BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: Vampire Hip Part 3 – Spike
November 22nd 2009 10:07
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“You play the bloodlust kinda cool” (Willow to Spike in 4.51 “The Initiative”)
Spike is a punk with just enough edge to be classified as cool by the mainstream audience. His coolness is assured by a constructed look that visually evokes a combination of the legendary public images of Sid Vicious and Billy Idol, complemented by the gesture repertoire of James Dean, the cinematic rebel par excellence: when told he looks familiar, Spike replies: “Yeah, I get that a lot.” (4.62, “Where the Wild Things Are”). In his trademark jeans and leather, a bottle of booze and a cig in his mouth, Spike embodies teenage transgressions: Buffy’s teenage little sister Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg) explains to Buffy why she likes to hang with Spike, “he has cool hair and cool leather coats and stuff, and he doesn’t treat me like an alien” (5.14), in other words he has the right look and the right attitude. Smoking seems to be a requirement for all cool villains, who are designed to relate to youth culture. Always in style, Spike’s rebellion is summed up by the rather childish defiant gesture of smoking right in front of the no smoking sign in the hospital (5.21, “The Weight of the World”), exemplifying the perception that subcultural attitude is primarily that of insubordination.
As a vampire, Spike is indeed presented as very young and immature, finding delight in all the wrong things, much like a teenager on rampage. This image subverts the more classic vampire style exemplified by Angel. Spike acquires the features of his personal image one by one: his nickname refers to his bad poetry or the way he killed his victims – depending on who is telling the story. Contrary to Angel/Liam’s humbler Irish origins, William the Bloody was an upperclass poet and a salon dandy, as we find out in “Fool for Love” (5.7). After being turned into a vampire, Spike rejected his former dandified self and reinvented his persona as a working class thug. He affected a working class accent in opposition to his own background and to Angelus’ aristocratic pretensions (the latter dropped his Irish lingo altogether). This affectation, quite the reverse to Angelus’ more refined image, continues to develop through the act of killing two slayers, whereby Spike acquires the two remaining elements of his reinvented self: the scar over his left eye, inflicted by the Chinese slayer at the turn of the century, and the black leather coat after defeating Nikki, an Afro-American slayer, in 1970s New York. His personal style traces and illustrates a journey through experience represented by hard-gained trophies. The killing of a slayer validates Spike’s status in the vampire gang and makes him feel empowered and confident enough to sexually conquer Drusilla.
Spike in full bloom: is it more Sid or more Billy Idol, can't decide...
Spike’s stylish act often tends to be visually undermined, in the tradition of Buffyverse’s camp humour. When Spike tells Buffy “I’ve always been bad’ there is a cut to the poet William, in 19th century London, in a beige suit and tie, his honey coloured hair in comely locks, laboriously trying to find a rhyme for another bad poem (“I am the very spirit of vexation. What’s another word for gleaming?”), and presented as the ultimate sissy. Parody and play on Spike’s self-constructed tough image is a permanent feature of the show similarly to the on-going deconstructing of Angel’s macho affectations.
Before there was Spike: William the Bloody, a very bad Victorian poet
Ridiculed by society for his lack of talent as a poet and humiliated by his chosen lady, Spike readily accepted Drusilla’s gift of combined pain and pleasure and embraced his new vampiric identity. He tells Buffy: “Becoming a vampire is a profound and powerful experience. I could feel this new strength coursing through me. Being killed made me feel alive for the very first time. I was through living by society’s rules. Decided to make a few of my own.” Gaining this new subcultural status gives Spike strength and drive for his one man/demon revolt, in line with the Sex Pistols version of “My Way”. After the restraints and humiliations of his human life in the repressed Victorian age, vampirism liberates him. Leashing out, Spike seeks brawls and fights and tests himself ever further to prove his worth. The vampire gang is a source of self-esteem, constituting an inverted incestuous notion of a family, and a source of challenge through constant rivalry with Angelus. For the latter, being a vampire and thus automatically assuming the elite position on top of the food chain is a reason to use “a certain amount of finesse”. To Spike this is “bollocks”, he can choose his own status now: “That stuff’s for the frilly cuffs and collars crowd”, the crowd he used to be an outsider in before his turning, “I’ll take a good brawl any day” (5.7).
In this way Spike recreated himself as “a creature of darkness”, ultimately arriving at the punk look, as described by Hebdige in his book on punk: “‘the truth behind punk rock’, what all non-punks had feared, that underneath the outrage there lurked real violence, real perversion, a real threat of death”. Punk is an offensive and violent aesthetic, translated literally in the show, which allowed Spike the luxury of covering his clothes in real human blood, instead of fake one used symbolically in that subculture. Punk’s agenda drenched in Apocalyptic imagery, profanity and nihilism, encouraging perverse sexuality and obsessive individualism, suited Spike’s image of contestation perfectly. According to Dick Hebdige, in punk “the perverse and the abnormal were valued intrinsically. In particular, the illicit iconography of sexual fetishism” (107-8). This sheds light on Spike’s motto, “I may be love’s bitch, but at least I’m man enough to admit it” (3.30 “Lover’s Walk”) and the romantic undercurrent of the contradictory nature of punk. Spike’s main concern and weakness is the love of the fair sex. His TV preferences for Passions and Dawson’s Creek betray his inner truly romantic sensibilities. Yet despite all his transformations he still gets humiliated and rejected by all the girls he loves. He has subcultural dilemmas: he is either too much or too little of a demon to satisfy them.
Drusilla, Spike’s sire and great love, is described by Angel as a classicist: she has a grotesque, desolate, vaguely Victorian aura (she was turned in 1860) and an emotionally focused “Gothic personality”, which according to Alicia Porter is characterized by introspection, interest in the spiritual and otherworldly (manifested through Dru’s visions), theatrical gestures and movements, and surreal moods. Her character introduces goth elements of the macabre, such as talking to dead birds and playing with mutilated dolls. As a vampire Drusilla enjoys being hurt and tortured. She possesses an undeniable chemistry with Spike, projecting a dark, eerie romanticism, and sharing a perverse sensibility along the same twisted wavelength.
Historically goth developed from “the post-punk school of gloomy introspection” (Thompson and Greene). Spike and Drusilla are an iconic subcultural item, a yin and yang coupling of goth and punk: “Punk represents rebellion, Goth represents sadness” (Porter). The intimacy between them manifests itself in small telling gestures and rituals, which imply a kinky eroticism and insinuate images of bondage: Drusilla kisses Spike’s cheek after purposefully scratching it with her fingernail (2.5, “Halloween”) and licks a slayer’s blood, a supposed aphrodisiac, off his finger in “Fool for Love” (5.7). They always caress and touch each other and in a romantic gesture of reunion they go to Bronze, Sunnydale’s only nightclub, to feed on lovers (5.14, “Crush”). Spike calls Drusilla his Black Beauty, claiming she delivered him from mediocrity: “I’m nothing without her.” Having a penchant for grand gestures, he nonetheless later offers to kill Drusilla in order to prove his love for Buffy, demonstrating the contradictory nature of punk.
Rrrrromancing the slayer
Spike’s relationship with Buffy also includes a sexually transgressive ingredient, as his obsession with the slayer has a fetishistic aspect: Buffy’s on/off boyfriend Riley (Marc Blucas) discovers Spike in Buffy’s bedroom smelling her pink sweater. He also repeatedly steals her underwear. With Buffy Spike becomes the passive and masochistic partner, her “soddin’ sex slave” (6.17, “Normal Again”). They engage in the unconventional practice of rough sex in public places and Buffy sums up their relationship nicely: “I beat him up a lot. For Spike it’s like third base” (5.4, “Out of My Mind”). Spike ultimately inverts the stereotype of the vampire as the seductive force, he is the seduced love fool.
Style tragedy finally strikes in the form of a...humble Hawaiian T-shirt
The most serious crisis in Spike’s unlife however, one that makes him contemplate suicide, occurs when in addition to his inability to perform as a vampire, because of the anti-violence chip inserted by the Initiative, he also loses his cultivated image: in “Doomed” (4.55) he shrinks his clothes in an attempt to do the laundry and is forced to wear Xander’s khaki shorts and a colourful hawaiian t-shirt: “Don’t look at me! (…) I’m beyond pathetic. I don’t want pity from geeks more useless than I am”. In Spike’s case his punk vampirism is the very epitome of a “revolt into style”. He embodies the irreverent, anarchic and antiestablishment themes of punk in his love of chaos and trouble. Punk, like vampirism, is both attractive and repulsive. It is a paradoxical, ambiguous and narcissistic subcultural attitude characterized by a wicked, dark and dry sense of humour: when confronted by a group of vampires about his penchant for killing his own kind, Spike answers “a bloke’s gotta have a hobby” and gleefully engages in a bashing.
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: Vampire Hip Part 4 – Buffy vs. Dracula
Article by Patricia Bieszk
© Copyright P. Bieszk 2009
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