"OLDER AND FAR AWAY." BtVS Episode.

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On Buffyworld.com: Trailer, Summary, Transcript

On BuffyGuide.com: Older and Far Away

The resemblance of ‘Older and Far Away’ to the subgenre of horror known as the slasher film, is clear. The episode takes as a premise the familiar horror scenario of entrapment within a confined space, usually a house. The notion of a house would normally imply the nuclear family, security, belonging, a retreat from the dangers of the outside world. But, as Carol Clover has noted in her seminal book on the slasher film, Men, Women and Chainsaws (Princeton University Press, 1992), the secure retreat turns out to be the place that should at all costs be avoided and from which its occupants wish desperately to escape. For houses in slasher films contain murderers (nearly always male) who violently kill a series of victims who are trapped within the house. In this sense the slasher film implies that domestic and family life itself can be dangerous and confining. In standard slasher films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Scream the person who finally dispatches the murderer hiding in the house and who escapes to the world outside, is usually a young woman, whom Clover terms the Final Girl – the sole survivor of carnage. Clover describes the Final Girl as generally androgynous, who has trouble forming relationships with men, and who seizes on the phallic weapons of the murderer in order to take charge of them herself and use them against her attacker. While this template does not fit Buffy exactly, there is nonetheless sufficient overlap for us to perceive her as some sort of Final Girl who breaks the spell of the apparently haunted house in this episode.

But while it is certainly useful to consider ‘Older’ in terms of the slasher genre, other thematic issues come into play when we compare the episode to a film that resembles it very closely indeed - El angel exterminador (The Exterminating Angel, 1962) by director Luis Buñuel. The plot of the episode parallels that of the film so closely that it is hard to imagine that the writers of the former did not have the latter in mind. Both film and episode focus on guests at a party who become gradually aware that, inexplicably, they cannot escape the space in which they are trapped (though in El angel the guests are confined to one room in the house). In the party of El angel the camera moves from group to group, picking up on their banal conversations that hint at sexual and political intrigue, much as Buffy, under the cover of party conversation, deals with the misplaced advances of Spike and fends off attempts by Xander and Anya to interest her in their friend Richard. Once realisation dawns that they are trapped, the characters of both film and episode not only attempt to find a way of escape but also try to survive the horrors of existing in a closed space. Some of the characters’ darker secrets begin to emerge: in particular this is the episode where the Scoobies discover Dawn’s kleptomania. Other tensions surface, too, as in the confrontation between a particularly unpleasant Anya and Willow, in which Tara aggressively intervenes. Darker secrets emerge in El angel, too, piercing the civilised veneer of the party. We become more clearly aware of the affairs that some characters are conducting with others, as well as political intrigue and social climbing. The guests of El angel exterminador gradually reveal that, behind the façade of their haute-bourgeois conversations, they are in thrall to more basic and sometimes violent desires. In ‘Older and Far Away’, not only is a rather tame party invaded by a demon, but the use of magic and witchcraft and the activities of vengeance demons also come to the fore. Illicit sexual desire, too, becomes apparent. Buffy and Spike’s clandestine and perhaps rather unhealthy sexual relationship is known to themselves and to us the audience, although concealed from most of Buffy’s Scooby friends. But Tara is by now an exception, and makes veiled references to the affair (on one occasion in front of all the other guests). This has its parallel in the film, with clandestine affairs, the engaged couple’s secret sexual consummation of their as yet unrealised marriage, and the male pursuit of female guests under cover of darkness.

Eventually it becomes apparent that in ‘Older’ the explanation for the guests’ confinement lies in Halfrek’s vengeance spell, made in response to Dawn’s wish that everyone around her would spend some time with her. When the spell is broken, Buffy’s birthday guests duly leave. Buffy herself must stay behind in the house with Dawn, however, recalled to her domestic responsibilities for her sister. She is the one who has solved the puzzle of how their situation came about and thus sets the Scoobies on the path to solving the crisis, but in direct contrast to Clover’s Final Girl she herself cannot escape the house. In the case of Buñuel, the reason for the guests’ entrapment is never made clear, but the implication is that it is their own bourgeois and corrupt existence that confines them. Buñuel reinforces this point at the end of the film. The guests have finally made their escape – one of them works out that, by repeating their exact movements and conversation of the night before, when the ‘spell’ came into effect, they can be released. The character who solves the problem, Leticia, resembles Buffy in many ways: blonde and unattached, she is a freer spirit than the other guests, less conventional. (She is also having an affair with her host). The guests subsequently go to church to give thanks, and find themselves trapped in the church in exactly the same way as they were in the house, doomed to repeat another set of ritual moves. Buñuel underlines his point by filling both house and church at times with flocks of sheep, the mindless animal that wanders around aimlessly in herds and does what the others do.

Both film and episode also boast an exterminating angel as suggested in Buñuel’s title, though Buñuel’s angel only appears fleetingly in an unexplained shot detached from the film’s action. In ‘Older’, Buffy brings the exterminating angel home with her in the form of a demon which has itself become entrapped in its own sword, which she has brought home as a souvenir. (Buffy ought to have been aware of the supernatural dangers of the sword: she describes it as shiny, a term that identifies it as having supernatural properties, as used previously by Giles in describing the dagonsphere in season 5’s ‘No Place Like Home’). When Tara performs a spell in an attempt to release them from the house, the disastrous effect is to release the demon from the sword, and the demon makes a bad situation worse by attacking the guests. In particular it seriously wounds Richard: this attack on top of the enchanted imprisonment damages the already remote possibility that Richard and Buffy might start up a conventional romantic relationship.

The implied reference of ‘Older’ to El angel (wther the writers were aware of it or not) continues BtVS’s intermittent link to Dad and surrealism, not only in terms of passing reference but also in more speculative episodes such as ‘Restless’ in season 4.  The contrast of the supernatural to reason and civilisation also typifies surrealism. When El angel opened in Paris, Buñuel placed a warning to patrons that they should not expect clear and rational meanings. He argued that life, like the film, was repetitive, and also subject to varying interpretations, but the perhaps the best explanation of the film was simply that there wasn’t one. It is indeed possible to think of BtVS as the sort of alternate reality that surrealists preferred to the conventions, so that any attempt to reaffirm ‘normal’ life is undermined by the recurrence of the demons and vampires. An abiding desire of Buffy’s throughout the programme has been to live what she perceives to be the ‘normal’, conventional life of an ordinary American girl growing up, with high school proms, parties and relationships with ordinary men (as opposed to vampires). Her birthday parties, which recur through all the series, exemplify her vain attempts to enjoy this supposedly normal life. The party of ‘Older and Far Away’ follows this pattern, even though Buffy is also attempting in series 6 to come to terms with her resurrection and summary ejection from heaven. Xander and Anya actively try to impose a form of conventional normality on Buffy by forcibly introducing her to Richard, a clean-looking, ‘normal’ guy with whom Xander works. BtVS approaches these conventional desires in a more benign manner than Buñuel’s scathing attack on bourgeois society in El angel: nonetheless the use of similar surrealist motifs to the film in ‘Older’ and other episodes of season 6 – the repetition of sequences and the stabbing of the hand in ‘Life Serial’, the sheep of ‘Smashed’ - suggests that the Buffyverse incorporates a similar approach to reality that we find in Buñuel. Where the two differ is that while Buñuel seeks to break down the barrier between the conventional veneer and the undercurrent of fears and dubious desires, Buffy’s whole raison d’être is to maintain that divide. Nonetheless, the use of Buñuelian surrealist motifs underscores the increasing tendencies towards transgression that can be observed in many of the characters in season 6 – Buffy’s taste for violent sex with Spike, Willow’s struggle over the misuse of magic, and the dysfunctional relationship between Buffy and Dawn of which Dawn’s stealing is a symptom.

Both ‘Older’ and El angel deliberately relate the revelation of transgressive desires and behaviour to a sense of entrapment in a constricting reality. BtVS, however, does not use this entrapment to critique the hypocrisy of convention. ‘Older’’s surreal re-reading of place and boundary does not so much reveal the co-existence of different levels of reality – for the characters already know that such realities are possible - as critique the blurring of boundaries that occurs with such co-existence, and remind us of the fact that human desires in such a context include that of drawing boundaries and assigning places – the underlying motif of Dawn’s wish that traps them all in the house. The motif of confinement in ‘Older’ reflects an ongoing sense of confinement throughout the series. It is notable that BtVS never moves out of its confined space of Sunnydale except in flashbacks relating to the principal vampire characters. While British characters, vampires and demons seem to move in and out of Sunnydale at will, the principal Scoobies – Buffy, Willow and Xander – remain closely tied to the town. Buffy has occasionally been to Los Angeles but usually to visit Angel (their encounters usually proving tense and ultimately unhappy), and her visits are not seen in BtVS itself; while her work as a waitress in a Los Angeles diner at the beginning of season 3 can be seen very much as an evasion of Sunnydale reality. Xander’s sole attempt to escape Sunnydale for a tour of America fails when his car breaks down and he is forced to work (and perform) in a ladies’ night club: the return to Sunnydale is a flight from humiliation and a return to purpose. Willow does not leave Sunnydale until the beginning of season 7, even after offers of university places from prestige institutions such as Harvard and Oxford: her journey to England appears to entail recovery and penance after Tara’s death sends her on a potentially apocalyptic bout of black magic. Sunnydale is thus the place where the characters ought to be, and moving out of this sphere entails either transgression or pain and possibly both. Buffy can only leave once Sunnydale itself is destroyed, at the end of season 7.

What also distinguishes the episode from the film is the attitude towards death, the exterminating angel, envisaged in El angel as the ultimate horror, the threat of decay and death, underlying all the other sordid realities that make themselves manifest in the drawing room of the Calle Providencia. The guests flee the exterminating angel at the end – even the host abandons his home – only to become trapped again in the church and thus exposed again to the ultimate threat of death. Buffy has also brought the threat of death into her own home with the demon enclosed in the sword: released by Tara’s spell, it attacks the guests. However, Buffy is able to cope far better than Buñuel’s guests, and succeeds in conquering it and killing it. When the spell that traps them all in the house is finally lifted, Buffy can choose to stay in her own home rather than abandon it, as Buñuel’s host Nobile does. She has no need to flee. The episode also, however, facilitates a conservative twist by reminding Buffy of her domestic responsibilities, so that when the others finally leave the house she remains in order to spend time with Dawn. Doing this, of course, goes against her responsibilities as a slayer to patrol – outside the confines of the house. This implicitly raises questions of incompatible responsibilities faced by many women and the implicit transgression of trying to fulfil one’s own desires as a woman as well as everyone else’s demnds. It is no surprise that in the following episode ‘As You Were’ Buffy finally breaks with Spike, a split arising partly from Buffy’s fear of transgression but also from her desire for a ‘normal’ life. But if Buffy wishes to be an ordinary woman, she will find her life more bounded.

--Ann Davies

 Assigned to Fay Schopen.

Multiple assignments possible.