Squandering Spike
Jun. 18th, 2003 10:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynI’d mentioned that I had something to say about how Mutant Enemy never really understood what they had in the character of Spike and in James Marsters as an actor, and that too many people, including staff, chalked up the following he developed to mere “girls like bad boys” sophistry. After finally getting my season 4 DVDs late last week I watched a number of episodes with commentary tracks, and the feature interview with JM about Spike, and I’m more firmly convinced than ever that they clearly had no idea what they truly have — and wondering if it will change on Angel.
Doug Petrie’s comments in The Initiative convinced me of this, and David “Rape is funny!” Fury made it even worse in his deadly dull commentary (that man should never do comment tracks, ever). I normally like Petrie, but he said something I thought was key — that Spike is a horrible boyfriend, the worst boyfriend ever. Fury says, in the middle of his stultifying comments on Primeval, that Spike, no matter how good he tries to be and no matter what good deeds he accomplishes, is always going to be evil. He makes it very clear that, to him, Spike has no potential or positive qualities to build on. And Fury’s going to be in the Angel crew next year.
I’m not a Spike apologist — far from it. I liked him as he was prior to the soul; I preferred a guy who was without the usual human signatures we were supposed to believe meant something in the Buffyverse such as conscience, empathy, guilt, but who rose above limitations by choice to earn someone’s love. I never felt like that was a bad thing. The fact that he was essentially evil because he wasn’t possessed of a soul, but struggling against his nature for love (that reverse corruption thing I adore), made him fascinating to me. A lot of women are drawn to the bad boys simply because they’re naughty; but by reducing Spike’s appeal to that, saying that’s the only reason we like him, loses sight of a larger need that most people have for their fictional characters — someone struggling against their nature or struggling against the elements for a greater purpose, or to achieve something internally. It’s called conflict. Most good narratives have, at their heart, conflict in order for protagonists to achieve a goal — doesn’t matter if it’s solving a murder or just coming to terms with personal issues, it’s conflict, and it’s what drives us to follow stories. For Spike, the conflict came in what brought him to Sunnydale and to working with Buffy, later the chip, then falling for Buffy, then trying to discover what it meant to be good.
Oddly, JM seemed to get that to some degree. The comments he makes in the S4 feature Spike Me seem to indicate that he loved portraying all of Spike’s conflicts, his internal struggles, and he understood what made Spike tick. He calls Spike the best boyfriend ever, when he’s referring to what Spike did for Dru, and also what he’s willing to do for Buffy (the interview clearly takes place early in S6). Yet in direct contrast, the writers and other members of the creation team do not see Spike similarly — Joss is probably closest to how fans and JM see the character, but even he doesn’t say a lot about how much opportunity for conflict the character represented, or comment on Spike’s ambiguities. So the haphazard, scattershot writing of late S6 makes a sad kind of sense, because clearly, the character polarized the writing team — on one hand you’d get a positive take on his relationship to Buffy like Life Serial, then you’d get violent, out of character stuff like Dead Things, and we never knew which way they would go. They did the same disservice to Buffy herself. Over and over they talk about how fans were upset by the darkness of the show in S6, missing the point that a lot of people love darkness: if it was darkness that was at fault, it wouldn’t have been such an issue. What most fans do hate is character rape — destroying or messing with the characters they’ve come to know in service to a half-witted personal agenda (like Marti Noxon’s sex issues) — or haphazard, consistency-free writing.
A friend of mine once said something really interesting about Chris Carter and the X-Files: that he couldn’t replicate his success with other shows because he didn’t understand what it was he did right when he made XF in the first place. And while I think Joss knows that he created a really interesting and wonderful character in Spike (clearly, because they brought him back, and a number of people commented on the S2 discs that they had to bring him back for more than the originally slated eps because he was just so fun and they liked him so much), I don’t think he or any of the staff, particularly MN, got what it was that appealed so much to so many viewers. Almost as if they resented how much people liked him, so they reduced it to bad boy.
A lot of people are drawn only to the heroes, and a lot of people are drawn only to the bad guys. Bad guys are often fun, but even many people who normally like the hero types loved Spike. Maybe because he mirrors our own struggles in life, just in a more bizarre story. Most of us, whether we’re good or bad, are trying to make our existence as endurable as we can, trying to get what we can out of life. Spike was an avatar of our condition — no matter what type of protagonist we usually fell for, we could see this constant struggle for something else in Spike, and it made him really interesting to watch for a lot of folks. We could identify with his struggles, even if we weren’t normally drawn to that kind of character. In some respects his failings make him more malleable as a character, and it provides larger opportunities than more carefully delineated characters like Angel or Giles.
But I don’t believe the folks at ME ever understood that. They appear fixated on notions of black and white. You either have a soul and are human or human-like, and thus acceptable, or you don’t have a soul, and can’t seem to rise above that. In order to be loved, you must be human or have a soul — and can be forgiven the worst of sins if you do. (Unless you’re Spike.) A soul is a free pass, regardless of your atrocity; atoning for your atrocities, however, will likely earn you very little if you don’t have the soul. This is a very simplistic thing to hang your entire character development on if you don’t ever flesh out what the soul means, which ME never really did. The danced around the topic, but never really came out and said why everyone was fixated on the soul, especially when they could have in the alarming contrast between Warren and Spike in those final eps of S6.
Spike has no soul, and we are forced to watch him try to rape Buffy in a poorly executed attempt to remind us that, as Fury insists, Spike is always evil. Noxon said that we had to be reminded he was bad because people had forgotten (since, of course, he’d been struggling to be a better person), and this was their ham-fisted way of doing it. Anya, when she is a demon, is heartless and cruel; when she desires to atone for her vengeance act in Selfless, she becomes human again, but Halfrek, her dearest friend, is sacrificed for her atonement. Not Anya, herself, but her friend. And it’s never spoken of again, except in jest as a way to point out that Spike seems to get special treatment from Buffy. Xander tries to rape Buffy in one of the earliest episodes of the show, but he’s excused because a demon has inhabited him. As if, you know, a demon isn’t inhabiting Spike, and one didn’t inhabit Anya, either. Or Oz. Exceptions are made for the humans or the changed-to-human, an exception is made for soulled Angel, but none can be made for Spike, because it would not fit with ME’s weird agenda, an agenda that seemed to apply, strangely, only to this one character. He is not allowed to try to better himself without a soul. You simply must be human or have a soul to be allowed the chance to be loved or respected or achieve atonement.
The thing I never fully understood was what ME’s agenda was. It seems to be what JM is saying these days, reminding people that Spike is bad and trying to push back on girls fantasizing about a bad guy. Which is okay, I mean, I get why he’s a company man, but it’s ignoring a lot of his past beliefs about Spike, and it makes me sad that he would question his own acting in past seasons because of how things played out in service to ME’s agenda. (Especially Fool for Love — that he wishes he could take back those tears after Buffy throws the money at him is just terrible. That’s one of the most powerful, galvanizing scenes of any episode in the show’s history, and taking that away would have robbed it of much of its power). But it also means that a lot of what we’ll be hearing about Spike, one of the more complex characters on television, will be reductive. An actor’s take on a character has a lot to do with how he’s played. We can cite the scriptwriters all we want, and give credit for Joss’s creation, but the truth is that an actor has a lot of impact on how it plays out. A crappy, charisma-less actor in that role would have been gone within the three-episode allotment Spike originally had. There would have been little incentive to bring him back for arguably the best episode in season 3 or as a regular in 4. So having JM buy into the Mutant Enemy black and white world of the Buffy party line is sad, in that there’s too much potential for his character to stagnate if he’s afraid to push the envelope. I hope that’s not the case.
Watching the S4 eps, I realize that the one thing Spike never, ever got was dignity. The only time before Chosen he was ever allowed a shred of it was at the end of Intervention when Buffy recognizes what he did and what he was capable of. Sometimes the indignities and humiliations were incredibly funny, sometimes the effect was tragic and meaningful. But it’s a distancing mechanism — by not allowing him dignity, it’s easier for the audience to not feel for the character. But they miscalculated wildly, because so many people responded to him anyway. One of my all-time favorite Spike lines is “And you’re what, shocked and disappointed? I’m EVil.” I think ME kept trying to remind us of that in undignified ways, yet so many of us still ended up loving the guy for what he could be, because he kept acting in direct contrast to that through season 5. He does everything wrong, he suffers through indignity after humliation, but he keeps bouncing back up, mirroring what a lot of us go through in our daily lives.
It also served to polarize the people who liked Spike and Buffy together vs. the people who didn’t, and we’ve seen how the fandom suffers through that. What was sad about distancing us from him, and making his struggle to be good insignificant or, worse, worthless without the soul, was that they also squandered that incredible chemistry with Spike and Buffy together. Moviemakers spend jillions trying to pair big actors together in the hopes they’ll create chemistry and sell some romantic comedy or drama. SMG and JM had a powerful chemistry, whether as enemies or as friends/lovers; ME, however, seemed fixated on keeping the whole Angel & Buffy thing alive long after it was gone, even with Riley around. Instead of capitalizing on the kind of chemistry money can’t buy, they had to keep Spike uniformly unworthy of Buffy because to get her would diminish the importance of her human and soulled boyfriends. It would knock holes in the structure they set up, or something — that the soul and the humanity are the only things that make you good enough. Struggling of your own free will against your nature in order to be loved just won’t cut it in the Buffyverse.
Angel right now suffers from a few problems, but what they excel at is creating a world of moral ambiguity that closely reflects real life. Joss also managed to do this on Firefly: Mal was one of the most ambiguous “heroes” we’ve had on TV for a long time. He possessed both the best and worst of human nature; Jayne was a lying, cheating, mercenary scum. Yet they were given depths and layers and good qualities and allowed to be liked despite faults. River had the potential to cause serious problems, and did, but she was also allowed to be loved. On Angel, Wes has done some pretty bad things. Connor was just outright terrible. Angel himself has been Angelus three times now, yet we are still allowed to love him. So it’s peculiar to me that ME hasn’t allowed Buffy characters to live in the greyness that Firefly or Angel characters get to. Instead of enjoying and playing up Spike’s ambiguity and his moral quandaries as he struggles to find goodness without a soul, instead of showing us his reverse corruption by Buffy and the Scoobs, he’s pushed back into a box. Petrie, Noxon, Fury, all of them except apparently Jane Espenson and Drew Goddard, seem to see Spike as hopelessly evil — he’s on a straight line, no curves or twists allowed. And in case you forget that, we’ll remind you by making him a rapist or something equally reductive. We’re given wonderful character development like Buffy’s growing friendship and feelings for him in early season 6, but then we’re told she shouldn’t feel that way, and they shove something slimy in our face. We’re allowed to see the real guy underneath his exterior in Intervention (truly one of the best eps they’ve ever done in my opinion), just how depraved and how noble he can be, and Buffy’s allowed to see that, but they can’t let it last for long — people shouldn’t, they believe, react positively to it. If you see him as only evil, then affection for something evil must be quashed — it isn’t allowed to live in the Buffyverse.
The thing that makes a lot of people fall for someone like Spike is that they see potential for more in him. They saw that potential shown in Intervention, The Gift, Bargaining, After Life, etc. That’s ME’s success, and James’s success. They created a character who has potential — so it’s an absurd argument to maintain over and over that he’s merely evil and we shouldn’t be attracted to him. It’s not that girls always believe that bad boys can be cured by them. That’s an insulting way to reduce women’s desires, akin to saying that if women have fantasies about being ravaged, they want to be raped for real.
That kind of logic ignores the way humans relate to each other, how we find aspects of another person that are worthy of love. Good and bad coexist in most of us. If you insist that once you’ve been bad, you’ll always be bad, you’re limiting a person’s options completely. Over and over ME did things that grew Spike as a character, but each time they added layers, we were then told we shouldn’t like him. This talking out of both sides of their mouths was hard to handle for a lot of people (me, obviously, included). And I think that’s why a lot of people reacted so strongly to the things JM’s been saying lately — they may be hearing a message that tells them “don’t love bad boys, Spike is only a bad boy without the soul, you made a mistake.” That may not be what’s actually being said, but fans hear variations on this from ME all the time, so it starts to sound like the party line. And it’s hard to hear that if what we felt for the character wasn’t that simplistic.
I loved that he was a killer. I loved that he tried to reform for someone he loved and frequently failed. I adore that he was so complex you never knew which way he’d go. I wasn’t attracted to him because he was a bad boy, I was attracted to him because the bad things in him coexisted with good things and he knew it. I would never want to mitigate his past or pretend that he isn’t something he is, which is a demon, essentially. When Anya says in Family that many demons are productive members of society, it’s cute because she’s an ex-demon. But it’s also tied in to Spike and his history with the gang. For better or worse, whether he wants to or not, by early season 5 he’s becoming a productive member of that society. Despite their best efforts to tear that down and pretend that he’s still evil, ME couldn’t stop Spike’s following from growing, especially after Crush when we see him start to take steps to understand what he’s done wrong, and change. People wanted him around, and they wanted to see his struggle to be a productive member continue. It’s not about redemption, it’s about someone’s journey that we can identify with.
I worry that his time on Angel may erase a lot of what his story became on the show, simply because ME doesn’t get what he is. I think fans get what he is — or at least, not the schmoopy ones who want to turn him in Snuggles, but those of us who are fascinated by his brutal past and his current struggle to be a better man. It was interesting to watch his uphill battle because he was doing it of his own free will; I felt like the soul took away that free will, but ME is so fixated on the soul thing in the Buffyverse that it doesn’t allow anyone the chance to present a multi-layered character without one. Every time Spike got close to being that multi-layered character, they’d yank him back in his confined little corner.
On the other hand, they’ve allowed a lot of ambiguity in characters on Angel they never allowed in Buffy. Lilah, when she and Wes start up, becomes much more than evil and bitchy — she’s incredibly faceted by the time she dies. We learn to have sympathy for Connor’s plight even when he does increasingly more despicable things. We’re allowed to enjoy Angel as both Angelus and as soul boy. Lindsey got to be conflictedly evil, and Wes... well, Wes has shown more sides to his character than almost anyone outside of Spike, I think. So I’m both hopeful and filled with dread — will Fury, in his monochromatic view, see Spike in black and white again and force that down our throats? Will they just play up the bad boy aspects of Spike, without understanding that’s not the only thing that drew us to him? Will they get that the soul was an unnecessary accoutrement in his struggle for humanity, and focus more on his character rather than the device of the soul?
It’s so hard to say, because I don’t know that they really see him at all. It’s almost as if they can’t see the character they created and JM brought to indelible life — they are blinded by what their initial vision of him was, and his growth since then is invisible to their color-blind eyes. Don’t get me wrong if you read this far — I’m not all pissy with ME or the show or the characters. The S4 discs really brought home to me that they had no idea just what kind of quality Spike really had, and squandered so much potential. The show is still my favorite, ever, and the characters will always mean a great deal to me, but it’s confusing to me why they threw so much away and why their vision is so limited. There’s a peculiarly didactic quality to their need to force us to remember that Spike is bad and evil and wrong, as if we’re stupid girls who can’t tell the difference between a bad man and a good man. As deeply as I love this show and as immersed as I am in the fandom, I’m not sure I’ll ever understand why you’d squander so much potential just to lecture your audience. I'm mostly happy with what I got, but a little sad at what I never got to see.
Doug Petrie’s comments in The Initiative convinced me of this, and David “Rape is funny!” Fury made it even worse in his deadly dull commentary (that man should never do comment tracks, ever). I normally like Petrie, but he said something I thought was key — that Spike is a horrible boyfriend, the worst boyfriend ever. Fury says, in the middle of his stultifying comments on Primeval, that Spike, no matter how good he tries to be and no matter what good deeds he accomplishes, is always going to be evil. He makes it very clear that, to him, Spike has no potential or positive qualities to build on. And Fury’s going to be in the Angel crew next year.
I’m not a Spike apologist — far from it. I liked him as he was prior to the soul; I preferred a guy who was without the usual human signatures we were supposed to believe meant something in the Buffyverse such as conscience, empathy, guilt, but who rose above limitations by choice to earn someone’s love. I never felt like that was a bad thing. The fact that he was essentially evil because he wasn’t possessed of a soul, but struggling against his nature for love (that reverse corruption thing I adore), made him fascinating to me. A lot of women are drawn to the bad boys simply because they’re naughty; but by reducing Spike’s appeal to that, saying that’s the only reason we like him, loses sight of a larger need that most people have for their fictional characters — someone struggling against their nature or struggling against the elements for a greater purpose, or to achieve something internally. It’s called conflict. Most good narratives have, at their heart, conflict in order for protagonists to achieve a goal — doesn’t matter if it’s solving a murder or just coming to terms with personal issues, it’s conflict, and it’s what drives us to follow stories. For Spike, the conflict came in what brought him to Sunnydale and to working with Buffy, later the chip, then falling for Buffy, then trying to discover what it meant to be good.
Oddly, JM seemed to get that to some degree. The comments he makes in the S4 feature Spike Me seem to indicate that he loved portraying all of Spike’s conflicts, his internal struggles, and he understood what made Spike tick. He calls Spike the best boyfriend ever, when he’s referring to what Spike did for Dru, and also what he’s willing to do for Buffy (the interview clearly takes place early in S6). Yet in direct contrast, the writers and other members of the creation team do not see Spike similarly — Joss is probably closest to how fans and JM see the character, but even he doesn’t say a lot about how much opportunity for conflict the character represented, or comment on Spike’s ambiguities. So the haphazard, scattershot writing of late S6 makes a sad kind of sense, because clearly, the character polarized the writing team — on one hand you’d get a positive take on his relationship to Buffy like Life Serial, then you’d get violent, out of character stuff like Dead Things, and we never knew which way they would go. They did the same disservice to Buffy herself. Over and over they talk about how fans were upset by the darkness of the show in S6, missing the point that a lot of people love darkness: if it was darkness that was at fault, it wouldn’t have been such an issue. What most fans do hate is character rape — destroying or messing with the characters they’ve come to know in service to a half-witted personal agenda (like Marti Noxon’s sex issues) — or haphazard, consistency-free writing.
A friend of mine once said something really interesting about Chris Carter and the X-Files: that he couldn’t replicate his success with other shows because he didn’t understand what it was he did right when he made XF in the first place. And while I think Joss knows that he created a really interesting and wonderful character in Spike (clearly, because they brought him back, and a number of people commented on the S2 discs that they had to bring him back for more than the originally slated eps because he was just so fun and they liked him so much), I don’t think he or any of the staff, particularly MN, got what it was that appealed so much to so many viewers. Almost as if they resented how much people liked him, so they reduced it to bad boy.
A lot of people are drawn only to the heroes, and a lot of people are drawn only to the bad guys. Bad guys are often fun, but even many people who normally like the hero types loved Spike. Maybe because he mirrors our own struggles in life, just in a more bizarre story. Most of us, whether we’re good or bad, are trying to make our existence as endurable as we can, trying to get what we can out of life. Spike was an avatar of our condition — no matter what type of protagonist we usually fell for, we could see this constant struggle for something else in Spike, and it made him really interesting to watch for a lot of folks. We could identify with his struggles, even if we weren’t normally drawn to that kind of character. In some respects his failings make him more malleable as a character, and it provides larger opportunities than more carefully delineated characters like Angel or Giles.
But I don’t believe the folks at ME ever understood that. They appear fixated on notions of black and white. You either have a soul and are human or human-like, and thus acceptable, or you don’t have a soul, and can’t seem to rise above that. In order to be loved, you must be human or have a soul — and can be forgiven the worst of sins if you do. (Unless you’re Spike.) A soul is a free pass, regardless of your atrocity; atoning for your atrocities, however, will likely earn you very little if you don’t have the soul. This is a very simplistic thing to hang your entire character development on if you don’t ever flesh out what the soul means, which ME never really did. The danced around the topic, but never really came out and said why everyone was fixated on the soul, especially when they could have in the alarming contrast between Warren and Spike in those final eps of S6.
Spike has no soul, and we are forced to watch him try to rape Buffy in a poorly executed attempt to remind us that, as Fury insists, Spike is always evil. Noxon said that we had to be reminded he was bad because people had forgotten (since, of course, he’d been struggling to be a better person), and this was their ham-fisted way of doing it. Anya, when she is a demon, is heartless and cruel; when she desires to atone for her vengeance act in Selfless, she becomes human again, but Halfrek, her dearest friend, is sacrificed for her atonement. Not Anya, herself, but her friend. And it’s never spoken of again, except in jest as a way to point out that Spike seems to get special treatment from Buffy. Xander tries to rape Buffy in one of the earliest episodes of the show, but he’s excused because a demon has inhabited him. As if, you know, a demon isn’t inhabiting Spike, and one didn’t inhabit Anya, either. Or Oz. Exceptions are made for the humans or the changed-to-human, an exception is made for soulled Angel, but none can be made for Spike, because it would not fit with ME’s weird agenda, an agenda that seemed to apply, strangely, only to this one character. He is not allowed to try to better himself without a soul. You simply must be human or have a soul to be allowed the chance to be loved or respected or achieve atonement.
The thing I never fully understood was what ME’s agenda was. It seems to be what JM is saying these days, reminding people that Spike is bad and trying to push back on girls fantasizing about a bad guy. Which is okay, I mean, I get why he’s a company man, but it’s ignoring a lot of his past beliefs about Spike, and it makes me sad that he would question his own acting in past seasons because of how things played out in service to ME’s agenda. (Especially Fool for Love — that he wishes he could take back those tears after Buffy throws the money at him is just terrible. That’s one of the most powerful, galvanizing scenes of any episode in the show’s history, and taking that away would have robbed it of much of its power). But it also means that a lot of what we’ll be hearing about Spike, one of the more complex characters on television, will be reductive. An actor’s take on a character has a lot to do with how he’s played. We can cite the scriptwriters all we want, and give credit for Joss’s creation, but the truth is that an actor has a lot of impact on how it plays out. A crappy, charisma-less actor in that role would have been gone within the three-episode allotment Spike originally had. There would have been little incentive to bring him back for arguably the best episode in season 3 or as a regular in 4. So having JM buy into the Mutant Enemy black and white world of the Buffy party line is sad, in that there’s too much potential for his character to stagnate if he’s afraid to push the envelope. I hope that’s not the case.
Watching the S4 eps, I realize that the one thing Spike never, ever got was dignity. The only time before Chosen he was ever allowed a shred of it was at the end of Intervention when Buffy recognizes what he did and what he was capable of. Sometimes the indignities and humiliations were incredibly funny, sometimes the effect was tragic and meaningful. But it’s a distancing mechanism — by not allowing him dignity, it’s easier for the audience to not feel for the character. But they miscalculated wildly, because so many people responded to him anyway. One of my all-time favorite Spike lines is “And you’re what, shocked and disappointed? I’m EVil.” I think ME kept trying to remind us of that in undignified ways, yet so many of us still ended up loving the guy for what he could be, because he kept acting in direct contrast to that through season 5. He does everything wrong, he suffers through indignity after humliation, but he keeps bouncing back up, mirroring what a lot of us go through in our daily lives.
It also served to polarize the people who liked Spike and Buffy together vs. the people who didn’t, and we’ve seen how the fandom suffers through that. What was sad about distancing us from him, and making his struggle to be good insignificant or, worse, worthless without the soul, was that they also squandered that incredible chemistry with Spike and Buffy together. Moviemakers spend jillions trying to pair big actors together in the hopes they’ll create chemistry and sell some romantic comedy or drama. SMG and JM had a powerful chemistry, whether as enemies or as friends/lovers; ME, however, seemed fixated on keeping the whole Angel & Buffy thing alive long after it was gone, even with Riley around. Instead of capitalizing on the kind of chemistry money can’t buy, they had to keep Spike uniformly unworthy of Buffy because to get her would diminish the importance of her human and soulled boyfriends. It would knock holes in the structure they set up, or something — that the soul and the humanity are the only things that make you good enough. Struggling of your own free will against your nature in order to be loved just won’t cut it in the Buffyverse.
Angel right now suffers from a few problems, but what they excel at is creating a world of moral ambiguity that closely reflects real life. Joss also managed to do this on Firefly: Mal was one of the most ambiguous “heroes” we’ve had on TV for a long time. He possessed both the best and worst of human nature; Jayne was a lying, cheating, mercenary scum. Yet they were given depths and layers and good qualities and allowed to be liked despite faults. River had the potential to cause serious problems, and did, but she was also allowed to be loved. On Angel, Wes has done some pretty bad things. Connor was just outright terrible. Angel himself has been Angelus three times now, yet we are still allowed to love him. So it’s peculiar to me that ME hasn’t allowed Buffy characters to live in the greyness that Firefly or Angel characters get to. Instead of enjoying and playing up Spike’s ambiguity and his moral quandaries as he struggles to find goodness without a soul, instead of showing us his reverse corruption by Buffy and the Scoobs, he’s pushed back into a box. Petrie, Noxon, Fury, all of them except apparently Jane Espenson and Drew Goddard, seem to see Spike as hopelessly evil — he’s on a straight line, no curves or twists allowed. And in case you forget that, we’ll remind you by making him a rapist or something equally reductive. We’re given wonderful character development like Buffy’s growing friendship and feelings for him in early season 6, but then we’re told she shouldn’t feel that way, and they shove something slimy in our face. We’re allowed to see the real guy underneath his exterior in Intervention (truly one of the best eps they’ve ever done in my opinion), just how depraved and how noble he can be, and Buffy’s allowed to see that, but they can’t let it last for long — people shouldn’t, they believe, react positively to it. If you see him as only evil, then affection for something evil must be quashed — it isn’t allowed to live in the Buffyverse.
The thing that makes a lot of people fall for someone like Spike is that they see potential for more in him. They saw that potential shown in Intervention, The Gift, Bargaining, After Life, etc. That’s ME’s success, and James’s success. They created a character who has potential — so it’s an absurd argument to maintain over and over that he’s merely evil and we shouldn’t be attracted to him. It’s not that girls always believe that bad boys can be cured by them. That’s an insulting way to reduce women’s desires, akin to saying that if women have fantasies about being ravaged, they want to be raped for real.
That kind of logic ignores the way humans relate to each other, how we find aspects of another person that are worthy of love. Good and bad coexist in most of us. If you insist that once you’ve been bad, you’ll always be bad, you’re limiting a person’s options completely. Over and over ME did things that grew Spike as a character, but each time they added layers, we were then told we shouldn’t like him. This talking out of both sides of their mouths was hard to handle for a lot of people (me, obviously, included). And I think that’s why a lot of people reacted so strongly to the things JM’s been saying lately — they may be hearing a message that tells them “don’t love bad boys, Spike is only a bad boy without the soul, you made a mistake.” That may not be what’s actually being said, but fans hear variations on this from ME all the time, so it starts to sound like the party line. And it’s hard to hear that if what we felt for the character wasn’t that simplistic.
I loved that he was a killer. I loved that he tried to reform for someone he loved and frequently failed. I adore that he was so complex you never knew which way he’d go. I wasn’t attracted to him because he was a bad boy, I was attracted to him because the bad things in him coexisted with good things and he knew it. I would never want to mitigate his past or pretend that he isn’t something he is, which is a demon, essentially. When Anya says in Family that many demons are productive members of society, it’s cute because she’s an ex-demon. But it’s also tied in to Spike and his history with the gang. For better or worse, whether he wants to or not, by early season 5 he’s becoming a productive member of that society. Despite their best efforts to tear that down and pretend that he’s still evil, ME couldn’t stop Spike’s following from growing, especially after Crush when we see him start to take steps to understand what he’s done wrong, and change. People wanted him around, and they wanted to see his struggle to be a productive member continue. It’s not about redemption, it’s about someone’s journey that we can identify with.
I worry that his time on Angel may erase a lot of what his story became on the show, simply because ME doesn’t get what he is. I think fans get what he is — or at least, not the schmoopy ones who want to turn him in Snuggles, but those of us who are fascinated by his brutal past and his current struggle to be a better man. It was interesting to watch his uphill battle because he was doing it of his own free will; I felt like the soul took away that free will, but ME is so fixated on the soul thing in the Buffyverse that it doesn’t allow anyone the chance to present a multi-layered character without one. Every time Spike got close to being that multi-layered character, they’d yank him back in his confined little corner.
On the other hand, they’ve allowed a lot of ambiguity in characters on Angel they never allowed in Buffy. Lilah, when she and Wes start up, becomes much more than evil and bitchy — she’s incredibly faceted by the time she dies. We learn to have sympathy for Connor’s plight even when he does increasingly more despicable things. We’re allowed to enjoy Angel as both Angelus and as soul boy. Lindsey got to be conflictedly evil, and Wes... well, Wes has shown more sides to his character than almost anyone outside of Spike, I think. So I’m both hopeful and filled with dread — will Fury, in his monochromatic view, see Spike in black and white again and force that down our throats? Will they just play up the bad boy aspects of Spike, without understanding that’s not the only thing that drew us to him? Will they get that the soul was an unnecessary accoutrement in his struggle for humanity, and focus more on his character rather than the device of the soul?
It’s so hard to say, because I don’t know that they really see him at all. It’s almost as if they can’t see the character they created and JM brought to indelible life — they are blinded by what their initial vision of him was, and his growth since then is invisible to their color-blind eyes. Don’t get me wrong if you read this far — I’m not all pissy with ME or the show or the characters. The S4 discs really brought home to me that they had no idea just what kind of quality Spike really had, and squandered so much potential. The show is still my favorite, ever, and the characters will always mean a great deal to me, but it’s confusing to me why they threw so much away and why their vision is so limited. There’s a peculiarly didactic quality to their need to force us to remember that Spike is bad and evil and wrong, as if we’re stupid girls who can’t tell the difference between a bad man and a good man. As deeply as I love this show and as immersed as I am in the fandom, I’m not sure I’ll ever understand why you’d squander so much potential just to lecture your audience. I'm mostly happy with what I got, but a little sad at what I never got to see.
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Date: 2003-06-18 01:08 pm (UTC)It's the flawed heroes that people love. The tragic ones, that keep trying and trying and have to work bitterly for every victory. Spike is the ultimate Underdog, at evil and at good, so his character has great appeal.
Have you ever read The Hobbit? Bilbo Baggins is a wonderful, lovable protagonist-- and he's a lazy, whiny, stuffy, boring, shy, chubby, mostly useless little nag, whose only redeeming features are a soft heart and excellent common sense. A hero who isn't perfect is a great character-- in many ways that's why for the most part I liked Buffy from seasons 5-7 better than the earlier years (unlike everyone else), because in those seasons we see that she's not ideal glowing white hero with perfect hair and an easy rejoinder, but in fact has some royally fucked up problems. All back to sympathy. And Spike epitomized someone we felt bad for and hoped/wished had better luck.
It’s not that girls always believe that bad boys can be cured by them. That’s an insulting way to reduce women’s desires, akin to saying that if women have fantasies about being ravaged, they want to be raped for real.
I agree. What appealed to me about Spike's transformation was not that Buffy made Spike better by being the object of his love-- Spike made himself better by loving her. Buffy for the most part hindered, even forbid his change, not tried to change him.
I worry that his time on Angel may erase a lot of what his story became on the show, simply because ME doesn’t get what he is.
I can only bite my lip and hope that doesn't happen. Is Ultimate Drew going over to Angel? That'd help.
It was interesting to watch his uphill battle because he was doing it of his own free will
That's why I went from liking to look at him cause the actor was hot to adoring the character had wanting to spend hours writing about him.
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Date: 2003-06-18 02:00 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2003-06-18 11:04 pm (UTC)although I still ache for the Spuffy.
I do, as well. However, this gives me lovely ideas of Spike growing into his own person on Angel, and then eventually leaving the show. And on the episode that he leaves is the episode Buffy guest stars, and we see them go off together, now that they've finally waited and grown into their own persons and are ready to be fully baked. Then again, that's probably why I wrote a fic about this very fantasy.
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Date: 2003-06-19 08:48 am (UTC)