The Mirror Cracked: "Dopplegangers" on BtVS (1/?): Xander, mostly

[red_satin_doll]

mcjulie challenged me to write a meta about dopplegangers on BtVS in the convo thread of her wonderful meta "Where Did I Go? A Farewell to the Buffybot".  The jist of her meta is that the Buffybot represents the "I'm Fine" mask that Buffy puts on to cover her grief and depression, starting with her mother's death in mid S5, and continuing through S6. (She also pointed out to me that Buffy is the only character on the show who gets two dopplegangers: the Buffybot and The First.)



First things first: a doppleganger ("double walker") is simply an exact "double or look-alike" of any person.  The double cannot be explained away by an optical illusion or reflection in the mirror, they are not an identical twin, and generally seems to have a physical presence and is glimpsed by the person themselves or someone who knows them. In other words, not a double seen only in a dream or hallucination, but seeming to have a real physical presence. (Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper is a relatively well-known literary example.)  In old folklore, the sight of a doppleganger was taken as a sign of imminent death or misfortune to the person so copied. Nowadays, the use of a doppleganger can be comic, tragic; they can be an antagonist or a means of self-awareness.

On BtVS, the dopplegangers that the Scoobies encounter serve a bit of all of these functions, but most specifically they represent the efforts of Buffy, Willow and Xander to grapple with personal identity, with selfhood, and especially with the difficult transition from childhood to adulthood.  In each case the dopplegangers serve slightly different functions. Willow's transformation into her own shadow self, into the darker, wilder self  (her rage, her sexuality, her desire for power and control) that she tried in early season to hide and deny - from Vamp Willow to Dark Willow - is well known enough that I hardly need mention it; instead I'll link to  norwie2010's meta "Giles and the Wild Woman";  and local_max has posted some superb in-depth analysis of Willow's personality here and here, as well as a look at how the finales of S2 and S6 mirror one another in terms of Willow, Xander, and Buffy's arcs.  

Interestingly enough, Willow has only one doppleganger: Vamp Willow.  VW becomes a doppleganger when she enters the world of the "real" Sunnydale in "Dopplegangerland".  Whereas her counterpart, Vamp Xander (NB in an unfairly underrated performance), is not technically considered a doppleganger because he never is similarly transported to the other side, merely an AU version of Xander, a "what if?" variation. Xander's literal doppleganger is the second self he sees in The Replacement: he has been split by the ray from a Toth demon and divided into two halves, the goofy, nerdish class clown familiar from the early seasons, and a successful, confident adult who dresses well, earns a promotion, and signs a lease on the mortgage: in other words, the more mature or "adult" side of Xander.

But there's a complication here: if a doppleganger is a double glimpsed by the person or someone who knows them, and if from a Doylian standpoint, the viewers function as residents of Sunnydale and friends to the Scoobies, even though as spectators rather than participants; or, going a bit further, the various characters represent "us" through our identification with them and so we as audience members are actually "in" the story as participants, then for us the AU versions of the characters are also "dopplegangers", even if the Scoobies themselves are not aware of them. And so Xander can be said to have two dopplegangers: Vamp Xander and Mature Xander ( or MX; I'll call him that for convenience sake).

VX, like VW, obviously represents Xander's darker sides at that point in the series.  As a fannish aside, NB is wonderful in The Wish: dark, sexy, dangerous; the scene in which VX and VW kill Cordelia together and VX cups his mate's head in his hand, as the camera circles around them is one of the most chilling AND erotic moments in the series. (Yeah, I said it.)  He never makes the transition to the "real" Sunnydale, and Xander never becomes aware of his existence.  But it isn't necessary on a story level because I think that Xander's less pleasant traits are much closer to the surface than are Willow's, and in fact they are not even hidden: sexual urges, slut-shaming (first Cordelia, later Anya and Buffy), jealousy (initially of Angel, later Spike), lying (Xander's lie in Becoming contributes to the trauma of S2's finale for Buffy and is not addressed until S7, Selfless), having an "affair" (if it can be called that) with Willow behind his best male friend's (Oz) back, and so forth.  

This is not to bash the character, and I don't mean to be overly-hard on him, because these qualities are interlaced with his loyalty, humor, courage, supportiveness, friendship, generosity and kindness. He is, in other words, a real and complex character and it's the combination that makes him so. And in some ways, the fact that these qualities are not particularly hidden may be healthier in the long run than Willow's attempts to quash her shadow selves, which ends up backfiring spectacularly and tragically in S6.  

The Self that Xander has a difficult time coming to terms with is his literal doppleganger, Mature Xander. Since S4 in particular, Xander has been experiencing a crisis of confidence, trying to find his way in the world.  After Graduation Day (S3) Xander, like many young people who had no particular focus or plans, has been set adrift after high school.  While Buffy and Willow seem safely occupied with college, Xander struggles to find a job, to remain part of Buffy and Willow's world; in addition, he grapples with his new relationship with Anya, and to define himself in relation to his parents, to extricate himself from their house and the abusive, dysfunctional family dynamic. (Portrayed vividly in his nightmares in "Restless".)

 But as with Willow's transformation into Dark Willow, a crisis arise when he tries to become MX.  Throughout S5 and S6 he goes through the motions of being a proper, functioning, mature adult, doing all that proper, functioning, mature adults are "supposed" to do in our society: the job, the girlfriend etc.  To that end he proposes to Anya at the end of S5, in part because the world is going to end, in part because he genuinely loves her (I saw nothing on the show to suggest his love wasn't genuine).  He has obviously been thinking about it - the proposal seems spur of the moment but he has a ring in his pocket to present her with, so it's something he's been thinking about - even if only for an hour beforehand.  

But there's another motivation I think, and that is, he is proposing to her because that is what one does, that is what a man does.  The apartment, the job, a marriage: they all fall together in our society's vision like dominos, one naturally following the other.  And certainly he wants to be the man, the husband, that his father never was. He is also acting from "the heart" rather than from the brain. (Remember, in "Primeval" Xander was the "Heart" in the spell to call the First Slayer.) He loves Anya, the world might end, therefore it seems right to propose.  But acting from the heart without the brain can lead to rash decision-making; once the threat of imminent doom is over, he acts again from the heart - in this case, through fear - rather than logic or reason, and rather Anya to reveal the engagement. Later in Hell's Bell's he again acts from fear, observing the demon's visions and his father's behavior and leaves Anya at the altar; then in S7 he runs to rescue her ("Selfless") but throughout the season is unable to articulate his feelings, to fully reunite or release her.

I don't know that he can be fully faulted even though  I don't condone his actions on many occasions and it's unpleasant to watch.  All the more so because some of the key moments in his arc feel somewhat "shoved" into the narrative, especially in Hell's Bells; this I consider a failure of the writers to craft his arc as carefully, or with as much attention, as they did to Buffy and Willow's (whatever the flaws of their arcs might be.)  Within the story, however, Xander has no strong male father figure or role model to look up to.  This is a major theme within BtVS: the lack of caring, nuturing parental figures, and the absence of functional, healthy relationships that would provide models to the Scoobies.  They have to grapple their way to adulthood surrounded by adults who are, on some level or another, abusive, neglectful, dysfunctional, etc.

In Xander's case, his father is abusive (verbally at the very least; and we can see where Xander gets his slut-shaming tendencies from in Hell's Bells); Giles never fully warms to Xander, and never seems to really particularly like him; and Angel and Spike are both rivals for Buffy's time and affection. The only males Xander really connects to are Oz, who is the most laid-back, non-threatening male on the show - except for those three days a month; and Riley.

Riley is almost a "special case" in that, as a soldier, he is on some level Xander's alter ego - remember that Xander transforms into a soldier in S2's "Halloween" - and while he is also Buffy's lover, Xander doesn't seem to regard him as a rival in quite the same way, probably because he isn't a vampire.  No, Riley is human, a sort of "improved" Xander, and if Xander identifies with him (as well as likes him) the way viewers identify with favored characters, then it makes sense that Xander pushes Buffy towards Riley in ITW.  (And I have no wish to get into in-depth discussions of that episode for obvious reasons, ie, I go all ragey and stabby at the thought of it.  Enough said.) And he may perceive Riley as being "more together" than he himself is, although the events of S5 prove otherwise.

So Xander has no males to really connect to, or that he is able to connect to, especially ones older than himself who could "show him the way" to manhood.  One of the unfortunate aspects of this is that IMO, he and Spike have chemistry - and I don't mean in the 'shippy way, although there's that as well - and actually seem like they could be genuine friends once they got over their differences.  Think of the way they work together in "Him" to solve the problem of the love spell that plagues the women on the show, for instance.  Or the comedy gold of Spike in Xander's basement apartment in S4 - which is repeated for dramatic rather than comic effect when Xander takes him into his apartment again in S7.  It may be at Buffy's insistence, but it's a reminder of Xander's capacity for loyalty (Buffy) and kindness (Spike).  I think there may actually be a streak of genuine brotherly liking or affection between the two; and like brothers - or like Spike and Angel - it's hidden in most cases behind snark and insults.  (Xander possesses the warm humanity and the friendly, nonsexual connection to Buffy that the man in Spike craves; Spike has is her confidant in ways he used to be but isn't after Bargaining, as well as the sexual connection to her he wanted so badly. And so it goes.)

So the task of Xander's arc in the end of S6 and throughout S7 is to come full circle, to truly become a man, to fully inhabit "himself": goofy Xander, Vamp Xander (wonderfully called back at the end of S7 when chloroforms Dawn) and Mature Xander.  This includes reconnecting with Anya, the woman whose heart he ripped out carelessly, not out of deliberate cruelty, in  HB.  
There's a lot of talk in fandom - and in the show itself - about Buffy's inability to love, about her inability to articulate or say the word "love" or her struggle to define it. In this way her struggle mirror's Xander's own: both Buffy and Xander, in rejecting and then accepting their demon partners, even if in flawed and imperfect ways, are learning to come to peace with their own inner demons.

Of course, it always comes back to Buffy in my head...and I have many thoughts about Buffy's dopplegangers that I'll save for another post.

Comments

cont'd

[norwie2010.livejournal.com]

To get back to BtVS, Buffy comes clearly from a petty bourgeois background: her mother is a self employed small business owner. Willow comes from a petty bourgeois background, too: Her parents are part of the academic petty bourgeoisie/state servants. With Xander we don't know but presumably he comes from a working class background and Giles is a capitalist/seems to come from a capitalist background (he has enough surplus capital to invest this capital to earn a living, even tough he works as a librarian as a cover for his "real job" as a watcher).

While Buffy moves on to become proletariat, Xander moves on to become petty bourgeoisie/payed by the surplus value of the company he works for, hence alienating him from the proletariat which works under him (there are differing theories if this means Xander is merely "well paid proletariat", or "petty bourgeoisie" or even "capitalist", since he is payed out of the same budget - the surplus value - which pays the "true" capitalist's paycheck/luxury.).

Now Anya: She comes from a non-capitalist society where she's presumably part of the peasantry (one of the main classes under feudalism, while only an ancillary class under capitalism). Being a vengeance demon plays very importantly into her class background: Not only is she the patron saint of scorned women, she is revenge incarnated of the oppressed main class of her time: The peasantry. When time moves on and industrialization and capitalism become the dominant economical model within society, Anya moves with the times and sympathizes with the new oppressed main class: The proletariat.

The break in this comes when she becomes a human high school student: Suddenly, she becomes "capitalist" (more like petty bourgeoisie). And the question is: Why?

I have two rather unsatisfactory answers to that:

1. High school in BtVS is coded "petty bourgeois". While this of course is not true in real life, where many, many more people hail from a proletarian background, at least in Sunnydale High School the majority of the students seem to be members of petty bourgeoisie. Hence, Anya becomes petty bourgeoisie herself.

2. As i stated in my previous post, Whedon doesn't "get" the working class. He's unable to depict a believable working class member, nor does he seem to be able to reconcile the idea of "working class vs. capitalists" (the antagonism of the two main classes) with the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1990. Hence, he tries to "talk over" the antagonism of the main classes and denies it's importance to our daily life: The antagonism "vanishes" in his work, the only remnants which stay are certain "mind sets" and self imposed ideologies.

(Also, the majority of the audience self identifies as "middle class", or petty bourgeoisie.)

Which is not how it works. ;-)

Re: cont'd

[local-max.livejournal.com]

Sorry about replying long after the comment, but I just "rediscovered" this thread had activity.

I really love what you've written here -- I am not sure where I myself would be classified.

On Anya, though, I tend to believe that Anya's hyperidentification with capitalism is actually a character point rather than a political point, though that in turn could perhaps become a political point. If we take Selfless as the skeleton key to her series characterization (and I do), the point is, I think, that Anya simply takes on the dominant ideology of her "society," whatever that society is at that time; until her turning point in the s6 finale (more in a minute), she simply "clings to whatever comes along." She has an altruistic philosophical core back in the beginning of the millennium, but turns her back on it once Olaf cheats on her, and after that is obsessed with *belonging* to some club or another, and playing her part as a cog in a vast machine. She wants to be D'Hoffryn's best vengeance demon, the best possible girlfriend and wife to Xander, and then the best possible employee to Giles and the best American. The actual triggers for her hypercapitalism are

1) learning that Xander can buy her more things in s4,
2) learning that the way to "win the game of life" is to collect money and have children in Real Me,
3) learning of her mortality after her arm is broken, and seizing on the dominant cultural model of having the great apartment and kids and pets and a boat in order to prevent her from having to worry about her mortality in The Replacement,
4) becoming a "working girl" and discovering that she is just *good* at working for Giles at the Magic Box, and
5) learning of the Watchers Council visit and deciding that she will best "pass" as a human if she takes on the most superficially stereotyped traits of the USA in Checkpoint.

None of these things have to do with Anya actually sympathizing with anyone -- 1, 3, 4 and 5 are motivated by what pleases her , and 2 is motivated by essentially *a* set of rules, one which is totally a caricature/cartoon of what "life" is. All of them suggest that Anya's commitment to other people is superficial, because of her inability to believe in herself and her fear of rejection -- which is also demonstrated in her vengeance demon days by her willingness to grant wishes that hurt the wishers (Cordelia in The Wish and the girl in Selfless both would have died from their own wish without outside intervention from Wishverse!Giles or Willow, and later Anya herself within-Selfless, respectively). In this sense, I think the political point is that Anya's ideologue tendencies are there to point out the shallowness of political commitment for most people -- a willingness to be totally gung-ho about whatever system that *currently* benefits them.

Anya's actual growth does come through her relationship with Xander (initially) and then the Scoobies as a whole, though there is some two-way exploitation (with Xander and Giles), indifference (with Buffy) and antagonism (with Willow); but eventually she chooses not to wreak vengeance on Xander despite the fact that that is what her vengeance-demon ideological framework would require, and sides with Buffy et al. against Willow *for Willow's sake* against what her current ideological framework says; her actual transformation away from accepting ideologies unquestioningly happens through personal commitments, which is how it happens for the entire cast (whose connection to political movements is almost always *positively* affected by personal connection to others rather than to abstract principles, which are easily manipulated and often rationalizations for self-serving and/or destructive behaviours). Which! presumably you know most of this, but I think that the portrayal of Anya's hyper-ideological nature is more to satirize thoughtless adherence to system without deeper personal investment rather than to actually make a point about a particular system (though -- by lumping capitalism and 21st century marriage in with various obscure and deliberately ridiculous demon rituals that Anya also believes in, they are making the point that the dominant cultural assumptions about what constitutes a good social order are not necessarily meaningful).

Re: cont'd

[local-max.livejournal.com]

This isn't my field, so forgive what I get wrong!

Thinking about this some more -- the basic assumption is that the values Anya adopts are the central values that the USA as a whole extols ("they used to say, 'who's my little patriot, you?' when I was younger and therefore smaller than I am today"). I think Anya's views line up fairly well with the "American Dream" with an extra emphasis on money (and a great apartment) as the primary measure of success, but with marriage as a secondary value. BUT it is also really the case that there is no one true dominant ideology. Whether Anya's strong beliefs coincide with an actual "American dream" or a TV version of what Americans believe is the American dream is another issue. (Anya is one of the few characters who is not overly pop culture savvy -- which could mean either that she's less prone to influence from the media than the other characters, or, more likely I think, less able to recognize and decode the implicit messages within pop culture.)

The fact that the show takes the tactic of a) showing Anya not actually helping the oppressed women, and b) satirizing all of Anya's strong philosophical beliefs, rather than just her present-day ones, may be a failure to engage fully with the possibility of the lower class, as you suggest.

It is interesting that in her very first appearance, Anya CREATES a hell of mass production that leads to Cordelia, the wisher, being killed -- but paradoxically, it's also a world in which Cordelia's cultural dominance (Cordelia's parents being genuinely rich rather than petty bourgeoisie, before the IRS incident) is overturned by the "proletariat" of the school in Xander and Willow (who is petty bourgeoisie by economic status but is the oppressed socially). I suppose this conception of vampires as overturning the social order through mass production prefigures/ties into Spike's association of himself with the working class within the Industrial Revolution in Fool for Love. And hey -- when they set up the blood-pumping machine, the person whom they kill is Aura, one of Cordelia's (implied: rich) friends. (But also a racial minority!) So there is a bit of a post-French Revolution guillotining aristocrats vibe to the revenge against Cordelia and Aura, as well as parallels with Anne in the fascism, people being consumed entirely by machines system. The French Revolution model actually may fit with Anya's championing of the lower classes -- the entire social order is overturned, and while she is in principle enacting a wish for Cordelia, it's the Cordettes, the school's economic elite, who are most dramatically killed (that is, before Buffy's entry disrupts the natural flow -- Buffy only enters the narrative from "outside," via Cordelia's knowledge outside the narrative frame Anya had created).

I am rambling and don't know where, if anywhere, I'm going with this -- except that vampires are demonic representations of both nightmare versions of transgression against moral/social taboos in a way that is potentially freeing but also destructive, and of nightmare versions of hierarchical order (primarily the Master, though Angel too). So I have trouble decoding all the references, though I think it's best understood as Willow-Xander and the other vampires ascending to power by becoming the new dominant class (or I guess servants to the state, the state being the Master), a revolution for purely personal gain. Vamp!Willow is both Willow's first chance to access the possibility of her non-normative sexuality and to break out of forms of oppression, but Vamp!Willow also does so by attempting to reestablish an alternate order with the same implicit hierarchy as the Master had, not to mention the being entirely selfish/monstrous. Spike frees Buffy from social constraints but he's also a man who wants to dominate her.