Buffy The Vampire Slayer

In the little booklet accompanying the Chosen DVD set, Joss Whedon names his 12 top-10 Buffy episodes not “shot” by himself—among them, “Passion”. He also notes that his list is meant in part “to brag about episodes I worked on less visibly”. “Passion” was written by Ty King and directed by Michael E. Gershman. Of course, Whedon (the former Hollywood script doctor) often rewrote or added passages for Buffy, collaborating with the credited writers. Most of us nowadays understand that a television show has many parents. Whatever its precise parentage, “Passion” is a wonderful creature—or perhaps I should say creation, but it does seem almost alive to me. Its director, Michael Gershman, was the longtime Director of Photography for the series, and he shot the episode beautifully (it was the first he directed, but not the last). It’s one of the visually darkest episodes of Buffy, and Gershman uses the interplay of light and dark to develop the emotions and ideas of the story. The writing is also particularly beautiful; and perhaps one of its most noteworthy elements is the memorable voiceover, enhanced by an extraordinarily effective use of music and sound. Those visuals and that voiceover work together to make “Passion” one of the great episodes of television.

“Passion” is the 17th episode of the second season of Buffy, many people’s favorite season. The show comes as one of an intense sequence of episodes. In the two-part 13th/14th, “Surprise” / “Innocence”, the vampire Angel loses his soul (which gypsies had returned to him only to torment him) when he enjoys a moment of pure happiness as he and Buffy make love for the first time. So, Episode 14, Angel turns evil; episode 15, Oz turns werewolf (though Willow still kisses him); in episode 16, Cordelia comes out, publicly claiming Xander as her boyfriend. In other words, we have shows about (among other things) Buffy and Angel; Willow and Oz; Xander and Cordelia. We might say that the next episode, “Passion”, is about the adults—Buffy’s Watcher, the librarian Rupert Giles, and computer teacher Jenny Calendar—and it is indeed the episode in which Buffy in effect gives Jenny her forgiveness for Jenny’s part in supporting the gypsy curse and her blessing on a reconciliation between Jenny and Giles (“I don’t want him to be lonely. I don’t want anyone to be”). It is the fourth episode in a row about the central characters’ romantic relationships.

But it is also the episode in which Jenny dies. Thus it is the first instance of a Whedon trademark, the death of a character in whom the audience is invested, the death of a character who is alive for the audience. Something similar occurs in the pilot, with the death of Xander’s best friend Jesse, but the effect is not as strong there, because in Jenny’s case, the long-term narrative form of television has been operating to create something like a relationship: we have known Jenny (played by Robia LaMorte) almost as long as the rest of the characters, now in their second season. In an interview on “Passion” recorded for the Chosen DVD, Whedon calls Jenny Calendar’s death a “very specifically placed pivotal moment in the show. We needed to kill somebody, because we needed to tell the audience that not everything is safe.” I must confess that I couldn’t help thinking “Who better to kill than someone whose last name is LaMorte?”—but that is simple serendipity, enjoyable though the wordplay might be. In any case, it seems clear that in “Passion” we see one climax of a set of stories about relationships driving towards a moment of mortality—or, to put it another way, “Passion” is about sex and death. Among many other things. (In Buffy, there are always other things.) Almost every scene is ripe with meaning, and few more so than the opening of “Passion.”

Opening Rhythms: Visual and Voice

The first shot of “Passion” gives us an unusual camera angle: we are looking down on the heads of dancers in the Bronze as they move to slowly swinging music in the dim light. We hear a female voice coolly singing about slipping the net and cutting free. Buffy and Xander dance while conversing, though we cannot hear their words; Cordelia and Willow chat at a table in the background; and even farther back, unseen by the others, is Angel, gazing at Buffy from the dark. Only we see him. The other characters’ unawareness of his gaze makes them seem vulnerable; makes him seem powerful. Back in 1975, film scholar Laura Mulvey wrote a now-famous Freudian analysis of the male gaze (“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”). Whatever one’s view about the Freudian specifics of her argument, is there anyone who hasn’t felt, at one time or another, the unnerving sensation that someone is watching? The power goes to the watcher (and I’m not talking about Quentin Travers). From Gershman’s opening shot looking down on the dancers throughout the rest of the scene (or, indeed, the rest of the episode), it is clear that the one gazing is exerting a kind of power.

But Angel’s (or Angelus’s) visual stalking is not the only element in the scene that indicates such power. As the female voice sings, we begin to hear a male voice speak: David Boreanaz voicing Angel. His words take over, though he begins almost in a whisper: “Passion. It lies in all of us—sleeping, waiting—and though unwanted, unbidden, it will stir—open its jaws and howl.” The words begin in quiet but end with animal rage, though the voice is quiet still. Just as the other characters are unaware of his gaze, so too they are unaware of his voice. Again, only we share that knowledge; his voice surrounds the scene. If not an omniscient “voice of God,” a voiceover is usually given to the protagonist, recalling events or commenting as they proceed; normally, the voiceover gives the viewer a place to locate, often a character to identify with or at least pull for. How chilling is it, then, that the most dangerous antagonist gives the voiceover here? J.P. Telotte, author of Voices in the Dark, confirms that this is a rarity (I e-mailed him to ask). Voiceovers are characteristic of film noir, and there are many film noir elements of this episode (some of which I’ll touch on later). But giving the villain the voiceover is not characteristic, because giving a character the voiceover normally means giving the character power. So, unaware of his voice, unaware of his gaze, the others dance on.

Additional uses of sound and sight in the opening amplify the emotion. The diegetic music, the opening song in the Bronze, gives way to Christophe Beck’s nondiegetic score as the Scoobies move into the night. As they emerge, smiling, from the club, again we cannot hear their voices, but the rhythm of their walking works with the music of the female singer (“Think I’d learn by now,” she tells us). The music shifts to the strings as we see Angel with a victim in the night, dropping her drained body to the ground (foreshadowing another body to be dropped later in the episode). Percussion reminiscent of a slow heartbeat (slow with the nearness of death?) weaves through the sound of the strings. We seem to look over Angel’s shoulder in a shot in which a close-up of the dark back of his head and his black coat take up nearly a third of the screen, while the small figures of Buffy, Willow, Xander, and Cordelia walk away into a narrow space between buildings. Again the visual makes this dangerous figure predominant, looming over the others. Having seen him murder while the others are unknowing, we share his view and hear his voice; we are immersed in the darkness with him.

This is not the most ominous part of the opening, however. The music, percussive notes cascading down like distant thunder, rolls into the next scene, carrying the feeling of danger with it. We are looking into Buffy’s room through her window as she moves around in the light, preparing for bed. She senses something is out there and looks through the blinds, through the glass of her window, the glass of our screen. Then our viewpoint shifts; we are inside. In one of the darkest episodes ever, we have here one of the darkest scenes: After Buffy turns her lamp off, there is only a glint of light on the coverlet, on her face. We might not even see, on first viewing, Angel’s head outside, behind the blinds, as he gazes in and then slips aside, out of sight; I confess that I did not. But when the moment comes, when one does see him—it is shocking. And then, in the next shot, with more light on her sleeping face (has some time passed?), we see a shadow move towards it. The shadow is Angel. His hand gently touches her face, and she lies unaware of the danger. In the most literal sense, the stalker in the room is dreadful. The musical score is beautiful but ominous; and the images tell us just how dark the moment is. In the last shot of the scene, there is darkness dominating in the center of the screen, with window light to the left and right. As he sits on her girlhood bed, Angel’s head is in the center of the darkness, and his shadow falls towards her, though her face still catches the light: two faces together in the dark. Now Angel is silent as he gazes. With the camera, we pull back from, retreat from, this beautiful scene so full of the fearful power of potential violence, still aware of the love that came before. All of this comes before the credits. Windows

As attentive Buffy watchers will recall, Buffy’s bedroom window is a significant place for the long-term story. Framed against that window was Buffy and Angel’s first kiss—a shot repeatedly shown throughout the years of the series; it was also the place of the visual revelation that Angel is a vampire. Her blinds provide a noir backdrop for that scene. She often uses the window as a door, a way to secretly get out of her house to patrol, and just as often uses it to allow Angel in to visit her—at first to warn her of danger, and later for more pleasant purposes. We see them kissing through the window, as well as by it. It is nothing new to suggest that, especially in vampire stories, the image of a threshold (whether door or window) can be connected with the idea of sexuality. In fact, it is a rather comforting part of vampire myth to think that the vampire can only enter where invited—making for a kind of safe sexual fantasy. But once invited, the vampire can always return (one can’t re-virgin oneself). In this very episode, we find a reminder of the sexual suggestion when Buffy searches for a spell to disinvite the vampire: Xander tells her and Cordelia that the situation should be a warning against “inviting strange men into your bedrooms”. The open window seems a reasonable symbol for female sexuality.

I would never argue, however, that Buffy is a one-to-one allegory; symbols can have more than one meaning (and indeed, if they live in more than one mind, they must, to one degree or another; none of us see things exactly alike). In this episode, there is a cluster of window images, all of them important. What I would like to suggest is that they color one another—they echo in one another (to use both sight and sound to try to express the idea). I will limit myself to discussing only three in any depth. The first we have already covered: Buffy’s bedroom window, which was a central place for the expression of their love but has become, in the opening of “Passion”, the entry for a predator; as David Kociemba says in a brilliant essay on the episode, “Angelus systematically rewrites the settings” (“‘Over-Identify Much?’: Passion, ‘Passion,’ and the Author-Audience Feedback Loop in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Slayage, 5.3, par. 19). The second is the window that frames Jenny Calendar’s death. The third is the window through which we see Buffy and Willow’s reaction to Jenny’s death.

Threshold imagery can evoke either sex or death (or both; the French call the moment of sexual climax “la petite mort”, after all). The threshold is a place of crossing over, in one way or another; you aren’t where you were before, physically or emotionally. For Jenny, the window is a place of death. She has been working late, alone in her computer classroom, trying to create a transliteration of the lost gypsy ritual of restoration, to return Angel’s soul once more. In the dimness of late afternoon, Giles visits her, and when she reports her conversation with Buffy and tells him she may have news, he invites her to come to his home later: It seems their relationship will be restored along with Angel’s soul.

In the next scene in Jenny’s classroom, she is still working, and it is much darker; the only light comes from noir-slatted windows and the computer screen. Just after her program successfully creates the transliteration, she saves it on disk (she backs up her work! Angel would have been eternally damned if I’d been the one at that computer). And then she sees Angel sitting in the darkness, watching, waiting. He taunts her, toys with her, destroys both the computer and the printout of the spell. She has earlier obtained an orb of Thessala to hold his soul when she draws it from the ether; as Jenny held it in the magic shop, the director focused in close-up on Robia LaMorte’s face, lit by the intermittently glowing orb, her own eyes glowing as she spoke of returning Angel’s soul. Now, in the darkened classroom, the orb glows again as Angel holds it, and his face is divided almost completely in half between dark and light.

Stacey Abbott has written of how just such visuals—half dark, half light—indicate Angel’s two-sided nature (in her book Angel, p. 30). In this scene in “Passion”, Angel smashes the orb—smashes the light—and throws Jenny through the locked door: premonitory violence. As she runs through the colonnaded outer hallways of the school, light and dark seem to strobe over her. Film scholar Jeanine Basinger (Joss Whedon’s college professor), addressing the biennial Slayage conference on the Whedonverses, spoke of the art of the rhythm of editing (in fact, she was referring to the work of another famous student of hers). There is another kind of rhythm here, of music and movement. The opening scene I have already described shows a slower rhythm as the characters dance and stroll in oblivious happiness; here, Jenny’s desperate motion matches the speed of the intense musical score, just as the strobing shadows do. We have sped to a climax.

Her race ends up a stairway, at the landing, by the window. Angel, who seemed behind, has reached it before her. The two figures are framed by the half-circle of the large window. This shot, like the shot of Buffy and Angel’s first kiss, is a memorable one, often re-shown; many viewers probably have it clearly in mind. In the structure of the window, seven arrowing lines of wood point towards the center, where Jenny and Angel stand. She is to the left, he is to the right; as he breaks her neck, his arm reaches straight up the center, moving with the musical score. She drops gracefully into the darkness as his body moves into the center of the space, clearly marked by the window’s lines. The visuals and the music have the emotional force of beautifully performed ballet, horrific though the scene is. The lighting and the framing are provided by the incomplete circle of the window (no symbolic ring of immortality here). And we are with them inside the dark place; only outside, through the window, is there light.

The window of Jenny’s death, then, is the second such image. It is also, of course, the window through which we clearly see Angel’s killing—which, with all the anonymous and minor characters he has killed before, we have perhaps not truly seen. As Whedon says in the “Passion” interview, they “wanted to show that—No, Angel isn’t just pretending to be evil, he’s not just a little bit evil… he’s her enemy.”

The next major window image shows us Angel watching again, savoring the reaction to this murder. Both the voiceover and the secret gaze return. The voiceover starts just after the discovery of Jenny’s dead body and bleeds over into the scene in which Buffy and Willow get the phone call from Giles telling them what has happened, as Angel greedily watches from outside. Passion, his voiceover tells us, is in “the joy of love, the clarity of hatred, the ecstasy of grief.” The ecstasy of grief indeed: As Angel watches from the dark, the view through the Summers window is softened by sheer, translucent curtains, but we can still see the faces. Once again we cannot hear their words (except for Willow’s “No!”)—but we can hear the tones of their voices; we can hear and see their pain. With the framing of the window, we are made conscious of the fact of observation; somehow their grief seems both more distant and more real. This window shows us the human vulnerability to loss. And outside, Angel gloats. Shadows and Fire

In “Passion”, Angel is the figure most connected with the dark. But there are others who are shadowed as well. We have already touched on the shadow moving towards Buffy. When Jenny sits in her computer classroom, bars of shadow fall on the board behind her, noir-fashion. The same imagery, bars of shadow on dimly lit walls, appeared in the magic shop she visited—and even more darkly when the vampire Drusilla entered the shop later to kill the owner. Angel’s incestuously connected fellow vampire Spike, Drusilla’s lover, who formerly seemed the greatest threat to Buffy but now is confined to a wheelchair, is represented with the large shadow of a chain on the wall beside him as Angel taunts him with his confinement. Giles, having discovered Jenny’s dead body placed in his own bed by Angel, stands literally up against the wall by the threshold of his home as he talks to the police; as he does so, his shadow rises large on the wall behind him, while the police lights revolve outside the open door. Like Buffy, Giles has been touched by Angel’s darkness. The angel of death has penetrated Jenny’s body and Giles’s home.

The scene of Giles’s discovery is, like most of the episode, set in darkness; but small candles have been placed on every step of the stairs that Giles, carrying a bottle of wine, mounts to find Jenny. He assumes that they have been put there by Jenny as part of a romantic invitation, but it is Angel that has placed them there, just as he has placed the love duet of La Bohème on the record player. At the highest note, Giles drops the wine in perfect rhythm: the glass crashes, the liquid spills.

Those small candle flames suggest passion. There are two other noteworthy instances of fire in the episode. More than one viewer has complained about the fact that, when Angel destroys Jenny’s computer, it bursts into flame. Visual symbolism takes precedence over verisimilitude here: the sight of Angel warming his hands at this hellish little flame gives us a premonition of the scene’s emotional direction; it is a sign of his savagery. And later in the story, Giles creates a much larger blaze as he tries to take vengeance on Angel. (As Whedon says in the Chosen booklet, “Death, La Boheme, and Tony Head with a flaming baseball bat. Come ON, people.”) Giles not only strikes Angel but sets the whole Factory (Angel, Drusilla, and Spike’s home) afire. But as Buffy has warned Xander, Willow, and Cordelia, the problem with this scenario is that it could get Giles killed; in fact, it seems that may have been one of his goals (“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” she asks him after she runs to the rescue). Following a futile battle with Angel, Buffy turns away to save Giles; and the action closes with a scene that combines the imagery of windows and fiery passion: Buffy drags Giles out of the flames and hugs him, both of them huddled on the ground outside, framed by a window full of fire behind them. “You can’t leave me—I can’t do this alone,” she tells him. She has lost Angel and he has lost Jenny. But Giles and Buffy must step outside their passions and go on.

Voices,—Over and—Off

Angel’s voiceover has, from the start of the episode, suggested power, just as his unseen gaze has. As Kaja Silverman observes in The Acoustic Mirror, voiceovers in Hollywood cinema had long been almost “exclusively male” (p. 48). In more recent televisual terms, we have heard more female voiceovers (in Roswell; in Veronica Mars; in Gossip Girl—both of the latter two by Kristen Bell; and one could go on). But here the male is the voice-from-above. Furthermore, and much more unusually, the voice is the voice of the enemy (as I’ve noted earlier). The effect is to make the forces martialed against Buffy seem particularly threatening.

However, the situation is much more complicated than that. Throughout the episode, Angel is stalking Buffy, her friends, and her mother. When Buffy tries to give her mother a censored version of what has happened with Angel, Joyce summarizes, “He’s changed; he’s not the same guy you fell for.” But Willow later reminds Buffy that, different though he is, “You’re still the only thing he thinks about.” Many fans of the series distinguish between Angel with a soul and Angel without a soul by using the names Angel and Angelus, respectively. Some may have wondered why I have not used the same distinction. Sometimes I do, but in this discussion I have chosen not to, because one of the things I think “Passion” makes us uncomfortably aware of is that the two are much closer than we might like to imagine. Any of the beautiful sentences in the voiceover could have been spoken by either. The words are dangerous because they’re true. “Without passion, we’d be truly dead”—and who better to tell us than the undead lover?

But the episode does not just leave us with the danger of the beautiful darkness. (And may I say: One reason this episode is so impressive in its operatic expressiveness is that all the major actors were particularly beautiful at this season of their lives.) There is yet another aesthetic twist in the power of the voiceover. Buffy is known for the power of its language (i.e., Whedon and the other writers are known for the power of their language), but in this episode Buffy has ceded that power to Angel. Until the end; and then she takes back her voice and the voiceover. As Kaja Silverman reminds us, we sometimes hear not a voiceover but a voice-off—“so designated because its ostensible source is not visible at the moment of emission” (p. 48). It is much more likely to be female than is a voiceover, she notes, and is much less powerful in effect. Repeatedly in this episode we see Buffy speaking without being able to hear her. I would argue that at the end of “Passion,” Buffy’s voice moves from the status of normal character’s voice to voice-off to voiceover, and thus to regained power.

In the scene following Buffy’s rescue of Giles, Buffy stands with him at Jenny Calendar’s gravesite in the cool daylight. The two of them mourn her, and Buffy says, “I’m sorry I couldn’t kill him for you—for her—when I had the chance.” Then we move from the visual of the gravestone to the sight of Willow substituting in Ms. Calendar’s room. Just as happened at some points with Angel’s voiceover, we hear words of characters in the scene—mixed back and forth with the voice from outside the scene—in this case, Buffy’s, spoken by Sarah Michelle Gellar. As her voice bleeds over from the graveyard to the classroom, she says, “I wasn’t ready. But I think I finally am”; then we hear Willow’s quiet words to the class about following Ms. Calendar’s lessons; and then Buffy’s voice again. It may be from “off,” but it also seems “above,” as she asserts the course to come: “I can’t hold onto the past anymore. Angel is gone. Nothing’s ever gonna bring him back.”

Taking the voiceover position, Buffy is taking back her strength in the fight. And the contrast in the voices is revealing, too: Angel’s words are abstract and elegant; Buffy’s are conversational, simple. Writers such as Karen Eileen Overbey and Lahney Preston-Matto (among many others) have pointed out that Buffy’s language is one of her weapons, a lively, witty force (Fighting the Forces, pp. 75-76). But her language here is tired and quiet, with little in the way of figurative speech or grand generalizations. Angel is telling us the meaning of life; Buffy is simply facing her own facts. But hers is the final voice of the episode; Buffy has the last word.

The episode, however, does not end with words; it ends with an image. Buffy’s voice, remember, has spread out from her own place (in the cemetery with Giles) over the outside world (in the school with Willow and the other students). But as she speaks the final words, we see the computer disk with the restoration spell for Angel slide unnoticed off the desk to land between it and a computer stand.

In this episode full of darkness, the last shot is of a slice of light between two walls of darkness: the disk, in close-up, cuts across the light between the shadows, as the sound of its falling echoes portentously. The visual ironically undercuts Buffy’s declaration that nothing will bring Angel back—or at least it does in potential; when we first see it, we do not know whether or not the restoration spell will ever be used again—or, indeed, should be. As Whedon says in the interview, “We wanted to make it as hard for our characters and for the audience as possible. We wanted to make them as unhappy as possible, and we wanted to make them know that redeeming or getting Angel back would be either impossible or so difficult and fraught with consequences that they themselves would be unsure whether they wanted to.” The visual, then, undercuts Buffy’s voiceover; hers is definitely not the voice-of-God type, but more the damaged noir hero voice: not all-knowing, but all the more human in its imperfection of knowledge and language—and all the more heroic, too.

Jenny Calendar’s secret knowledge, falling like her body, is waiting to be revived—though she never will be. We, the audience, have been guided by Angel’s voice; we have gazed from his viewpoint. On Jenny’s blackboard, the night of her death, the word “mirror” is writ large. How much of ourselves do we see here? In our unoperatic existences, is there still some danger from that flame? Do we peer through that window? By the end of “Passion,” the hero’s voice prevails. But still, by the end of “Passion,” we have seen a little more of the darkness.