Buffy’s Message of Failure and Redemption

I still fail to see how a story where a guy who has literally been presented as more animal than man (vampire), manages to stop himself from raping a girl (even when she’s sent him the biggest slew of mixed messages ever) and then gets pushed to brink of insanity with remorse and finally manages to make peace with her and himself before saving the whole fucking world by sacrificing himself is an offensive storyline!

Especially when it’s also paired alongside the story of woman who’s driven to a nervous breakdown by years of hardship and horror, who treats him like an animal for her own ends, but ultimately realises that he’s a worthwhile being and that, if he’s capable of being worthwhile, then she’s also capable of the same.

AND specifically alongside the story of a young woman who has more power than she understands, who misuses it for her own ends and goes to the worst places (murder and wanting to destroy the world) before ultimately finding a way to control herself that brings solidarity and not destruction.

I personally found it all to be an uplifting idea that people can always come back and ultimately do the right thing, even if they had been previously pushed astonishingly far off the rails by the horrors and pitfalls of this life.

I found the idea that a man who was once capable of performing appalling acts, because he’d been literally dehumanised, could find a way to rediscover his connection to humanity and put the urges that led to those acts under check to be a very positive thing. It’s an extreme scene because it has to be. It’s horrifying that someone could be capable of assaulting someone like that. Life takes you places you don’t necessarily expect to go and situations take on a life of their own. That’s not an excuse. There is no excuse. It would be better never to go to those places but having arrived at a defining moment like that a person should also be judged on what they do about it. How far they go. And what they do afterwards.

Spike fights his demons literally to win a token that signifies his commitment to not being a slave to his urges, and is driven actually crazy by those “first evil” “primal” urges that came out in that scene. He succeeds so well that he later has to be bullied into letting go of that control a little again and trusting himself to be able to let his abilities loose in good directions. To be a whole person.

Willow’s demons are just as literal. Her acts were just as appalling and her comeback is just as hard. And she also has to be cajoled into trusting herself to let her power loose again.

Buffy’s demons are always literal. She’s fighting the evil urges inside all of us. She’s fighting the idea that there’s something inherently appalling in our world that can poison and dehumanise us so that we become appalling too. But that evil requires our permission to work. We have to allow it to.

I could also bring up Faith (a murderer, who’s chosen a better path after a lot of prompting and a jail sentence), Angel (a murderer and rapist, who’s a bit of a patronising twat who keeps making the mistake of going for the big gesture but whose heart is on the right journey), Giles (a black magician and murderer, who’s heart is generally in the right place but who still sometimes clings to patronising ideas and is prepared to go to dark places justified by his own morality), Xander (an attempted rapist, who is so worried that he’s going to end up as an abusive drunk that he calls off his wedding to try and prevent it), Anya (a murderer and torturer, who has a hard time of it when she first becomes human and reverts to murder when she suffers an emotional set back but finally chooses to give it up and dies fighting for the good), Andrew (black magician and murderer, who bumbles into being evil and bumbles into being good, mostly because he wants to be accepted by the cool kids) and Jonathan (black magician and accomplice to two murderers, who decides to seek redemption far far too late).

Purely good guys in this story, where are they..? I don’t see any. I see a bunch of fuckwits whose best redeeming feature is that they keep on trying to be better, no matter how much they fuck up. (And I haven’t even brought up any other Angel characters!)

I found it all to be a story about the appalling depths to which we can sink given the right set of emotional and situational circumstances, but also about the heights we can rise to if we just try hard enough to not let ourselves become disconnected from other people. The lesson is that, no matter how far you think you’ve gone wrong, doing the appalling thing is always a choice and you can always, always – even if you did the appalling thing – change if you really want to.

It’s fair to take Spike to task for attacking Buffy back then. It’s not fair for that now to be his defining characteristic in anyone’s mind. It’s not fair to judge Joss or Marty harshly for including that scene. It’s not fair to say Joss’s feminist cred is damaged by that scene. Fuck, that scene strengthens it in my eyes. It throws down a challenge to any men who might think that rape is a primal unstoppable thing. If Spike – a soulless animal pushed by the, in this particular case, actually confusing behaviour of a woman – can stop, can finally get it through his skull that no is actually meaning no, then why the fuck can’t you! If he can feel remorse and try to not be the type of person who could commit a rape ever again, then every man – everyone – sure as hell can too. It’s messy and confusing. It’s dirty and ugly. The scenes after were screwed up by the writers not telling James that Spike was actually going deliberately for his soul back and making the ending too ambiguous. Apart from that, it may well be one of the most positive statements the show made. It’s an anti-rape scene.

Because of the screw up with the ambiguity over the soul, we’re in a odd place. People had to judge which way they thought it was going. I find it quite depressing that people out there were so quick to judge, and judge so absolutely, that this scene – and, by failure to change their position, the subsequent storyline of redemption – were a bad thing. Having seen this bad thing and made an on the spot judgment, so many people seem to have closed their minds and seen no more. Viewers seem capable of hand-waving all the murders committed by various characters but a – not actually rape – is apparently irredeemable. I would say it was a matter of graphic detail. The AR scene is between two main characters and last minutes. Most of the murders are quick and happen to minor characters. But then what about Andrew killing Jonathan? Why wasn’t that as shocking and lasting as the AR scene? Buffy can accept Andrew as a Watcher, Xander can sleep with Anya, but Spike cannot be Buffy’s friend? Becoming a good person, means emasculating him?

Seven TV seasons of Buffy and five of Angel all sending out the same message of hopeful redemption for all… and they failed. We continue to let our preference for one character over another blind us, we let our ships get in the way and we let our prejudices about how victims and criminals are supposed to react to each other become absolutes. We see in generalities. One almost rape becomes every rape that’s ever happened. At the very point that Spike becomes human, we dehumanise him by yelling the label “rapist” and casting him aside. This is complicated and it is messy. It’s grey upon grey upon grey.

By allowing Spike redemption, we don’t automatically forgive all rapists. By allowing Willow redemption, we don’t forgive all murderers. By allowing them redemption we allow hope that people can WANT to be redeemed, even for those appalling acts. By allowing that we deny that the idea of a First Evil exists or that, if we think it does, then we can beat it. We say that evil is a choice – not a primal urge or defacto state of humanity – and that people don’t have to choose it.