Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Myth, Metaphor & Morality

by Field, Mark

  Adding to the latter view is the fact that Buffy stopped Xander from going after Spike. I’m not sure I have a good explanation for why Buffy stopped Xander. Here’s one from Yoda at AtPO:

  “So in this bathroom scene I see Buffy as a sad & confused woman who cares for someone she feels she shouldn’t mostly because she feels that she can’t trust him.

  Her defenses are down both emotionally & physically. Spike is someone she has come to care about and to some degree trust.

  So when he betrays that trust by forcing himself on her she reacts as a woman not a Slayer. Her actions are emotional not logical. The tears and pleas are not so much that she is afraid of him physically but rather she is begging & pleading because she so desperately wants to be able to trust him.

  I think she wants to believe that he has changed and can love her the way she wants to be loved, but also knows that as long as he doesn't have a reliable moral compass, he's a bad risk. And I think that is what's killing her. And that is why she pushes him away, in part.

  I also think she is afraid that if she does fall in love with Spike, that she will lose herself to her darkness. That the darkness will be all that is left of her, because it is such a significant part of her. And I think this scares her to death.

  A long time ago Angelus told Spike that the only way to kill Buffy is to love her. He recognized that Buffy’s Achilles heel is her love. If she loves you she will let you close enough to hurt her. And as Spike said in Dead Things "You only hurt the ones you love".

  I think by Buffy allowing that scene to play out as far as it did it shows that Buffy has let Spike into her heart whether she admits it to herself or not. He couldn't have hurt her so badly otherwise.”

  After the episode aired, there was a lot of screaming discussion about whether Spike’s actions “really” amounted to attempted rape. From a strictly legal point of view, there is room for doubt. I’m not going to repeat the arguments because they’re tedious and not terribly enlightening for non-lawyers. More important for me now is a point I’ve made before, namely that it doesn’t matter how an action would be treated in real life, what matters is how it’s treated within the show. Within the show it was attempted rape, even if that seems to contradict the intended nuance. That may affect our judgment of the writing, but it doesn’t change the nature of the scene within the plot.

  I’ll let shadowkat criticize the writing:

  “Buffy and Spike engaged in a violent sexual relationship, often starting with Buffy saying no - only to eventually give in and attack him sexually as she does in Smashed,

  Tabula Rasa (kissing scene), Gone. The pushme -pullme relationship was what was painful to watch. She says no but means yes…. Characterwise? It made sense. Buffy appeared to be doing what I’ve seen many people do, excusing her actions by making them someone else's fault.

  "Why do I let Spike do these things to me? Why do I let Spike hurt me?" The audience, or at least a portion of it, was beginning to root for Spike to slap the living hell out of Buffy. "Tell me you love me. Tell me you want me." Bam!

  This was a risky move on the part of the writers - which they probably hoped worked because Spike was an amoral vampire, the villain…. Unfortunately watching Buffy beat up Spike, push Spike, pull Spike, manipulate Spike while Spike obviously loved her beyond reason was not making Spike inherently evil to the viewer - it was making Buffy seem that way to some, not all the viewers. I've rewatched the episodes - you can literally watch them three ways. I can see it from the view that Spike is seducing her and is obsessive and ruthless and in love all at the same time. And yes I like the fact you can see it both ways - very intriguing. But and this is a huge But, if you are going to end this with an attempted rape - you better damn well make the character who’s the intended victim a little more sympathetic, otherwise half your audience is going to be rooting for the wrong character. And that is what happened and that is what continues to disturb me on a weird horrible level.”

  For me, the most interesting issue within the accepted mythology of the show was Spike’s own reaction to the attempted rape. There were two components of that. First was the look of horror on his face after Buffy kicked him off. He was so shocked that he left his treasured duster, the very symbol of his identity as a Big Bad, on the stairs for Xander to find. Think about that for a minute -- a vampire understands that he has done wrong and is upset by it.

  The second was this dialogue with Clem:

  SPIKE: (shakily) What have I done?

  Beat. Spike frowns, looks bemused.

  SPIKE: Why *didn't* I do it?

  Think about this in the context of vampires. They are, by definition, without conscience: “ANGEL: When you become a vampire the demon takes your body, but it doesn't get your soul. That's gone! No conscience, no remorse... It's an easy way to live.” (Angel) And yet Spike seems to express remorse, or at least puzzlement, about his attack. That shouldn’t happen with a vampire. It didn’t even happen with Faith after she tried to rape/kill Xander in Consequences. Something has made Spike different, whether it’s the chip or the human nature which informs the vampire he became.

  Keep this in mind, because we’re nearing the denouement of Spike’s “Clockwork Orange” journey. As shadowkat put it, “I think the chip is irrelevant now. Spike has changed. He just doesn't know it yet. This episode and that scene had to happen in order for him to find out. In Btvs - a character has to hit rock bottom before he can learn what he's made of and truly change. Spike just did.”

  I’ve deliberately saved the saddest event for last, just as it occurred in the episode. In my view, we’re supposed to see Tara as the price of Buffy’s resurrection. Two factors lead me to conclude that Tara’s death was Willow’s price. What I’m about to say about the first one requires mild thematic spoilers for the AtS episode, The Price. This aired the week before Seeing Red. The entire episode revolves around thaumogenesis and the “cosmic price” (Cordy’s phrase) for dark magic. For me, that was a signal of what was to come, and the obvious price for Willow to pay was Tara. (As a side note, I really strongly didn’t appreciate the use of an AtS episode to spoil me for Buffy.)

  The other factor comes from the events of S6 themselves. In After Life Spike said that there was “always” a price for magic. As I’ve pointed out, the first three episodes of every season set the themes, and After Life was the third episode of S6. Now, as I suggested in my post on that episode, Spike’s statement wasn’t true in general, but it still could be the case that something as serious as a resurrection spell might demand a price:

  XANDER: We made a demon? Bad us.

  WILLOW: Thaumogenesis is when doing a spell actually creates a being. In this case it was like, a, a side-effect, I guess. Like a price.

  DAWN: What?

  WILLOW: Think of it like, the world doesn't like you getting something for free, and we asked for this huge gift. Buffy. A-and so the world said, 'fine, but if you have that, you have to take this too.' And it made the demon.

  The kicker is that the demon in After Life was not the price after all. As Anya warned them, “Well, technically, that's not a price. That's a gift with purchase.” Tara’s fate was sealed when Willow killed the fawn, and the price remained to be paid. Vino de madre.

  Finally, there’s the “lesbian cliché” debate surrounding Tara’s death. I wasn’t aware of the stereotype when the show aired, so this didn’t bother me at first watching. Once I understood the point, I thought then and still do that the writers should have been more careful about the way they set up Tara’s death; they could have done more to avoid the stereotype. That said, I don’t think the writers intended to convey that Tara was punished for being gay. There was moral significance in Tara’s life; her death was simply tragedy.

  Trivia notes: (1) The title is a pun. In English idiom, “to see red” means to get furiously angry, which is true of Xander, of Warren, and of Willow. Tara “sees Red” in the sense of Willow’s nickname, the, uh, orbs are red, and at the very end
Willow’s eyes turn red to connect the color to the idiom. (2) Tara told Willow that Buffy told her that she was sleeping with Spike. Buffy didn’t actually use those words in their conversation at the end of Dead Things, but it was pretty clear that she was. (3) Willow offered to “Sherlock around”, referring to Sherlock Holmes. (4) The figurine Buffy poked while searching the Trio’s lair was that of Vampirella. (5) Anya mentioned “lies flying around like little monkeys”, referring to the winged monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. (5) Andrew called the demon ‘Puf’N’Stuff’, for which see the link. (6) Andrew mentioned Siegfried & Roy, the magicians and entertainers. (7) Andrew called Jonathan “skin job”, which is reference to the movie Blade Runner. (8) Xander referred to himself as “Chicken of the Sea”, which is the brand name for canned tuna, but also has a pun on the word “chicken” as meaning a coward. (9) Spike’s attitude towards love in his conversation with Buffy was the same as he’s had since Lover’s Walk. (10) I think it’s plausible to see the scene between Warren and Katrina in the bar in Dead Things as prefiguring Buffy’s conversation with Spike here. (11) Jonathan referred to Warren as “Charles Atlas”, who was famous for advertising a bodybuilding regimen to turn weak men into strong. (12) This sentence from Andrew contains a string of Star Trek references: “He's Picard, you're Deanna Troi. Get used to the feeling, Betazoid.” (13) Warren called Xander “Shemp”, referring to Shemp Howard, an occasional member of The Three Stooges. (14) Xander called Warren “Mighty Mouse”, referring to the cartoon character. (15) Clem wanted to watch Knight Rider on TV, which was a 1980s show. (16) Clem’s line “love’s a funny thing” is what Spike said when he left Buffy and Angel in Lover’s Walk. (17) The park which the Trio robbed was called “Wild River Adventure”, after the Wild Rivers franchise in the US. (18) James Marsters said later that the attempted rape scene was very difficult for him and that he’d never do another.

  Villains

  “Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles…”

  I think Villains is an excellent episode, but it presents us with some difficult ethical issues. I’ll hold off on those for a bit and start with my metaphorical reading of the episode because I think it’s crucial to Buffy’s journey in S6.

  The whole point of Seeing Red was to send Willow into the murderous rage we see here in Villains. But the show isn’t about Willow, it’s about Buffy, so I’m inclined to read the story as metaphor (surprise!). Willow’s rage at Warren – a murderer, yes, but also an attempted rapist – can be seen metaphorically as the outward expression of Buffy’s repressed rage at Warren, but also at Spike.

  Willow’s rage also reflects her own storyline, of course. It’s not just Tara’s murder. Magic allows Willow to express the anger she feels at having to bear a lifetime of unjustified pain (“the softer side of Sears”) and the inability to put a stop to it. Again, though, we might see this as an allegory of Buffy’s own struggle to be the Slayer and the pain she has felt all season at being pulled back from heaven.

  In my reading, there’s another aspect to the metaphor and the explosion of rage by Buffy’s metaphorical spirit serves as an essential step in Buffy’s own progress. I’ll complete the thought in my discussion of the finale.

  On another metaphorical point, Xander says that he’s had the blood of his friends on his hands. That’s an odd way to put it; the phrase usually implies some culpability. Is he reconsidering his participation in resurrecting Buffy because he now sees the price?

  Now to the ethical issues. The first involves Buffy’s decision to let Dawn stay with Spike. It’s hard to imagine that any sentient woman would entrust her kid sister with someone who just attempted to rape her. We might say that Buffy wasn’t trusting Spike, she was trusting the chip. But that can’t be the explanation. A purely evil Spike could simply arrange for someone else to harm Dawn, just as he tried to do to Buffy and the SG with Adam in S4. Buffy knows that he won’t do that, which means that she knows that Spike can restrain himself. This complication is fascinating in its interplay with the soul canon and Spike’s “Clockwork Orange” journey, but it adds to my doubts about the artistic choices in Seeing Red.

  I mentioned Spike, but I’m not going to discuss his actions here. The dialogue is still ambiguous about what he’s asking from the Cave Demon, but we’ll know soon enough and I’ll talk about it then.

  Since Wrecked, the show has used the magic/drugs metaphor to represent Willow’s struggle for self-control. Here, in the beautiful, brilliant image in the Magic Box, we see her “overdose” by taking in the contents of the dark magic books. She then uses that power to seek out and kill Warren. Put aside the issue of whether Warren “deserved” his fate; I’ll get to that below. The second ethical issue is this: does the fact that she was “under the influence” (at least metaphorically) excuse her conduct in killing Warren?

  I’ve seen many people argue that it does. Buffy herself suggests that the power itself is exercising agency rather than Willow: “And now she's messing with forces that want to hurt her. All of us.” The story line, however, doesn’t support Buffy’s attempt to defend her friend. Willow left Tara’s body cold and alone in the house before she absorbed the dark magics. The first thing Willow did after absorbing them was heal Buffy. If she were under the thrall of dark forces, that’s hardly something they would command her to do. No, that was still Willow, exercising moral agency. Even at the end we saw flashes of Willow:

  “WILLOW: The pain will be unbearable, but you won't be able to move. Bullet usually travels faster than this, of course. But the dying? It'll seem like it takes forever.

  She pauses, as if affected by her own words, looking at the little wound on Warren's chest. Warren just grunts and squeezes his eyes shut in pain.

  WILLOW: Something, isn't it? (pensively) One tiny piece of metal destroys everything. (Warren groaning loudly) It ripped her insides out ... took her light away. From me. From the world.

  Now she looks Warren in the eye again, re-focusing.”

  In any event, from the standpoint of the law Buffy’ “the magic made her do it” excuse is wrong and must be wrong. The legal system doesn’t recognize any such “under the influence” defense in the circumstances we see here. Let’s analogize it to a real world situation. Suppose you go out and get high on PCP in order to generate the courage to murder someone, and then use your drugged state as a defense. The law can’t accept this defense – you intended to use the drug to aid you in the crime, just as Willow here intended the magic to help her kill Warren. Her intent to kill came before the “drug”, and that’s key to the issue of murder. Thus, the magic/drugs metaphor has yet another dubious consequence – blurring Willow’s guilt – even though it should not.

  Now, did Warren “deserve” to die (putting aside for the moment the nature of his death)? Xander and Dawn express the view of many that he deserves death. Buffy disagrees, and she states what has been her code all along (since at least Gingerbread): “Being a Slayer doesn't give me a license to kill. Warren's human. … [T]he human world has its own rules for dealing with people like him.” By going after Warren, Willow is violating not just the legal rules which apply to all of us in the real world – we don’t allow vengeance by private parties – but the code Buffy lives by in her world.

  I think it’s important to understand the reason behind Buffy’s code. It’s not arbitrary at all. She has always made a distinction between the souled and the unsouled. The difference is critical: the former can be redeemed. Buffy’s “license to kill” can only work if those she slays are irredeemable. Horrible as Warren was, Willow acted the part of a vengeance demon when she tracked him down. Buffy didn’t want to “let Willow destroy herself” by killing Warren, but she got there too late to accomplish her goal.

  “Bored now” is probably the most well-known phrase from the entire series. It’s hard to convey the chill I got when I heard Willow say those words. What followed gets my vote as the most shocking scene ever shown on network television. I’ll let DEN
describe his reaction: “The fact that Warren has no chance at all in his confrontation with Willow is even more disturbing. In most "vengeance stories" the moral ambiguities are blurred by making the avenger fight against heavy odds, or by creating a showdown with at least the structure of a fair fight. But Dark Willow uses her power to torture Warren in a fashion our culture reserves for the worst villains. … And for what? On the other side or in the next incarnation, will not Tara shrink from what Willow has become? It has been well said: "if you seek revenge, first dig two graves."

  “Alas, poor Willow. I knew her dear viewer: a woman of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy…. and now, how abhorred in my imagination she is! My gorge rises at it.”

  Trivia notes: (1) Willow invoked Osiris to bring Tara back to life. That was the god she invoked to resurrect Buffy in Bargaining. (2) The fact that Tara died “by natural order” was a distinction made in Bargaining between Joyce’s death and Buffy’s. (3) Jonathan sarcastically referred to Andrew as “Dragnet” after the TV show of that name. (4) Jonathan didn’t want to become a “butt monkey”, a slang term meaning someone who is dominated by everyone around them. (5) Andrew said Sunnydale was “like Mayberry”, a phrase used by Mr. Trick in Faith, Hope & Trick, and referring to the TV sitcom The Andy Griffith Show. (6) Andrew and Jonathan mentioned 3 movies starring Mathew Broderick: War Games, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and The Producers. (7) The scene of Willow sucking the magic out of the books was pre-figured in Smashed when she used magic to take information out of her computer. (Drew Greenberg, Smashed commentary) (8) Some viewers thought that Buffy flat lined in the hospital. In fact, that was just the disruption to the equipment caused by Willow’s magic, similar to the way the lights blew out in the Magic Box when she walked in. Buffy came close to dying, no doubt, but this wasn’t a third death. (9) Warren said he came “bearing dead presidents”, a slang phrase for bills of various denominations. (10) Warren called Rack “Nostradamus”, a prophet. (11) Xander suggested that Willow had gotten “the makeover of the damned”, referring to the movie Queen of the Damned. (12) Xander also called Willow “Puppet Master”, referring to the film of that title. (13) Xander described Willow as “off the wagon”, a slang phrase meaning that Willow has started “drinking” again. (14) Clem offered Dawn some “Country Time”, a brand name of lemonade. (15) Willow said that Buffy was Warren’s “Big O”, a slang phrase meaning he got off on trying to kill her. (16) “Bored now” was said by VampWillow in The Wish and Doppelgangland. (17) Willow’s story here takes its inspiration from the Dark Phoenix story in X-Men comics. (18) The fact that Amber Benson and Adam Busch were a couple for years (see trivia notes to IWMTLY) is notably ironic.