I wrote this as an e-mail to my friend Olivia, who'd just seen Seeing Red down in Australia. She shared my attitude of "what the fuck?" This isn't a polished essay with nicely aligned points and coherent thoughts; in fact, I realize it's rather incoherent in a way, but that's how I feel. This is basically a screed, I guess, an impassioned screed and one I wrote only recently because I haven't been able to bring myself to rewatch or talk about the episode since it aired.
It seems to me that if you're going to spend three years developing a character from interesting bad guy into reluctantly heroic semi-good guy, you wouldn't really want to tell people that the feelings you've coaxed along in them for those three years by making him more and more likable and heroic are actually in fact misplaced, false, founded on something completely wrong, and ha ha ha, aren't we clever, we reminded you he's evil by making him a rapist and don't you feel awful now for loving him? It's one thing to yank the chains of your viewers, show them things they may not want to see or shake them out of complacency and expectation, but I fear it's another thing entirely to say "the guy you like and want to care about is in fact the lowest scum of the earth, he's now a rapist of someone he professes to love." This is a shaking no one needs.
Almost from the beginning of his appearances on Buffy, Spike was different. We were interested in Dru, but we'd never have wanted her to be a regular character -- she would have worn very thin for anyone no matter how funny they found her, but Spike was spectacular. Even people who aren't attracted to him the way I am love him as a character. He was so good they couldn't kill him off as planned, he was so good they brought him back as soon as they had the chance, and he was so good he became the second lead player this year. So for all this time, since his second season appearances, his one shot on third season, and then being a regular on fourth, we've been shown more and more of Spike, led into believing in him more and more, wanting to see the fascinating turns of development in his character, changing with him, growing along with him in this bizarre journey he's on. Only now, we're told, he's so bad that all the changes he's been through meant nothing (and ostensibly are supposed to be meaningless to us now too). He's a would-be rapist of his love, and we are the lovers of a rapist. And I'm not one of those fans who think rape is sexy and cool.
Do I think Spike has never raped before? Absolutely not -- of course he has. He's done unspeakable things and would have continued to do so if the chip hadn't happened to him. But that's where the twisty-turny part of his character comes in. By virtue of chipping, he's been forced into this state of working inside the coded structure of humans. In the meantime he's learned how to interact with them, and even found things he enjoys with them besides feeding on them (all the Summers women, for instance). By slowing him down, removing him from the killing track, he's looked at things in a different way, and discovered things about himself. That's where he found out he loved Buffy. What bothers me is that by changing him as they have, the raping, pillaging, killing qualities about him have been changed as well, and his attack on Buffy takes what was a deeper, emotional need for acknowledgement from her, admission from her, and turns it into being about sex and power. I'm absolutely sure Spike's raped many times in his killing life. But that is about sex and power, something I never saw his feelings for Buffy as being about.
What a lot of people who like Spike and Spike with Buffy enjoy is that he's in this sort of forced redemptive situation. He doesn't want to be redeemed or atone for anything, but now he's kind of having to do this by virtue of his feelings for Buffy and because he's, as he put it in his inimitable style, "love's bitch." Merry called this "reverse corruption" -- where a character is forced to be more good than he is by nature, usually because he loves someone and wants to be loved in return. To earn their love. And it's best when the reverse corruptee doesn't want to do the good things, and grumbles all the way over it, just as Spike does. He's not nice. He's not good by nature. He's not a decent person. But he's been behaving in these ways because he feels something he never thought he'd feel, and he has to find some way of creating a better situation for himself. He's too smart not to do the right thing when it's required of him. That's why he's survived so long even when putting himself in danger.
Like I said the other day, Spike's animalistic, but he's not an animal. He lives in an animalistic way -- killing and feeding, nothing mechanized or farmed or civilized about it. He hunts and kills and he enjoys that he hunts and kills. Animals don't generally kill for pleasure or revenge, but Spike often does, because he's gone so far beyond what he was when he was human, and he wants to be rid of those human feelings of compassion and love, only... they keep coming back and biting him in the ass, no matter how many ruthless killings he engages in. He's stuck with it. And an animal wouldn't know that. An animal wouldn't exhibit any self control, wouldn't check himself when he knew he'd gone too far, wouldn't show compassion and concern and love. The best you can get from an animal is loyalty and the kind of dependent love I get from miss kitty -- not the complex layered stuff the characters on the show get from Spike. So I look at him and I don't see the animal who can't control his feelings to the point of where he tries to take it by force. I can see him being desperate for her to admit her feelings, to love him, and I can totally see him trying to coerce and pressure her, manipulate and push her in bad directions -- the evil stuff he's done before. But the one thing we've seen over and over is the clever, sensible, practical side of him, the side that also loves painfully and pitifully, and that side isn't going to go so far beyond coercion that it's rape. This was over the line of what Spike's shown of his animalistic side, and I hate, hate, hate it.
The nice thing about the show is that it hasn't mitigated his behavior. He's been sick and cruel and terrible and we've been shown this in all its disgusting glory -- gleefully killing slayers, murdering people right and left, bragging about his "one good day." But now it's as if they had to find some way to tell all the people who really liked this character, who were enjoying seeing him figure out how to reconcile all this with his love for someone good, that they were stupid and wrong and will be punished for "forgetting" that Spike is bad. I think there's always an element of redemptionists in fandom, and they have the stupid idea that if they like a character then they have to pretend he isn't bad because then it reflects something about them. The Krycek fans, I always thought, were the worst I've ever seen -- "He didn't kidnap Scully and he didn't kill Mulder's dad!! It was a drive-by shooting and he just happened to be there because he was bringing something to Pa Mulder! It was an accident! He was just in the room when Melissa Scully was killed! He didn't dooooo it!" But the thing is, not all of us who love Spike love him because we want to pretend he isn't what he is -- a soulless killer.
I like that he's a soulless killer. I like that the vampires on this show are not romanticized and haven't been given the Anne Rice phony luster of Gothic Romanticism and aren't they just misunderstood and beeeyoootiful? Vampires here in Buffyland are cruel, vicious, evil, venal, and vain. They are stone cold killers. They have no redeeeming characteristics except as foils for the good guys. This is a good thing. But I think that if you're going to have the character be semi-redeemed from this description, where he's been slowly bringing the audience with him into this new realm of behavior and feelings, then you bloody well don't get to tell the audience they shouldn't have gone there. When Angel was turned bad in second season, it was wonderfully, tragically Romantic and painful and all the good things. We couldn't believe that this good guy, Buffy's true love, was this evil. That's why it worked so well.
But from the beginning we've known Spike was Bad. And now he's been, slowly, drawn into the Good side, and just as the audience reaches their maximum sympathy point with him, just as we're all drawn into going, you know, I like this guy and I feel like Buffy's a shit for dumping on him and demanding he move on when he's given everything to her and I'd like to see how this will be resolved... they make him her attempted rapist. The lowest form of life in the human race. Knowing, I'm absolutely sure, that there can be no sympathy left for him after that. And I can see the Mutant Enemy staff just sitting around going, hah hah! It's so funny! All those poor little redemptionistas crying in their beer! We pulled a fast one on them.
Most of the time I can't understand the weeping over the whole lesbian = death thing that's been going on with the Tara/Willow fans. The overreaction and the... scathing quality of it, the irrationality of it, has made me run away from them because they don't discuss it in a way anyone can have differences about or want to at least have a back and forth about. But when I think of how I feel about Spike, when I really sit down and try to collect myself (I have not been able to bring myself to watch Seeing Red again, although I know I have to for various reasons, and I can barely talk about it without becoming unglued), I start to understand how... gutted the T/W fans feel. How betrayed. I get it.
I like that M.E. took me in different directions than I often wanted to go. I like it when someone challenges me and makes me feel like I don't know what to expect. Few things make me feel that way; there have been almost no surprises for me in film or TV for years. But this wasn't a good taking me in directions I didn't expect -- this was like someone shoving a knife in my face, threatening me, and I don't mean in a good way. This was telling me that the journey the writers and directors and production people had taken me on the past few years was actually leading me into the Blair Witch forest and I will never return from this dark place and oh, look, here's little bits of body parts for your trouble. This was telling me that the character is not worth my interest, that he isn't just irredeemable (and I don't really want him redeemed, I just want him there working on trying to be loved), he's a scum sucking rapist bastard who doesn't deserve to live, let alone deserve to get Buffy's affections. I feel kicked in the teeth. I like being kicked in the gut by something powerful and profoundly affecting; this was just getting my bicuspids rammed down my throat by a big pair of Doc Martenses.
I liked Spike as a character the moment he came on the screen, and then I loved him when he became a regular, and when he fell in love with Buffy, I looooooved him. That changed the equation for me drastically, because I like so wrong it's right, doomed and thwarted love stories. Even if they can't be together, there are ways to make Spike so disgusted and fed up that he'd want to change the chip thing. Making him a rapist was flat out unnecessary to the dramatic reasoning of making him leave. You can make him leave, humiliate him, in different ways. This didn't just degrade Buffy, it degraded Spike, and the fans who've endured what was an at times intolerably difficult season. I didn't think it was possible for me to get more upset than the horrible, pathetic sex against the wall in the alley scene in Doublemeat Palace, with Buffy making no eye contact and Spike desperately humping her as if neither of them were there; and then they did the even more horrible catwalk scene in Dead Things, which rang true in no way for either character, but hey -- they did! They sank lower, they were more degrading to the characters! They made Spike a rapist and Buffy a victim. The girl Joss once said was the antidote to all those little blonde girl victims in the alleys of horror movies is now... a victim. So hooray -- now Spike isn't just evil but interesting, wicked but wonderful, he's simply repulsive and worthless, and Our Hero Buffy is no longer heroic. Way to go, guys.
I don't know. I just... I keep wanting to be all open-minded and say, oh wow, I love the dramatic tension, and what are they going to do with Spike with a soul and he'll have guilt and all, but the thing is... he was having an interesting enough time trying to deal with Buffy's expectations of him and live his life to earn her affections, we didn't need that forced on us. I think the ending of the season was a dud -- they're backpedaling, they're saying, oh we meant to have Spike want a soul but ha ha, we tricked you into thinking he wanted the chip out to hurt her (and the truth is, if this was always their intention, they did a terrible, terrible job of writing this, which I don't usually expect from them), and now whee! Spike will have guilt and be angsty and stuff. It was a hell of a lot more fun early in 6th season when he and Buffy were trying to forge some kind of friendship, in shows like After Life, where we saw these tentative threads of who both these characters were becoming, or the musical, where the connection between them was jolted into life because of true, honest emotion.
The attempted rape wasn't true or honest. It was lame and forced and degrading to the characters and the fans. It gave us nothing dramatically that would affect us in the way good storytelling should (and why I didn't feel manipulated by Tara's death, because I felt it was very profound, like with Joyce or Jenny's deaths), it just cheapened a cheap and sleazy season, it cheapened a character we'd been investing our emotions and intellect in, and cheapened a show that is the best thing I've ever seen on TV.
And that's only part of how I feel, but I'm done now, because I realize I'm starting to sound like someone on the kitten board and foam is probably flying off my lips, and I don't want to be like that.