7]
Willow’s Jewishess, according to this argument, has evidently
been eroded to the point where it is not assimilated so much as eradicated.[8]
In each case, there is a worry that, despite itself, the show is rehearsing and
perpetuating cultural practices that lead to the exclusion or assimilation of
groups outside of the norm. For Jean-François Lyotard, writing in Heidegger
and ‘the jews’ the fact of cultural exclusion is part of a process of
forgetting at the core of ‘Western’ thought. The term ‘jews’ is used by Lyotard
in a non-ethnically specific fashion (the quotation marks and lack of a capital
letter make this clear) but as a term which nevertheless signifies under the
inevitable specificity of Jewish history. It:
refers to all those who, wherever they are, seek to remember
and to bear witness to something that is constitutively forgotten, not only in
each individual mind, but in the very thought of the West. And it refers to all
those who assume this anamnesis and this witnessing as an obligation, or a
debt, not only toward thought, but toward justice.[9]
This
forgotten thing, following Freud, Lyotard calls the ‘unconscious affect’. As
long as the unconscious affect remains forgotten, remains undiscovered, ‘it
will give rise to inexplicable formulations (expressions, symptoms) […] Its
‘expressions’ form a tissue of ‘screen memories’ that block the anamnesis’.[10] Lyotard’s notion of screen memory is
taken from Freud’s. The latter’s conjecture about the individual’s relationship
to memory, especially in terms of amnesia, is that ‘[…]what is important
remains in the memory. But through the processes, already familiar to you, of
condensation and more especially of displacement, what is important in memory
is replaced by something else which appears unimportant.’[11]
This notion is then used by Freud in part 1(C) section 3 of ‘Moses and
Monotheism’ to draw an analogy between the trauma suffered by an individual
which might be responsible for amnesia, and the trauma of a nation (or tribe)
and its collective amnesiac condition and concomitant substitutive memory. The affect
of this memory has played itself out in expulsions, assimilations and, of
course, in the Final Solution where even the ‘assimilated Jew was forced to
remember that he stood as a witness, however involuntarily, for something about
himself which Europe did not want to remember:
Through mass extermination, Nazi Germany attempted to eliminate
without trace or memory the physical presence of all Jews in Europe; and [...]
by doing so it also sought to eliminate from within Western thought (and
therefore within the thought and political project of Nazism itself) the
unrepresentable itself ‘represented’ by ‘the jews’, namely, what Lyotard argues
is a relation to what is always already forgotten in all thought, writing,
literature, and art, to a ‘Forgotten’ that was never part of any memory as such
and which memory, as memory, forgets in turn by representing (that is, by
giving form to it or producing an image for it).[12]
Willow’s Jewishness, by its seeming lack that tends to its
almost complete disappearance, offers a sense of this forgetting that is rather
more literal than that outlined by Lyotard but which, nevertheless, is part of
a representational economy that occludes certain ethnicities at the moment of
seemingly engaging with them. The concern of Alderman and Seidel-Arpaci that Buffy
is ‘unable to escape the internalised forces of the dominant culture’ would
appear to have a significant level of validity when that dominant culture is
not simply U.S. majority culture but something as vast and historically
embedded as western thought.
However, while the criticism
outlined above has a certain validity, it resides in a particular emphasis on
external expressions of cultural belonging that are not necessarily appropriate
or necessary for 21st century claims to heritage and history. In The
Watcher’s Guide, one of the very many companion guides and other pieces of
merchandising spawned by Buffy, the writers, in their brief introduction
to Willow, claim that she is from a ‘strongly Jewish’ home.[13]
This is borne out by Willow’s comments in ‘Passion’ (2.17) in which, in order
to try to keep Angel out of Willow’s house, a spell involving a crucifix is
used. Willow expresses concern about her father’s response and says: ‘Ira
Rosenberg’s only daughter nailing crucifixes to her bedroom wall? I have to go
over to Xander’s house just to watch ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ every year’.
The particularly strict Ira is never seen, and his absence, even from casual
mention, places Willow in a context that seems both archly traditional and very
modern. The absent father, and emotionally distant and professionally-focussed
mother[14]
are a far cry from the over-bearing, over-protective Jewish parents of popular
culture.
In Buffy, parents are largely
ignored, and the absence of much information regarding Willow’s parental
situation is much more a feature of the show’s concerns than any overt comment
on her Jewishness, but by refusing the stereotype of a Tevye the Milkman on the
one hand[15]
and the butt of a thousand Jewish-mother jokes on the other the show insists
that Willow can be Jewish without having to be seen to be Jewish all the
time either by her family or by her friends.
And it is the notion of being
Jewish that is at stake here (or being anything). Beyond her surname,
there is very little that indicates that Willow is Jewish in the first season
of Buffy. Her Jewishness then is nominal fact, but seems to have little
influence on our understanding of Willow’s cultural concerns; nor does it seem
to have a great impact on her personality. She is intelligent, well versed in
computers, enjoys science, is goods at most subjects, she is shy, she is in
love with Xander and she has an unexpected strength when confronted with danger
or horror.
This may well indicate little
more than the fact that Buffy is a ‘white’ show as described by Ewan
Kirkland in ‘The Caucasian persuasion of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’[16]
and Willow’s Jewishness is unable to counter this:
Willow’s Jewishness might problematise this analysis were it
not so marginalised, only occasionally mentioned, and never permitted narrative
centrality. Indeed, Willow’s Jewishness represents the extent of ethnic colour
permitted within Buffy’s central
cast, constituting occasional one liners about crucifixes and A Charlie Brown Christmas. Willow shares Giles’ slightly nervous,
unassuming, initially sexually inept qualities of mainstream whiteness,
together with his thirst for knowledge.[17]
The problem with this assertion, as with Seidel-Arpaci and
Alderman’s is that they all read the absence of explicit representations of
Jewishness as being equivalent to a lack of Jewishness per se. And this is
patently untrue. One does not need to assert a version of identity anywhere
near as unflinchingly ontologically fixed as that proposed by Giles in the
opening episode of season seven to be able to grant a continuity of
performance.
Giles’s claim
is one of the most surprising comments ever made on the show in relation to
notions of identity, ethnicity and race. It comes as part of his effort to
reassure Willow, as she is due to head back to Sunnydale after recuperating in
England. This recuperation follows her murder of Warren and her attempt to
destroy the world towards the end of season six. Giles says, ‘In the end, we
all are who we are, no matter how much we may appear to have changed’ (7.1). In
a series that has seen Willow, for example, transform from season one geek to
season seven goddess; that has witnessed Anya’s strenuous efforts to overcome
having been a demon, in order to construct an amalgamated postmodern American
identity that can also accommodate her Dark Age Scandinavian incarnation; that
has seen Faith reconstituted as a penitent, responsible person after her
homicidal havoc; and that has allowed Dawn to be invented out of nothing in
order to live the life of Buffy’s sister, it is odd, to say the least, to have
an assertion of such steadfast ontological security. While the series’
increasing reliance on the concept of the soul as a guarantor of humanity may
well explain a certain insistence on a core identity, the metaphysical
awkwardness of the soul itself should give us pause for thought before it can
be seen as an instrument of ontological grounding[18].
And if there is no ontological grounding, or if the fashion of its being is
such an insubstantial thing, then Giles’s comment seems remarkably out of place
in the Buffyverse.
Placed
against this notion of a fixed and unchanging self that is resistant to the
external force of some metaphysical notion of a soul, there is the theoretical
model that would claim for performativity an entirely un-rooted self capable of
almost unending change and resistant not only to external features like a soul,
but equally resilient to external features such as skin colour:
…ethnicity would seem to be culturally rehearsed and
performed into an imaginary ontological status; indeed, as the contrived
(through constant and repeated endogamous marriage) repetition of traits such
as facial characteristics that are merely external, representational graphics
without meaning or signifiers that signify nothing more than themselves, ethnic
identity consists of the performance into imaginary being of something which
has no existence outside of the repetition of traits.[19]
To decry the representation of Willow’s disappearing
Jewishness is to largely invoke a model of the latter kind; to assert that she
remains Jewish despite external endorsement is seemingly to tend towards
Giles’s position.
Willow
herself makes a claim that implies a performative element to her Jewishness
(indeed to her identity in general, but at this moment specifically to the
extent that her identity is partially understood as comprising Jewishness
within it) in ‘Amends’ (3.10). This episode was initially aired on December 15,
1998 and was, unmistakable, the Christmas episode. To have a central claim
about Willow’s Jewishness in this episode then, is important. For Alderman and
Seidel-Arpaci, it simply affirms the extent to which Willow’s Jewishness is
only expressible as the opposite of Christianity; that it is only ever in a
negative relation to the dominant culture.
At one point
in the show, Buffy asks what everyone is doing for Christmas. Willow’s response
is short and absolute, ‘Being Jewish. Remember, people? Not everyone worships
Santa’. There is a directness and security in this that, while being posited
against Christianity is also a strong positive claim.
It is a strong positive claim that
carries within a dual relationship to Jewishness that underpins the show’s
representation of Willow. ‘Being Jewish’ is obviously the attenuated remainder
of the elided full phrase ‘I am being Jewish’. In response to the question,
‘what are you doing for Christmas’ it allows us to read the phrase as
expressive of a particular, willed, finite and bounded experience. It sits in
paradigmatic companionship with phrases such as ‘I am visiting relatives’, ‘I
am watching telly’, and ‘I am going away’. In other words, Willow’s phrasing
asserts the specificity of her action and the contextually-limited nature of
its performance. To that extent, Willow performs her Jewishness in an
environment of negative assertion in response to dominant culture. In avoiding
the ontological absoluteness of fixed identity, Willow falls prey to a
seemingly inevitable rear-guard action to avoid cooption by the dominant
culture: perfomativity in this context in the show is the same as majority
rule.
But, Willow
has not simply asserted a limited performance. ‘Being Jewish’ is something that
Willow constantly is. It is, quite literally, one of the many predicates of her
existence. A little later in the same episode Willow disputes the notion of
forgiveness as a specifically Christian virtue and rebukes Buffy’s use of the
phrase ‘Christmas spirit’ to illustrate it. Willow declares ‘Hello, still
Jewish. Chanukah spirit, I think that was’. If ‘being Jewish’ alerts us to a
continuous present tense, then ‘[I am] still Jewish’ demonstrates the past,
present and future assertion contained in the simple present declaration of ‘to
be’.
And between
these two grammatical possibility lies Willow’s predicament. It might be argued
that by locating the argument in English grammar rather than in Hebrew or
Arabic, I am rehearsing the same manoeuvres of exclusion or cooption as the
show is felt to have done. That would be to ignore one of the most important
aspects of the show: it is American, and more particualry Southern Californian.
The shooting
script for episode one indicates that, although the students going to school
‘could be from anywhere in America’ they are still demonstrably ‘So Cal’.[20]The
‘anywhere in America’ aspect has been well documented by David Lavery[21]
and the specifically So Cal nature of the show has been analysed by Boyd Tonkin
in ‘Entropy as Demon: Buffy in Southern California’.[22]
These two essays provide a geographical, topographical, cultural and geological
analysis of Buffy that is essential
to anyone wanting to understand the concept of a global product set in the
SoCal region.
The main
American characters in the show are white and, with the exception of Willow,
are simply American. The common-place hyphenated American is absent, with no
self-defined Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Polish-Americans and very few
African-Americans.[23]
This denial of hyphenated ethnicity is recognised in a fashion that is
both playful and knowing, as well as potentially offensive in ‘When She Was
Bad’ (2.1). Utilising her enormous power of the quip as she is about to stake a
vampire she says ‘You’re a vampire. Oh, I’m sorry, was that an offensive term?
Should I say ‘undead-American’’ (2.1).
Willow is Jewish-American,
although she never actively refers to herself in that way. Any assertion of
ethnicity is always simply Jewish, with all the paraphernalia of everyday
culture operating as the identifier of her Americanness. When Joyce is in
hospital in season five, Willow brings gifts to her and to Buffy and Dawn.
Joyce’s present is, rather incongruously, a beer hat. Willow declares that she
feels like Santa Claus (nicely reprising her chastising of Buffy two seasons
earlier), but continues that this is true except that she is ‘thinner and
younger and female and, well, Jewish’. The cultural trappings of a certain
version of America (beer hats and Santa Claus) are here co-opted by Willow
(rather than vice versa) and used to assert her identity via a range of
subject positions (physicality, age, gender and ethnicity) none of which has
precedence over the others in any absolute sense, although her Jewishness is
the most significant disbarring aspect in relation to the explicitly Christian
(via European paganism and Coca Cola) Santa Claus.
Willow is Jewish and is being
Jewish at different times in the show. That one is highlighted more than
another is a problem only if there is a belief that the character is being
somehow diminished as a consequence. While there is a clear difference both of
quantity and degree, Buffy is the Slayer and is being the Slayer
at different times; Giles is English and is being English at
different times. With Giles, the audience recognises that he is English
much more than they might recognise that Willow is Jewish, but this is largely
because he cannot avoid cultural difference (accent, lexis, habit, dress and so
on) and so appears to be being English always whereas the non-Orthodox
Willow has very few moments of such clear cultural difference.
This is not, however, an apology for
the show. It is clear that having introduced a character as Jewish, more could
have been done to have made that a more noticeable part of her identity. It is
perhaps appropriate that it is in episodes that trade on specific aspects of
American culture (Christmas, Thanksgiving) that we see the most explicit
expressions of those who do not fit easily into mainstream WASP America.
Willow’s Jewishness is seen most at Christmas or in reference to Christmas; the
Chumash tribe have their history repeated and are annihilated at Thanksgiving;
Xander’s working class background is most deeply felt at Christmas and at prom
time. When the cultural eclecticism that seems to mark America out is pressed
into homogeneity, the fissures are much more pronounced. Willow’s Jewishness is
not especially prominent throughout all episodes and seasons, because it does
not ‘disrupt’ the vision of the US (and of a deeply homogenised humanity) with
which the show is working.
Willow’s Jewishness, therefore,
disappears from screen as a central fact of her character, but this is not to
say that the character at any point is no longer Jewish. What it does suggest
is that representations of Jewishness do not require a superabundance of
cultural signifiers in order for Jewishness to be recognised. It is curious,
perhaps, that beyond her name on the credits, the first time that anything like
an expression of Willow’s Jewishness occurs is in relation to European Jewry
and anti-Semitism in literature. In an English class, The Merchant of Venice
is being discussed. In a scene that is designed as much to highlight Cordelia’s
character as Willow’s, Cordelia illustrates her touching empathy for others:
Ms Miller: So talk to me, people. How does what Shylock says
here about being a Jew relate to our discussion about the anger of the outcast
in society?
Cordelia: Well, how about color me totally self-involved?
Ms. Miller: Care to elaborate?
Cordelia: Yeah. With Shylock it’s whine, whine, whine, like
the whole world is about him. He acts like it’s justice, him getting a pound of
Antonio’s flesh. It’s not justice, it’s yicky.
Ms. Miller: But has Shylock suffered? Whats his place in
Venice society?
Willow: Well, everyone looked down on him.
Cordelia: That is such a twinkie defense. Shylock should get
over himself.[24]
Willow’s
comments are not made from a self-identified position as a Jew, but
nevertheless the audience is aware of her Jewishness which here is used to
signify humanity, empathy and consideration for others, as opposed to the
selfish, self-obsessed concerns of WASP America as exemplified by Cordelia. It
is not necessary here to labour the point of Willow’s Jewishness; instead it is
seen as an aspect of a character for whom the audience has an enormous amount
of affection, and who provides a muted moral compass which stands both
alongside but sometimes in opposition to the dominant morality of the show
which is not Christianity but is Buffy herself. Buffy’s complex morality is the
subject of a whole other chapter, at least,[25]
but a shorthand account would highlight a certain ethical pragmatism informed
by a mutable moral code. Willow’s own moral journey is equally as complicated
and allows us to see the extent to which her identity is constantly in the
process of being performed (with all the attendant changes in costume,
physicality and so on that this implies), and yet also allows us to see the
continuing aspects of her that we have known from the beginning.
When Willow
holds her dead girlfriend, Tara in her arms, with blood-soaked clothes and the
sun pouring in to the room we have a quintessentially dramatic moment (‘Seeing
Red’ (6.19)). Outside, Buffy lays wounded, Xander is oblivious to the real
events that are unfolding. The audience through the window in Willow’s room
sees the brightness, almost too bright, sees the vivid blood stain, feels, too,
the shock of the unexpected (a shock that is disabling and mortifying – Tara is
dead, Willow is in agony- but also thrilling and delightful – the frisson of a
drama blowing us (and Tara) away), and then we see Willow turn. Before our
eyes, her eyes become deep, liquid jet; her hair becomes raven; her face is
ruptured with protruding veins. There is no doubting the way in which aesthetic
is leading us. It is clearly the case that Willow’s transformation into the
irrational, world-destroying uber-witch is mirrored by her physicality.
Within the economy of
representation that the programme has been working with, this is an inevitable
and necessary step. Her potential for mis-use of magic and therefore, scary
behaviour has been demonstrated by her warning to Giles not to mess with her
earlier in the season (6.3)[26]
and, unlike the more straightforward examples of ugly equals bad, Willow offers
a chance of a much more playful and involuted strategy. Willow has already, if
only obliquely, been shaded evil by Darla’s and her clothes in the very first
episode (1.1). Teasingly, the possibility of Willow losing herself if she
allows herself to become unrestrained has been hinted at in ‘Halloween’ (2.6) when,
at Buffy’s insistence, she dresses up in semi-goth clothes only to hide under a
sheet and pretend to be ghost. When a spell turns everyone into what they are
wearing she becomes a ghost, incorporeal, and walks through walls in her skimpy
outfit.
The outfit (and the ontological dislocation) are then reprised in
substantially modified form in season three’s ‘The Wish’ (3.9) and
‘Doppelgangland’ (3.16). In these episodes, a Willow from another dimension, in
which Buffy never arrived in Sunnydale, is turned into a vampire. Yellow eyes,
bumpy face and shocking red hair as well as a black leather bustier, vamp
Willow is a goth-girl dream. Her attitude is one of laconic boredom, a sinuous
devil with sex on her mind. The sex, though, is ‘kinda gay’ according to ‘our’
Willow still resplendent in fluffy pink pullovers and dimmer henna hair.
Willow, of course, is gay as the seasons unfold which presents, at least, a
sense of the possible inter-relationship of the two Willows; of normal Willow’s
potential for evil. This is not due to her lesbianism, of course (though some
on the Christian right may disagree), rather it is a function of the drawing
together of the two characters in terms of dialogue, clothes and scenography
such that their aesthetic coincidence implies an ethical corollary.
This is exacerbated by the episode
‘Tabula Rasa’ (6.8) in which Willow, addicted to magic, casts a spell to make
Tara and Buffy forget how miserable they are. The spell does not succeed as
planned and all the characters lose their memory. Once again, an ontologically
disturbed Willow shares something with vamp Willow; this time it is her own
sense that she is ‘kinda gay’. The relationship between the two is made
explicit when season six’s grieving and evil Willow captures Warren and tortures
him. After a long and agonizing session, evil Willow directly quotes vamp
Willow by intoning ‘Bored now’ (6.20), one of vamp Willow’s expressions. Evil
Willow’s return to normalcy is shown to us through her morphing back into
henna-haired sweet-eyed, smooth-faced Willow, the black jacket and trousers now
little more than part of a young woman’s wardrobe.
Willow’s journey is not over
however. In season seven, despite her reluctance, she is cajoled into
performing a major feat of magic. The spell this time does go according to plan
(and thereby brings about the demise of the First Evil, the destruction of
Sunnydale and Spike’s ascendance to absolute hero) and during it Kennedy, her
new lover, is present. At the height of the spell, at the height of her powers
which are being used for absolute good, Willow transforms again. This time, she
turns an almost translucent, bright white from head to toe. Kennedy calls her
‘my goddess’(7.22) and the good triumphs. The apotheosis of good in the
aesthetics of the Buffy universe is light and white and Willow’s shining
performance presents us with the climax of moral and ethical excellence.
This moral
and ethical excellence is not derived from the fact that she is a witch capable
of performing the spell, nor a lesbian whose love is clearly profound and
intense. Her moral excellence derives from a personality that while
incorporating witchcraft and lesbianism, among other salient facts, is also
strongly informed by her Jewishness. Indeed, before we understand Willow as
witch or lesbian we know her as a Jew. From the shy girl who is picked on in
school, to the saviour of the world, Willow is always Jewish and it is as a
Jew, as a very, very cool Jew indeed that she helps save the world one last
time.
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Beer Bad Hate Piece
Beer isn’t bad; beer’s bloody brilliant. And more beer
is even better. After a dozen pints, the world’s a better place (or you’re so
smashed and unconscious that its not being a better place is not a worry).
Buffy is also brilliant – a morally nuanced, socially
engaged, generally liberal show that offers an examination of being in the
world in different ways and at different times of your life.
This episode was, at best, a blunt metaphor of
absolutely no aesthetic worth, no narrative interest and peculiarly dull acting
and direction; or it was a cow-towing act of nauseatingly obsequious obeisance
to a corporate dictat from a bunch of hypocrite cynics and two-bob bullies.
The episode is dull, didactic and stupid. Worse, it
parades its ignorant message of abstinence in a context that has always been
open to multiple possibilities and to oppositionality. To love this episode is
to pander to the worst aspects of a non-reflective, self-satisfied, moral myopia;
it is to side with the philistines and life deniers.
No one episode has ever done more to try and defile
the artistic integrity, aesthetic bravery and politico-moral sophistication of
its parent show. It is an irredeemable excrescence.
I am not fond.
[1]
Jes Battis, ‘She’s Not All Grown Yet: Willow as Hybrid/Hero in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ in Slayage, Number 8 (March 2003).
[2]
Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Willow C’
[3]
Slayage Vol. 10 (November 2003),
<http;//slayage.tv.essays.slayage10/Alderman_&_Seidel-Arpaci.htm>.
[4]
Alderman and Seidel-Arpaci, ‘Imaginary para-sties of the soul: Vampires and
Representations of ‘Blackness’ and ‘Jewishness’ in the Buffy / Angelverse’ in Slayage, Number 10 (November 2003).
[5]
In relation to notions of Englishness on the show, see : Matthew Pateman,
"'You say tomato': Englishness in Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Cercle
8 (2003): 103-113. www.cercles.com/n8/pateman.pdf
and Matthew Kilburn, ‘Slay up, and Slay the game! How Buffy gets
Britain’ in The Tides of Time Issue 29, pp. 16 – 24.
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~whosoc/tides/Tides_29.pdf
[7]
Ibid.
[8]
Mary Alice Money appears to adhere to a much more liberal notion of ethnic
inclusion when, in discussing the ways in which peripheral character become
less and less demonic, she asserts, ‘in these rehabilitated humans and demons,
the main characters and the audience confront the Other: the marginalized
figures who are worthy of inclusion, the nonhumans who are people after all,
the strangers who become us’. ‘The Undemonization of Supporting Characters in
Buffy’ in eds. Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery, Fighting the Forces, p.98.
[9] Jean François Lyotard,
‘Heidegger and ‘the jews’’ in ed. Bill Readings, Political Writings, p.141.
[10] Jean François Lyotard,
‘Heidegger and ‘the jews’’, p. 144.
[11]
(Sigmund Freud, ‘The
Archaic Features and Infantilism of Dreams’, in eds. J. Strachey and A.
Richards, trans. J Strachey, Introductory
Lectures on Psychoanalysis: Penguin
Freud Library Vol. 1, p.237.
[12]
David Carroll, ‘Foreword: The Memory of Devastation and the Responsibilities of
Thought: ‘And let's not talk about that’’ in Jean-François Lyotard Heidegger
and ‘the jews’, trans. Andreas Michael and Mark S. Roberts, pp. xi - xii.
[13]
Golden,
Christopher and Holder, Nancy. Buffy the
Vampire Slayer: The Watcher’s Guide, Vol. 1. (New York: Pocket, 1998)
p.164.
[14]
Our only real knowledge of Willow’s mother comes from the episode ‘Gingerbread’
in which a demon fakes the murder of two young children in order to create
outrage and violence among the town’s adults. The strategy works, and Willow’s
mother along with Buffy’s, putt heir daughters to the stake for witchcraft.
[15]
See Norman Jewison’s 1971 film Fiddler on the Roof, based on the stories
by Sholom Aleichem.
[16]
Ewan Kirkland, Slayage 17
[17]
ibid
[18] Greg Erickson’s excellent
essay ‘Religion Freaky or a ‘Bunch of Men Who Died?’: The (A)theology of Buffy’ in Slayage Numbers 13 and 14 (October 2004), makes, among others, the
following crucial point with regard to any supposed grounding of identity
through the concept of a soul: ‘On Buffy,
it is not the presence of a soul that separates humans from vampires (Angel, a
vampire with a soul is still not
human), but it is the lack of a soul
that seems to make a vampire evil’. Martin Buinicki and Anthony Enns make an
even more striking point when they try to demonstrate how the soul is itself a
disciplinary category wherein, ‘Buffy’s exercise of disciplinary power actually
rehearses the process by which souls are produced and sustained’. ‘Buffy the
Vampire Disciplinarian: Institutional Excess and the New Economy of Power’, Slayage, Number 4 (December 2001).
[19] Julie Rivkin and Michael
Ryan, ‘English without shadows’ in eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Literary Theory: An Anthology,
p.855.
[20] Buffy The Script Book
Season One, Volume one, p.7.
[21]
I am very grateful to David Lavery for sending me his ‘Fatal Environment: Buffy
the Vampire Slayer and American Culture’ which he presented at the Staking a Claim conference held in
Adelaide, July 2003.
[22] Boyd Tonkin, ‘Entropy as
Demon: Buffy in Southern California’ in ed. Roz Kaveney, Reading the Vampire Slayer, pp. 37-52.
[23] The character of Charles
Gunn in Angel is interestingly critiqued from the position of ethnicity
in Naomi Alderman and Annette Seidel-Arpaci ‘Imaginary Para-Sites of the Soul:
Vampires and Representations of ‘Blackness’ and ‘Jewishness’ in the Buffy/Angelverse’
in Slayage, Number 10
(November 2003).
[24]
‘Out of Sigh, Out of Mind’ BtVS 1.11
[25]
See chapter nine of my The Aesthetics of Culture in Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (Jefferson: McFarland Publishers, 2005).
[26] We have also seen the
physically disabling effects on Willow of attempting high level magic in her
spell to make Glory disappear in ‘Blood Ties’ (5.13) which causes her to have
headaches and a nose bleed, in addition to her eyes turning black.
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