Buffy and Alienation

Although it may seem like a simple equation to be born a vampire slayer, and to fulfill your role by slaying vampires, several different bodies appear Buffy with different ideas about the meaning of the slayer's role.

The most unnerving of these is known as the Initiative, operating out of a secret facility below Sunnydale. The Initiative is a secret government organization formed to capture, study, and kill demons and vampires. Formed under the impression that the slayer is a myth, those in power in the Initiative have a hard time reconciling Buffy's self-determination with their tightly-regimented operation. Distrustful of Buffy's autonomy, the head official at the Initiative eventually attempts (unsuccessfully) to have Buffy killed.

The attempts made by the Initiative to enlist Buffy, but only on their own terms, reflect Marx's portrayal of the bourgeoisie. In the same way that Buffy has skills that are useful to the Initiative, the work and skills of the proletariat are useful to the bourgeois. However, as in Buffy's case, the bourgeois are operating in their own interest, and those who work for them are seen as mere automatons. Where Marx calls out religion as the opiate of the masses, the Initiative in fact drugs their soldiers to avoid questions and rebellion regarding the end goal their labor contributes to. Although the soldiers in the Initiative are not under any more pressure than any other member of the proletariat to work for wages, they are alienated from their labor by the extra measure of the unspoken goals of their superiors. These goals alienate the soldiers, and seek to alienate Buffy, from the labor of protecting the populace. This work becomes a commodity produced for wages and advances in wages, rather than an ethical imperative with inherent rewards.

Buffy, as a free agent, is a threat to the Initiative's leaders in the same way Marx sees communism as a threat to capitalism. She works fro herself, and the satisfaction she finds in her work is for those whose lives she saves, and for herself. Throughout the show, she shirks impositions from others on how her work should she be done, seeking instead an identity defined by doing her work well and finding personal growth and fulfillment through it.