The 'Seeing Red' bathroom scene:
Why ME went there, gender relations in the Buffyverse, and the future of Buffy/Spike
 
by ariana@ndirect.co.uk
Fall 2002
 
 
Ever since I saw the unexpurgated version of the bathroom scene, I've been asking myself why the Mutant Enemy team ("ME") felt the need to subject the audience to this disturbing, jarring, out-of-character scene. Buffy the Vampire Slayer turned into a whimpering victim almost as soon as Spike touched her, while the Spike who in 'Fool For Love' was moved by Buffy's tears didn't seem to even notice her hysterical sobbing and frantic efforts to get away. As of the end of season 6, the scene seemed to serve only two purposes: to prove that Spike is unworthy of Buffy, and to send him to Africa. The first point was already made, albeit badly, in 'As You Were,' while the second could just as easily have been achieved by a different handling of the Spike/Anya affair, for instance.

So why did ME choose to show us a graphic sexual assault instead? My initial conclusion was that they either put it in purely for shock value, or they have a cunning plan for season 7.

I honestly wouldn't put the first option past Marti "I mention rape in every episode" Noxon, and indeed, I do think that played an important part in their decision to include the scene at all. The audience didn't "get" the Bad Boyfriend thing earlier in the season, so ME took out a sledgehammer. But in my opinion, this does beg the question "If Joss Whedon cared enough to soften the snarky Buffy/Spike scene in 'Hell's Bells', why did he let his minions put in the bathroom scene at all?" Either he doesn't give a toss about Buffy and Spike after all, or the scene has a greater purpose. This brought me to the cunning plan theory, and sent me on a quest to find deeper meaning in the scene and try to imagine how ME will use it in season 7.

First of all, I have to say that, plan or no plan, I think there are some incontrovertible problems with the scene itself. By its very nature, it's a dangerous place for the show to go. In her Succubus interview (May 2002), Jane Esperson made a point of saying that the scene wasn't about real life rape issues. If this is how it was meant, then it was a poorly presented dramatic choice, because ME made the scene very realistic. As a consequence, there may be an audience expectation for ME to send the "right" message about real life sexual assaults, which could backfire if they fail to do so. They're taking a serious dramatic risk, and only season 7 will tell if it was worth it.

Its real life implications or lack thereof aside, one of the main problems I see in the scene as it's presented on screen is that it reduces the characters of Spike and Buffy to gender stereotypes they don't fit into. Buffy has always displayed stereotypical masculine traits like strength, aggressiveness and emotional detachment. Spike, on the other hand, often shows stereotypical feminine behaviour like submissiveness, caring and emotional expressiveness. Both of these tendencies are particularly visible in their season 6 relationship. It's difficult to suddenly accept Spike as the overpowering male and Buffy the overpowered female when the relationship has been tipped the other way all season.

This begs the question why ME switched their roles to give us that scene. Some cynical theories immediately spring to mind. Maybe ME thought a victimised, sobbing Buffy would garner sympathy for their largely unsympathetic heroine, and indeed, it's difficult not to feel for her plight in that scene. Having decided to do a "rape" scene, ME probably also felt the need to make Buffy so weak and feeble to make it unequivocally clear that she wasn't "asking for it" (and to spin the assault out to 47 seconds, spread over an ad break). Meanwhile, if ME wanted to hammer home the "Spike is Evil" message given in all their season 6 interviews, then I believe they failed completely. If they had wanted to do Evil, they would have made him plan the attack, as he did in 'Fool For Love'. But instead, Spike is presented as a desperate, human-faced lunatic. Buffy has been blowing hot and cold on him all season, and he's finally snapped. So no evil Spike and a manipulatively sympathetic Buffy.

As I mentioned above, one of the more obvious reasons for the assault is to show that Spike is an unsuitable mate for Buffy. I'll concede that it does make this point perfectly clear, though its shock value and questionable characterisation make it a clumsy dramatic tool. The message of the whole scene is actually expressed far more eloquently in the initial conversation. There is a complete communications breakdown between Buffy and Spike; she isn't listening when he tries to apologise, he isn't listening when she tells him she can't love him. They also have different definitions of love: Buffy wants trust, Spike wants passion. This point, which in my opinion is somewhat overshadowed by the length and graphic nature of the assault, is something that I find particularly significant on a metaphorical level, so I will come back to it later.

As seen above, I'm struggling to fully justify the scene from a story-telling point of view. However, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is not only a story, but also a metaphorical representation of a young woman growing up. On this level, Buffy's family and the members of the Scooby Gang represent aspects of her personality, while other characters, like Spike, represent the Other, people who are not her. The Buffyverse is the heroine's world view, and as such the positive and negative forces in it are represented by femininity and masculinity respectively (the antithesis of the Chinese Yin-Yang system). So how does the sexual assault fit in with this metaphor?

One of the main themes of season 6 is the conflict between the masculine and feminine principles. As a young adult, Buffy is struggling to deal with her own sexual identity. In season 5, burdened with the weight of sorrow and responsibility, she felt that she was losing her "ability to love", her goodness and femininity, and becoming more masculine: cold and violent where she was once warm and loving. In addition to this, Buffy realises that she is attracted to her former enemy Spike. This creates a conflict within her between her sexual desire and her instinctive distrust of him for what he is (a vampire in the story, a bad boy in the metaphor). Following her unsuccessful suicide attempt in 'The Gift', Buffy is too immature and depressed to solve the conflict, and, having lost her connection to her own femininity, surrenders completely to the masculine principle.

The result is that the masculine principle takes over the Buffyverse, dominating its good, feminine aspects, and threatening to destroy Buffy completely. The effects are visible in the story. Buffy's new enemies are the Doublemeat phallus and Warren's magic balls, while male characters are at their worst: Giles the father figure vanishes, Xander the good man becomes a useless jerk, Spike the embodiment of male sexuality turns into a would-be rapist. Meanwhile, female characters are victims: Dawn is ignored, Anya is abandoned at the altar, Tara is murdered. It is significant that Willow, the female character who is the worst aggressor, mind-raping her partner and trying to destroy the world, is the one who plays the masculine role in her relationship (as demonstrated by Tara's passive sexual poses in 'Once More With Feeling' and 'Seeing Red'). As part of the metaphorical gender conflict is taking place within her, Buffy herself is both abuser and victim.

Rape is the very nadir of gender relations. It's masculinity at its worst, femininity at its weakest. As such, it does have a place in a story with an underlying theme of the masculine principle trying to destroy the feminine. In this context, the sexual assault in 'Seeing Red' makes a little more sense, as it serves as a (not very subtle) symbolic rape and therefore fits in with one of the main themes of the season. In fact, Buffy and Spike's relationship itself has largely consisted of the masculine (Buffy as the abuser, Spike as the representative of darkness) dominating the feminine (Spike as the abused, Buffy as the representative of light), and as such some kind of rape is perhaps its logical conclusion. The abrupt gender switch I mentioned above becomes necessary because this a television show catering to an audience who would not take a woman raping a man seriously. So for the "rape" to happen and make its point, Spike has to be the perpetrator and Buffy the victim.

But there are many other symbolic rapes throughout the season, and none of them are like this. Why impose one that looks a great deal like the real thing on the heroine and her love interest? The best explanation is possibly that this is the most important symbolic rape, because the relationship between Buffy and Spike is the main expression of the season's metaphor. As such, it probably needed to be presented in a way that couldn't be so easily dismissed, unlike Willow's magic spells, Warren's supervillain mind control device, or the ludicrous Doublemeat monster. Whatever one can say about the bathroom scene, it's not easy to dismiss.

So now they've introduced this disturbing scene in the name of the almighty metaphor, what are ME going to do with it?

For a start, I suspect that whatever they do with it will not conform to our expectation of the "right" or realistic way to treat a sexual assault. After all, falling into the trap of the lesbian cliché with Tara's death seems to have left ME (and as far as I can tell, most of the audience) completely unfazed. So I suspect that, taking the stance that the Buffyverse isn't the real world, ME won't feel the need to give a realistic or even a "correct" follow-up to the sexual assault either.

With this in mind, it seems clear to me that the assault will not lead to a return of Buffy and Spike as mortal enemies. The scene was handled in such a way that reconciliation between the characters is shown as possible as soon as the attack ends. They can both come back from it.

Spike is the villain of the piece, but shows immediate horror and remorse at what he has done. His half-finished "Oh, God. Buffy, I didn't..." expresses that rape was not his intent: although his actions were bad, they didn't come from an "evil place" (to paraphrase Jane Espenson on another topic). I think this is actually one reason why he isn't in game face: he isn't evil, he's just very wrong, just as Buffy was very wrong when she beat him in 'Dead Things.' Furthermore, his first action after the scene is to set off on a quest to change himself, thereby taking responsibility for his actions and playing an active role in repairing the damage (clumsy misdirection aside). Add in a little bit of humility in his first few s7 episodes, and Spike definitely deserves to be forgiven.

Furthermore, her uncharacteristic weakness during the assault itself notwithstanding, Buffy is not a victim, and therefore will not be shown as being overly vindictive or traumatised by the event. In fact, this is borne up almost immediately on the show, with Buffy telling Xander not to go after Spike in 'Seeing Red', and her bringing Dawn to Spike's crypt the day after the assault in 'Villains'. I also find it significant that her first big post-attack action is to go out and break Warren's orbs, thereby symbolically refusing to be victimised by the masculine power that assaulted her earlier. So though she will have understandable misgivings (already seen in 'Grave'), I expect Buffy will be able to ultimately forgive Spike in season 7.

From the metaphorical point of view too, forgiveness makes sense. For the "young woman growing up" metaphor to continue next season, there will have to be a reconciliation between the sexes. Despite their conflicting natures, the masculine and the feminine are complementary principles, not opposites; one cannot function without the other. The feminine principle is weak without the masculine, and, as shown in season 6, the masculine is destructive without the feminine.

By the time season 6 reaches 'Grave', there are already signs that balance is returning. Buffy gets back in touch with her feminine side in her weepy scene with Dawn. The masculine characters start to make up for their previous actions: absent Giles returns, useless Xander saves the world, soulless Spike fights to gain a soul. Willow ends the season sobbing in Xander's arms. Buffy has already reintegrated three of her avatars - Dawn, Xander and Giles - into her life. The next step is to accept the worst of herself as well and learn to control it, by forgiving Willow and helping her recover. Once this is done, Buffy will be ready to accept the good and the bad in the universe too.

In season 6, overwhelmed by her own darkness, Buffy was unwilling or unable to see the good in Spike, the soft, feminine side which the audience could already see. I'm confident that restoring the balance to the Buffyverse will involve Buffy recognising the light in Spike, a task facilitated by the fact that he too has been fighting his personal demons and becoming a better person (expressed in the story by him fighting, well, demons, and acquiring a soul).

I am therefore confident that the aftermath of the scene will not be as bad as some Spike fans have feared. Despite appearances, I don't think it marks the end of Spike and Buffy's relationship. In fact, if anything, I actually believe ME wanted this graphic sexual scene to come between Spike and Buffy because they want to do a Buffy/Spike romance next year.

This theory comes across an immediate and rather obvious problem: the visuals provided by the scene itself. The whole scene is framed in a colourless environment which screams "Hello! I'm really important!" The assault goes on for what feels like ages, and is artificially extended by a commercial break, so that the viewer's mind is completely filled with Spike's obscenities and Buffy's begging. The last season 6 image of Buffy and Spike's faces in the same shot shows us a sobbing Buffy, and a demented Spike tearing at her bathrobe. With these images in their audience's mind, how could ME possibly be aiming for a romance next season?

Furthermore, It's a well-known fact that when Angelus killed Jenny Calendar in season 2, ME purposefully put him in game face so that the audience would accept Buffy telling his human face that she loved him. Spike isn't afforded the privilege of this get out clause. The face which told Buffy he was going to "make [her] feel it" is the same one which she will look into when he returns to Sunnydale. Given these facts, it might seem obvious that ME designed the bathroom scene to be the death knoll of the Buffy/Spike romance.

But let's not forget that these are the same people who had Spike ranting and raving about the chip while on his way to deliberately acquire a soul, and who gave the audience  six months of Magic-Addict Willow before turning her into the Darth Willow the audience could have predicted at the beginning of the season. This year, ME have been the kings of clumsy, obvious misdirection. It is not inconceivable therefore that the bathroom scene is another ploy designed to throw the audience off the scent. In fact, it's precisely the extreme nature of the assault which suggests that it is not all it seems. As I mentioned before, it is so shocking that it actually detracts from the important points made in the conversation that precedes it.

I spoke above of the need to balance the polarising principles in order to make the Buffyverse a better place, and Buffy a better person. On a personal level, the ultimate partnership of male and female is symbolised through marriage. When the young woman in the metaphor reaches the point where she can balance the forces within her and become a mature, healthy adult, she is ready to look for a mate. As many have already argued, the only available mate in the Buffyverse right now is Spike, since all the other male regulars are aspects of Buffy.

The bathroom scene's clearest message is that Spike is currently an unsuitable mate for Buffy. But more than the assault, it's the conversation between Buffy and Spike when he enters the bathroom that illustrates the problem:

SPIKE: Trust is for old marrieds, Buffy. Great love is wild and passionate and dangerous. It burns and consumes.
BUFFY: Until there's nothing left. That kind of love doesn't last.

At this point, Spike is the immature young man who wants sex and romance, but not the responsibility of a committed, long-term relationship. Buffy, on the other hand, wants a love that will last. Whether consciously or not, she is already thinking of Spike in terms of a life-long mate. In 'Villains,' even though he has proved that he is unsuitable just the previous day, she is ready to offer him her love and her future, represented by Dawn as her metaphorical heart and symbolic offspring. Now all Spike has to do is earn them.

I drew the obvious parallel to Angel above. Unlike Angel, Spike doesn't get things handed to him on a plate. Angel was souled against his will, and then guided by Whistler, Buffy and his colleagues at Angel Investigations. After the initial chipping, Spike has travelled his journey almost entirely on his own, with only the chip and his love for Buffy as an impetus for change. The bathroom scene takes Spike to his lowest point ever. He has already lost his identity as the Big Bad vampire, a point which 'As You Were' actually did make quite clearly. This convivial, social character was reduced to an isolated pariah in season 6, whose only meaningful interactions were with Buffy, and towards the end, Clem. At the end of 'Seeing Red', he has lost his last source of pride: even the "five hours straight" sexual prowess, the only thing Buffy seemed to like about him, has become a source of shame. He has been knocked so low that it will take a lot of effort for him to climb his way back. But when he does, he will have earned the respect and happiness he needs.

Meanwhile, within the story in season 7, the assault will serve as a barrier to stop Spike and Buffy from repeating the mistake of season 6. Following the assault, Buffy's wariness and Spike guilt will force them to keep their hands off each other, so that they can develop a platonic relationship and work out their issues before resuming their romance. There will be no "can you be kissing me?" shortcuts: Buffy and Spike will have to go through the whole long process of rebuilding trust on both sides that Tara described in 'Entropy'. After all, if the marriage metaphor holds true, this will be the most important relationship of both their lives.

Given all this, I now have a far more optimistic view of how season 7 will progress after all the destruction of season 6. Just as Season 6 portrayed the descent of all characters into hell, Season 7 must be their ascent back to a better place. ME's avowed intension to do a two-season arc, and the more mundane need to attract sufficient ratings, suggest that season 7 will be both the continuation and the anti-thesis of season 6, light where the latter was dark, hopeful where the latter was full of despair. Buffyverse feminine to season 6's masculine, effectively.

In conclusion, nothing is really going to convince me that we don't owe the scene to ME's sensationalism and Marti Noxon's issues. But although its execution and in-story logic are flawed (like many things in season 6), I am confident the bathroom scene will ultimately lead to better things for both Spike and Buffy.
love..
 

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