Thoughts on Rewatching S3E07, “Revelations” (3/3): First act of the fuffy tragedy
Faith has a paradoxical role in “Revelations.” On the surface, she is endlessly and entirely the one out of the loop, the one to whom secrets are revealed only too late. Nobody tells her about the secret meetings, about Buffy’s past with Angel, about Buffy’s present with Angel, about Gwendolyn Post’s evil schemes. She begins the episode sharing her own personal history of disappointment, being reassured by Buffy that some people might still be trustworthy, and ends it receiving "a word of advice", namely that she’s an idiot. Her own conclusion is that you can’t trust anyone.
But does Faith Lehane have a secret of her own? She obviously did in “Faith, Hope, and Trick”, namely the secret of her Watcher being dead and the vampire that killed her being in pursuit. But that secret was unearthed by Buffy and Giles within the space of half an episode.
And her villain arc later on in the season is defined by secrets: “I killed Allan Finch”, “I defected to the mayor,” (and, perhaps, “I had sex with Xander”). In each case, the secret in question is 1) revealed within one or two episodes (14-15, 15-17, 13-15), 2) without her willingly admitting it, 3) by Buffy working together with a male character (Giles, Giles and Angel, Xander).
So clearly Faith is both very willing to keep secrets, and absolutely terrible at doing so. But, is there another secret, hiding in plain sight? Joked about in lines like “I am seeing someone, tonight actually.” and “You’ve got the tix, why don’t we go together?” and “if you’re a screamer, feel free,” and “come on then, give us a kiss”, and a heart drawn on a window and the “Nobody Knows I’m a Lesbian” shirt that she might as well be wearing? Like the secret that Faith is hopelessly smitten with Buffy Summers?
Since the bit is probably getting a bit old now: yes, this is another post about the heavy gay barely-even-subtext of Faith and Buffy. But I specifically wanted to look at it through the lens of secrets and revelations. The text of the show never comes out and presents us with Faith‘s desire for Buffy, but it constructs that desire out of the way they relate to secrets.
The point of the various examples listed above is that Faith is always at a disadvantage with Buffy. Consider that in “Faith, Hope, and Trick”, they have explicitly paralleled secrets about their “toughest fight” with a vampire, things that they need to open up about and move on from. And they both open up about these secrets… But! Faith opens up to Buffy, and receives support and acceptance for doing so. Buffy opens up to Giles and Willow, and Faith is still actively asking for details about that matter here, four episodes later. Faith’s secrets are exposed to Buffy, but Buffy’s aren’t exposed to Faith.
In and of itself, that epistemic asymmetry isn’t inherently sexual or romantic, any more than asymmetric nudity, or (to use an example the show will woefully under-utilitise in 11 episode’s time) asymmetric telepathy, is inherently sexual or romantic. But they are all latently so, because they involve a salient crossing of normal personal boundaries (epistemic, visual, or psychic). Likewise, mutual crossing of boundaries - being naked together, or telepathically linked, or sharing a secret nobody else knows - is a sort of intimacy, and thus latently sexual or romantic.
Faith is clearly trying to move from an asymmetry to a shared intimacy, to balance things, to say “I’ve shown, and am showing you, mine: can you show me yours?” And in this case I think it clearly does read as sexual/romantic, because 1) it’s specific - Faith always appears asking Buffy questions, not other people, 2) it’s usually about something sexually charged - whether she ever catches kids “doing the diddy”, whether Scott Hope gives her “that good down there tickle”, what it was like to “boink the undead”, and 3) it’s emotionally important: when Buffy refuses to answer, Faith effectively says “alright, I’m done talking to you for tonight, Lagoses be damned”, and when Xander tells her Buffy’s been keeping Angel a secret, she becomes so single-mindedly homicidal that it overrides everything else (like calling an ambulance for Giles).
(It hurts my heart that Faith never got to high-five Kendra about trying to kill Angel the first time they met him (or teach her what a high five is)).
So yeah, that’s the sense in which Faith is symbolically constituted as gay by the way she relates to Buffy’s secrets. It also makes sense in-universe: if Faith is in love with Buffy she’ll be very aware that not everyone will respond positively to this fact, and it becomes imperative to figure out if Buffy feels the same way. Hence she needs to learn as much as possible about Buffy’s secrets. Her secret is one that’s only safe to tell to someone else who has the same secret.
Hence the events of “Revelations” aren’t just a painful denial of her desire to share secrets, but a practical obstacle. They’re an obstacle, obviously, because Angel seems to be a romantic rival, but that’s mirroring the more basic fact that if Buffy won’t tell her things, won’t open up to her, then she can’t figure out if her feelings are reciprocated. And then she faces a dilemma between doing nothing and risking blowing everything up if she reveals a desire that Buffy can’t accept.
(YMMV on how many times you figure she’s been in this situation before, facing that dilemma with some other girl. *slaps roof of Faith* you can fit so much angst in this one's backstory)
So what does she do? Well, textually she disappears for the next two episodes, appears again trying to patch things up in “Amends”, then disappears for two more episodes, seems to be integrated with the group in “the Zeppo”, and then there’s “Bad Girls”.
And Faith is once again symbolically constituted as gay for Buffy in “Bad Girls”, but in a different way. It’s less about secrets and more about temptation, giving in to impulse. “Life is very simple: you want something, so you take me. I mean take it.”
(Obviously Faith is consistently impulsive in all her episodes - but it’s “Bad Girls” where she really tries, and succeeds, at drawing this out of Buffy as well.)
That’s what the text shows us: I’d suggest the following reading of it. Initially Faith does simply withdraw, telling herself she’s better off alone, doesn’t need anybody, can’t trust anyone, and so on. Thinking too much about Buffy Summers just makes her, as Gwendolyn Post says, “an idiot.”
But after reconnecting a bit in episodes 10 and 13, she embarks on a new strategy, what we might call “deniable seduction.” That’s because she’s internalised two lessons from this episode: first, that Buffy holds her secrets close, and won’t ever open up about them. And second, that Buffy will lie to protect the people she cares about.
The first lesson is double-edged: it means Faith might never be able to get Buffy to admit how she feels (maybe she won’t even admit it to herself), but it also means that what Buffy does or doesn’t say isn’t particularly revealing about what she really feels. She has things inside her, dark and dirty desires, that she might never admit to but which might nevertheless be drawn out in action. Hence whatever she says about following the rules and being responsible, she might still be seduced into… stealing from a sporting goods store (if you know what I mean). And the second lesson means that if Buffy can be seduced, if the bond can be forged, if they do bad-girl-stuff together, then that will be enough. Because then Buffy will loyally protect her, just like she protected Angel.
And so when things go bad at the end of “Bad Girls”, and suddenly they have that intimacy of the shared secret, this all blows up in her face. Because Faith has learnt that Buffy will keep secrets to protect someone she loves, but Buffy has learnt the opposite. For her, the lesson of “Revelations” was that keeping secrets is a mistake, they’ll always come out, probably at the worst possible times, and cause more harm to the people you’re trying to protect.
(Which, in the context of “Consequences”, is not entirely wrong - Faith’s efforts to keep her secret don’t work very well, and the results of it coming out involuntarily are worse than if she had just opened up about it in the first place… but it’s also not entirely right (see: Wesley and the plan to ship Faith to an English prison), and arguably does reflect Buffy and Faith’s different class backgrounds and different degrees of social support, but anyway that’s a discussion for another day…)
And so Buffy is trying to do the right thing, trying to do better than she did here, addressing Faith almost the way she might, with hindsight, have tried to address her Episode-7-self. But from Faith’s perspective it’s devastating: she’s tried everything, and been betrayed in a new way every time. She tried to share and connect, and Buffy kept shutting down and lying to protect Angel; now she’s in exactly the same position Angel was in, and suddenly Buffy’s all about honesty and openness.
I think this fuels a perception that Buffy is deeply unreasonable, which in turn strengthens the belief that she’s in denial, dishonest with herself, self-hating, incoherent. And of course this is all, not to keep hammering the point, intensely gay:
“You know exactly what I'm about 'cause you have it in you, too. I've seen it, B. You've got the lust. And I'm not just talking about screwing vampires.”
And all of this provides, I think, necessary context for the final fall at the end of “Consequences.” If you just follow the surface events of that episode, it can seem very sudden, maybe even unmotivated. How does defecting to the mayor fit with any of the actual problems or issues Faith is shown to have in this episode? But if it’s the culmination of a whole half-season of longing and striving, in which Faith has, as she sees it, tried everything and gotten nothing to show for it, thrown herself into connecting with this girl who she should by rights have a special connection with, closer than anyone in the world, and been betrayed in two different opposite ways - if the girl she’s in love with hates herself so much that she’ll find a way to sabotage any chance of them being happy together… well, maybe it makes a bit more sense, as a final “screw this, evil be thou my good”, Milton’s-Satan-esque meltdown.
But that’s all in the future. “Revelations”, as I suggest in the title, is closing the first act of this tragedy. It’s also, I think, the point where Faith having a season-long arc is locked in. The last three episodes she’s been in, she was fun but it still felt possible that they might write her out at any moment, give her a four-episode stint like Kendra and then either have her leave town with her new Watcher, or die dramatically to make the Big Bad seem scarier. But the way this episode ends, she has to come back - there’s no way to end on that mournful bitter silence and not be setting up an ongoing thing.
And just to underline how tragic the tragedy of it all is, I want to note how despite Faith and Angel being in some ways parallels, on the point at issue in this episode they’re opposites. Faith puts up a (bad) show of being cool and unbothered but from her very first episode she’s been exposed, and vulnerable, and open to Buffy, and she’s been constantly trying to lean into and equalise that, to share information that will prompt Buffy into sharing back.
Angel, by contrast, starts out knowing far more than Buffy does (due to being, you know, an adult man who should know better) and spends all his time lurking and brooding and watching from the shadows. He knows more than her and he tries to keep it that way, and when stressed he comes out and admits that he thinks he knows better than her. Things between Buffy and Faith are harder because they’re both desperate traumatised teenagers doing their best, but that fact is also what makes them better for each other than the immortal father figures they both end up attracting, and more capable of a relationship that could be healthy in the long run.
