"Hey, you think I'm never lonely because I'm so cute and popular? I can be surrounded by people and be completely alone.”
--Cordelia
One of the advantages Joss Whedon and his writers had in creating stories for Buffy the Vampire Slayer
was the freedom implicit in the show’s premise: because the
setting was an area rife with mystical energy, they were free to
essentially do anything they wanted to do and simply use magic as the
explanation. Body switching? Possession? The whole gang suddenly
developing amnesia? Recurring time loops? Everyone in town losing the
ability to speak? Wishes made reality? Alternate universes? A musical
in which the characters realize they’re in
a musical? All of it was fair game, and although that level of freedom
came with its share of danger--the danger that the series would lean on
it too heavily, and the stories would start to feel contrived--it also
allowed the writers to create powerful metaphors. "The Witch"
examined the idea of parents dominating their children’s lives by
having Amy’s mother literally snatch her daughter’s life
away, switching bodies with her and living her life the way she thinks
it should be lived. "The Pack"
gave us a glimpse of the ruthless pack mentality high school kids can
exhibit as they ostracize those they perceive as inferior by having a
group of them become possessed by hyena spirits. And "Out of Mind, Out of Sight"
presents us with our most powerful and effective metaphor yet: a girl
who is continually ignored by everyone around her literally becomes
invisible.
As an examination of the ways in which kids can feel socially isolated, "Out of Mind, Out of Sight"
hits on all cylinders, and Marcie Ross, our unfortunate invisible girl,
isn’t the only character in the spotlight. Buffy feels isolated
too; the episode starts with Buffy having one of those strangely klutzy
moments she’s prone to having, as she barrels out into the
hallway, bounces off Cordelia and her pals who are passing by, and
drops her (weapon-filled) bag. She scrambles to come up with an
explanation for the weapons, but Cordelia dismisses it: she simply
doesn’t care. She doesn’t even care enough about Buffy to
be curious about the weapons; she’s already written Buffy off as
a freak and Buffy isn’t important enough to bear thinking about
beyond that one-word explanation. Cordelia and her followers walk away,
leaving Buffy on the floor to pick up her things, alone. Later on,
Buffy even feels alone with Willow and Xander: as they reminisce about
an apparently hilarious field trip they took in sixth grade,
Buffy’s the odd man out. She doesn’t have any friends she
can reminisce about sixth grade with; she lost them all when she became
the Slayer.
Making things
even worse for Buffy is the annual May Queen competition: the school is
about to decide who the prettiest, most popular girl is, and elect her
their queen, because high school is ridiculous and that’s just
the kind of ridiculous thing high schools do. (High school is something
you survive. The central metaphor of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
that high school is hell, was right on the money.) Buffy was the May
Queen, or May Queen equivalent, in her old high school in Los Angeles
before she became the Slayer and her popularity took a nosedive, and
now she’s depressed. She knows she has no chance at that kind of
popularity again in Sunnydale. And it isn’t that Buffy wants or
needs the adoration of everyone in school; she’s isn’t that
shallow. And she’s also smart enough to know that being the May
Queen doesn’t earn you any real friends, just sycophants. But the
fact that Buffy would have absolutely no chance is just an affirmation
of her aloneness; no one really knows her at school, no one takes the
time to talk to her. She has Willow and Xander and Giles and
that’s it. Being able to make friends the way regular people do
is just one more thing the Slayer took away from her.
But of course
Cordelia is in the running for May Queen and of course she’s
going to win because she’s a beautiful, vacuous, self-absorbed,
two-dimensional harpy who doesn’t even notice, much less care,
about anyone else around her. Until she starts becoming a person, a
process which, thankfully, begins in this episode, because honestly
I’m not sure how much more I can take of her. Not that I’m
against bitchy characters? Spike was bitchy after all and I liked him
fine. I don’t care how nice a character is. But they should at
least be a character, an
actual believable three-dimensional one, and Cordelia was so over the
top during the first season of this show that she was a parody. When I
watched these episodes for the first time a few years back I never
cared if Cordelia was ultimately meant to be one of Buffy’s
friends or one of her enemies, I never cared whether the writers
intended to make Cordelia a better person or a worse one over time, I
just wanted the writers to for God’s sake make Cordelia a person of some kind. Now that I’ve watched the whole series, and Angel,
multiple times and I know Cordelia will eventually become a person
she’s a little easier to take, but she still regularly annoys me
because, to put it simply, no one in the real world acts like her. No one is that self-involved. No one is that oblivious to what’s going on around them. Yes, there are plenty of assholes in the world but there is no one, not one single person,
who would actually publicly say, as Cordelia does in this episode, that
she’s pissed at a girl who’s leg she ran over with her car
because the girl was making the situation all about her and not even
considering how traumatized Cordelia was. Sure, there are plenty of
people out there who wouldn’t have given a shit about running
someone over, but none of them, not one, would have actually said what Cordy said
unless they were making a joke or trying to show off how much of an
asshole they are. But Cordelia’s not kidding, and she’s not
trying to be an asshole either: this is how she really thinks. She
really thinks the girl she ran over is selfish for not taking her
feelings into account. But no one in the world thinks that way, and
even if they did--let’s say they were a sociopath--they would at
least know it was an aberrant way of thinking and that it wasn't at all
socially acceptable, and they would also know they shouldn’t be
telling people about it and expecting them to sympathize. Up until now
Cordelia has been just as much of a parody as Principal Flutie was, and
while it was acceptable in Flutie because he was a minor supporting
character, Cordy is in the main credits; she should be a person. The
process of humanizing her begins with this episode, but it will take a
long time, and in fact another television series, to finally come to
fruition. But at least it's finally begun. Let’s have a parade.
In a way,
Cordelia has Marcie, our invisible girl, to thank for finally beginning
her journey to personhood. Marcie is pissed about being invisible: this
was something that was done to her, not something she wanted; the
people around her forced this upon her. In a series of flashbacks, we
see how Marcie was ignored, and belittled, not just by the cool kids at
school but also by her teachers, who simply never noticed her. There
was no one catastrophic event, no one moment that was so cruel, so hard
for Marcie to bear that it sent her over the edge. Instead the
flashbacks are notable because they’re so mundane: Marcie tries
to enter conversations between Cordelia and Harmony and is rebuffed.
She continually raises her hand in class but the teacher always seems
to call on someone else. We even find out that Willow and Xander
ignored Marcie too; they didn’t mean to, they weren’t
trying to. But they had four classes with Marcie the year before and
somehow never managed to notice her. On Marcie’s yearbook
everyone wrote, “Have a nice summer”, which is the polite
thing people write when they have nothing to say to you. Xander and
Willow signed Marcie’s yearbook and Xander wrote the same thing.
(Willow points out that she at least wrote “Have a great
summer”.) No one did anything horrible to Marcie...at least,
nothing that was any more horrible than what routinely happens to
millions of kids in schools every day. And that’s the whole
point. One day, this shy, lonely girl disappeared...simply because no one ever
really noticed her. And now she’s angry, and she decides to take
it out on Cordelia. The episode starts with Cordelia’s boyfriend
being beaten with his own baseball bat (the jerk deserved it for
laughing at Buffy in the scene before) and soon the incidents escalate;
Harmony is pushed down the stairs, and the teacher we saw ignoring
Marcie in the flashbacks is nearly suffocated to death with a plastic
bag tied over her head. The word Look is painted on the lockers where Cordy‘s boyfriend was beaten; the word Listen is written on the chalkboard in the classroom where the teacher almost suffocated.
The gang gets to
work and solves the mystery quickly, and without any clunky plotting
(for the moment.) It might be a ghost they’re dealing with, or
some sort of
invisible creature, but Buffy is leaning toward the latter: when she
follows the sound of laughter to the band room after Harmony is pushed
down the stairs, she feels Marcie bump into her. Cordy’s
boyfriend and Harmony have both been attacked and Cordy is the common
denominator there, so Buffy keeps an eye on Cordy and as she’s
watching her later she hears a flute echoing through the hallways. When
Willow compiles a list of dead and missing kids, Buffy notices
Marcie is the most recent person missing, her only activity was band,
and she plays the flute. Buffy explores the band room again, notices a
boot print on a chair, figures out that someone used it to climb,
notices an access hatch in the ceiling, and when she crawls through it
she finds Marcie’s things, including her flute, and her yearbook
with her name on it (and with Cordelia’s photo defaced.) Mystery
solved, and although Cordelia may be shallow and self-absorbed I never
said she’s not smart; she solves the mystery too, right after she
saves Ms. Miller, the teacher who nearly suffocated to death. Ms.
Miller was going to help Cordy with her term paper, and Marcie not
uncoincidentally times her attack so Cordy would discover Ms. Miller in
the midst of suffocating. Cordy knows all three of the victims have
ties to her and, shamelessly, because that’s what she is, she
runs to the library and begs Buffy (while insulting her) for help.
Invisible people aren’t really covered in the Slayer handbook,
but Buffy guesses from the way Cordelia’s photo is defaced--a
crown is drawn on her head--that Marcie might be planning something for
Cordy’s May Queen coronation at the Bronze that night. When
Willow floats the idea of stopping the coronation to keep Cordelia
safe, Cordelia disagrees: “If I'm not crowned tonight then, then
Marcie's won!” Cordy says. “And that would be bad. She's
evil, okay? Way eviler than me.”
Maybe, Cordy, but I still like her better, even though she’s evil. And let's make no mistake, Marcie is evil
now, or at least clinically insane, and probably both. One of the
things that makes this episode great is the fact that it never does the
expected, it never takes the easy way out. On any other television
series you might expect Marcie to be cured of her condition and then
come to feel remorse for her acts, perhaps after a heart-felt speech
from the hero. After all, Marcie hasn’t actually killed anyone
yet; she doesn’t seem a lost cause, and she really is the
victim here. She never asked to become invisible. She never asked to be
ignored. Invisibility isn’t a cool superpower for Marcie,
it’s a curse; it’s something that isolates her and
it’s been steadily eating away at her mind. But Marcie doesn't
feel remorse; instead she
ruthlessly stalks and traps the entire gang, and Cordy as well, locking
Giles, Willow and Xander in the school basement as the room fills up
with gas, and managing to get the drop on Buffy (Marcie’s
invisible after all) and injecting her with something and knocking her
out. Luckily Angel is around to save Giles, Willow and Xander, but
Buffy and Cordy wake up tied to the May King and Queen thrones at the
Bronze (tied by some kind of super kryptonite rope that Slayers
can’t break, apparently, but I guess the rope looked pretty
thick, and Buffy was still woozy from whatever she was drugged with, so
I’ll let it slide. Also Marcie would have to have been pretty
damn strong to pull Cordelia up through the ceiling the way she did
when she captured her, but I guess I'll let that slide too.) In front
of Buffy and
Cordelia, written in glitter on a curtain, is the word Learn.
When Marcie arrives, wheeling a covered tray toward them, Buffy and
Cordelia try to get her talking, and when Cordelia asks Marcie what she
wants them to learn, Marcie replies, “You don't get it. You're
not the student. You're the lesson.” She takes the cloth off of
the tray, revealing surgical instruments. And then she reveals her
plan: she’s already injected Cordelia with a local anesthetic,
and she intends to mutilate her face and present her to the school at
the May Queen ceremony that night. “Your face,” Marcie
tells her. “That's what this is all about, isn't it? Your
beautiful face. That's what makes you shine just a little bit brighter
than the rest of us. We all want what you have. To be noticed,
remembered. To be seen. Well, I'm fulfilling your fondest wish. I'm gonna give you a face no one will ever forget.”
There’s
not going to be a happy ending here. Buffy’s not going to give a
speech that makes everything better; all the people who ignored and
belittled Marcie aren’t going to give her a group hug and
magically make her visible again. Marcie isn’t going to suddenly
realize the folly of her ways. She fully intends to go through with her
plan, because her sanity, her very identity, has been destroyed. And
it’s a tragedy, and there’s nothing to be done, and
that’s just that. Marcie is dispatched when she makes the classic
mistake all villains make--she talks too much, and gives Buffy time to
escape--but when Buffy defeats her Marcie doesn’t become visible,
and she isn’t going to be cured. Even Cordelia isn’t going
to suddenly change her ways, though we’ve been given every reason
to expect her to, and she would’ve, if this was almost any other
television series; when she thanks Buffy and the gang for saving her
life in school the next day and they invite her to lunch, she quickly
changes her tone when her boyfriend Mitch happens by and asks her if
she’s hanging out with losers now. “Are you kidding?”
Cordy says, and takes his arm and walks away with him. “I was
just being charitable. Helping them with their fashion problems. You
think I really felt like joining that social leper colony?
Please!” Cordelia has grown as a person here, but she’s
still afraid: she told Buffy earlier in the episode that the people she
surrounds herself with don’t really know her and might not even
like her; they’re just with her because of the status it confers
upon them, and she feels lonely all the time. When Buffy asked why she
works so hard at being popular then, Cordelia replied, “Well, it
beats being alone all by yourself.” Ironically, Cordelia and
Marcie have that in common, at least. They’re both terrified of
being alone.
When Marcie was
defeated, two FBI agents who had been hanging around the school
suddenly barged into the Bronze and whisked her away. When Buffy asked them if they
could cure Marcie, they told her they can rehabilitate her, and that in
time she'll learn to be a useful member of society again. But we learn
in the last scene of the episode that even that faint hope is a cheat:
their idea of rehabilitating Marcie is indoctrinating her into a secret
government program for training invisible assassins. “This isn't
the first time this has happened, is it?” Buffy said to them, as
they took Marcie away. “It's happened at other schools.”
Buffy didn’t say this has happened before, she said it’s happened at other schools,
and that was a specific, deliberate choice on the part of the writers.
Because this episode isn’t about social isolation generally;
it’s about the kind of isolation people feel in high school
specifically. High school can be the hardest time in a young
person’s life, a time when they’re being overwhelmed by
outside pressures at the exact moment when they’re least equipped
to handle them, and the worst pressure of all is the pressure to fit
in. For some kids, it’s simply too much to bear.
This was an
excellent episode; so far in the first season only "Nightmares" was
better, and then only just barely ("Nightmares" wins because it really
is hard
to beat Vampire Buffy on the fun scale.) "Out of Mind, Out of Sight"
knows what it’s trying to say and it gets its message across
without dusting off the same old trite ideas we’ve all seen a
hundred times before on a hundred different television shows, it gives
us some more insight into Buffy, and it even begins the salvage process
on Cordelia in the bargain. The episode is brave and it’s ballsy;
it surprises us. The villain is unrepentant. Furthermore, the villain
is a victim, but she isn’t
saved. Cordelia has a chance to change her behavior by the end, but is
too afraid to take it. Buffy feels alone, and she’s going to go
on feeling alone. None of this feels like a victory; if anything, it
feels like a defeat for our heroes. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
was a great television show because it took risks: because it was
unflinching in its exploration of the dark places inside us, and
because at the end of the day, the Big Bads were people. This episode
is a perfect example of that.
So what is "Out of Mind, Out of Sight" trying
to tell us? What’s the message that it gets across so well, and
in such a unique, uncompromising way? Maybe that there aren’t always
happy endings, and not every problem can be solved with a stake and a
quip. There are a lot of Marcie’s out there, and although in the
real world high school kids don’t turn invisible from being
ignored, the damage to their sense of self can be every bit as
severe...if not so easy to see.
