Buffy The Disciplinarian
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Way in Punishment,” Foucault describes the efforts of reformers to suit the
punishment very directly to the crime: “The ideal punishment would be transparent
to the crime that it punishes; thus for him who contemplates it, it will be infallibly
the sign of the crime that it punishes” (105). Buffy does not simply slay all vampires
and demons; rather, she establishes a set of penalties for certain infringements that
vary from the most extreme (death to vampires who feed on the living) to the
relatively mild and necessary (werewolves must be locked up during a full moon).
This is even more evident with Angel, who offers to help both humans and demons
depending on who is being victimized by whom at any given time. For example, in
the episode “She,” Angel assists a woman fleeing oppression in another dimension
even though she has already murdered at least one human; his aid is contingent on
her refraining from any further killing: “I’m not saying you shouldn’t fight. Just
know I’ll be there to stop you if you cross the line.”
Foucault also stresses the importance of categorization to the ideal penal system:
“For penal semiotics to cover the whole field of illegalities that one wishes to
eliminate, all offences must be defined; they must be classified and collected into
species from which none of them can escape” (98). In contrast to the institutions of
the Council and The Initiative, both of which fail to recognize the “individuality”
of the creatures they confront, Buffy and Angel are able to differentiate between
groups of vampires and demons, and they pay close attention to their various
backgrounds and motives. For example. The Initiative trains its soldiers to refer to
vampires and demons as “Hostile Subterrestrials,” or simply “HSTs,” and they are
taught to view these beings as animals which all possess an equal degree of evil.
This failure to differentiate becomes a major source of conflict in the episode “New
Moon Rising,” where Buffy and her boyfriend Riley, a member of The Initiative,
argue about the justice of putting all demons into a single category:
Buffy: You sounded like Mr. Initiative: demons bad, people good.
Riley: Something wrong with that theorem?
Buffy: There’s different degrees o f...
Riley: Evil?
Buffy: It’s just different with different demons. There are creatures,
vampires for example, who aren’t evil at all.
Riley: Name one.
Buffy’s defense of Oz, a friend who is a werewolf, echoes Foucault’s description
of “the delinquent whose slow formation is shown in a biographical investigation”
and who should be distinguished from the offender “in that he is not only the
author of his acts...but is linked to his offense by a whole bundle of complex
threads (instincts, drives, tendencies, character)” (252). Buffy similarly claims that