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. (VN)
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