(Part four of five)
Section 3 – Internal States
“Normal Again” reveals a distressing portion of Buffy’s past and an anxiety that is exploited by the demon in her hallucination. She is told by her parents and the doctor in this that her life as a slayer and her friends in Sunnydale are all false constructs in her mind caused by her schizophrenia, and she is urged to sever ties with these constructs to return to a healthy and normal life. The hallucinations make Buffy doubt herself and her entire past, present, perception of reality, and sanity, leaving her trying to validate her experiences to others and herself. Her whole world is thrown into question and she is soon overwhelmed. During and after the experiences, she withdraws and crouches, curling into herself and protecting her head (fig. 3). For short periods Buffy reverts to a childlike state, like River, and her personality turns around. “I feel so lost. I feel so detached”, she tells Willow. This is worsened by the sudden and frequent lapses in and out of the hallucination, subjecting her to brief and fractured experiences of each timeline. At times, the two bleed into each other as conversations from one are continued in the other. It is disorienting for both Buffy and the viewer. Interestingly, the episode’s shooting script shows that Xander also begins to express doubts in the cemetery alongside Spike about his reality based on the fantastic elements of his life, but this dialogue is left out in the final footage and Buffy remains alone in her suspicions. Her anxieties about the situation are exacerbated by her previous admittance to a psychiatric hospital by her parents following her first sightings of vampires. The hallucinations are also complicated by Buffy’s past experiences of dreams on the show, mostly understood as prophetic visions (their reliability confirmed multiple times, though not always). Burkhead notes that “for both Buffy and the audience, they provide vital clues to what the Slayer will face” (122). Looking at this episode trope (which is found across numerous sci-fi shows), Mains states that characters “must choose between the story-world, which is their reality despite its impossibilities, and an “asylum world” that cannot be true, even though it makes more sense according to the laws of the normal world” (146). There is also the doctor, “a paternal authority figure who rationally accounts for the deluded creation of an impossible world by a confused patient who is feeling troubled by a lack of control over his or her environment” (149). Thus the show gaslights Buffy on multiple layers and initially succeeds in doing so. Considering that the hallucination world promises to reunite her with her father and deceased mother, it is no wonder that she gives in to their demands at first. Luchoomon states that in cinema “the nostalgic subject and the fantasist are both dreamers. Both are dissatisfied with the reality of the present and seek to escape it, the one in an idealised past, the other in utopian fantasy” (342). This applies well to Buffy as the nostalgic subject, with Cordelia and Jonathan being the fantasist.
We are given plenty of information and background on Buffy’s experience with her hallucinations, but we are largely left in the dark about River’s altered state in Serenity. Barrett stresses that “when hypnosis is viewed as this metaphor for ultimate control, the filmmaker—and hence his/her audience—wants to identify with the observer, not the subject of this overwhelming phenomena” (26). Only a glimpse is provided of her point of view during this scene, and in a formal style vastly different from the rest of the film. We are aware of the backstory, that she had been conditioned to react to a subliminal message hidden in an animated commercial as a method used by the Alliance to identify and locate her. What we do not know are the specifics of how this works. It is uncertain how aware or conscious she is during this, and how much control she has over her actions and thoughts. Are the rapid-fire images of Miranda and her experimentation at the academy hallucinations or flashbacks to memories (implanted or not)? Most of what we have to go on regarding her internal state lies in the span of thirty seconds after River notices the video (fig. 4 and 5). As River stares slack-jawed at the screen, the camera zooms right into her face. Background noise fades, followed by the video’s music as a soft blue and white filter makes everything glow and blend together. There is a rush of distressing memories interspersed with images of the video. Time slows as River turns and begins attacking bar patrons amidst silence. The scene appears underwater or in a dream, before the sound rushes back and all formal aspects are brought back to their original state.
A useful approach to this scene is Anna Powell’s analysis of Tarkovsky’s film Stalker using theories of the movement-image and time-image by Deleuze. She notes that “in Stalker, external action and character interaction are suspended at times almost to zero as the movement-image is displaced by the time-image” (138). Although the aforementioned clip of Serenity is not really similar to Tarkovsky’s style, it has a comparable effect in the moments leading up to River’s fighting. The significant change in the camera’s perception and the reduced flow of the image disconnects us from the action and draws us into River’s own mental shift in perceiving reality. Powell expands on Stalker that “we thus travel in an interior realm of the mind, cut off from organic matter in a silent and contemplative passage through space and into duration” (138). The footage also uses the common cinematographic method of the extreme zoom into a character’s face to signify emotion and represent the subject’s interiority, which harkens back to The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). River appears detached from her own actions in the scene, perhaps being more of an observer to her conditioned behavior. Her alienated subjectivity is revealed appropriately through suspended image and sound.
From analyzing the fantasies of alternate realities and the trappings of hallucinations (and other altered perceptions) in Whedon’s works, we can conclude that while both ultimately take power away from its subjects, hallucinations are only used to manipulate and weaken them. Women especially struggle to maintain control over themselves and their surroundings as they are typically acted upon and made passive in these scenarios. They effectively lose agency and become decentered from their own narratives.
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