The title of this paper comes from the seventh season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Two characters, Spike and Faith, discuss how they allow restraints to be placed on them for the safety of others. Spike’s sleepwalk killings have recently caused him to be shackled to a wall while Faith’s addiction to violence led to three years of prison. Spike muses, “You had the power to walk away anytime. Nothing stopped you.” Faith’s reply reflects on the nature of both her addiction and her recovery, “I stopped me. I got dangerous for awhile” (“Dirty Girls,” BtVS). Discussions of addiction in Whedon’s works primarily focus on allegories for drug addiction in Buffy. There remains relatively little discussion of other types of addictions in the Whedonverse or the fact that the addiction trope is present in virtually everything Joss Whedon produces. In this paper, I take my cue from Whedon’s ongoing interest in psychoanalysis and broadly define addiction as the use of fetish to seek fulfillment through the jouissance of repeated trauma. From a basic overview of addiction in Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, and the Avengers films, I turn to what is most profound about Whedon’s approach to addiction: an understanding of recovery as no longer using the other as an object of desire but rather seeking fulfillment through sacrificial love of the other. Whedon’s recent move from director of cult favorite TV shows to the director of blockbuster films demands that we take him seriously as a force not only in science fiction/fantasy but also in popular culture as a whole. What he has to say about the nature of addiction and recovery should be accepted as an important part of an ongoing discussion of addiction in popular culture today.
About the presenterNellene Benhardus
Nellene Benhardus is a PhD Candidate at The University of Iowa. She specializes in issues of religion, sexuality, and addiction both in Victorian Britain (Oscar Wilde) and contemporary popular culture (Joss Whedon). Her dissertation is “Perhaps They Were A Different Kind of People”: Religious and Sexual Difference in British Decadence.