Synopsis for Sept. 22-26, 2008,
"The Restless Id"

The Discussion

The opening dream sequence of "Restless" (focalized through Willow), illustrated for us the ways that language dissociates us from our own desires, a precept that is of particular importance to Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the opening scene, we find Willow painting a Greek poem by Sappho on the naked back of her lover, Tara. (For the poem, see the "Restless" Primer.) According to Lacan, our entrance into language and into the intersubjective network of laws and conventions that language makes possible forever severs us from the materiality of the real. Forever after, we can only see the world (and our own bodily drives) through the fantasy version of the real that we call reality. The image also perfectly exemplifies a point made by Peter Brooks in our readings from last month, in a passage where he is, in fact, discussing Lacanian psychoanalysis: "The paradox of the 'dead desire' is of course that it continues very much to live, but in displaced and unrecognized form, as desire that cannot speak its right name—could speak its name only by way of the substitutive condensation of metaphor... yet for this very reason continues as a force in the present, driving the discourse of the subject forward in the word-to-word connections of metonymy, extending the desiring subject forward on those 'rails' that figure the necessary dynamic of desire, a motor insisting—as narrative ever does—toward the unnamed meaning" (58). Since our sexuality must always work through language it cannot speak its right name; indeed, it has no name since it is, by definition, prelingual, primordial and therefore outside our ability to "read" it. Willow's inability to name her kitty is another metaphor for this situation: she is not able to put a name on the figure that, in the sequence, comes to represent the animalistic and the primoridial. At the same time, the kitty, undeveloped as it is, could be said to represent regression to childhood. By the way, the sexualizing of Tara's back could be said to exemplify one other point made by Freud: "The most prominent of the parts of the body from which this libido arises are known by the name of 'erotogenic zones', though in fact the whole body is an erotogenic zone of this kind" (Outline 151).

As is made clear in the sequence, the poem is also represented as Willow's homework assignment, which illustrates how our desire is also coordinated by the laws and strictures of society after we pass the Oedipal stage of psychosexual development. (See Freud Module 1.) We could, for example, read this sequence as an exemplification of sublimation: Willow is releasing the cathexis of her desire in a pursuit that is acceptable to the Name-of-the-Father. Nonetheless, the repressed manifests itself in the sequence: the hunting kitten and the slayer outside the window could both be read as the return of the repressed, specifically, in this case, not only primordial desire but the death drive, the latter of which is represented by the first slayer.

Students also began to read elements of the sequence in metaphorical and psychoanalytical ways: Allison Mattes pointed out that the paintbrush is quite phallic here (important, given the obviously sexual nature of the scene and given the fact that Willow here is doing her homework, an injunction from superego authority figures) and Eiliff tied red to desire (particularly the curtain in the scene; curtains also return later in the dream sequence). The two interpretations come together in Willow's backstage sequence where the first slayer's phallic knife penetrates the red curtains (which thus clearly come to represent the folds of the female pudenda, something Joss Whedon in fact corroborates in the commentary found on the DVD of the episode).

We also discussed the significance of the play subtext in the Willow dream sequence. As Jeff Yip (S3) suggested in class in a previous semester, the show appears thus to be making a comment on the performativity of identity, the fact that very little in human behavior is inherent; it is all determined or coordinated by language and by the social conventions/ ideologies that are tied to language. The relationship of this performativity to the Name-of-the-Father is made clear by the fact that all of Willow's authority figures are in the audience and are ready to punish her, as Giles informs her. Because of the inherently sexist nature of Freud's (and culture's) gender roles, authority is associated specifically with male figures (or the Phallus, as Lacan might say). As a result, Giles (the father figure of the series) only hears "Cowboy guy" rather than a woman when he asks for the correct name for an object ("props").

The power associated with the male Gaze is also exemplified in the sequence, as many of you pointed out, particularly the scene in which we see a close-up of Cowboy guy's face and eye, with a weeping woman in the background. (The gaze of the camera is here associated with the hyper-male figure: Cowboy guy.) Buffy puts herself in between and contests the sexism of patriarchal society ("men...with your sales!"), as she does throughout the series. (She is, after all, a woman who claims the power of the phallus/stake on a regular basis.) The scene is all the more perfect because of the dead male body on the bottom right of the screen, for, as Lacan argues, the Gaze is ultimately constructed over a constitutive lack aligned with the real. Indeed, the episode keeps figuring out ways of questioning, undoing, or castrating male fantasies of control (e.g., over women).

We then turned to the Xander Harris dream sequence, which I suggested is a nice representation of Freud's concept of displacement, one of the two main mechanisms by which the dream work (i.e. repression) manipulates our dream thoughts in order to create the manifest dream that we remember upon waking. As we learn at the end of the sequence, Xander is really working out a childhood trauma tied to his father; however, he displaces this childhood trauma through alternative father figures (as Buffy states, "are you sure we're the ones you're looking for?"): first Giles (who, in the sequence, adopts Spike as his "good son"; Xander states, "yah, I was into that for a while"); then Kurtz via both Xander's former high-school principle, Schneider, and also Apocalypse Now—an evil father figure who demonstrates the debilitating effects of an overly powerful superego, as well as the death drive. Xander's continual return (in the dream sequence) to the scene of his childhood trauma (the basement of his home) perfectly illustrates Freud's understanding of repetition compulsion (as Amber Worman and Emily Ponder pointed out); repetition compulsion, as we know from Peter Brooks and the Freud Module 5, is intimately tied up with the death drive, a fact that is literalized by the fact that Xander dies at the end of the sequence, his heart ripped out by his own father (who then turns into the First Slayer, the principle of the death drive in the episode). As David Humble suggested in a previous version of this class, we are also thus given a metaphor for castration.

The Oedipal argument is, of course, aided by the fact that Xander also exhibits classic desire for the mother through his sexual encounter with "Buffy's mom," as Julie Stockman pointed out. The scene not only ties this stage clearly to the phallic phase of development (Xander goes to pee, though can't perform because of the gaze of the father, with the father's gaze here displaced onto doctors and the military—thanks, Holly, for that), but we also have a lovely example of parapraxis, or what we have come to call Freudian slip. The same exploration of patriarchy is explored later in Buffy's dream sequence, with Adam and Riley aligned with the gun as phallus and the authority of government. Interestingly here, Aaron Strand explained, Joyce Summers’ sexual advance is made without her lips moving, which underscores how Xander is here trying to put words in her mouth (through wish fulfillment).

Whereas the Xander Harris sequence is a good example of displacement, the Rupert Giles sequence exemplifies condensation: an innocuous element in the dream (a watch) is made to take on an impacted multiplicity of meaning in the sequence: a literal watch and its association with linear temporality or chronology; the Watcher (thanks, Joshua Wolf!) and, thus, the principle of the law and the superego; the opposition between chronological time and regressive time, as Emily Ponder and others suggested (further worked out in the sequence through other references like "the chronicles" and "don't get linear on me now"); and hypnosis as the means of regression. Giles is thus working out his anxiety at being in the position of the father. Indeed, the reason Giles is called Rupert and Rupes in the sequence (something that is very rare in the Buffyverse) is precisely because Giles is, in the sequence, anxious about his patronym (thanks, Jen Rukavina!), quite literally the "Name of the father," which gets passed down to you from the father at birth.

The final image of Giles crawling back stage, following a wire that then loops around, of all things, a watch provides us with a final metaphor for the twists and turns of narrative, as well as this narrative's tendency to loop around a single metaphor, the watch. Once again, we are thus provided with a nice visual metaphor for the opposition metonymy/metaphor. Brittany Lock also pointed out that the crawling on all fours suggests regression or movement backwards, further supported by the word play: Giles is crawling "back stage." This final image thus brings together for us Brooks' theories about metaphor/metonymy and Freud's theories about condensation/displacement, two oppositions that are exactly analogous.

The final Buffy dream sequence is one of the loveliest evocations ever on television of man's struggle with the death drive, punctuated at the line, "the slayer stands alone," with the final return of the man with the cheese slices. As Seth Good correctly pointed out in a previous semester, that mystery (beyond its travestying of the audience's desire for meaning, as Amber Worman argued and as Joss Whedon corroborates on the DVD commentary) is a reference to a children's rhyme (and thus a last evocation of regression): "The farmer in the dell, the farmer in the dell,/ Hi-ho, the derry-o, the farmer in the dell/... The cheese stands alone, the cheese stands alone,/ Hi-ho, the derry-o, the cheese stands alone."