The view of human relations embedded in Buffy the Vampire Slayer coincides with key elements of René Girard's theory of mimetic rivalry and scapegoating.  As developed in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World and other works, Girard's thesis contains the following elements:

• Human desire is an essentially mimetic phenomenon in which one desires an object because one sees others desiring it, which leads to conflict when two people cannot possess the same object.

• Mimetic rivalry may develop into violence, the desired object retreating into the background as the rivals become more obsessed with defeating each other.

• The violence escalates and widens as the mimetic process pulls others into its vortex, melting down differences as the rivals become more alike in their imitation of each other's hostile behavior.

• The process may be halted through an act of scapegoating, spontaneous or engineered, that turns the war of each against all into the unanimity of all against one.

A number of Buffy episodes might have been written as dramatic illustrations of some or all of these claims, yet to our knowledge none of critical literature has approached the series from a Girardian perspective. This paper will bring Girard into the critical conversation around Buffy by offering (1) a close analysis of "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered," an episode that dramatizes most of the elements of Girard's thesis, and (2) a more global assessment of how the structure and movement of the series as a whole illustrates Girard’s thesis.