#the next one focuses on buffy's side of things and the role of spike's arc in supporting buffy's in the last three seasons

[impalementation]

spike, angel, buffy & romanticism: part 3

part 1: “When you kiss me I want to die”: Angel and the high school seasons

part 2: “Love isn’t brains, children”: Enter Spike as the id

* 

“Something effulgent”: Season five and the construction of Spike the romantic

Prior to becoming a romantic interest, Spike is everything I discussed in the last section. He is an id and a mirror for Buffy, he’s prone to both romantic exaggeration and cutting realism, and his liminality suggests ambiguity. But outside of “Lovers Walk”, the writing doesn’t actually delve too deeply into Spike’s nature as a romantic. If you stopped the canon at “Restless”, you’d probably think that Spike’s love for Drusilla was intriguing, but that the show hadn’t really gone anywhere with the implications of it, and for all you knew, that might not be an important part of his character anymore. So one of the most interesting things about season five to me, is that in this season in which the writers first consciously, deliberately decide to explore the sexual and romantic tension between Spike and Buffy, they also emphasize Spike’s romanticism more than ever. The choice to define Spike by his romanticism is a choice that follows naturally from everything established about his character, but it was also not an inevitable choice. Therefore, it’s a choice worth looking at in some detail.

Consider everything that “Fool For Love” establishes about Spike, especially the things that contradict what was supposedly canon at the time. It makes Drusilla his sire instead of Angel, meaning that he is sired by a romantic connection, and as a direct result of heartbreak. It makes him a poet living in the middle of the Victorian era, an age at odds with his previous ages of “barely 200” and “126”. Meaning that the writing specifically decides to ignore its canon in order to associate him with an era in which passions would have been repressed (rather than the Romantic era of the early 1800’s or the modern energy of the early 1900’s). Moreover, the episode reveals his entire aesthetic and personality to essentially be a construct. But most tellingly of all, it reveals him to be an idealist. Spike is not just a performance artist; he yearns for the “effulgent”, for something “glowing and glistening” that the “vulgarians” of the world don’t understand. In other words, he yearns for something bigger and more beautiful than life: something romantic. Later, he chases after “death, glory, and sod all else.” Spike may be a “fool for love”, who has a romantic view of romantic love specifically, but the episode is very clear about the fact that he is also a romantic more generally. When Drusilla turns him, she doesn’t tempt him by telling him she’ll love him forever. She tempts him by offering him “something…effulgent”. (Which, in typical Spike form, the episode immediately undercuts by having him say “ow” instead of swooning romantically). The fact that “Fool For Love”, Spike’s major backstory episode, is so determined to paint him as a romantic--and in particular, a disappointed, frustrated romantic--that it is willing to contradict canon to do so, tells you that this choice was important for framing Spike and his new, ongoing thematic role.

I’ve talked in the past about how season five is all about the tension between the mythical and the mortal--between big, grand, sweeping narratives, and the reality of being human. Buffy is the Slayer, but she’s also just a girl who loses her mother. Dawn is the key, but she’s also just a confused and hormonal fourteen-year-old. Willow is a powerful witch, but she also just wants her girlfriend to be okay. Glory is a god, but she’s also a human man named Ben, and finds herself increasingly weakened by his emotions. And Spike embodies this tension perfectly. He’s a soulless vampire with a lifetime of bloodshed behind him, but he’s also this silly, human man who wants to love and be loved. He wants big, grand things, but every time they are frustrated by a Victorian society, a rejection, a chip, a pratfall, or dying with an “ow”. Furthermore, his season five storyline is all about the tension between loving in an exalted, yet often selfish way, versus loving in a “real” or selfless way. 

There was a fascinating piece a ways back that discussed how Spike’s attempts to woo Buffy in season five almost perfectly match the romantic narratives of Courtly Love. In the words of the author:

The term "Courtly Love" is used to describe a certain kind of relationship common in romantic medieval literature. The Knight/Lover finds himself desperately and piteously enamored of a divinely beautiful but unobtainable woman. After a period of distressed introspection, he offers himself as her faithful servant and goes forth to perform brave deeds in her honor. His desire to impress her and to be found worthy of her gradually transforms and ennobles him; his sufferings -- inner turmoil, doubts as to the lady's care of him, as well as physical travails -- ultimately lends him wisdom, patience, and virtue and his acts themselves worldly renown.

You can see for yourself how well that description fits Spike’s arc. He fixates on the torturous, abject nature of his love, and has it in his head that he can perform deeds and demonstrate virtue, and this will prove to Buffy that he is worthy of her. But despite Spike’s gradual ennobling over the course of the season, I think it would be a mistake to see the season as using the Courtly Love narrative uncritically, or even just ironically. The same way it would be a mistake to see season two as using the Gothic uncritically. Spike is as much Don Quixote as he is Lancelot. He is a character that deliberately tries to act out romantic tropes, giving the writing an opportunity to satirize those tropes, including the tropes of chivalric romance. In particular, the writing criticizes Spike’s (very chivalric) fixation on love as a personal agony, something that is more about pain--and specifically, his pain--than building a real relationship. Over and over in season five, he is forced to abandon these sorts of flattering romantic mindsets in favor of a more complicated reality. 

So at first, Spike’s “deeds” tend to be shallow and vaguely transactional. He tries to help Buffy in “Checkpoint” even though she doesn’t want it (and insults her when she doesn’t appreciate it), he asks “what the hell does it take?” when Buffy is unimpressed by him not feeding on “bleeding disaster victims” in “Triangle”, he rants bitterly at a mannequin when Buffy fails to be grateful to him for taking her to Riley in “Into the Woods”, and he is angry and confused when Buffy is unmoved by his offer to stake Drusilla in “Crush”. While these attempts to symbolically reject his evilness are startling for a soulless vampire, and although Spike certainly feels like he is fundamentally altering himself for Buffy’s sake, none of it is based on understanding or supporting Buffy in a way that she would actually find substantial. Moreover, he lashes out when his gestures fail to win her attention or affection. He has an idea in his head of how their romantic scenes should play out, and reacts petulantly when reality fails to live up to it. 

But these incidents of self-interested narrativizing are also continuously contrasted with scenes in which Spike reacts with real generosity, or is surprised when he realizes he’s touched something emotionally genuine. When Buffy seeks him out in “Checkpoint”, his mannerisms instantly change when he realizes she actually needs real help (“You’re the only one strong enough to protect them”), rather than the performed help he offered at the beginning of the episode. At the end of “Fool For Love” he’s struck dumb by Buffy’s grief, and his antagonistic posturing all evening melts away. He abandons his romantic vision of their erotic, life-and-death rivalry in favor of real, awkward emotional intimacy. In “Forever” he tries to anonymously leave flowers for Joyce, and reacts angrily when he’s denied—but this time not because he wanted something from Buffy. Simply because he wanted to do something meaningful. 

This contradictory behavior comes to a head in “Intervention”, the episode in which Spike finally begins to understand the difference between real and transactional generosity. Up until that point, Spike has been reacting both selfishly and unselfishly, but he hasn’t been able to truly distinguish between them, which is why he keeps repeating the same mistakes. Although he touches something real at the end of “Fool For Love”, for instance, he goes on to rifle through Buffy’s intimates in the very next episode. And so “Intervention” has Spike go to extremes of fakeness and reality. He gives up on having the real Buffy, and seeks out an artificial substitute that lets him live out his cheesiest romance novel scripts. It’s important that the Buffybot isn’t just a sexbot, even if he does have sex with her. She’s a bot he plays out romantic scenarios with the way he played them with Harmony in “Crush”, allowing him to almost literally live within a fiction. But then he “gives up” on having Buffy in a way that’s actually real, by offering up his life. He lets himself be tortured, and potentially killed, for no other reason than that to do otherwise would cause Buffy pain. The focus is on her pain, not his. For the first time, he acts like the Knight he’s been trying to be all along. He performs a grand, heroic deed that causes the object of his affection to see him in a different light, and even grant him a kiss. Yet ironically, as part of learning the difference between real and fake, he ceases to press for Buffy’s reciprocation. Through the end of season five, Spike continues to act the selfless Knight, assisting Buffy in her heroism without asking for anything in return. Which culminates in his declaration that he knows Buffy “will never love him”, even after he’s promised her the deed of protecting Dawn, and even though she allows a kind of intimacy by letting him back in her house. He proves that he sees those gestures for what they are, rather than in a transactional light. The irony of the way Spike fulfills the narrative of chivalric romance, is that his ennobling involves letting aspects of that narrative go. 

In a Courtly Love narrative, the object of the Knight’s affection is fundamentally pedestalized. The Knight himself might be flawed, but the woman he pines after is not. She is “divinely beautiful” and “unobtainable”, something above him and almost more than human. This is why it’s so comic that in Don Quixote, which was a direct satire of chivalric romance, Alonso Quixano’s “lady love” is a vulgar peasant farmgirl who has no idea who he is. (Think of the way Spike asks if Buffy is tough in “School Hard” or threatens to “take her apart” despite “how brilliant she is” in “The Initiative”, followed by scenes where Buffy is acting like the teenage girl she is. Or how Giles in “Checkpoint” says that Buffy has “acquired a remarkable focus” before cutting to Buffy yawning.). Although it’s true that Buffy is beautiful, and supernatural, and profoundly moral, she is also very human, and the writing is very concerned with that humanity. Season five in particular, as I’ve mentioned, is preoccupied with the duality of Buffy’s mythic and mortal nature. Thus it becomes significant that Buffy is assigned such a heightened role in Spike’s chivalric narrative. Just Spike is at once Lancelot and Don Quixote, Buffy is at once Achilles, Dulcinea, and a coming-of-age protagonist. 

And part of the “lesson” of Spike’s arc is for him to see both sides of the roles they embody. One of my favorite things about the scene in Buffy’s house in “The Gift” is how adroitly it conveys the dualities of both Buffy and Spike with simple, but poetic imagery and language. Buffy stands above Spike on her steps, conveying her elevated role, and Spike honors the way her heroic status has inspired him by physically looking up to her as he explains that he expects nothing from her. But by expecting nothing from her, and promising to protect her sister, he also honors the fact that she is a real person with no obligation to him, and a younger sister she cares about more than anything. He also honors his own duality by at once making Knightly promises, and acknowledging that he sees through his former delusions: “I know that I’m a monster, but you treat me like a man.” In “Fool For Love” he tried to acknowledge the same duality of realism and romance, by declaring to Cecily that “I know I’m a bad poet, but I’m a good man.” But at the time, he was an innocent, whose desire to be seen, and whose romantic avoidance of “dark, ugly things”, left him unprepared to understand how Cecily really saw him (similar to Spike’s insistence in “Crush” that what he and Buffy have “isn’t pretty, but it’s real” just before Buffy locks him out). Spike is a character defined simultaneously by continuous disillusionment and dogged aspiration, which is why he makes perfect sense as a character to embody a season torn between the pain of being human, and the wonder of the gift of love.

Fittingly, the season ends with Spike’s most devastating loss of innocence of all. He fails to be the hero for Buffy or Dawn (note that Knightly language he uses on the tower: “I made a promise to a lady”), and he loses the woman he loves. He may have become more virtuous, but unlike in a chivalric romance, that virtue wins him neither Buffy, nor something flattering like “world reknown.” The climax of the “The Gift” is full of romance—a god, a troll hammer, a damsel on a tower, a heroic self-sacrifice, a vampire transformed into a Knight—but the end result is that Buffy is dead, in part because he wasn’t good enough, and all that he and the Scoobies can do is grieve. Stories got Spike nothing, even when reality finally lived up to them. It is a swan song to the myths of childhood, and on the other side of Glory’s portal, Spike and the other characters will have to confront a world where those myths have been left behind.

part 4: “But I can’t fool myself. Or Spike, for some reason.”: Buffy and Spike as a blended self

[ettadunham]

A Buffy rewatch 7x01 Lessons

aka redemption, nostalgia, and the circle of storytelling

We did it, guys! We made it to the last season! Also, hello if you’re new, and stumbled upon this without context. As usual, these impromptu text posts are the product of my fevered mind as I rant about the episode I just watched for an hour (okay, sometimes perhaps two). Anything goes!

And in today’s episode it’s the beginning of the end, as it’s relentlessly signaled towards the audience.

I’ll be honest, in the pantheon of Buffy season openers I find Lessons to be somewhat… middling. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of good stuff here, but there are parts of the main storyline that are just frustratingly inconsequential.

Let’s not beat around the bush – I’m mainly talking about Dawn’s new friends here. It’s obvious what the show is doing here, having Dawn form a friendship with two other misfit students and fighting demons on her first day of high school. We’re clearly going back to the beginnings. It’s what the Master aka the First tells us as well. Invoking the show’s very first episode and showing the next generation taking on that mantle.

(Also, that scene of the Fist appearing to Spike as all the Big Bads is still a lot. The music! Drusilla! You got me there, show. You got me right in my nostalgia feels.)

Which is a nice and cool thought. I love that. I love Dawn here. I just wish that the friends she makes actually appeared beyond this one single episode.

Imagine if one of those kids were Cassie! Or Amanda! I know that it’s tough to plan out these kinds of things, but the show’s done it in the past – or at the very least, set up a consistent group of background characters they could always go back to.

There are so many minor characters all over the Buffyverse, who were plucked out of that canvas and had their own little arcs through a few cameos. Think of Chantarelle, Amy, Harmony, or even Jonathan. And these characters weren’t set up to have as big of a role as they eventually got; the writers just saw an opportunity to develop them.

Meanwhile we’ve got these two kids, who this episode codes as part of our new Scooby gang. And we never see them again.

That’s just a bummer.

And it takes away a lot from the main action for me. Again, I like the idea of doing this, going back to high school as the beginning of a new cycle, where life as a teenager is hell… But I also wish I was more invested in the fate of these kids beyond Dawn.

On the plus side, I’m definitely a fan of Prinicipal Wood, and his lack of subtlety when it comes to his involvement with the supernatural. He’s like dropping hints that he knows what’s up, instead of just straight up telling Buffy that his mom was a Slayer. So is it any wonder that it’s getting picked up as shady on Buffy’s end?

He’s doing his best though, guys!! He’s got a lot of mommy issues. Give him a break.

Spike too has his own issues (which we’ll talk about in relation to Robin too). It’s a stark contrast, seeing a newly ensouled Spike here, laughing maniacally at Buffy asking him if he’s real. So are the cuts on his chest, marking his attempts at trying to cut his own heart out.

I don’t feel adequate enough to talk about that in depth. This is self-harm territory. But there’s also obviously something very specific about Spike trying to get at his own heart too in a metaphoric sense. Sure, through the heart is one of the ways a vampire can be killed, but he didn’t try to stake himself.

Spike’s a romantic. It’s one of his core traits that’s followed him through all of his incarnations. Even as a soulless vampire, he was a romantic. Except then, that side of him became twisted. As he was incapable of experiencing love in its entirety, this alter ego of his focused on what was left. Dependence. Obsession. Possession.

Spike as a vampire also reveled in his passions, and so to him violence, sex and love were all the same. They all came from the same place.

It’s no wonder then that the first thing Spike does after getting his soul back is to try and get rid of his heart. The thing that made him do all those things, even before he became a vampire.

Discussing redemption on Buffy is interesting to me, because this isn’t the show where that’s a central motive. Those stories happen over at Angel.

So, from that perspective, seeing how Willow’s story is handled here makes complete sense to me.

You know, I’ve read the hot takes about how Willow should be facing more consequences for her actions. But let me ask you this: what could possibly be worse for Willow than losing Tara?

Here’s another: how would punishing her be helpful?

And if your answer is “because murder should be punished because we live in a society”, that’s a good point. It is indeed how most of our society functions. For a reason.

But the show has been proposing for many seasons now, that normal societal rules don’t always apply in Buffy’s world. As a result, Buffy herself is positioned as the one with the power to decide how to handle any situation. Something that Faith already tells her in season 3; but Buffy rejects that idea then. At that time, she hasn’t even severed her ties with the Council yet, and was unprepared for that level of responsibility.

The Buffy of season 7 however not only recognizes her power, but embraces it. She is the law.

Which means that she can set her own principals and examples outside of society. And you can call Buffy self-righteous or whatever anyway you want, but she was never one for punishments.

Buffy always protects. If there’s a threat, she fights it, and if it’s neutralized, she lets it go. That’s why she never killed Spike after he was chipped. That’s why she didn’t kill Ben.

Buffy’s not vindictive and gives everyone the chance to grow; and in turn, so does the show.

“But… what about Faith?” – you say, predictably. I of course knew you were gonna bring her up. Mostly because you are currently just a voice in my head, arguing with my much more advanced logic.

Ah, yes. Let’s talk about Faith.

Specifically, let’s talk Faith in Consequences.

Hey, remember Consequences? The episode in which Buffy is trying to make Faith face up to her actions while also protecting her? The one where they argue about them being the law, and Buffy rejecting that specifically because Faith posits that they shouldn’t take responsibility for what they do?

More importantly, I want to emphasize this: with the gang, Buffy argues for Faith. She may not have quite embraced her role here yet as the law, but it’s clear where her head is at. She even asks for Angel’s help to keep Faith from becoming a threat.

Faith of course has her own set of issues that pushes her over to the dark side, but that doesn’t become evident for a few more episodes to the rest of the group. And I’d argue that it’s largely due to Buffy that Faith is even welcomed back for that short period of time.

Of course, comparing that to Willow’s murder is still not a good fit. Faith killed someone by accident at that point. Willow was going on a vengeance trip.

So let’s fast-forward to season 4. Where Faith wakes up and the gang doesn’t know how to deal with her.

Now, I criticized Buffy’s approach there, saying that she only seems to be preparing for two options here. Faith is either still a threat that needs to be dealt with, or she regrets her actions, in which case, there’s nothing to worry about.

Faith’s state of mind is of course a bit more complicated than that in the episode, but notice something important. Buffy doesn’t want to fight or punish Faith if it’s not necessary, even though at this point, she definitely did more than enough murder. When they meet, she tells her so. “It doesn’t have to be like this, you know.”

And for Buffy, that’s genuinely true.

After what goes down, Buffy’s pissed at Faith though. And yet we only see that side of Buffy on Angel the series. Where redemption for Faith becomes a central conflict, and one that’s ultimately resolved by her taking responsibility for her actions, and giving herself up to the police. A justice system that’s operating under normal societal rules.

And for Faith’s arc, that works. Part of her ongoing struggle was facing up and dealing with what she’s done, so this gave her the opportunity.

That however, isn’t always the case. Mostly because prison systems overall are largely unhelpful in actually rehabilitating people, but that’s a hot take for another day.

Narratively of course we still want that sense of fulfillment. We want to see the characters we love redeem themselves, and we want to be satisfied that it’s earned. But for me, that’s there with Willow as much as it’s there with Faith. It’s just that beyond the difference in thematic approach between the shows, their arcs just aren’t a one-to-one comparison.

Willow isn’t in denial about what she’s done. And she’s been dealt enough punishment as it is, even if it wasn’t any consequence of her own actions. By societal rules, she should be in prison, but because Buffy operates outside of those, Willow instead gets to have help, support and lessons.

And that’s kind of fascinating.

GILES:  “Do you want to be punished?” WILLOW:  “I wanna be Willow.”

I haven’t talked about Dawn nearly enough, but just know that I love her.

That is all.