Authors: Gilene Yeffeth
Following that love story was going to be tough in any case, so Whedon pulled his punches and introduced Parker, the embodiment of the dangers of infatuation. Buffy makes the Parker Mistake because she wants to fall in love with an everyday human being more than she wants Parker in the specific. Zipping through the assumption and attraction in a rush to get to normal and loved, Buffy misses the cues that would have told her he was a shallow, not very bright user, and pays the price. Parker adds to Buffy’s experience with men, but mostly he serves as foil and foreshadowing for Buffy’s next big romance, Riley Finn.
The assumption phase for this romance is automatic: Riley and Buffy are both beautiful, blond, athletic college students. When they discover in “Hush” (4-10) that they’re both superhuman demon fighters, attraction goes wild, fueled by copulatory gazes over dead demons and hot hand-to-hand combat. In fact, combat is the foreplay for their first sexual encounter, one that leads to frequent, healthy, sweaty, welllit intercourse. But a gulf opens between them when Riley discovers that his superhuman strength comes from drugs that are killing him, which forces him to return to being just a strong human. If he truly loved Buffy unconditionally, Riley would accept their differences as fact and not as a comment on his inadequacy. Instead, he sees Buffy only in relationship to himself, a reproach to his own lost power, and punishes her by finding sexual solace with the enemy as a vampire addict, a tacit admission that all that safe, bouncy lovemaking was a sham. Buffy fails him just as badly by turning from him when she
discovers his addiction, betrayed because he isn’t the hero she needs him to be. Real love is unconditional, and they don’t have it.
There’s also another factor at work: by the time the fourth season ends, Buffy is no longer a wisecracking teenager. She’s an adult, increasingly aware that the line between good and evil is more of a smudge, and she knows that Riley’s matter-of-fact, Manichean view of the universe is too simplistic. The fifth season codes this in the form of the two men vying for her: Riley the Impossibly Good and Spike the Unspeakably Evil, an ostensibly easy choice. But it slowly becomes evident that while the noble Riley’s love is selfish and conditional, the murderous Spike’s love is without qualification.
At first glance, assumption plays no part in Buffy and Spike’s relationship. They meet as mortal enemies, trying without hesitation to kill one another. But their first interactions are, in fact, strong cues for assumption, and although she dismisses him as just another vampire, and he sees her as pretty much the third notch on his Slayer-killing belt, they surprise each other. He’s much more powerful than she realizes, and she’s much more complex than he can fathom. Adding to the attraction is the fact that, from the beginning, their conflict is sexual. In their first real physical confrontation in “School Hard” (2-3), he knocks her to the ground and straddles her, saying, “I’ll make it quick. It won’t hurt a bit,” and she says, “Wrong. It’s gonna hurt
a lot
,” foreshadowing the next five seasons of mutual violence. It’s a coded erotic beginning to a complex hate/hate relationship that takes an abrupt turn when Spike is forced to choose between Angelus’s plan for the end of the world and his own enjoyment of life. Stuck between Angelus and Buffy, he chooses her, and starts irrevocably down a path that leads him to unconditional love, not only of Buffy but of life (“Becoming, Part 2,” 2-22).
Caught in a dynamic so strong neither can break away, Spike and Buffy continue to ignore what viewers can see plainly: they’re meant for each other. But when Buffy is injured and forced to confront her own mortality, it’s Spike she goes to for answers in “Fool for Love” (5-7). When she asks him how he killed two Slayers, he gives her the key she doesn’t want. “Every Slayer,” he tells her, fixing her with a copulatory gaze, “has a death wish,” and then he rephrases it in sexual terms: “You know you want to dance.” It’s in this scene that their erotic attraction becomes clear: They’re tied to each other in a heated, perverse symbiosis that fuses all the elements of attraction: they’re beautiful, strong, smart, funny, and forbidden, and they’re the only two people
on the planet who can understand each other. They’re the ultimate aphrodisiac: they know each other to the core.
Swamped by emotion and lust, Spike moves into infatuation much more readily than Buffy, because he’s the true romantic, the real fool for love. In that, he’s smarter than Buffy, who keeps trying to fall in love with Good instead of finding a partner who not only understands her but also values her for what she is. Spike might have gone on loving her hopelessly forever, except for a major plot move: Buffy dies to save the world. If Spike’s love were immature and conditional, that would finish things, and he’d return to his old life. Instead, he stays in a life that doesn’t fit him, helping her friends and protecting her sister, knowing that he’ll never see her again and still loving her hopelessly. When she comes back from the dead and claws her way out of the grave, he’s the only one who understands what’s happened, and his calm handling of her crisis is one of the best demonstrations of real love ever filmed. When she asks, “How long was I gone?” and he says, “Hundred and forty-seven days yesterday . . . one forty-eight today,” he speaks volumes about how much he loves her (“Afterlife,” 6-3).
And Buffy knows it. He’s the only one she can trust with the truth about her “rescue,” the only one she can talk to without anger or guilt, the only one who accepts her absolutely. But her love isn’t based on those things; like Spike’s, it’s also unconditional. Although she finally ends their affair, she stands by him through stupid crimes (selling monster eggs?), attempted rape, and insanity, refusing to kill him again and again even though he crosses her moral line, rejecting his offer to leave when it appears that the First Evil plans to work through him, telling him “I’m not ready for you not to be here” (“First Date,” 7-14). Even throughout a very uneven sixth season that swings between brilliant episodes and stories that are appalling world and character violations, Spike and Buffy’s love story stays true because Spike, like Angel before him, loves Buffy unconditionally, sacrifices for her, endures torture for her, almost dies for her, finally does die for her, and, much against her will, Buffy reciprocates, risking her life to save him, forgiving him the unforgivable, telling him at the end that she loves him because he’s earned it.
But there’s another dimension to
Buffy’s
love stories beyond the psychological accuracy, a dimension that makes them even deeper, the ever-present knowledge that while falling in love can be devastating, consummating that love can be lethal. A quick run-down of Love’s
Greatest Hits on
Buffy
shows that love in this world really is a matter of life and death.
Buffy sleeps with Angel who turns into a demon and tries to kill her with a short time-out when they’re possessed by the spirits of a murder-suicide love match (“I Only Have Eyes for You,” 2-19). When she tries to date within her species, she ends up with an ex-boyfriend who tries to feed her to vampires (“Lie to Me,” 2-7), a nice guy with a death wish (“Never Kill a Boy on the First Date,” 1-5), a groping loser who turns into The Creature from the Swim Team (“Go Fish,” 2-20), and another nice guy whose best friend tries to kill her as Sunnydale’s Mr. Hyde (“Beauty and the Beasts,” 3-4). After that, she falls for a man whose jealous mentor tries to send her to her death (“The I in Team,” 4-13) and a vampire who’s tried to kill her so many times he’s practically the Wile E. Coyote of Sunnydale.
Buffy’s friends aren’t doing any better. Willow’s hopeless crush on Xander leads her to accept a stranger’s invitation to a nice walk in the dark and almost gets her killed in “Welcome to the Hellmouth” (1-1). After that she gets a crush on an Internet pen pal who turns out to be a demon-infested robot (“I Robot, You Jane,” 1-8), falls in love with a werewolf who tries to rip her apart (“Phases,” 2-15); and finally finds a haven with Tara, who is shot to death as she’s standing in Willow’s bedroom, making a sexual advance. Or there’s Cordelia Chase, who almost gets vamped by her dance partner (“The Harvest,” 1-2), dates a fraternity boy who tries to feed her to a giant lizard (“Reptile Boy,” 2-5), is kidnapped by a Frankenstein football player who wants to cut off her head so they can be together forever, and falls in love with Xander who betrays her, which results in her impalement on a rebar (“Lover’s Walk,” 3-8). Buffy’s family doesn’t fare any better. Her mother has two boyfriends in the entire run of the show (not counting her candy-inspired interlude with Giles on the hood of the police car), a homicidal robot (“Ted,” 2-11) and the nice guy who sends her flowers the morning she dies (“The Body,” 5-16). And Buffy’s little sister, Dawn, goes on her first date and gets her first kiss from a guy who turns into a vampire, pins her down in the missionary position, and offers to make her immortal, after which she stakes him.
But it’s not just Sunnydale’s women who are mauled by the metaphor. Whedon’s universe offers equal-opportunity death to men. Angel is human until a pick-up date named Darla murders him in an alley and makes him a vampire. He manages to make it through the next two hundred years and then meets Buffy, his one true love, who
runs a phallic sword through him and sends him to hell. Spike’s story is similar: He meets Drusilla when she finds him weeping in the street after rejection by the woman he loves; she comforts him by making him a vampire. He loves her for the next century until he falls for Buffy, someone even more lethal than Dru, and finally dying spectacularly in the series finale to save her and defeat his kind. Giles, Buffy’s Watcher, falls in love with a fellow teacher and then, on the night they plan to consummate their love, finds her dead in his bed (“Passion,” 2-17). But the real champ in the Sex-Is-Death sweepstakes is Xander, who ignores nonlethal and therefore nonsexual Willow to lust after a substitute teacher who invites him to her house for a study date and turns into a praying mantis (“Teacher’s Pet,” 1-4), an undead exchange student whose kiss causes death (“Inca Mummy Girl,” 2-4), and Cordelia, who wishes him into an alternate universe where he’s a vampire staked by Buffy (“The Wish,” 3-9). When he tries to be proactive and use magic to make things work, hordes of women attack him, ready to love him to death (“Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” 2-16). He loses his virginity to deviant Slayer Faith, who tries to strangle him when he comes back for seconds, and proposes to Anya the Vengeance Demon who does her best to eviscerate him by proxy when he leaves her at the altar. Then his rebound date strings him up above an ancient symbol and penetrates his abdomen with a spear so that his blood will unleash the undead (“First Date,” 7-14).
Still, the most interesting sex-as-pain-and-death relationship in this series is Buffy and Spike. Their frequent physical fights grow more and more sexual, so that when Spike finally tells Buffy he loves her, and she tries to track back to where she went wrong, she decides it’s the pain: “I do beat him up a lot. For him, that’s like third base” (“Crush,” 5-14). The foreplay for their first sexual encounter is a knockdown fight, during which Spike tells her, “I wasn’t planning to hurt you, much,” right before she hits him and then kisses him and then hits him again (“Smashed,” 6-9). It’s important that Buffy doesn’t sleep with Spike until she knows the prophylactic chip in his head does not work for her, because it means that in the heated proximity of the rough sex they become addicted to, they’re both easy to kill, each knowing that the “little death” of orgasm can, at any moment, change from symbol to reality, and the fact that the sex is violent simulates this. They’re miming death over and over again, practicing the moment they both assume they’re hurtling toward, the moment they fulfill their roles as Vampire Slayer and Slayer Assassin. That erotic risk coupled
with their repeated demonstrations of unconditional love makes their twisted relationship one of the most powerful ever written, a fitting climax to a series in which “dying for a kiss” isn’t just a figure of speech, at least not for Spike.
But Whedon’s greatest love story doesn’t stop there. He takes it down another layer, to the metaphor that fuels the series and raises the romances of
Buffy
to the level of myth: Buffy as the Slayer is unconditionally, inextricably, erotically tied to Death.
Angel’s transformation into a vampire after their first kiss in the first season is the only incident in the series in which sexual arousal is directly linked to becoming the monster, but it ties into the long tradition of oral eroticism that the vampire story has represented since Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
. Buffy screams when confronted with the truth, but it’s a truth that she needs to face. She can’t remain an innocent and save the world, too, just as she can’t remain sexually innocent and become a mature woman. That metaphor is reinforced when she makes love with Angel for the first time and wakes up with Angelus, a move that at first glance seems only to symbolize “all men are beasts,” but comes to mean that all lovers are dangerous when Buffy proves to be just as lethal as Angelus. When Buffy refuses to destroy Angelus, she protects death; when she sacrifices Angel to save the world, she sacrifices love.
The power of this metaphor also explains Buffy’s failed relationship with Riley. Yes, their love is conditional, but what really undercuts their relationship is a much deeper failing: Riley is the wrong metaphor. As the corn-fed farm boy, Riley represents the Beautiful American, light and peace and wholesomeness, and Buffy wants to connect to him because she wants to be Good’s Girlfriend. But the relationship feels wrong: Riley wears a milk mustache while Buffy’s hands drip blood. His appreciation of her as the Slayer seems to stem from the fact that she’s really athletic and great at covert ops, just like one of the guys. He never seems to understand what Angel and Spike know instinctively, that Buffy has a heart of darkness. As Buffy comes to understand this herself, the series darkens but it also deepens, becoming much richer as each season adds more layers to the metaphor, so that in the last three seasons Whedon connects directly with this paradox at the core of Buffy, the complexity that made the series so irresistible from the beginning: Our savior is a murderess, and she’s infatuated with Death.