azdak

Sometimes I’m capable of such staggering denseness that it surprises even me. For instance, it was only yesterday that I realised that S6 both begins and ends with Buffy crawling out of her grave. I suppose I failed to notice because I watched it so out of order, starting with OMWF and then jumping about all over the place, but still, it’s kind of a crashing oversight.

The implication of that framing, of course, is that for most of S6 Buffy is still dead. She may have come back physically, but emotionally she’s still trapped under the earth, still linked to the chthonic realm of darkness and the fear (a point driven home in S7 when the First can assume her form because technically she’s still dead, even though she isn’t really - an inversion of the S6 perspective, which is that technically she isn’t dead, she just feels as if she is/wishes she were). It’s not until she crawls out of the second grave in that subtly entitled episode that she really comes back to life, optimism, enthusiasm, emotions and all. Now, if for most of S6 Buffy is linked with death, and death in turn is represented by the grave, by being under the earth, what sort of use does the season make of subterranean imagery in connection with Buffy? Quite a lot. In Flooded she’s down fighting demons in her flooded basement (while Dawn sits on the steps and watches), in Life Serial she constantly has to go into the basement of the Magic Box to confront the mummy’s hand, and in Normal Again she locks her friends in the basement and plans to let the demon loose on them there. Of course, basements feature frequently in the Jossverse (hardly surprising, given that he’s interested in the monsters that dwell in the depths of the human psyche) and the character most frequently associated with them (at least once Xander moves out of his parents’ basement) is not Buffy but Spike. It’s S7 where he’s most firmly basement-bound, but even in earlier seasons his crypt has a lower level where he keeps his darkest secrets – his shrine to Buffy in S5 and the demon eggs in AYW – and I think it’s significant than in OMWF (in which every tiny detail, every single camera angle, is imbued with layers of meaning) we first see him coming up the steps from this subterranean chamber. Subsequently, he leaps onto a coffin and then topples into an open grave, dragging Buffy in with him. As she lies on top of him, there’s a moment when it looks as if she’s going to give in to the sexual tension between them, then she breaks free and leaps out of the grave. The chthonic link is also made in Bargaining, when he tells Dawn that he, like Buffy, clawed his way out of his grave, and his association with death is verbalised explicitly in OMWF when he tells Buffy ‘You have to go on living, so one of us is living’, not to mention his entire ‘Let me rest in peace’ number, which is riddled with death imagery. Then, of course, there’s Dead Things, where Buffy tells Spike that he’s a loathsome dead thing, all the while beating him up in a frenzy that suggests she is really articulating what she feels about herself.

The ‘darkness’ in him that he insists she is drawn to is presumably not evil but death, and he is quite right about her attraction to it. In the imagery of S6, Spike is one of the chthonic gods. He is death, and Buffy’s painful, anguished affair with him is a love affair with death. When she tells him ‘It’s killing me’ she is telling no less than the truth. Only when she wrenches herself from him and climbs from the basement of his crypt back into the light can she start the long crawl back to life (topographically, the break-up scene in AYW echoes Buffy’s escape from Spike’s embrace in the grave in OMWF).

Of course, imagery is only one layer of storytelling. The relationship between Buffy and Spike can equally well be looked at in terms of the psychology of the individual characters, with no mythic resonances necessary. Nonethless, I suspect that the real reason why ME insisted S6 Spike was a 'bad boyfriend' was not because he was evil (thought to some extent he still was) but because at this level of poetic imagery, he really does represent death, and Buffy has to free herself from his embrace before she can fully crawl out of her grave and resume living.