Something to Sing About in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

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Recommended: Vampires throughout history

Throughout much of recorded human history, people have written tales of the dead returning to life, usually to trouble the living in some way. These traditional myths have progressed from ancient superstitions, to campfire ghost stories, to television shows such as Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In the series, vampires are created from the dead victims of other vampires (as long as a certain rite is performed during the victim's death). After a time they rise from their graves and immediately seek to kill and drink the blood of the living. Creatures such as these are, as Lacan [give first name when you first mention someone] describes them, "between the two deaths" and live again only to fulfill insistent, mechanical drive. This drive, often centered on killing, vengeance, or some other quest for closure, is distinct from desire in that it is not "caught up in dialectical trickery" (Zizek 21). According to Zizek [ditto], normal desires are not always what they seem, for when we desire something, we may be seeking something else entirely (21). Most of the vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer fit Lacan's profile of between the two deaths, and, as one might expect, they are antagonists to the protector of the living, Buffy. However, in the musical episode "Once More, with Feeling," Whedon explores two protagonists who are also between the two deaths, each struggling to revert back to their prior state of being, but both in a different situation. One of these characters, Spike, once fit the archetype of the vampire, but now faces difficulty as he is forced to cope with normal dialectical desire in order to exist in the civilized, symbolic world. The other, Buffy, fulfilled the death drive when she sa...

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... her to be the Slayer. Her only chance to find motivation in the world is to find a new desire. Both characters approach the same center, but from different ends of the drive-symbol spectrum. Thus, Whedon not only makes use of the Lacanian "between the two deaths" concept, but he also plays with making it dynamic (Spike) and with inverting it (Buffy). Then, at the very end of the episode, the two experiments are united in an elegant closure.

Sources Cited or Consulted

Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "Once More, with Feeling."

Felluga, Dino. "Modules on Lacan: On Desire." Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. Date March 11, 2003. Purdue U. March 23, 2003. <http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/psychoanalysis/lacandesire.html>.

Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991.

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