Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Not Just Fighting Vampires, But Gender Roles As Well

            At the begin of this episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy and her boyfriend are throwing a football back and forth on the beach.  Buffy’s boyfriend proceeds to tell her that she “throws like a girl.”   This is such an ironic comment because he knows just how powerful she is and that she fights vampires almost every night!  To counteract this ignorant comment about the undermined strength of females everywhere, Buffy sends a perfect spiral back with her slayer strength. 

          When Dracula arrives in Sunnydale he is in a wooden coffin full of dirt from his home country Transylvania.  Dracula’s first encounter with Buffy is after she finished slaying a vampire.  Her clothes appear to be a fitted black leather jacket along with skin-tight jeans.  This type of attire is very impractical when fighting a vampire because it does not allow you to move as freely as you could.  It seems that the costume designers wanted her clothing to look as if it was painted on.  Then in that case she could move as free as the wind because she would have no clothes to restrict her.  Her clothes are more about sex appeal than functionality.  Dracula in this episode is portrayed as a young man with a pale complexion and a long black cape.  He possesses the power of mind control and shape shifting abilities (i.e. mist/bat/werewolf).

           While discussing Dracula’s arrival with her group of friends, Buffy describes him as having “dark penetrating eyes”.  When thinking of the word penetration, its not usually related to eyes but to a penis entering a vagina.  Buffy’s boyfriend makes this relation and becomes very insecure about the idea of Buffy and Dracula being together.  He switches from the normal gender role of a strong, powerful man to a weak, insecure boy when they talk about Dracula.

         Later that night, Xander, Buffy’s friend, has a fight with his girlfriend about the infamous Dracula while walking home.  Then they go their separate ways and Dracula appears in front of Xander.  He tries to regain his masculinity after his fight with his girlfriend by provoking a confrontation with him.  This fails completely because of Dracula’s mind control powers, and Xander turns into an extremely obedient and giddy little boy.  He seems to break the normal gender role of a man by showing extreme emotion towards Dracula.  This also hints at the homoerotic nature of Dracula if he chooses other men to become obsessed/in love with him. 

          The following night Dracula enters Buffy’s room while she is sleeping.  After he materializes from the mist Buffy immediately wakes up and becomes entranced by him.  Again, his eyes captivate her, which is different from Bram Stokers novel because his red eyes usually revolted everyone.   This scene turns very sexual as he sits on the bed and she brushes her hair away from her neck. During this entire scene she does not try to stop him from progressing at all, she is willing for intercourse to happen. The camera zooms in on her face as he bites her neck, forcing the viewer to look at her face as he penetrates her.

           The morning after Dracula was in Buffy’s room the viewer finds out that her mother was the one who invited Dracula in the house for coffee, thus allowing him to enter Buffy’s bedroom that night.  As Buffy’s friends are performing a protection spell on the house, Buffy’s mother is talking about how he seemed so charming and that she felt like giving up on men altogether before he came to the house.  She then tells the two girls that when they get older they will understand what she means; the girls share a grimacing look.  The mother doesn’t even consider that they could be lesbians, which they are.  This is just an example of how people of that generation do not consider any type of union other than a man and a woman.

          In the final scene of this episode, Buffy goes to Dracula’s castle and they make her look like an innocent child and a woman at the same time.  She is wearing pink leather pants and a black shirt.  The color of the pants resemble the traditional gender role of a little girl, but since they are leather it makes the viewer question how old they are actually trying to portray her.  When Dracula convinces her to drink the blood from his wrist the camera zooms in on her face.  She looks up at him through her eyelashes, creating a look of sex appeal and innocence at the same time.  As she is drinking his blood the camera focuses on her mouth and then switches to Dracula’s face.  The act of Buffy drinking his blood can be considered a union of them both.  Although, once Buffy drank his blood her true slayer nature came forward and she staked him in the chest. (#LikeAGirl!)