Lie to Me

[Updated April 29, 2013]

Lie to Me is almost certainly the best episode which I rarely see on Top 10 lists, including my own. In his reviews for The AV Club, Noel Murray suggested it as the episode he’d use to introduce a new viewer to Buffy. It’s truly a wonderful episode.

Before I get to the episode itself, I’ll note a structural point. The seasons have a definite structure to them. The first 3 episodes lay out plot, metaphor, and theme(s) for the season. It’s worth thinking about this while you watch the first few episodes of each season, but it’s generally impossible to pick out the themes except in hindsight because they’re deliberately subtle. Episode 7 – Lie to Me is Episode 7 of S2 – is a major episode that establishes the most important ideas for the season. Most of the time, Episode 7 will be rated one of the top episodes of the season.

So let’s take a look at it. When Drusilla tells Angel in the teaser that “it is just the beginning”, I relate that back to my theory that Halloween is the transition episode symbolized by Janus. Lie to Me very much marks the beginning of what we’ll see for the remainder of the season, including much more emphasis on dark settings (note the lighting). It also marks Buffy’s first attempts to understand the adult world.

Lie to Me defines, for me anyway, the theme of the show – growing up – and the dialogue makes it easy to see why. Like any teenager, Buffy’s starting to wonder what growing up actually means. One thing it means is that there aren’t any easy decisions:

“Buffy:  Nothing's ever simple anymore. I'm constantly trying to work it out. Who to love or hate. Who to trust. It's just, like, the more I know, the more confused I get.

Giles:  I believe that's called growing up.”

When Buffy says this, she’s sitting at night in a graveyard waiting for her childhood crush to rise so she can slay him. That’s pretty clearly the kind of thing I had in mind in the Introduction, when I said that Buffy slays vampires on her journey to becoming an adult. Consider it in the context of Ford’s situation and his plan. Ford’s fate – to die bald and shriveled and in pain – is a metaphor for the aging process. It’s that resistance to aging which characterizes the vampire. Ford’s solution is to die young and stay pretty. When she slays Ford, Buffy’s not just putting her childhood behind her for good, she’s rejecting the very idea that there can be any permanent childhood.

Buffy’s argument with Ford in the club is also very revealing. Ford’s situation is dire, but his solution is worse. Aside from the fact that we all think very highly of ourselves, and therefore are sure we’d take Buffy’s side of the argument, there’s a good reason why Buffy can lecture him about choices without sounding self-righteous. She herself made a very difficult and similar choice in Prophecy Girl: she chose to die in order to do what was right.

This seems like a good place to talk about the importance of choice in BtVS. We saw it was an important theme in S1 – Buffy wasn’t really the Slayer until she made the conscious choice to commit to her destiny in Prophecy Girl. Now, in Lie to Me, which is a very important episode, we see choice emphasized again. It is literally true that the power of choice will remain important to the show through the very end: if you don’t know already, the very last episode is entitled Chosen.

So where is Joss – who wrote Prophecy Girl and Lie to Me and Chosen, and many others as well – coming from when it comes to the importance of choice? Joss has said in the DVD commentary to the Firefly episode Objects in Space that the most important book he ever read was La Nausee. In fact, if you watch carefully, this book will make an appearance in S3.

La Nausee was written by the French existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. This novel is considered the seminal work for Sartre’s version of existentialism. Joss says that he was heavily influenced by existentialism but describes himself as an “absurdist”, which is closely related to but not identical with an existentialist. It’s a term Sartre’s contemporary, Albert Camus, used. I don’t want to get too technical about this, and Joss isn’t a philosopher per se, so I’m going to treat the two schools of philosophy as substantially identical here and just refer to existentialism.

Back to La Nausee. While Wikipedia is far from the best source for discussing the details of philosophy, its plot summary of the ending is fair:

“In his resolution at the end of the book [the protagonist] accepts the indifference of the physical world to man's aspirations. He is able to see that realization not only as a regret but also as an opportunity. People are free to make their own meaning: a freedom that is also a responsibility, because without that commitment there will be no meaning.”

Let me try to translate this into Buffy. Buffy is in constant peril from the world because it – that is, the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness – doesn’t care about her; it’s indifferent to her at best, actively opposed to her at worst. She therefore can’t rely on the material world to give meaning to her life. Nor is there any higher power which might give such meaning. Only within herself can she find that meaning, and she does so through the power of choice. She chooses her friends, she chooses to commit to her destiny, she chooses to accept responsibility for the world, because in so doing she gives meaning both to herself and to the world at large.

Some people see the world of the existentialists as very bleak, but they actually saw it as both realistic and quite optimistic because the power to make the world resides inside each of us. In their view, it’s only realistic to admit that there is no power watching over us and that the natural world is indifferent to us. That’s Ford’s situation with his cancer. What the existentialist insists on, though, is that the power of choice always remains to human beings. They may not have good choices, as Buffy tells Ford, but they have them:

“A critical claim in existentialist thought is that individuals are always free to make choices and guide their lives towards their own chosen goal or "project". The claim holds that individuals cannot escape this freedom, even in overwhelming circumstances. For instance, even an empire's colonized victims possess choices: to submit to rule, to negotiate, to act in complicity, to commit suicide, to resist nonviolently, or to counter-attack.

Although external circumstances may limit individuals..., they cannot force a person to follow one of the remaining courses over another. In this sense the individual still has some freedom of choice. For this reason, individuals choose in anguish: they know that they must make a choice, and that it will have consequences. For Sartre, to claim that one amongst many conscious possibilities takes undeniable precedence (for instance, "I cannot risk my life, because I must support my family") is to assume the role of an object in the world, not a free agent, but merely at the mercy of circumstance....” Cite.

For an existentialist, this power to make choices allows people to create their own authentic self. Simplifying somewhat, it’s the anxiety about death which leads us to the liberating power of choice:

“This experience of my own death, or “nothingness,” … can act as a spur to authenticity: I come to see that I “am” not anything but must “make myself be” through my choice. In committing myself in the face of death … the roles that I have hitherto thoughtlessly engaged in … become something that I myself own up to, become responsible for.” Cite.

I think it’s pretty easy to see how this fits in with Prophecy Girl. Buffy faced her fears and made a conscious choice by committing herself in the face of death. She therefore became responsible for her destiny. An existentialist would say that she was true to herself, or in their word, “authentic”.

Ford’s situation here gives us another reflection on this. He blamed the world for his actions and refused to accept responsibility for the choice he actually was making, even as he denied the possibility of choice to his unwitting victims:

 “Ford:  Okay, well, you try vomiting for twenty-four hours straight because the pain in your head is so intense, and *then* we'll discuss the concept of right and wrong. (points down) These people are sheep. They wanna be vampires 'cause they're lonely, miserable or bored. I don't have a choice.

Buffy:  You have a choice. You don't have a good choice, but you have a choice!”

To an existentialist, Ford was rejecting his own humanity when he said he had no choice, trying to make himself an object rather than a person. That’s the sign of someone acting in what Sartre called “bad faith”. Quoting again from Wikipedia:

“As a human, one cannot claim his actions are determined by external forces; this is the core statement of existentialism. ... One must not exercise bad faith by denying the self's freedom of choice and accountability.”

Buffy’s reflections with Giles at the end show that she recognizes both the need to make choices and the difficulty of remaining true to herself while doing so. “This inner anguish over moral uncertainty is a central underlying theme in existentialism, as the anguish demonstrates a personal feeling of responsibility over the choices one makes throughout life.” Id.

Ok, that’s enough on philosophy for now. I’ll revisit some of these issues later on. Just keep in mind that Joss has a particular view of the world which informs the Buffy we see on the screen.

In addition to philosophy, we also learn some important facts in Lie to Me. For one thing, we learn that Angel sired Dru. He did more than that, though – in a very real sense, he made her. She is what she is today because of Angel. This is a critical fact for explaining my view of what Dru represents, which I’m holding off for a while.

Lie to Me is also important for the seasonal arc, but I can’t explain that now because of spoilers. I’ll talk about it when we get to the end of S2.

Trivia notes: (1) The title of the song which plays when Ford first goes into his “club” is “Neverland”. And what’s the story of Peter Pan all about? (2) The TV movie which Ford lip synchs is the Jack Palance version of Dracula. (3) Xander’s reference to Angel as “Dead Boy” is perhaps a reference to the US punk band The Dead Boys. (4) Ford asking Buffy on a date, telling her that it’s a “surprise”, parallels Jenny’s invitation to Giles. Buffy probably would have preferred the monster trucks.