Concluding our Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Three posts is another blog by Kathleen Hudson, this time exploring 'Earshot' and American Horror Story: Murder House and the depiction of School shootings. Don't forget to check out all our Season Three posts (including: Claire Healey's post on Faith, identity and choice, which you can find here; Dana Alex's post on reading Jekyll and Hyde in Buffy Season Three, which you can read here; and also the first of Ash Darrow's posts exploring Giles' character arc, which you find here). As always, to share posts and your thoughts on this or any of the blogs from our Buffy Blog Series, use the hashtag #BuffySlays20.
Written
and produced before the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado on April 20,
1999, the release of Buffy The Vampire
Slayer’s Season Three Episode 'Earshot' was delayed due to its depiction of
aborted violence on school grounds. Years later, its depiction of an
almost-shooting is an early entry in an on-going attempt in popular culture to
identify the root causes of school shootings and formulate preventative
measures, yet retroactive viewing also illuminates some of the tensions and
ambiguities which continue to dominate discourses on American identity and mass
violence.
(Buffy discovering Jonathan in the clock tower) |
'Earshot'
begins with Buffy defeating a demonic enemy and temporarily gaining the demon’s
ability to hear the thoughts of those around her. Though she initially uses this
to her advantage, her newfound ability soon alienates her from her friends and
family as she is forced to negotiate their innermost insecurities. The issue
reaches its crisis point in the school cafeteria when, crippled by the chaotic
thunder of thoughts, she manages to pick up a single threatening one – 'This
time tomorrow, I'll kill you all' – before collapsing in pain. This insight leads
Buffy to believe that a mass shooting will occur at her high school, though she
is unable to pinpoint who is planning the shooting or why. The rest of the
episode is spent with Buffy, now cured of her ability, frantically trying to
find out who is threatening her school and how to stop him.
In
Buffy, hearing and empathizing with
the perpetrator enables the hero to circumvent tragedy. The would-be shooter Jonathan’s
loneliness and lack of meaningful socialization is labelled as the primary
cause of his alienation, as is his underlying bitterness towards those whom he
considers popular. Buffy herself admits that 'I don’t think about you much at
all… you have all this pain and all these feelings and nobody’s really paying
attention,' yet these feelings are then used by Buffy to link both Jonathan and
Buffy, who, despite being a cheerleader, is ‘othered’ by her Slayer identity,
with their peers. From the clock tower, a reference to the University of Texas
shooting in 1966, Buffy looks down on her fellow students and invests them with
similar feelings of pain and loneliness, implying that these factors always
exist underneath the surface of adolescent life.
(Buffy and Jonathan looking down from the clock tower) |
Buffy
is allowed into the thoughts of her teachers and fellow students, blessed with
an ability which those still reeling from a tragedy would naturally covet. The
impulse to apply meaning, and therefore order and control, to a chaotic event
such as a high school shooting is a natural byproduct of grief, so tapping into
a cross-section of diverse motivations seems valuable. Indeed, after the
Columbine shooting a moral and political panic over gun laws, school safety,
goth culture, bullying, drugs and even video games and music reshaped the
cultural landscape, while the myriad of singular ‘causes’ failed to
satisfactorily provide a narrative conclusion and indeed prevent future
school-based violence. In ‘Earshot.’ Buffy is increasingly unable to manage the
voices she hears, just as those around her are unable to control even
admittedly irrational trains of thought. Knowing the thoughts of others does
not solve problems or, truly, prevent catastrophe, but rather only causes more
chaos. What’s more, what Buffy hears is not in fact accurate – Jonathan plans
to kill only himself, though this still reflects a troubling consequence of social
alienation.
The
episode ostensibly ends happily – the actual threat comes from a terrifying
lunch lady rather than a student, and both tragedies are successfully
prevented. However, an unsettling anxiety is still present, and over a decade
later and after a numerous national attempts in America to contextualize
cultural grief and identify causes for school shootings, this tension is
examined further in American Horror Story:
Murder House (2011), the first season of an anthology-esque horror TV show.
This season features an on-going subplot in which Tate Langdon, a teenaged
ghost haunting the ‘Murder House,’ and those around him attempt to come to
terms with his role as perpetrator of a mass school shooting. Tate’s family,
girlfriend (the Murder House’s living resident, Violet, who meets Tate years
after his death), and victims are defined by two major impulses – the ongoing
attempt to get Tate to acknowledge what he did (he claims to not remember what
happened) and to understand his motivations.
(Tate) |
Both
shows examine the impulse to impose meaning onto a fundamentally destabilizing
trauma. Whereas Buffy optimistically circumvents
tragedy through empathy, however, American
Horror Story posits that the answers either do not exist or are impossible
to discover. Indeed, even Buffy hints at this fear. Jonathan remains a
marginalized character throughout the series – first appearing in Season Two,
his self-esteem is repeatedly damaged by his fellow students. If Buffy’s
discovery of his almost-suicide in this episode is meant to illuminate the
consequences of bullying, this goal is undercut by Buffy’s identification with
the universality of suffering, which de-individualizes Jonathan’s impulses, as
well as her repeated dismissal of him at the end of the episode (she is not 'saint Buffy' and is not going to go to prom with a guy who is 'like, three
feet tall') and throughout the series.
In
American Horror Story Tate is more
overtly evil, his personal narrative a manipulative attempt to avoid
responsibility for his actions. As he walks through the hallways of his school
he is depicted with a monstrous, skeletal face which marks him as ‘other,’ yet
he is otherwise a master of ‘passing.’ Both Jonathan and Tate’s
characterizations invalidate easy explanations for mass violence in schools and
deny victims and bystanders closure. In a monologue Tate admits to Violet that: 'I hated high school' but does not provide any solid explanation for this – he
is an ‘other’ but he targets all social groups; he is interested in certain kinds
of music and clothes but not obsessively so; he is corrupted by the ‘Murder
House’ but also operates independently of it. High school itself lacks
permanence for Tate: he recalls telling himself that 'you can do anything, you
can be anything, screw high school…that’s just a blip in your timeline, don’t
get stuck there…' Of course, Tate, the students he as murdered, the survivors
of the shooting, and those dragged into the narrative years after the fact
remain, ironically, 'stuck there,' unable to move on. Tate and his victims
never escape their high school bodies, a now-paralyzed high school teacher
lumps Violet in with the other emotional tourists who cycle through, and
numerous innocents, Violet’s family included, fall victim to Tate’s continuing
penchant for violence. This trauma has a far-reaching ripple effect – yet where
does the ripple really start? How can it be contextualized?
(Tate and Violent, confronted by Tate's victims) |
In the episode 'Halloween: Part Two' the ghosts of Tate’s victims, temporarily mobilized,
attempt to confront Tate with his crimes. Their situation bespeaks the stasis
Tate himself fears, the tragedy inherent to school shootings in particular: 'I
was never going to save the world' one of Tate’s victims tells him, 'but Amir (a
fellow victim) could have.' Denied a future, the ghosts attempt to gain some form
of closure – asking Tate why he murdered them and begging him to 'Just admit
what you did.' They echo those who have lost friends and family in school
shootings and who seek to create a suitable narrative response to acts of seemingly
random violence. Tate, however, insists on his ignorance and fails to explain
himself even when he eventually admits to the murders in the final episode of
the season. Similarly, while Jonathan ultimately states in the final season of Buffy that he has gotten past much of
the alienation that defined him in high school, he remains a figure whose
passivity is weaponized as a tool for evil.
Attempts
to assign blame to an outer trigger such as violent video games or music, or to
identify a more pervasive social alienation underscore both plotlines, yet are also
rendered null by the sheer impossibility of finding or creating satisfactory
answers. Tate targets a range of students from all levels of the high school
hierarchy and continues to kill and torture after his death – Violet eventually
rejects him because is 'the darkness' rather than a victim of it. After years
of post-Columbine ‘hindsight,’ American Horror
Story acknowledges that as a society we are no closer to eradicating the
root causes of mass violence, and particularly violence perpetrated by that ever-unstable
teenaged demographic, then we were in the days immediately following Columbine.
And, although 'Earshot' was written before the Columbine shooting, the act of
suicide, whether it be an isolated act by a disturbed student or the end to a
mass murder where the shooter either kills himself or is killed by the police,
inspires the same anxieties – they are acts of (self) destruction in which informs
national and generational identities even as a satisfactory explanation is left
unspoken.
Dr.
Kathleen "Queen of the Goths" Hudson is an eternal member of Sheffield
Gothic: while she lives the American Dream, Sheffield Gothic continues
to worship her from across the pond. To the best of our knowledge, she does not live imprisoned in an underground church leading a cult of vampires, nor does she teach in a school situated above a Hellmouth.
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