Who Are You? (Anne)

Part One: Lily

In Season 5, Episode 22 of Angel – the very last episode of the Buffyverse, Not Fade Away – we meet a very important character for one final time. Her name is Anne.

Or, it will be. That’s not her name yet. We have met her once before, and back then she was Chanterelle. A minor supporting character meant only to round out the small group of vampire worshippers that we meet. She is a scared, vulnerable teenager – well-meaning but naive, and not much more than a potential victim. When we next meet her, she will be Anne – a self-possessed woman running a shelter for vulnerable teens, and more than that, she is of vital thematic importance. She is instructive in showing the so-called Champions of Angel what being a hero really means. In Not Fade Away, Gunn goes to help Anne unload some supplies for her shelter, and they share a very important exchange.

“What if I told you it doesn’t help? What would you do if you found out that none of it matters? That it’s all controlled by forces more powerful and uncaring than we can conceive, and they will never let it get better down here. What would you do?”
“I’d get this truck packed before the new stuff gets here.”

Charles Gunn and Anne Steele, Angel 5×22 Not Fade Away

If Angel’s “if nothing we do matters” speech is the most explicit expression of existentialist morality in the Buffyverse, then this is that morality in real, honest practice. This is the core of existental heroism, as the show sees it. Faced with the brutal apathy of the universe – the overwhelming pointlessness of existence – Anne does not argue or deny it. She accepts that she cannot change this state of affairs. She simply chooses to do a good thing anyway. She can’t control the universe, but she can get this truck packed. So she gets the truck packed.

It is fascinating that such a pure expression of existentialism – the moral core of both series – is handed, in the grand finale to the universe, to a character who started off as a bit-part and appears in a grand total of five episodes across both shows. It’s a titanic responsibility for such a small character. It is given to her because Anne’s thematic importance outstrips her physical screen time by magnitudes. She ends up as an important reflection of both Buffy and Angel, important to both Buffy and Angel, and that is thanks to the transformation she undergoes in this episode.

Here in this episode, pre-transformation, her name is Lily. She seems a little more assured that she was in Lie To Me – at least, she is not devoted to a vampire cult, so that’s a step up – but she is still a way off the person we meet in Blood Money. She has devoted herself to another cause, and one far more dangerous than any vampire cult. This one is called love, and it has caused her to blow all her money on matching heart tattoos instead of food. Lily’s tendency to throw herself fully into whatever situation she finds herself in, out of a need for acceptance and love, is one that both tracks with someone who joined a vampire cult (and here, we find out, used to be in another cult under the name ‘Sister Sunshine’), and will later this episode be completely ready to join Ken’s church under the vague promise of seeing Rickie again. Appropriately for someone with three different names, Lily is a chameleon – just as willing to name herself after the sun as she is to worship night-walkers – and she changes her skin in the pursuit of the love she has clearly not had enough of.

The exact nature of Lily’s tragic backstory is unclear, though it is clear that she has one. The dark, silent glance she gives when Buffy asks about her home life tells us all we need to know. Indeed, something must have motivated her to run away from home – and young too, given that she is seemingly around Buffy’s age and had canonically been a member of multiple cults while Buffy was still sixteen. Whatever the exact trauma might be, we can be in no doubt about its existence.

This ambiguity allows for many different reads, and one that springs to mind here is the reading of Anne as a trans character. She is a character defined by the concept of chosen names – of casting off an old self and moving forward with a new, truer identity – a concept to which transness is intimately related. Her tendency to flick between multiple names before she eventually settles on one is a familiar story to many trans people from early in their transitions. This lends a darkly interesting angle to Buffy’s question: “What do they call you back home?” Her veiled expression conjures a backstory where she suffers deadnaming at home, and that is why she ran away. LGBTQ youth are overwhelmingly represented among homeless youth, and trans youth especially, and as we talked about in the Becoming essay, this mini-arc within the show is extremely interested in evoking the queer experience.

I do not believe that any reading of Lily as a trans character was intended by the writers. There is no indication anywhere else in the show that the existence of trans people was ever considered – and given how most television shows in the 90s and 00s treated trans people, I’m frankly relieved. But there is resonance here for trans viewers. My intention here is not to insist that the trans reading is the “correct” one – just that the trans reading exists. It is there, intended or not. Given the vagueness of Lily’s backstory, it cannot be considered any less legitimate than any other interpretation – and I would argue that it is the most interesting and thematically appropriate angle. Even within the confines of cisheteronormativity, the stubborn shoots of queerness bloom.

The ambiguous information we are given leads directly to the trans reading being the one that lends the most coherence to the character – and indeed, is arguably the most interesting angle. The queer subtext here is unintentional, and yet the themes involved combined with non-specifics make it inevitable.

(Of course, this is the only time that this season will accidentally empower the queer reading of a character. It will never happen again.)

Part Two: Anne

Lily’s journey of transformation through adopted names reaches its climax here, when she meets a girl who calls herself Anne. Anne used to be a hero, and saved Lily’s life, but now she seems to have left that life behind, and is living as a semi-anonymous runaway. It is Lily’s job to put her back on that path, though she doesn’t know it. She is there first to hand Anne a Call To Action that she can refuse, and then to be put in danger so that Anne is forced to act, and become Buffy again. Propp might call her the Princess, or the Dispatcher. In Buffyverse terms, she is the Damsel. It’s a role that we have seen characters on Buffy play (most notably Willow in Prophecy Girl), but that we more often see on Angel. The Damsel is a helpless figure, there to flutter her eyelashes at our reluctant hero, and trigger them into action.

Angel, as a concept, is clearly poking through the membrane of this show – naturally, as we are now just a season away from this universe’ mitosis. We are in LA – our brooding hero needs to save a downtrodden blonde – they overthrow a villain who was exploiting the helpless underclass. Shots from this episode are taken and used in the invariant first strings of the Angel opening credits. Even Carlos Jacott pops up here, ahead of his appearance in the other show. With Buffy being over as a show as per the end of Becoming, Anne is living through an episode of Angel. It has all the iconic elements. The only thing that it is missing is the one thing that Buffy is really missing too. Angel.

Which is appropriate, as this episode’s second plotline stars the Scoobies, trying to get through an episode of Buffy without Buffy. They desperately miss her, and not only as friends. They miss her presence as the telos of their universe. Without the main character they are all designed to orbit around, they are adrift. Buffy’s absence is a void they cannot fill. Their plotline is a lowly, pathetic imitation of a standard Buffy plot – spending the entire episode trying to slay the single vampire mook that Buffy herself would dismiss before the opening credits.

Just as it did last year, this season opens in a cemetery. Where it differs is that last year’s was interested in re-establishing the basic premise of the show: Buffy is a badass who fights vampires, Xander and Willow are her friends. Now, the show is established and confident enough to start subverting that premise. The camera pans up from a vampire, rising from his grave, to the figure of a woman standing over it, inviting our pavlovian-trained brains to expect to see Buffy. Instead, we see Willow.

It will become customary going forward for, whenever Buffy is missing/dead/comatose/otherwise unavailable, Willow to be the person who steps into her leadership role. It’s a role that the cripplingly shy Willow of season one could not have performed, and shows how large a step she took in Becoming.

However, even this more confident Willow is no substitute. Perhaps her biggest mistake is indicated when she refers to Buffy’s tendency to trade witty banter mid-fight as something that “the Slayer” does.

“Well, the Slayer always says a pun or-or a witty play on words, and I think it throws the vampires off, and it makes them frightened because I’m wisecracking.”

Willow Rosenberg, 3×01 Anne

Willow is attempting to step into the role of The Slayer, and therefore utterly failing to step into the role of Buffy. As this season spends much of its time establishing – the two are not synonymous. And Willow, for all her growth, is still stuck in Buffy’s shadow. In trying to be Buffy, she cements herself as Not Buffy.

This plotline is resolved when the Scoobies enlist of the “next best thing” to Buffy – which, very explicitly, is not a Slayer at all. It’s Cordelia – who is still, for the next two episodes, Buffy’s Shadow Self, and aligns with her Girl side. It is that part that becomes necessary to successfully slay the vampire, reminding us again of how these two parts of Buffy must always be wed.

“I know what we need.”
“A Vampire Slayer?”
“No. Next best thing. Bait.”

Xander Harris and Oz, 3×01 Anne

The woman herself, however, is wed to none of these parts. After the trauma of Becoming, she has become divorced from her name and herself. She does not take part in this episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that the Scoobies are living, because Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, is no more. There is only Anne, another Not-Buffy, and Anne wants nothing more than to be left alone.

Not that she’s any better off alone, of course. She sits alone in her one-room apartment, staring into space. The crash cut from the single-shot montage following the Scoobies and the other inhabitants of Sunnydale enjoying their first day back at school, to this image, emphasises her solitude. She is cut off from her own show, and her own life. Metaphorically, she is dead. Anne’s obvious depression, as well as her frustration at being dragged back into a world she voluntarily left, evoke themes that will come into focus in Season Six.

“I didn’t bring anything with me. And I didn’t ask for you to come to me with your problems. I just wanted to be left alone.”

Anne, 3×01 Anne, providing a pretty good synopsis of 6×03 After Life

Her only respite comes in the form of dreams – dreaming of her dead lover, coming to comfort her. He does so on a beach – continuing the motif of beaches being a refuge and symbol of contentment for Anne. This contentment is broken, however, when dream!Angel reminds her of her crime. She killed him, and destroyed the one connection remaining to her. I think on some level, she believes she deserves this loneliness. As long as the guilt over Angel remains, she will continue this self-imposed exile. (Which means, of course, it will never end, because such self-flagellation never truly goes away).

The main difference between Anne’s quasi-suicidal isolation here, and Buffy’s in Season Six, is that Buffy got to go to heaven, while Anne explicitly ends up in hell. Hell as in the place that she has sent Angel. Her imprisonment here is a subconscious expression of what she believes she deserves – a Just punishment for what she has done. Her thematic parallel for this episode, Lily, makes this clear.

“I always knew I would come here. Sooner or later. I knew I belonged here.”
“Where?”
“Hell.”

Lily and Anne, 3×01 Anne

Anne may have buried her guilt deep down into her subconscious, along with the rest of her identity, but she can’t stop it spilling out. Her words to Lily when breaking the news that Rickie has died (as well as Lily’s words back to her) reveal just how much the trauma of season two is absolutely dominating her mind. It’s proof of her lingering self-blame – verging on self-hatred.

“But he didn’t do anything wrong! Why would this happen to him?
“That’s not the point. These things happen all the time. You can’t just close your eyes and hope that they’re gonna go away.”
“…Is it because of you?”

Lily and Anne, 3×01 Anne

“Angel was supposed to pay for what he did to my people.”
“And me? What was I supposed to be paying for?”

Jenny Calendar and Buffy Summers, 2×14 Innocence

“So it was me. I did it.”

Buffy Summers, 2×14 Innocence

“Close your eyes.”

Buffy Summers, 2×22 Becoming

Ken twists the knife for both of them when he taunts Lily with the knowledge that Rickie suffered for a lifetime, forgetting even his own name – though not forgetting Lily’s. Rickie’s suffering invokes Angel, who will in three episode’s time remember his lover’s name even while half-feral after a century of torture. It also invokes Anne herself, who – in the midst of her own extended hell, having lost her own name – still thinks about Angel. Rickie, just like Lily, works as a thematic parallel to both.

This would be Anne hitting rock bottom – if she hadn’t already been lying there all summer. The life that Ken lays out for her is already her life. A life of working until she dies. A life without companionship. A life where she is denied her own name. She has all that already. ‘Hell’, as Ken describes it, is simply an exaggerated version of her current existence. Anne even works in a diner called ‘Helen’s Kitchen’, as if to drive the point home. Hell is no change. She is already there.

It is this realisation of how bad her current life is that drives her reclamation of her old one. Lily and Rickie provide a reflection of her, and Ken’s ‘Hell’ provides a reflection of her life. It is through this reflection that she remembers her own strength, and how she can share that strength with others.

Ken taunts her about her position – how she has had her wish to disappear and lose herself granted. He believes that she has no choice but to accept this fate, because he thinks he knows her. But he forgets that she always has a choice. He’s not entirely wrong about her motivations, but he’s also wrong to assume he knows her. He doesn’t. He knows Anne.

He does not know Buffy Summers.

Intermission: From Each According To Her Ability

The rest of the season will dive deeper into ideas of identity and mirror images, but as we’re not there yet, let’s take a brief break from the character analysis and talk about something slightly less controversial. Let’s talk about communism.

Hell, according to this episode, is a factory. It is a factory where workers must perform labour their entire life. They have no life or identity outside of this. All the time and energy they have is directed for the purpose of profit, to benefit a select few in power. In other words, it is a capitalist’s dream. The fundamental driving force of capitalism is efficient profit-seeking, and what is more efficient than trans-dimensional forced labour? 

What products they are making and what profit exactly the demons are seeking is unclear – and frankly, doesn’t really matter. This is, in the show’s typical fashion, an everyday horror taken to absurd extremes. They do what capitalism does. They exploit those most exploitable, at the bottom rung of society. The system they employ to divorce workers of their own names is an extreme version of Marx’s ideas of alienation. Just as Angelus was an extreme, horror-movie version of a shitty boyfriend, the hell that the demon’s create is an extreme, horror movie version of the everyday abuses of capitalism.

The life this hell demands is, ironically enough, the supposed ideal life for a Slayer. No friends. No life. No identity of your own. Performing work that serves others until you either die or get too old to perform it correctly. The life of a slayer is not dissimilar to life under capitalism. Through this lens, the Watchers are Capitalists – withholding resources from those they claim to “protect” to ensure their own continued power – while Slayers are the proletariat, doing all the actual labour while gaining none of the profits or credit.

And so what does Buffy do, when faced with the extreme horrors of capitalism? She does the only logical thing she can do – lead a worker’s revolt.

This is Buffy’s triumphant moment – the reclamation of her identity and narrative standing. There is something truly wonderful in the act that displays her truest self being an act of rebellion – of revolution. Buffy is anti-authority, and will return to anti-authority themes again and again – whether that authority be patriarchy, the state, the police, or, in this case, capital. Her revolution here, giving power to the previously powerless and uniting them against a common enemy, not only foreshadows the season finale, but the series finale too. 

This scene is a communist power fantasy, and I mean that in the most complementary way. Buffy leads an army of factory workers to overthrow their leaders and claim power for themselves, and she does so wielding a hammer and sickle – a victory shot so iconic it will sign off the opening credits for the next three seasons. Both the aesthetics and ethics here scream communism.

Mark Field argues in Myth Metaphor and Morality^[1] that this scene is actually anti-communist, and bases that argument upon communist idelogy being supposedly counter to existentialism, as it seeks a solution to life’s suffering rather than accepting it. While I respect Field’s work, I have to pretty vehemently disagree, and not just because Sartre himself remained a lifelong communist. Existentialism requires accepting the fundamental truth of the universe – that it is apathetic. It does not require accepting capitalism. To suppose that it did would be supposing that capitalism is the default state of the world – an immutable cosmic force, like death or gravity. Capitalists would love for you to believe that it is. It is not. Capitalism is a choice. It is a choice made for us by the already powerful, and though its power seems insurmountable, we all have a choice in how we react to it – whether we support it, accept it, ignore it, or resist it. It’s not a good choice, but it is a choice. It is this free will against insurmountable odds that Buffy enacts here – and her choice is simple. She takes up the weapons of the workers and destroys the ruling class. The phrase “what would Buffy do?” has never had a clearer answer.

There is one person who would agree with Field here though – and that is the writer, Joss Whedon. His personal politics are far less revolutionary that the ones of his own show. In fact, he has gone on record rejecting the communist aesthetics of this episode. The “sickle” that Buffy wields isn’t, according to Whedon, a sickle at all – it’s an African weapon known as a Mambele. Whedon would tell us that all that is intended here is a story about the reclamation of personal power and identity, and a weapon that Sarah Michelle Gellar happens to look cool wielding. There is nothing deeper here, and any communist reading is an act of unfounded projection from the viewer.

There is a narrow-mindedness in this viewpoint that verges on arrogance. It is absurd to think that when a Western viewer sees Buffy wielding a hammer and a sickle-like instrument, their minds won’t immediately leap to the hammer-and-sickle imagery that is a thousand times more well-known than the Mambele. It’s foolish to write a story about workers in a factory overthrowing their cruel masters and expect it not to evoke communist themes. 

Whedon’s intentions are not irrelevant here. It’s actually quite interesting that he chose to have Buffy wield a Mambele (a curved knife with two edges – it won’t be the last time she wields a weapon in this style). It’s worth considering the intentionality behind that. But intentions are not always outcomes. What a viewer hears is not always what a writer intended to say. Barthes was right. The author can only control the words written, and they cannot control the interpretation.

Buffy’s weapon was meant to be a Mambele. It looks like a Sickle. Everything in the surrounding story primes us, the viewer, to think “sickle”. Viewing it as a sickle in turn makes the story more thematically coherent. Seeing it as a sickle is not just a valid read – it is the most interesting one. Whedon and the other creators may be the puppet masters here, but they can only create shadows for us to see. We are in charge of deciding what those shadows mean. A story that was never intended is no less real.

(Of course, this is the only time that the show will ever tell a story it didn’t entirely intend to. It will never happen again.)

Part Three: Buffy

So we come to the climax. The question of identity that defines this episode, this season, and will crop up in an important subplot next season. A simple, straightforward question. Who are you? 

It turns out the answer is just as simple.

“I’m Buffy, the vampire slayer. And you are?”

With this iconic reclamation, Anne dies, and Buffy Summers is reborn. She cracks like an egg and breaks free – claiming her name, her power, and her narrative standing. When she declares her name, she does not just claim ‘Buffy’. She claims ‘Buffy, the Vampire Slayer’ – encompassing all parts of her identity, Girl and Slayer, as well as the show itself. She is the show, and this victorious moment emphasises how completely that is true. It harkens back to Prophecy Girl, and the theme tune breaking through to the main show at the moment that Buffy accepts her destiny. The veil between the narrative and metanarrative becomes gossamer in these times of personal triumph. Buffy cannot exist without Buffy, or vice versa. Accepting herself means accepting the show.

She does not let go entirely of her guilt surrounding Angel. I don’t think she ever really does – she’s Buffy, nobody takes excessive responsibility like her. She does, however, stop being entirely beholden to it, and doesn’t let it destroy her. This tension between guilt and identity will continue throughout the season. She’s caught in a sort of catch-22. It’s her guilt that pushes her away from her name, from being herself – being Buffy – and yet, the guilt complex is a fundamental part of who she is. It shapes her. If she didn’t have this quality, she wouldn’t really be Buffy.

This episode is concerned with asking who exactly Buffy is, and it partly answers that here. She’s rebellious, powerful, fiercely kind, and will fight against authority and injustice. We know that already. What is interesting is how it is emphasised in this scene of self-reclamation that Buffy has fun fighting the demons. She says it herself, with a wicked smile on her face. She also later kills Ken in cold blood, with a casual quip. Buffy doesn’t fight for enjoyment, but she does enjoy the fight, and if she denied that, she’d be doing what she was doing at the start of this episode – denying a part of herself. She wouldn’t really be Buffy.

As Lily’s reflected plight spurred Anne to become Buffy, Buffy’s expression of rebellious power is what spurs Lily to claim her own – killing Ken, and by the end of the episode, becoming Anne. Their transformations are mutually recursive. They become themselves by becoming each other. Anne even seems to take specific inspiration in Buffy helping homeless teens, as that is the cause she devotes herself to from now on.

It is this final transformation that gives Anne the narrative power to deliver such a vital line in the final episode of Angel. She is worthy of being a thematic parallel to Angel because of the work she has done to be a thematic parallel to Buffy. I would argue that Anne is one of two characters whose transition between Buffy and Angel is completely seamless, and that’s because of how perfectly she functions as a thematic counterpoint to both Buffy and Angel as characters. 

This episode asks “who is Buffy?”, but it might be better off asking “who is Anne?”. “Anne” is an idea of someone who exists only in the shadow of “Buffy”. The Not-Buffy. That can be a blessing as much as a curse. “Anne” is the name of someone who can follow in Buffy’s footsteps, who can draw strength and transformative power from her. It is also a name that, this episode shows, must be destroyed in order for Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, to exist.

Anne takes on her final name, and it is tinged with a little melancholy, because while being “Anne” is a step up for her, it implies an existence in Buffy’s perpetual wake. She can “be Anne”, because that name is no longer needed by the hero – but she cannot be Buffy. Only one person can be Buffy. The continued existence of the show relies on it. As much as Buffy can give other characters strength, she cannot bring them up to her level completely, lest the show cease to be. There is only one Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.

And so, as Buffy reclaims her name and rightful place in Sunnydale, we leave Anne behind, but not the themes of identity and narrative power that she represents. There is another girl out there, with another name – a character this episode and essay both allude to liberally. Another traumatised child, sitting alone in a room, dreaming of the love she doesn’t have. A girl who absolutely, factually, is Buffy, and yet is defined by her existence as Not Buffy. A girl who exists only to be a shadow of another.

She is Anne too.

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References:

1. Mark Field, Myth Metaphor and Morality, ch. 3×11 Gingerbread
2. Lars Pearson, Christa Dickson & Lawrence Miles, Dusted: The Unauthorized Guide to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ch. 3×01 Anne