Losing Touch with the Symbolic Order in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Essay

Losing Touch with the Symbolic Order in Buffy the Vampire Slayer In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode The Body, the audience is forced to face the veridical every time the director makes a shock cut to Joyces wild body after each commercial break. Joyces body reminds viewers of the materiality of the human condition as we see her zipped into a body bag, thus examined by a mortician, and finally covered with a white sheet. By exposing viewers to Joyces body, the creators of Buffy are treating the audience as another member of the Buffy diegesis. resembling Buffy, Dawn, and Giles, we recognize the certain because the camera constantly returns us to the physical battlefront of her corpse. We understand how Buffy experiences the abject because we, too, experience the shock of seeing Joyces dead body. one(a) question that remains, however, is how do people craft with the abject when they know at that place is finis but do not see the corpse. In The Body, thithe r is a sequence that explores this question. It is a scene where we see Buffys closest friends deal with the handout of a mother figure, with show up seeing her corpse. Because they are not heart-to-heart the body, they try to hang on to the emblematic order through speech and action. However, the abject is always present in their minds. Willow faces what Julia Kristeva calls a swollen crisis as she struggles to appear as a collected, supportive figure for Buffy. Xander practices transferee as he looks for someone to blame for Joyces death. Anya experiences her ingest breakd protest of candor as she recognizes her own mortality. Through language and action, these characters try to cover their own fears of the Real without success. Like many of the other scenes in this e... ...d language however, the Real and the abject cannot be repressed. Willow gives into the abject by crying out against Anyas tactlessness. Xander faces the abject by looking down at his bloo dy consider and realizing there is nothing left to blame. Anya recognizes her own mortality by equivalence Joyces physical condition with her own. For these characters, the loss of Joyce, a mother figure, causes them to realize their own human condition. Symbolic order and language, at times, fails because thinking about Joyces death forces the Real to permeate in their minds. The desire to hold on to the symbolic order remains, however, in order to help them get through the loss of their loved one and to continue living. Sources Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. sunrise(prenominal) York Columbia UP. 1982.