This weekend, my wife and I finished watching Joss Whedon’s television opus, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show of seven seasons which had taken over our evenings. I now hope to get more reading and writing done after our son goes to bed. We just have to fight the temptation to watch Angel, Dollhouse, or, once again, Buffy.
We’d seen a few episodes of Buffy here and there and were entertained, but hardly hooked. It was not until we started from the very beginning and watched the series in order that we recognized Whedon and company’s masterful storytelling. We knew Whedon’s genius from seeing Firefly, but the world of Buffy hadn’t tempted us the same way. I still think the short-lived western in space is a better work of art than Buffy, but Buffy deserves the praise and popularity it’s received. The show is smart, mythological, metaphorical, genuinely emotional, funny as hell, and morally dramatic. Don’t let the cheesy title or make-up fool you; Buffy is serious literary art.
Almost all of the characters are well defined, rounded, and memorable, but I have to say that I found Spike the most interesting. He’s the most humorous character, in my opinion, or at least among the funniest, but he is perhaps also the most developed and explored. He’s one of two vampires who regain their lost souls, but unlike Angel, who had his soul thrust upon him by a gypsy curse, Spike seeks his soul while still a demonic vampire. In the Buffy mythology, humans who become vampires retain their personalities and knowledge, but lose their souls, the core of their personhood. They are demons in human-like bodies, with a demon’s evil will and dark power.
When we first meet Spike, he’s researching a way to kill Buffy, whose fated vocation is slaying vampires and other demons. Spike has killed two slayers in his death, no easy feat even for a powerful vampire, but Buffy proves too powerful for him. He later teams up with Buffy, not out of any good motive, but for mutual benefit. He’s back to trying to kill her soon enough, though. In Season Four, the military, researching the demonic, places a computer chip in Spike’s brain that prevents him from attacking humans. This basically neuters him for almost the rest of the series; all of Spike’s various attempts to remove the chip fail.
We learn more about Spike’s past as the series progresses. Before he became a vampire, he was an overly sentimental and love-sick poet named William. His poetry was terrible and didn’t win him the heart of his beloved. He was mocked and scorned and ridiculed. Interestingly, even after be became a vampire, Spike seemed mostly motivated by love. He made his mother a vampire, wanting her to be with him forever. His actions in the second and third seasons revolve around his love for Drusilla, the vampire who sired him. As you might guess, Spike falls in love with Buffy. His love for Buffy ultimately leads him to undergo a series of tortures by a very powerful being who can give him back his soul.
Spike seems unique among vampires in that he becomes motivated by the good without possessing a soul. Perhaps other vampires are capable of this as well: the moral structure of Buffy isn’t entirely clear on this point. Demons are not spiritual entities or fallen angels, but ugly physical beings of immense strength that often have horns, scales, and multiple bumps. The mythology is more pagan than Christian. In any case, Spike’s story reveals a truth very much at home in the Christian imagination.
Buffy, like all vampire slayers, has superhuman strength which she uses to fight the forces of darkness, but her method of fighting evil is basically the same as the world’s typical way of fighting evil: she slays the evildoers. Spike’s story shows another, deeper, and ultimately more triumphant way of fighting evil: saving the evildoer. While several of Buffy’s friends would see Spike turned to ashes, Buffy sees in Spike hope for redemption, and she’s willing to risk their physical safety to give Spike the opportunity to become more human. What makes Season Seven’s final victory possible isn’t just the power of the slayer, the power to kill, but Spike’s act of loving self-sacrifice. His gift of self presents a greater and more fundamental triumph over evil than destroying evil men, vampires, and demons. Buffy’s vocation of slaying vampires is just, but also tragic. Spike shows that every slain vampire isn’t ultimately a victory, but a failure, a failure to redeem, a finality marked by the triumph of evil over a vampire.
The issue of redemption (and corruption) gets played out even further in the last season of Angel, when (surprise, surprise) Spike returns. This leads to the fact that there are now two heroes, two vampires with a soul — but there is a difference, since Spike won his, it is not a curse on him, so he doesn’t have to worry about happiness in the way Angel does. Early on, the rivalry between the two is quite strong, as Spike tries to become the hero while Angel is apparently becoming corrupt.
Sweet. We do intend to watch Angel, but time does not offer us the opportunity at present. Whedon has a way of monopolizing our lives. I look forward to the series!
I used to watch Buffy occasionally at the house of a friend who liked the show, and the thing that struck me about the show was the ever-present themes and props that pointed toward S&M sex – the characters seemed to wear lots of tight leather, the sets often featured whips and restraint devices of various kinds and in general often looked like S&M clubs, the relationship between Buffy and Spike had a certain quality of her being “taken” and so on.
Sexuality is a strong theme in the series: it’s about vampires, after all. I can’t speak to the authorial intent, but I suspect that the objects you noticed are better interpreted as general images and metaphors of self-destruction, depravity, addiction, captivity, stain, and possessiveness.
Kyle,
I can’t believe this has only gotten four comments. We love Buffy, and like you, our favorite character, by far, is Spike.
Thank you for pointing out the emptiness of slaying vampires in terms of actually combatting evil. I don’t think I’ve seen that pointed out before. The toll that slaying takes on Buffy is a recurring theme over the years, and I like the way your analysis of Spike explains it. Of course, she HAS to slay the vampires, to protect the living, but every slain vampire is also a triumph of evil. No wonder it is such a burden to her. (OH! Is that part of why Spike can hit her after she comes back? Because her slaying is sort of a cooperation in evil? No, that doesn’t work, because she’d done plenty of slaying before. Phooey.)
Anyway, the theme of love as sacrifice comes up more often than just at the series finale, but I like the way you see Spike’s sacrificial love as the only real triumph over the evil represented by vampires and demons, through redemption rather than death and killing.
Finally, repsonding to: “I now hope to get more reading and writing done after our son goes to bed.” This made me smile. It was quite a few years ago that we would tuck our sons in and then start the recorded episode of Buffy, and now they are older and have seen the shows themselves. Still, the sound of the Nerf Herders evokes lots of falling-asleep memories for my younger son.
Now you have to re-watch the whole series and write some more!
Grrr. Arggh.
R
I loved the series, and one of the things that has always stuck in my mind is that although there was very little religion in the show, nevertheless when Willow brought Buffy back from the dead, I thought it was absolutely devastating that Buffy had been in what presumably was heaven. (I think it may have been explicitly stated.) She had finally been at peace, and those who loved her thoughtlessly brought her back. As I recall, she tried to keep them from realizing the gravity of what they had done, but they did find out.
Regarding the allegations of S&M trappings, there was a tiny moment in one show where someone observed that Spike was trying to look like Billy Idol, and Buffy remarked that Billy Idol actually had gotten the look from Spike. So it’s not that we detect an S&M look in vampires, but rather that we see a vampirish look in S&M gear. I hope I cleared that up.
Thanks, R. Adding to what I wrote, Spike fascinates me because he’s a character of believable consistency yet believably immense variety. The character himself, helped by the actor playing him, has a range of personalities: he develops a great deal in the series, yet remains himself. I really liked how different he looked and acted as the pathetic poet William, yet how William remained in keys ways in the villain Spike. One of my favorite episodes is the one in which Spike returns to Sunnydale in an effort to win back Drusilla’s love. His line to Buffy, “I may be love’s bitch, but at least I’m man enough to admit it,” captures him perfectly.
David,
Yeah, the writers and actors did a fabulous job of having the characters keep devastating secrets from one another – one of them being Buffy’s time in Heaven following her death – and showing with subtlety the poison that secrecy had on their friendships. The episode in which all the beans we spilled, the musical “Once More with Feeling,” was brilliant.
There were thousands of tiny moments throughout the series that were priceless. I will never forget Spike watching television in that crypt of his (funny enough in itself), when he stands up and shouts at the screen, “”Pacey, you blind idiot, can’t you see that she doesn’t love you?” He was watching Dawson’s Creek!
David:
Or
“Timmy’s down the bloody well!”
Yes, Spike’s tv-watching was a lot of fun. What did he watch with Joyce and/or Dawn when Buffy hid them in his crypt? I forget. But he loved his soaps.
R