"OLDER AND FAR AWAY." BtVS Episode.

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On Buffyworld.com: Trailer, Summary, Transcript

On BuffyGuide.com: Older and Far Away

The resemblance of ‘Older and Far Away’ to the subgenre of horror known as the slasher film, is clear. The episode takes as a premise the familiar horror scenario of entrapment within a confined space, usually a house. The notion of a house would normally imply the nuclear family, security, belonging, a retreat from the dangers of the outside world. But, as Carol Clover has noted in her seminal book on the slasher film, Men, Women and Chainsaws (Princeton University Press, 1992), the secure retreat turns out to be the place that should at all costs be avoided and from which its occupants wish desperately to escape. For houses in slasher films contain murderers (nearly always male) who violently kill a series of victims who are trapped within the house. In this sense the slasher film implies that domestic and family life itself can be dangerous and confining. In standard slasher films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Scream the person who finally dispatches the murderer hiding in the house and who escapes to the world outside, is usually a young woman, whom Clover terms the Final Girl – the sole survivor of carnage. Clover describes the Final Girl as generally androgynous, who has trouble forming relationships with men, and who seizes on the phallic weapons of the murderer in order to take charge of them herself and use them against her attacker. While this template does not fit Buffy exactly, there is nonetheless sufficient overlap for us to perceive her as some sort of Final Girl who breaks the spell of the apparently haunted house in this episode.

But while it is certainly useful to consider ‘Older’ in terms of the slasher genre, other thematic issues come into play when we compare the episode to a film that resembles it very closely indeed - El angel exterminador (The Exterminating Angel, 1962) by director Luis Buñuel. The plot of the episode parallels that of the film so closely that it is hard to imagine that the writers of the former did not have the latter in mind. Both film and episode focus on guests at a party who become gradually aware that, inexplicably, they cannot escape the space in which they are trapped (though in El angel the guests are confined to one room in the house). In the party of El angel the camera moves from group to group, picking up on their banal conversations that hint at sexual and political intrigue, much as Buffy, under the cover of party conversation, deals with the misplaced advances of Spike and fends off attempts by Xander and Anya to interest her in their friend Richard. Once realisation dawns that they are trapped, the characters of both film and episode not only attempt to find a way of escape but also try to survive the horrors of existing in a closed space. Some of the characters’ darker secrets begin to emerge: in particular this is the episode where the Scoobies discover Dawn’s kleptomania. Other tensions surface, too, as in the confrontation between a particularly unpleasant Anya and Willow, in which Tara aggressively intervenes. Darker secrets emerge in El angel, too, piercing the civilised veneer of the party. We become more clearly aware of the affairs that some characters are conducting with others, as well as political intrigue and social climbing. The guests of El angel exterminador gradually reveal that, behind the façade of their haute-bourgeois conversations, they are in thrall to more basic and sometimes violent desires. In ‘Older and Far Away’, not only is a rather tame party invaded by a demon, but the use of magic and witchcraft and the activities of vengeance demons also come to the fore. Illicit sexual desire, too, becomes apparent. Buffy and Spike’s clandestine and perhaps rather unhealthy sexual relationship is known to themselves and to us the audience, although concealed from most of Buffy’s Scooby friends. But Tara is by now an exception, and makes veiled references to the affair (on one occasion in front of all the other guests). This has its parallel in the film, with clandest