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Popular Culture Review
setting fire to her old school in L.A. due to a vampire infestation which only she
was able to recognize. Buffy is eager to put her slaying days behind her, but
unfortunately her new school turns out to be located over a “Hellmouth,” a portal
which a vampire known as “The Master” is attempting to open in order to destroy
the world. Buffy is forced to accept her identity as a slayer and save the world from
certain destruction, while at the same time negotiating obstacles placed before her
by the educational institution. For example, by attempting to stop Buffy from leaving
campus, the school’s principal not only misjudges her character but also
inadvertently puts the world in mortal jeopardy, and only by “rebelling” against
the system and its preconceptions can Buffy succeed in resolving the crisis. Over
the course of the first four seasons, this pattern becomes even more pronounced in
episodes such as “Graduation Day, Part One,” in which the Watcher’s Council, an
institution ostensibly created to help Buffy slay vampires and demons, becomes an
obstacle that Buffy has to overcome in averting a catastrophe at Sunnydale’s
graduation ceremony. In the fourth season, the military institution called The
Initiative becomes the very crisis Buffy has to resolve during her first year of
college: its experiments in biological warfare result in the creation of a cyborg
demon named “Adam” who threatens to annihilate the entire human race. Buffy’s
resistance to institutional authority thus becomes almost indistinguishable from
her role as the vampire slayer.
BtVS also seems to depict these institutions as Foucaultian models of discipline
and punishment, emphasizing surveillance, categorization, and regulation of
behavior. For example, the high school principal repeatedly warns Buffy and her
friends, “I have my eye on you,” and the Council’s mechanism of control takes the
form of the “Watcher,” an individual whose sole purpose is to monitor the activities
of the slayer. The use of surveillance is most obvious in The Initiative, which has
hidden video cameras throughout the campus of Sunnydale Univ ersity. The Initiative
also employs an elaborate system of ordering and classifying demons according to
their behavior and anatomy. This is similar to the Watcher’s Council, which
possesses extensive knowledge of vampires and demons, and the high school
principal performs a similar procedure by dividing students into discrete categories
of troublemakers. (Buffy and her friends seem to occupy their own particular sub
category.) These institutions regulate the behavior of their subjects through the use
of routines and restrictions, such as those employed by the high school, and the
Watcher’s Council similarly attempts to control Buffy by discouraging her from
dating, training her, and ultimately putting her through a series of brutal tests. The
scientists who run The Initiative control the demons they capture by keeping them
in holding cells, using drugs and computer implants to regulate their behavior as
well as the behavior of their own soldiers. These similarities seem to support
Foucault’s equation of all institutions of power, such as “factories, schools, barracks.