Buffy The Disciplinarian
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[and] hospitals,” with prisons (228), and BtVS thus suggests a resistance to these
institutions.
BtVS also seems to critique institutions in its depiction of Buffy as a heroine
who is independent of the justice system. Those within institutions view Buffy as
a marginal element, a criminal operating outside the system, and she is repeatedly
chastised by authority figures. For example, in “Becoming, Part Two,” at the end
of the second season, Buffy is expelled by the principal, who repeatedly states that
she is a subversive element within the high school. In a similar way, when she
refuses to obey the Council’s orders in “Graduation Day, Part One,” Wesley, the
Council’s representative, accuses her of “mutiny.” Likewise, in the fourth season
episode “The I in Team,” Professor Walsh, the leader of The Initiative, tries to
have Buffy murdered, ostensibly because her behavior is unpredictable and
endangering The Initiative’s project. Colonel McNamara, who takes over the
Initiative after Walsh’s death, even labels her an “anarchist” (“New Moon Rising”).
The idea of the hero operating outside accepted institutions is extended in the spin
off series
in which Lindsay, the devious Wolfram and Hart lawyer, convinces
a police detective that Angel is “a being...w ho feels he is above the law”
(“Sanctuary”).
The notion that Buffy subverts modem institutions has also been fueled by
claims that the show’s vampires and demons represent social problems that
contemporary institutions can neither recognize nor control. For example, A. Susan
Owen argues that “each episode negotiates the claims of a rational world view in
the context of social fragmentation and institutional failure” (27). Owen illustrates
this point with the episode “Ted,” in which Buffy is abused by her mother’s
boyfriend, who turns out to be a cyborg; the failure of social institutions to solve
the very real problem of domestic abuse, Owen argues, is further represented by
the once again misdirected efforts of the police. Owen concludes that “in Sunnydale
the threat is inherent within the culture: reason, science and social order fail in the
face of predation, because predation is part of the modem project. In this narrative,
vampirism is the inverted human face of power and domination” (28).
However, Owen fails to account for the ways in which vampires themselves
are also subject to forces of power and domination. This domination can take the
form of a gypsy curse, which can change a vampire into a force for good, or the
excessive institutional power of The Initiative and its programs of behavior
modification and experimentation. Although it is tme that vampires are floating
signifiers that can symbolize a number of social issues, such as alcohol abuse and
premarital sex, they more frequently represent people who are subject to a variety
of institutional pressures. As Ono points out, their supernatural nature is often
coded as racial difference: “the marginalization of vampires on the show takes the
place of racial marginahzation in the world outside the show” (172). However, in