All Btvs and Ats quotes are from Psyche Transcripts. Philosophers are quoted from the book Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaardner. Thanks Masq for allowing long monstrous posts.
Finally bored, frustrated, and annoyed enough to write another monstrous essay as a mild attempt to calm my crankiness and to keep myself away from spoilers. Gone cold turkey.
This essay got away from me. I don’t know why. And it’s not really an essay so much as me trying to figure something out through writing about it and sharing it with others. Hey, twenty heads are better than one, right? Actually none of my posts are meant to be essays so much as explorations of issues that I see in Btvs and Ats that a) relate to my own life in some undescribable way and b) bug me. I tend to just think better when I write than when I do just about anything else. So if you see errors in thought, logic, or analysis? Kindly point them out. Thanks.
Souls – what do we know about them outside of Btvs and Ats? Well according to Plato, the immortal soul separated man from the lower beasts and made it possible for us to concern ourselves with the realm of ideas. I think therefore I am point of view. Never really understood Plato very well, so don’t shoot me if I misunderstood. Descartes seems to see the soul as a separate entity from the physical machine. It’s what makes us more than just a machine, gives us a consciousness, feelings, emotions, and sensations. I think the robots on Btvs would have confused Descartes. And he knew the soul existed because well, he didn’t trust his senses on what did or did not exist. Thoughts exist and we can’t see them. Lock saw people as having a blank slate, a tabula rasa, when they were born and their personality was developed by how they reacted to the things around them. To some people an orange may taste sour, to others tart. While of course it appears round to everyone. The primary attributes stay the same, it’s the secondary – the ones that we discover through our senses and interpret that vary. And from wandering about on the internet, we can interpret what we see, hear, taste, touch and smell in an unending variety of ways. There doesn’t appear to be a consensus on the secondary stuff. Not sure what that has to do with souls, but I found it interesting.
My own view is that we all have souls and they are immortal and exist after we die. Where they go? Haven’t a clue. But I’ve seen my grandmother’s dead body and that was enough to convince me that we had souls. Of course I’m a bit like Descartes, don’t entirely trust my senses. But this isn’t really relevant to Btvs and Ats. We’re not really interested in what I think a soul means or what a bunch of dead philosophers think – we want to know what it means and represents in Btvs and Ats, otherwise we’d all be discussing this stuff on the Plato Board not the All Things Philosophical about Buffy/Angel board. Key words being Buffy and Angel.
What I find most fascinating about Btvs and Ats is the writers do not limit themselves to one meaning for any given metaphor. They use metaphors to represent a wide range of inter-connecting ideas. Souls aren’t limited to good and evil and having a conscience. If you think that, you’re missing half the show. The thing about the Buffyverse is every time you think you have it figured out, they uncover another layer; it’s a bit like peeling an onion. This is my attempt at understanding what the writers are exploring with their constant references to souls. What are the multiple meanings of the metaphor? Agree or Disagree, but remember to be kind, this is just a tv show and merely my interpretation of it. I don’t profess to be able to read the creators collective minds.
1. The Soul as a metaphor for GUILT – Angel/Angelus, Gunn’s sister,
The first time a soul is mentioned in Buffy the Vampire Slayer is in Season One, Angel. Angel tells Buffy that he was cursed with a soul approximately 90 years ago, he’s 245 at this point. He states – “When you become a vampire, the demon doesn’t get your soul, that’s lost, no conscience – no remorse, it’s an easy way to live.” For Liam it was a gift. Prior to his turning, Liam was held back by feelings of duty to his family, guilt at not living up to his father’s expectations, guilt at not being a success for his family, and the inability to do what he so desperately wanted to do which was slam his failure down Daddy’s throat. It is the first thing he does when his conscience is removed.
Angel has the same problem. He’s tormented by his guilt for loving Buffy. He is powerfully attracted to her, but knows that he’s older than her and shouldn’t be with her, etc. He feels guilty for getting her in danger, which is indirectly his fault since he was responsible for the existence of Dru and Spike and it is his life force that restored Dru. If it weren’t for him – Dru, the Judge, Spike wouldn’t exist. He feels powerfully guilty about that. He also feels guilty for Buffy putting him first and being tormented by dreams about him. So in a moment of weakness he gives in and sleeps with Buffy. Loses his soul. It’s the easy path again. “The pain is gone!” Well not quite. He clearly still feels tormented by his feelings for Buffy. Life isn’t as easy as it was before. Now he has to prove himself again as the big bad vampire. He’s spent way too much time atoning and he looks like a failure, the “slayer’s lap dog” to the demon crowd. So he hatches the worst possible plan he can conceive of. A plan that will rival all the other big bad’s even the dreaded Master. This will certainly earn him a place in history. Question – is this plan constructed out of a sense of guilt? Not really. More a sense of pride. He needs to prove himself again. Spike has done more in the last 90 years to be worthy of the BB title than he has and that’s got to smart. Angelus’ worst flaw is his vanity, his pride. Having no conscience holding them back, vampires are proud of being evil – they embrace it. Angelus fell down on the job.
Poor Angelus – just as he’s about to succeed, the mouth of hell gaping open behind him, he gets the dang soul back. And instead of just chopping off his head, Buffy pierces him with a sword and sends him to hell. Then he comes back, awash with guilt and unable to do much about it.
On the surface, Angel’s story appears to be one that is ALL ABOUT GUILT. Heck Angel is a walking metaphor for guilt. How we handle it. How it tortures us. And how we live with it. So it’s no surprise that the audience begins to think, soul = guilt. No soul? No guilt. No guilt? Evil. But I think there’s more going on with both the guilt metaphor and the soul metaphor. Actually the fact that a soul isn’t the only metaphor ME uses to symbolize and discuss the problem with guilt, makes me realize there’s more going on.
First what is guilt? It keeps us from hurting each other? Well not exactly. We still do that. All the blasted time. It just makes us feel bad about it. And makes us think twice before we do it.
How do we handle guilt? I had an interesting conversation with a Lieutenant in the Navy a while back. He served on the USS Enterprise which was sent to bomb Afghanistan after 9/11. We discussed guilt. He said one of the hardest parts of his job was morale. As a gunnery Lieutenant, his group was in charge of cleaning, positioning, repairing, maintaining and targeting the guns on the boat. They had a Muslim chapel on board and many of their fellow officers were Muslim. The group they were targeting was a fanatic Muslim faction. To handle guilt, people often demonize the enemy, make them sub-human, evil. Otherwise it becomes difficult to fire a bunch of guns on them. But demonizing the enemy has a nasty side-effect – racism, religious prejudice…hate. Don’t want to go there. So he struggles to get the men to think less emotionally about it and not to direct their hatred towards one religious group or ethnicity. Not to deal with their guilt by making some other ethnic group to be worse than they are.
Sort of reminds me of Buffy in Living Conditions. She hates Kathy, her roommate. To rationalize her hatred of Kathy and make it possible for her to get rid of Kathy, she decides Kathy is a demon. A soul-sucking demon. Turns out she’s right. But still, what if she was wrong? What if Kathy was just an ordinary if slightly obnoxious girl? Riley does the same thing with the Initiative, rationalizes the military’s actions based on the fact that they are hunting demons. In AYW – he states, “If it came to a war between us and them, they’d win. Have to exterminate them.” The survival rationale. And in New Moon Rising? He tells Buffy all demons are bad, no graduations, we kill them. Riley keeps it simple, that way he doesn’t have to feel guilty.
Buffy isn’t so lucky. She does feel the weight of her slayer duties. She does wonder if she’s just a killer. In The Gift, she even asks Giles if that’s all she is. In Weight of The World, she is overwhelmed with guilt – which erupts from a momentary desire to just let Dawn die. If Dawn died, all her problems would be solved. Willow pushes her out of it. But it takes a while. Buffy feels guilt for Faith and handles it by telling herself that what happened with Faith wasn’t her fault, it would have happened any way. But a part of Buffy isn’t so sure. Part of the reason Buffy can’t stake Spike – is she can’t rationalize it in her head. With the chip, he can’t hurt anyone but her and she knows if push came to shove, she is stronger than him. She would kill him not the other way around. As she tells Dawn and Xander in Villains, “being the slayer, does not give me a license to kill.” A job she has to do every day in the demon world. But to live with herself? She makes choices. Only killing those demons that pose an obvious danger to the society and world in which she lives. Decisions the Watcher Council would probably take issue with, but Buffy can no longer trust the Watchers’ justifications and rational, they used these same justifications to put her and her mother in danger and to kill Faith.
The theme of a soul = conscience/guilt is repeated in Angel Season 1, War Zone, with the introduction of Gunn. In this episode, Gunn, a street fighter who has formed a vampire hunting squad to defend his territory, is faced with killing the person he loves most in the world, his sister Alonna. Alonna has been turned into a vampire. In the following scene, the writers cleverly show us the temptation of letting go of guilt. It’s an interesting metaphor for the temptations young street kids face when given drugs such as speed or crack and told to join violent gangs to support the habit. Like the vampire who loses their soul, these kids use the crack, the speed, to deaden themselves, to stop feeling the responsibility, the pain, and the guilt.
Alonna: "We were on the right track - just on the wrong team. All that rage and hatred we got? We get to keep all that, only on this side there is no guilt, no grief - just the hunt and the kill - and the fun! And come on, how often did we go out in the daylight anyway?"
Reminds me of a gang leader in some of the movies I’ve seen and the SE Hinton Books. Let go of the guilt – just have fun! The drug removes that. Ecstasy certainly does. You’re so high, you don’t care.
Gunn: "Alonna, I can't do this!"
Alonna: "You were made for this. - Oh, and all that misery and moping gone, I promise you."
Gunn: "I was never gonna let anything happen to you. I was supposed to protect you. You were my sister."
Alonna: "I still am. (Gunn shakes his head) So why don't you kill me? - Why *don't* you? (Spread her arms wide - Gunn just looks at her) Ah! *You* can't! Because you got the guilt - and I got the greatest guilt cure ever. I can free you! We can be together - our family can stay together - forever.”
Again the metaphor = without a soul, your guilt-free. Oh you still care about those who were important to you. Alonna clearly still loves Gunn, feels a connection to Gunn. But she wants to switch from continuously fighting to be good, to protect others. The old if you can’t fight them? Join them approach. Hey – we can stay together and the bad kids (vampires) are having more fun. All you have to do is give up your humanity, your soul.
Alonna: "Remember when we were kids - in that shelter on Plummer Street, hmm? (Gunn nods) Second floor was all rotted out. - You used to dare kids to cross, and of *course* you were the best at it, because you were the - you were the bravest. I wanted to be like you so bad, so I went up, and the floor gave out. I would have broken my neck, but - you'd been watching me the whole time. You were standing right below - and you caught me. - Ever since I can remember you've been looking out for me. - But you don't have to any more, because I'm good, and it's my turn to look out for you now."
Gunn: "How?"
Alonna: "Look at you. You're running and hiding, cold and hungry. You call that living? (Gunn looks down) You're the one that's falling now. Let me catch you. - Don’t you want to stop falling? (Gunn nods slightly) I'm gonna fix it. (Morphs into her vamp-face) Oh, say goodbye to everything you ever knew."
She wraps one arm around his neck and stretches up to bite him.
Gunn: "Good-bye." (he stakes her). (WAR ZONE, Ats Season 1)
The temptation must be overwhelming. According to Alonna – once you become a vampire, you stop being cold or hungry. You just want, take, have! And you don’t care about the consequences. The reason Alonna and Gunn are so poor and hungry all the time is they can’t do that. They can’t just go after what they want. When they do? They are overcome with guilt.
But unlike Angelus – Alonna doesn’t lose her capability to love others when she becomes a vampire. Clearly the soul metaphor does not equal love here. It only equals guilt or conscience. Alonna for all her faults, still wants to save Gunn. Still wants to help Gunn.
Still feels responsible for her brother. Their connection is deep enough to survive her death. Of course her ability to love is limited to those people she feels a personal tie to, whether they be human or demon.
In Angel’s storyline – love does not appear to be strong enough to survive the loss of Angel’s soul. Angelus does not appear to feel a personal tie to anyone in his life. Perhaps love wasn’t something Liam can feel strongly? Or perhaps, love isn’t part of the soul metaphor?
2. Soul = change of heart or ability to love, Angel and Darla
In the Surprise/Innocence arc of Season 2 Btvs, the soul was used as a metaphor for love. Not so much loss of love as a change in the type of love demonstrated. It was similarly used in this manner in the episodes Lullaby and the Darla pregnancy arc on Ats. Interesting use of the metaphor, which is also inconsistent, since it is not used with any other vampire on the show, all the others actually appear to be more than capable of loving one another. So why single out these two?
The metaphor in Surprise/Innocence was used to demonstrate a common teenage fear – I sleep with the guy, he turns all evil. It was perfect. Angel loses his soul the moment he gives in to his carnal desires and sleeps with the girl he loves. Unlike Riley, Parker or Spike, when Angel sleeps with Buffy – she is just a girl, barely seventeen years of age and a virgin. Angel is also portrayed as far older than she is, emotionally, mentally and physically. Riley, Parker and Spike actually are portrayed more like equals of varying maturity. And just in case we missed the Lolita reference – they repeat it in Becoming Part I – literally having Angel visit and start to stalk a fifteen year old girl, who is sucking a lollipop and wearing pigtails. With the soul – Angel is the kind fatherly presence, the older brother, the kind protector, the mysterious lover, who appears in time to save her or throw her a kiss then disappears. Without a soul – he is the obsessive stalker, the crude frat boy, the wolfish predator, the sadistic lover, - who drops bloody gifts on your doorstep and tells you that your sexual technique was lacking in expertise. Angelus could give Parker a few pointers.
It’s not until we are given glimpses into Angel’s past and see what he was like as a human that we realize, even as a human, Angel didn’t really know love. It was not until he met Buffy that he felt anything close to it. The writers have moved away from the love metaphor in Angel’s case. Angel’s soul no longer equals love so much as it just equals a conscience or rather the ability to feel remorse.
This love metaphor is however echoed with Darla. While Darla certainly feels affection and lust for Angel/Angelus, she does not love him. Something she realizes in Lullaby when she admits that the child she is carrying is truly the only thing she has ever loved.
Angel: "Well - you've never *loved* anything, Darla."
Darla: "That's true. Four hundred years and I never did - till now. - I don't know what to do."
Angel: " What I do know is that you love this baby, our baby. You've bonded with it. You've spent nine months carrying it, nourishing it..."
Darla: "No. No, I haven't been nourishing it. I haven't given this baby a thing. I'm dead. It's been nourishing me. These feelings that I'm having, they're not mine. They're coming from it."
Angel: "You don't know that."
Darla: "Of course I do! We both do. Angel, I don't have a soul. It does. And right now that soul is inside of me, but soon, it won't be and then..."
Angel: "Darla..."
Darla: "I won't be able to love it. I won't even be able to remember that I loved it. (Starts to cry) I want to remember."
Here the soul is a metaphor about love. Without the soul – Darla can’t love her child. She’ll kill it. She won’t even remember what the love was like. This metaphor for some reason appears to be reserved for Angelus and Darla. Because when we are introduced to other vampires? We do see affection, even love expressed.
James and Lisabeth in Heartthrob certainly shared a great love and both seem aware that that type of affection is not shared by Darla and Angelus who scoff at them both for being weak. James even tells Angel when he meets up with him again – that if he can love now, than he’s not the same man who screwed Darla to save his own neck. According to Cordy, Angel can only love again because he has a soul.
JAMES: But if you've changed ... if you're not the same man who screwed Darla and couldn't care less what happened to her...
ANGEL: Where did you hear ... Oh, you mean back in the day. Right.
CORDELIA: (comes up behind Angel, addresses James) He has changed. A lot. He has a soul now and he cares about people.
Interesting comment of Angel’s by the way, apparently he hasn’t changed that much. He doesn’t care what happens to Darla until she either becomes pregnant or human. He certainly doesn’t care enough to stake her the way Gunn does Alonna. Although that can be read either way like so many things in Btvs. Have to love the ambiguity makes for lively debates.
Spike and Dru are of course another example. For over a century they remain devoted to each other and share great love. Love that is commented on by the Judge who wants to burn them for it in Surprise. “You stink of affection and jealousy.” When Angelus appears, the Judge declares him clean. Apparently Spike and Dru have something Angelus doesn’t. Love. This may explain something that continues to confuse viewers of the show, how is it possible for Spike to love Buffy when Angelus didn’t appear to? (Unless of course you count Angelus’ sadistic desire to kill her and all her friends as love. Could be what made him nuts enough to end the world. Although I think it’s more likely that he just wanted to prove himself the Big Bad vampire again. Angelus does however seem to consider love to be a toxic thing – it is an incentive to do good, gets in the way of evil deeds.) And yes I think Spike’s love for Buffy is more than just the fact he gets off on being beaten up by her. If that was all it was, he would have lost interest when she died or by Tough Love when she stopped beating him up. The beating didn’t resume until after she kissed him. I think Spike can love. But his ability to love does not mean he’s not evil, it does not make him good any more than James or Alonna’s abilities to love made them good. So you clearly do not need a soul to feel love, the metaphor appears to be limited to Darla and Angel for some reason.
Perhaps it’s the purity of the love that the writers are examining with their metaphor?
With Angel/Angelus this is far easier to see, just as it is with Darla and Pregnant Darla. Angel is supposed to feel unselfish love for his friends and Buffy, so much so that he leaves Buffy and his motivation/incentive to do good while originally associated with Buffy, becomes more and more associated with a desire to make the world a better place. Angel has begun to care about others, people he does not know, who are not part of his immediate circle or family. Hence Cordelia’s line – “He has a soul now, he cares about people..” People outside of himself or whom directly affect himself.
Darla is the same way in Lullaby. With the child growing inside her, she gradually begins to care a little about Angel’s friends lives and in the end to save her child, commits the most selfless act of her entire existence – she stakes herself. Because in order for the child to be born – Darla must become dust. She gains nothing from her act but death.
James commits suicide to kill Angel because he can’t live with Lisabeth gone. He cares not for anything outside of the pleasure she gave him. Is that love? Well yeah. But it is love that encompasses only two people. He kills the vampire who reported her death without remorse. Spike helps Buffy save the world to get Dru away from Angelus in Becoming Part II. But when he leaves with Dru, he has no way of knowing if Buffy will win. Actually it looks like Angelus is going to kill her and the world is going to end. Also in The Gift – Spike attempts to save Dawn to make Buffy happy, he doesn’t really care if the world ends. Spike’s incentive is to make Buffy happy. His love is limited to her. Is that love? Well yes. But it’s a different type of love from the love in which Angel had for Buffy or Darla had for her son. Angel’s love encompassed what Joyce, Xander, Giles, Willow and the others felt was best for Buffy. Angel cared what happened to Cordelia when she came to LA enough to save her. And Cordelia hadn’t been one of his favorite people at the time. (Okay enough Spike analysis – the character confuses me because I could argue it the other way and still be right. Saving him for later. Back to Darla who is far easier and less confusing.)
Darla’s story also reemphasizes the whole soul as a conscience metaphor. When Darla becomes human – she is gradually overwhelmed with guilt. It doesn’t happen over night, she really shows little compassion for the man that she kills to set up Angel. But gradually, it becomes difficult to look at herself in the mirror. The memories rush in. The memories of who she once was and what she has done. Then she discovers she is dying of the same disease she had when she was alive 400 years before, syphilis. Her first reaction is to become a vampire again – immortality no matter what the cost. And the cost is an inherently selfish one. Because vampires by their very nature are evil and selfish things – they sustain themselves with the blood of the living. Living forever by cutting the lives of others dramatically short. Angel stops her, striving to save her soul, because to Angel – anything that has a soul can be redeemed. Angel has to believe this, otherwise there’s no point. (This occurs prior to his Epiphany that doing individual acts of kindness makes life worthwhile.) Failing to save her life or give her an extension, Angel offers to turn her, himself. Maybe the soul will have an affect. But Darla turns him down – watching him sacrifice and torture himself for her makes her realize that dying isn’t such a tragedy and chooses a natural death like the one she skipped out on ages ago. Unfortunately Wolfram and Hart appear with Drusilla and Darla’s choice is ripped from her. (Trial, Ats Season 2). But the metaphors remain, with the soul, Darla not only has a conscience, the ability to love someone else, but also perhaps the ability to choose good over evil.
3. Soul Metaphor = Incentive to do good (moral compass), Angel, Spike, Willow, Warren, Faith and Darla…
The one constant in the soul metaphors is that when we lose the soul – there go our inhibitions and anything keeping us from doing evil acts. It helps of course that a vampire is evil by its very existence, it lives by causing the death of others. The writers of Btvs and Ats remain consistent with this metaphor regardless of the soulless entity. Confusion arises by the fact that ensouled entities also appear to be capable of acts of great evil. But here lies the distinction at least according to Angel, with a soul you can choose not to do evil, without a soul you can’t, you are basically an organic machine directed to do evil works and you enjoy it.
Angel: Hmm. (faces her) But I know what it's like to take a life. To feel a future, a world of possibilities, snuffed out by your own hand. I know the power in it. The exhilaration. It was like a drug for me.
Faith: (looks up at him, sarcastically) Yeah? Sounds like you need some help. A professional maybe.
Angel: Hmm. (goes to the coffee table) A professional couldn't have helped me. (sits on it) It stopped when I got my soul back. My human heart.
Faith: Goody for you. If we're gonna party, let's get on with it. (holds out her wrists) Otherwise, could you let me out of these things?
Angel: Faith, you have a choice. You've tasted something few ever do. (stands up, paces) I mean, to kill without remorse is to feel like a god. (Consequences, Season 3 Btvs)
In Btvs and Ats the soul is consistently used to symbolize choice. Confusion arises from the fact that we honestly don’t know how many demons have souls. I’d assume none have human souls. So do they have a choice? Or is this metaphor isolated to vampires who were human and became demons? If we assume that without a soul, you do not have a clear choice, what does this mean? Going back to Alonna in War Zone, although she is thrilled to no longer feel guilt or remorse, this does not prevent her from feeling love. What it does is remove the choice between good and evil or perhaps a better way to put it is the “incentive” to do good. In Btvs and Ats – without an incentive such as a soul or some other ulterior motive – there is no reason to do good.
To truly understand what they are describing, perhaps we need to examine why “we” don’t commit acts of evil. Is it our inhibitions? If we were invisible, say like the invisible man in the H.G. Wells story or Marcy Clark in Out of Mind Out of Sight, would we lose all our inhibitions to commit works of evil? If we lost our soul would that help? Soul = inhibitions? Now we’re getting into Freud’s territory. Inhibitions, conscience, etc are the realm of the super-ego, the part that we learn over time from society, our parents, schools, etc. The super-ego is filled with inhibitions and rules governing our psyches telling us what we can or cannot do.
Btvs uses invisibility, magic as a drug, alcohol and loss of the soul to show how the super-ego can be removed and also to show how important it is. In Living Conditions, Buffy’s roommate Kathy starts sucking away Buffy’s soul, as she does so, Buffy’s inhibitions about hurting Kathy or venting her rage at Kathy slowly ebb away. It’s not until Buffy’s soul is returned that these inhibitions come back, she still has these feelings but she holds back the desire to express them. (Living Conditions, Season 4, Btvs). In another episode, Beer Bad, Buffy’s inhibitions are removed by alcohol – she does not however become homicidal, just goofy and less worried about breaking societal mores. Her id is unleashed but the super-ego still has a say, albeit a small one.
Willow’s inhibitions are similarly removed by magic. The more she uses dark magic, the less she seems to be inhibited by her super-ego or view of right and wrong. The magic appears to unleash Willow’s id. Something OZ notices as a potential danger as far back as Fear itself when he tells Willow he knows what it’s like to have something dark and powerful inside. It’s really not until Season 6, that we truly see what Oz is talking about. When Willow overdoses on magic – she bends reality, shifts people in and out, and kills people without blinking an eye. She feels like a god. Reminds me of Angel’s little speech to Faith. And without the inhibitions – the super-ego keeping her back? Willow has a blast. Because let’s face it of all the characters on Btvs, Willow is a mass of inhibitions. Terrified from the age of six of stepping out of line. When these inhibitions are stripped away? She lets it rip. (Wrecked, Smashed, Villains – Grave, Season 6, Btvs) But Willow still has a soul, all the magic has done is possibly push it aside.
So what about those people with a choice? Warren, Jonathan, Andrew, Faith, etc? They choose evil and ignore the dictates of the soul/super-ego. According to Angel, they all have a choice, they just choose to go the wrong direction or the incentive to do good just doesn’t have as much appeal for them?
We see Warren debate his decisions. So he definitely has a moral compass, he can choose. Unlike the vampires who have none and just do whatever they please. Spike for instance doesn’t think twice about making the Buffybot. Warren does consider not doing it. At the end of Intervention after the death of the homicidal Aprilbot, we see Warren attempting to pull his life back together again. Warren even tells Spike no more girls. But Spike intimidates him into doing it, so we can sort of forgive him for it. But Warren’s later acts? He chooses freely, on his own. For this reason, Warren’s acts of violence are almost worse than Spike’s. As Angel states to Faith, “You have a choice.” Warren understands and cares about why it’s wrong. Warren possesses an incentive to do good. Spike doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that Spike doesn’t see the difference between right and wrong, it’s that he doesn’t have an “incentive” to care about the difference.
Incentive is the key. The soul provides us with a higher goal, a connection to the world around us and, if you believe in such things, to the higher power who created us. IT is our incentive to do good acts, because doing kind good acts makes life more enjoyable and less hellish. Without a soul – you don’t see that. Life is hell. It will always be hell. And actually you get a kick out it being hell. Just because it’s hell doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it. You enjoy frolicking around the wrong people. If you want something? You can take it. Doesn’t matter. You fear zip. That’s the thing with vampires – as Spike states in Fool For Love – when you become a vampire, you fear nothing, nothing except one girl and in Spike’s case that girl became his obsession. He’s like a little boy in his bravado. Let’s destroy that which I fear! Faith who has a soul gets off on this idea as well – I have the power to take whatever I want, why don’t I? What incentive do I have not too? Well the soul. It makes her feel guilty. She feels the weight of what she’s done and she feels the lack of friends and companionship. Spike really doesn’t start to feel this until he gets the chip.
So does Spike’s chip act as an incentive to do good or is it merely an incentive to not harm others? Now the whole chip thing confuses me, but I think it is meant to be read as an incentive to not harm others. It’s not exactly like the conditioning experienced by the young protagonist, Alex, in A ClockWork Orange. In that film and novel, Alex is conditioned to react to all violence and Beethoven’s 5th with extreme sickness. The chip is a bit more complicated. Spike can pretend to hit someone, can roughly push someone aside to get out a door, or hit and kill non-living or demonic things without the chip firing. The chip only appears to fire when he intends to hurt someone physically either with his fangs, his fists or some other physical part of his body. As he states in This Year’s Girl – “just because I can’t hurt you all myself doesn’t prevent me from sending a loaded canon your way” or in The I in Team – “what am I a bleeding broken record? I’m still evil! I just can’t bite no more is all.” In Fool For Love when he appears to be trading blows with Buffy, she asks somewhat confused, “What that didn’t hurt?”, and Spike replies, “No, because I knew I couldn’t touch you. If there’s no intent to harm that bleeding government chip they shoved in my brain doesn’t fire. Now if I do this…” He goes into game face and moves to attack her then screams in anguish holding his head. “It hurts.”
According to Spike – the chip prevents him from biting any humans, physically killing humans himself and hurting humans with his fists, fangs or any other part of his body. The chip does not prevent him from firing verbal barbs, hiring someone else to kill them, ordering a Buffbot, dealing in demon contraband, which could kill tons of humans, or numerous other evil deeds. When Buffy comes back from the dead, Spike does have the ability to hurt her, which is ironic, considering she is actually the only person on the planet he doesn’t want to hurt, maim or kill any longer. It’s also ironic considering at one point she was the one person he wanted to hurt, maim or kill the most.
So is the chip a soul metaphor? Is it proof that a soul can be manufactured? Up until Seeing Red, I would have said no. Seeing Red confused me. It also confused Spike. Why did Spike feel guilty about attempting to rape Buffy? Was it his own innate sense of honor that screamed at him? Or is it the fact that he loved her and the idea of hurting someone he loved tormented him? He hurt Dru, she got off on it, didn’t hurt or torment him a bit. Maybe that was because Dru enjoyed it? Tired of talking about the bloody chip.
For the purposes of this essay – let’s assume the chip is not a replacement for a soul. It is not a metaphor for a soul. It is merely an electronic, man-made incentive to not bite or physically harm humans. It does not prevent monsters from finding other ways to harm humans, it just prevents them from doing it physically themselves. If the chip is a metaphor for anything – I think it’s for impotence. They certainly spend a great deal of time paralleling it with the concept. (See The Initiative, Smashed, Something Blue, and Seeing Red – for examples.)
Therefore, the only incentive Spike has for doing good is his own selfish desire to have sex with Buffy and be near Buffy. Must be hard to be an evil thing and fall in love with a good person. Have to feel sorry for the guy. Can’t think of a more impossible goal to strive for if you’re a vampire without a soul than to fall in love with a vampire slayer.
So what do you do if the one thing your lady love requires is that you have an outside incentive to do good, ie. a soul? Go get one of course.
4. Souls as commodities to be stolen, bought and traded
The idea of a soul as a commodity is not a new one. It is a common theme in horror and science-fiction. As far back as Goethe’s Faust, we have cautionary tales about what happens to common mortals who sell their souls to the devil for power, worldly goods or immortal life. In The Conjurer Wife by Fritz Leiber, a group of women steal another woman’s soul. The character wanders around hunting her. Without her soul she is a haunted somewhat creepy husk with no sentiments. The soul is what animates her, what gives her purpose.
Also in folklore, people still put coins on the lids of a dead relatives eyes so that their soul can pay its passage to the other world. In some cultures, forget which, food is placed near or around the body, so that the soul is not consumed before it can make it’s way to the afterlife. Instead the spirits, called soul-eaters, consume the food around the body.
In Btvs and Ats, the soul as a commodity is first introduced in Season 1, in which Catherine Madison, a witch, switches essences or souls with her daughter Amy and threatens to send Buffy’s soul to a dark place. At the last minute Buffy flips the mirror and send Catherine’s there instead. (Witch, Btvs 1)
Later, in Season 2 Btvs, in flashbacks we see gypsies call up Angel’s immortal soul to torment him. His soul is imprisoned in a glass orb and launched at him like a torpedo, crippling him in his tracks. The soul from the gypsies point of view is a weapon with which to torment Angel. The moment it stops being a weapon – the soul is removed.
In this sense the soul acts as both a metaphor for guilt and as a commodity or weapon. Guilt has become the gypsies’ weapon of choice. (Becoming Part I, Btvs 2)
How often do we use “guilt” to punish someone? If you hate what someone does, do you point out how many people they inadvertently wounded by their actions? Maybe bring up some personal emotional baggage that they had no clue of to add to it? Imagine how much worse we feel if we discover that our actions didn’t just hurt one person but hurt twenty? Say you make a stupid comment on a posting board, something relatively harmless from your point of view, under a pseudonym and find out say two days later that some kid read it and decided to take it to heart and did some crazy harmful act because of it. Are you responsible for this kid’s act? Of course not. But you feel responsible. You feel guilty. And if someone on that same board rails at you about it, you may think twice about ever posting again. It doesn’t matter if twenty people got something positive from your post, the fact it might have negatively impacted one person bugs you. That is using guilt as a weapon. Someone has made you feel guilty enough not to do something. Another perhaps better example is the parent who makes the kid feel guilty for not calling them or not writing enough. Or the people who pull their emotional baggage out and use it to win an argument, the other person suddenly is swayed by guilt into agreeing with them. Holtz in Angel is an expert at this. He uses Guilt to hurt Angel in Benediction, reminding Angel of what he did to Holtz’s children and then he uses Guilt to wrap Connor around his finger. Connor’s guilt about his feelings for Angel are part of the reason he jumps to the conclusion that Angelus killed Holtz. Holtz also uses Guilt to get Justine to join him – her guilt regarding her sister’s death. And Lilah uses Weseley’s guilt to seduce him into joining Wolfram and Hart. (Remember Judas? Lilah hisses at Wesely. Judas the betrayer is at the bottom ring of hell. Don’t tell me you’re too good for us. ) Without a soul? We don’t feel guilt. This is why Kathy, the demon roommate, is able to guilt Buffy into lending her things and putting up with her antics at the beginning of Living Conditions but once she begins sucking Buffy’s soul – the guilt trip no longer works.
Kathy, in Living Conditions, is the first time we get a demon who wants to grab a human soul for her own benefit. In Kathy’s case, she needs Buffy’s soul to stay in college. Without the soul, her demonic family will drag her sorry butt back into hell. So she decides to take Buffy’s soul. As she states to Buffy – they’ll take the person without a soul. Soulless it never occurs to Kathy that her actions are hurting Buffy. Kathy doesn’t care about anyone outside herself. Buffy begins to share this feeling as Kathy drains her soul. She too begins to care about no one outside herself. The soul is a commodity to Kathy and Buffy in this episode. It is something you can remove and without it, you can’t be in college and live a normal life.
In Double or Nothing, Season 3 Ats, the soul becomes even more of a commodity. Gunn actually trades his for a truck, placing little or no value on either his soul or his life. It’s not until he falls for Fred that he realizes how precious his soul is. Jenoff, the soul collector, who had given him the truck comes for his soul when Jenoff realizes Gunn wants to give his soul to Fred out of love. The soul apparently is a priceless gift that Gunn can give to Fred out of love. They can figuratively share their souls with each other. But by doing so, Gunn takes his soul out of the reach of the soul collector. So Jenoff comes calling and demands payment be made now. Angel tricks Jenoff into a game of cards and ends up cheating Jenoff out of both Angel and Gunn’s souls. The episode seems to cheapen the value of the soul, making it seem little more than something to gamble with at cards or trade for a truck.
Btvs on the other hand places a great deal of importance on the soul. Spike has to earn his. After spending most of the year being beaten down for not having a soul, Spike finally decides to go get his back. (Yes, I know there’s no concrete evidence in the story that Spike went to retrieve his soul from the Lurker demon, but let’s assume for the purposes of this essay or this paragraph that he did? Like everything else with Spike, it can be argued both ways.) To get it, Spike has to endure a series of physical tests. First he fights a warrior who has fire as fists. Then chops off two warriors heads. And finally endures being excavated by beetles. His tests are interlaced with Willow’s reign of terror on Sunnydale. When Spike fights the fire demon, we see Willow shooting fire at Jonathan and Andrew, when Spike chops off the heads, we see Xander and Dawn dealing with sword-bearers Andrew and Jonathan, and when Spike endures the beetles we see Buffy and Dawn struggling in the open grave. Spike’s tests seem to somehow echo the tests of the SG in Sunnydale. And as the SG struggle up into the sunlight of a beautiful spring day. Spike’s eyes and mouth lights up with a soul.
The soul when it is transferred or removed seems to light up the vessels eyes. Souls are taken from the mouth and the eyes, yet appear to be inserted through the heart. Is the heart the soul’s receptacle or are the eyes? And what if anything does the soul mean to the vessel? Is it their incentive to do good? Humans apparently can’t survive without a soul – they become empty carcasses. So a vampire is not a human without a soul but rather a human shell with a demon inside it. As Adam states in Who Are You – “ you are demons in a human shell, you walk in both worlds (demon and human) but fit in neither. You feel you have no place.” So a vampire with a human soul – is well something even more complex, they are a combination of the demon and the human in the human’s immortalized dead body.
The only other time we get a transference of souls is in This Year’s Girl to Who Are You. People have argued that Faith and Buffy don’t trade souls so much as their essence. But isn’t the soul a part of your essence? And the draconian device literally shifts the two. And no one but Tara, a complete stranger, notices the shift. All of Buffy’s friends, including her arch-nemesis Spike and her lover, Riley, believe Faith is Buffy. Only Tara recognizes that the spirit inhabiting Buffy’s body does not belong there. It is a foreign entity that seems fragmented to Tara and doesn’t quite fit. Ironic that only a complete stranger sees the difference, before Who Are You, Buffy had never met Tara, she didn’t know Tara existed. So our friends can’t see our souls? Our lover doesn’t love our soul so much as our body? If Buffy had not appeared in Faith’s body and Tara had not met the Faith possessed Buffy, would the SG have ever known? Frightening thought and possibly what caused the initial rift between Riley and Buffy. How would you feel if your lover slept with your body and couldn’t tell it wasn’t you? Sort of puts a whole new twist on the line – I love your mind and soul, not your body.
5. Soul as a metaphor for Growing Up = Spike/Harmony & Conclusion
This was not meant to be about Spike, but he keeps popping up like a weed in the middle of it. If anyone was a poster child for Peter Pan and arrested development, it is Spike. Soulless, Spike seems to be stuck in perpetual adolescence. The Pituary Gland which fires up those hormones and causes our bodies to start to grow up and become adults, just has not affected his brain. Apparently you need a soul for that or need to be turned after you mature. Darla and Angelus were already adults when they became vampires. Both had left their families and were struggling on their own. Liam (Angel) was stealing and brawling but he was clearly an adult and had clearly left home. Darla was living off the streets as a prostitute and dying of syphilis. Drusilla and William on the other hand were turned while they still resided in the bosom of their families. William was returning home to mother. Drusilla was entering the womb of the church. The church apparently had adopted her after her family was killed by Angelus. Harmony likewise is barely out of high school when she is turned.
Harmony, Drusilla and Spike act like rebel teens. People have commented that Harmony hasn’t changed much since she graduated from high school. She still values the same things. When she visits Cordelia in Disharmony – if becomes apparent how Cordy has changed. Cordy has moved past the petty concerns of popularity, fashion, belonging that tormented her in high school. She is more concerned with making ends meet, saving lives, and enduring the next headache. Harmony is only concerned with what she looks like, where she fits in, if she has a boyfriend, and other adolescent concerns. When Cordelia tries to help Harmony, she is horribly betrayed. Not by Harmony’s vampire nature so much as Harmony’s adolescent desire to be important to belong. The vampire guru has convinced Harmony that she will be empowered, will be part of the bigger, more powerful group if she betrays her friends. So Harmony goes along with it. It never really occurs to Harmony that she is betraying Cordy or hurting anyone. Any more than it occurred to Harmony back in high school when she rejected Cordy in favor of leading the Cordettes or when she made fun of Xander and Willow. When Harmony lost her soul – she was sentenced to being frozen in time. Frozen as an adolescent for an eternity. The vampire occupying her body can never mature past the stage in which it was turned. It’s stuck just as Harmony is stuck.
Spike is also stuck. He can reinvent himself. Redefine his boundaries. But without a soul, he can never stop being the adolescent bad boy. Just as Peter Pan had to leave never never land to grow up - Spike needs to get a soul. The soul doesn’t guarantee he’ll grow up of course, but it does provide him with the necessary ingredients – it forces him to face his mistakes and accept or least feel the consequences. Until Seeing Red, I’m not sure Spike ever truly felt or understood the negative repercussions of his actions. Oh, sure he would get a migraine every time he hit someone. But Spike didn’t identify the migraine with his actions so much as with the chip. Even after he attempts to rape Buffy, he blames the chip. He blames the chip for the torment that he is feeling. “What is this I’m feeling?” he asks Clem. “This silicon and wires and jiminy cricket…” It’s not real, he thinks, these feelings. They make no sense. Why am I feeling so much pain? Why didn’t I just kill the bitch? That’s what I’m supposed to do. I used to get pride from doing it. So why do I feel so horrible? Why do I hate myself so much? I didn’t even really do anything, I didn’t even complete the act. It’s the chip. It’s malfunctioned. Because if I had changed, truly changed, like I thought I did? I wouldn’t have tried to hurt her at all.
I wouldn’t have done it. So this has to be the chip.
Spike is starting the horrible process of growing up. He is beginning to discover something that Rupert Giles discovered ages ago, that fists and fangs and wild love is nothing to be proud of. Hurting people regardless of who they are doesn’t win you any medals. And destroying the world doesn’t make it more fun. The activities Spike once enjoyed so much no longer seem very important. Stealing has gotten old. Fighting just for the sake of fighting, has lost its appeal. As he tells Buffy in Life Serial – “you’ll get more out of them if you play cards with them then if you beat their heads in.” He is beginning to yearn for more than the wild frolic he had with Dru. He yearns for a smile to appear on Buffy’s face – a smile generated by him, although any smile would do. (Hell’s Bells, Btvs 6) And this realization surprises him slightly. He yearns for Buffy to acknowledge their relationship instead of keeping it in the dark, a secret. Without realizing it he is beginning to yearn for life. He even sings this in OMWF – “I’ve died so many years ago, but you can make me feel that it isn’t so.” And later, “You’ve got to live, so one of us is living…” and it can’t be me. Because without a soul – Spike will always be only half-alive. A dead thing. Incapable of growth. Frozen.
The soul would allow Spike to understand what he should have done in the bathroom in Seeing Red, what he should have done in As You Were or Dead Things. Without a soul, Spike only gets half of the picture. He only sees that he hurt Buffy in Seeing Red, but doesn’t really understand why she broke up with him. He thinks it’s because she doesn’t trust him. That’s it’s something as simple as changing the color of your hair or getting contacts or giving up blood. Spike doesn’t understand what a soul truly means. In Dead Things – all Spike understood was that Buffy was in trouble. That she could go to jail.
He sees the whole rationale but he lacks the feeling or sentiment behind it. David Hume, a contemporary of John Lock’s, states that rational thought is different than thought backed up with feelings and/or sentiments. Rationalists look at things in pure terms of cause and effect. Logic. They don’t tend to worry about emotional consequences. An example of the pure rationalist is Adam – who unemotionally theorizes that if we combine humans and demons we’ll have a more efficient species. Sort of like the Nazis in World War II or a government official who might decide if we don’t save those flood victims, we’ll cut back on overpopulation. Spike is thinking the same way – he’s always been a bit of a rationalist. In Pangs, he looks at the SG and wonders aloud why they care about the frigging Chumash tribe. The vengeance spirits are attacking them? Kill the spirits. Survive. Don’t apologize or waste time feeling sorry for them, what’s the point?
In Dead Things – he can’t understand why Buffy is about to throw her life away over some girl she accidentally killed in the forest. Why feel guilty about it? You can’t change it. You didn’t mean to hurt her. It was an accident. Going to jail won’t change it. Forget about it and move on. I’ll cover it up for you. This logic horrifies Buffy just as it is meant to horrify us, why? Because of our emotions or sentiments, which link us to each other. Buffy’s feelings of guilt can’t be explained with logic. It’s not logical or rational according to Hume. As a result she can’t explain it to Spike even it she wanted to.
The confusion regarding Spike and souls stems from the fact that Spike on occasion appears to express empathy. He is actually the only one all year who appears to show empathy towards Anya. But that empathy is very closely tied to his own woes. If you watch the scene in Entropy closely, you’ll realize that what Spike and Anya are bonding over is a similar problem. They are empathizing with a reflection of themselves. Their dialogue is almost a loop, each word reflecting the others. Also Spike knows all the players in Anya’s little drama fairly intimately. He is connected to those players through Buffy. It is not surprising he emphasizes here. If Anya had been a complete stranger, it is unlikely Spike would have given her the time of day. The empathy Spike feels for Dawn is similar – Dawn and Spike are a lot like. Both love Buffy. Both act like teenagers. Both steal. Spike emphasizes with people in the same way an adolescent might: do I know them? Do they affect my life? Well yeah, I guess I care. Angel on the other hand feels empathy for complete strangers. When Angel meets Gun, he feels a great deal of empathy for him and tries unsuccessfully to convince Gunn not to take on a nest of vampires. (War Zone).
Experience and being forced to look outside one’s self is often what enables us to emphasize with others. It wasn’t until I had to travel through a bomb site in NYC and saw burnt paper falling from dirt and smoke filled sky that I truly was able to emphasize with the people living in war torn countries. Until that moment I had not experienced that type of shock, fear and loss. My impressions of such events were based on images seen on TV or in the movies – they weren’t available to any of my other senses, just my eyes so had less impact. 9/11 changed all that for me. On the other hand, I am able to emphasize with people who have experienced traumas I have not – as long as I can imagine them or link them to an impression or memory that results in a similar emotion I can empathize with them. The older I get the more I can emphasize with and the more I feel the pain of others. As a child, a teenager – I did not see beyond my own backyard or my own wants and desires. The horrors of the world were only viewable in the movies, on the tv screen, in books or in the lectures of teachers at school. I had not seen them myself and I was too young to have anything to connect them to. For some reason true horror appears less real when it is transmitted through an electronic device such as a TV or movie screen.
Our experiences form who and what we are. That is not to say that you can only emphasize with a rape victim if you’ve been raped or only understand the pain of grieving widow if you lost a husband. The ability to imagine what it is like is often enough. And if you’ve made it past the age of twenty, it is more than likely no matter how peaceful and wonderful your childhood was, that you have experienced some sort of trauma in your life, however small. Although I don’t believe any trauma is small.
Here’s another way of looking at it,actors on film and television, the really good ones, use a technique called the method. The method contains a certain number of techniques that enable you to figure out how to convey emotions you have never personally experienced. For instance, say you have to play someone who just lost their parents and your parents are still alive? The scene calls for uncontrollable sobbing. You go back in your head and access a similar experience. Whether it is losing a favorite pet. Going to a friend’s funeral. Or seeing a grandparent die. Or you attempt to imagine what it would be like to lose your own parents. This is easier to do as you rack up experiences, your own and the experiences of the people you come in contact with.
People who can’t empathize with anyone including their loved ones are called sociopaths. These people just see us all as toys for their amusement. They truly can’t make the emotional connection; they lack sentiment. They are like Adam in Btvs, one step below Btvs’ vampires on the empathy scale.
In conclusion, the soul metaphors seem to serve numerous purposes on Btvs and Ats. But the one constant is that without a soul? You can’t truly grow up. You can’t feel true empathy for others outside your immediate circle. You have no incentive to do good acts unless these acts in some way further your own diabolical ends. And you can’t feel the pain of remorse for your crimes and nefarious actions. Without a soul – you have little to lose, because you have no understanding or appreciation of what you have. Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death in your point of view. With a soul – life is painful but you know what can be taken from you and you truly appreciate the emotional price of your actions. You understand what life costs emotionally and as a result your own life and the lives of others’ are that much more precious to you.
Hope that made sense. Again sorry for the length. Thoughts? Rants? Agreements?
Feedback appreciated as always.
Shadowkat ;-) (Whose afraid she’s just confused herself again regarding the whole soul thing…and everyone else along with her. Oh well hopefully I didn’t screw up on any historical or academic stuff. )
