Look, maybe I'm being paranoid...

[fpb]

...and at any rate surely someone must have noticed before me. But isn't it interesting how, in BtVS 3.01, "Anne", whose peculiar Hell seems drawn straight from nineteenth-century socialist propaganda picture about the miseries of the proletariat, Buffy fighs and defeats the oppressive demons while welding a hammer and something that looks very like a sickle?

Comments

[tigertrapped.livejournal.com]

Socio-political subtextual reading of BtVS. I knew there was something missing from my flist. Thank you for setting it straight.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Well, if it's there at all, it's not very subtle. I see it as more of a nostalgic gesture to a past ideological world.

[capnflynn.livejournal.com]

... And that image wound up in the opening credits, so you got to see it every time you watched an episode!

FOR JUSTICE THUNDERS CONDEMNATION

[joetexx.livejournal.com]

On Buffyguide around 2001 a dear Minnesota friend went on at some length about exactly this interpretation – she must have just gotten hold of the Season 3 CD. I slyly mentioned that what Ann's pit reminded me of was the laogai or Gulag, but it was a cheap shot – she was a Farmer Labor type lass, not remotely a Stalinist. She was all set to mount the barricades though - I tried to scare up a jpeg of 'LIBERTY LEADING THE PEOPLE' for her but for the life of me I couldn't recall 'Delacroix' till a week later.

Re: FOR JUSTICE THUNDERS CONDEMNATION

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I've got a much better one than Delacroix:


Giuseppe Pelizza da Volpedo, tha author of this, may just have been the greatest Italian painter in the nineteenth century, although that does not mean much - it was the poorest century for Italian painters in history. This is certainly the best remembered painting from the period; it's called "The advance of the Fourth Estate".