A William post inspired by Barb's effulgent entry!
I'm doing it again because I screwed up with the colours and the lj-cut is driving me mad!
After reading
rahirah 's entry I went to dig in my archives and found that essay on William/Spike I wrote for the Buffy Cross and Stake Spoiler Board...Some people from my flist may already know it (so sorry to bother you with old rambling of mine), but many don't. So here's my thoughts on Sweet William.
First off here is a background…which is quite normal concerning William but there is more…Once upon a time, I got involved in an email "war" (ok I may have started it actually….) with/against some friends, about William, during summer 2002, so I gathered here some stuff from that “debate”. Rosalind, Hansel, Emma, ARN and AnInstant from the C&S were the other protagonists in the conflit mostly based on my favourite episode, Fool For Love, and on the William/Cecily scene. We actually fought over the line "They are not like you and I" and what it meant about William. Basically it was a friendly war on grammar and interpretation!
My "Ode to William" was nothing but a summary of my points...Here I've just added some stuff about the season 5 of Ats to my old post.
Fool For Love is an amazing episode, and it’s due to the writing, to the way it has been directed and played by the actors (especially James), but it is also the episode of a bloody revelation: William! The one who was always underneath, but who, once revealed in that episode, gave to Spike an incredible consistency. I loved William in FFL…but I didn’t recognize him in LMPTM. Destiny kind of reassured me though.
For me the William in LMPTM is less "real" than the William in FFL. The main reason is a poorer writing IMO and the fact that sometimes JM overacts a bit. I believe in William in FFL...especially in the Cecily scene, and I could forgive James for any poor acting, just because of the way he nods and looks at Cecily in this scene! It's a moment of "grace" IMO. Indeed he has aged between the episodes, and the new wig didn't help! But I think he's too manly in LMPTM....I mean, in the first scene with Mother...it doesn't make sense since this scene is prior the party in FFL. The lack of coherence here bothers me. I don't believe in this William. Spike is an immature character! This is why I like FFL William better than LMPTM William, precisely because he's too much adult in the last, and that doesn't fit in his journey IMO.
I'm going to ramble again on my metaphors, but I still think that Spike's vampyrness (this word probably doesn't exist, but it looks pretty!) represents in BTVS the Peter Pan syndrom revealed by
shadowkat67.
Spike has always been portrayed as ONE character, either soulless or ensouled (and even in FFL the script says Spike for William) while Angelus and Angel have been showed as two different characters, because Spike's storyline is about growing up. When you grow up, you change and yet you don't change. Angel's storyline was different. I 've always seen it as a study of the monster/man duality a la Jeckyll/Hyde, the soul being a plot device similar to the potion in Stevenson's novel.
William was a fool sentimental, and a BOY, like Peter Pan, hooked to his dreams (hehe....Peter Pan hooked....isn't that funny???!!!! Oh sowwy), who didn't want to grow up ie to give his fantasy up...In the alley he just traded his world dream of poetry for another illusion by embracing the darkness (Dru's bite/kiss). How naive he was! This feature was showed again in "Destiny". Of course he has been duped. The freedom offered by Drusilla was just an illusion...He lost his way then and became a slave, ruling by his urges, but he only realized it after the AR scene in "Seeing Red".
As a vampire he simply stopped aging just like Peter Pan. William was the first age of this character, soulless Spike was the second age, his TEEN AGE (the pseudo-rebel punk phase) and, like Buffy, he entered adulthood in season 7...By getting back his soul he got back his free will (freeing Will !) and could make real choices again, those choices leading him to die in the Hellmouth, to save Fred in "Hell Bound" , to stay with Angel in L.A until the end. Ensouled Spike was the third age of William, when the character was really becoming a man, his own man and a good man, because basically, as he told Cecily, he was a good person.
In LMPTM it’s obvious that freshly-sired William doesn't really want to be the Big Bad. He feels free and stronger but he still wants the kind of life he has always dreamed of ( a woman to love, and Mother!), he might even still write poetry!
After all, Angel says he liked Spike's poems in “Hell bound”....so William must have kept writing a bit after he was sired.
The BB attitude has much to do with Angelus and Darla whom he hadn't met yet in the LMPTM flashback! He built Spike persona against his past, against the image of the "limp and fool sentimental" his vamped mother despised and mocked but also against Angelus and Darla who acted like aristocrats (or like a poofter according to Spike in FFL!)...so he had to played the rebel childe, the lower class vampire against them. They’ve all been wearing masks and Spike has been William’s one.
The problem with the masks is that they end up to stick on the face and you can’t remove them (see “Lorenzaccio” one of the best plays written by Alfred de Musset about Lorenzo de Medicis!), you tend to become the role you play…and you can’t go back to what you was once. In Ats episode 6, we learnt that lesson from El Numero Cinco, a luchador who never took off his mask. Of course Angel is wearing a mask too, unless Angel is the mask that Angelus is forced to wear (according to Connor!).
But lets’ go back to William…it’s all about William!
I think that William didn't change that much actually....He was just a repressed man in Victorian RL but he was already full of passion, fire and hidden desires that he only expressed in his poetry which was really bloody awful for his peers....His poem for Cecily is quite ambiguous, obscene even!
"My heart expands/'tis grown a bulge in it/inspired by your beauty, effulgent."
The "growing bulge" inspired by the lady's beauty is really meaningful for me...ok now you're going to think I have a dirty mind and morgain is going to call me “perv” again!
I don't think William really realized what he had written then...but Cecily, this little "Sainte Nitouche" certainly did!
The siring released William, then he could "express himself" in a different way, with Dru for instance, but Spike was still William, he never stopped being William! The façade he put on was about his "Big Bad attitude" as it's obviously showed in "Restless" and in "Storyteller". He built this BB personality, step by step, through the new accent, the new name, the new look, against William and probably because of Angelus and Dru (this has been confirmed in "Destiny", William had to harden up, had to challenge Angelus, had to lose a bit of himself in order to survive and to be loved, and Angelus was his Pygmalion) , but basically the main features of his personality belong to William the poet: sensitivity, heart, obsession, imagination, impatience, anger (see the sour look William shoots the man who took his poem, before taking it back and following Cecily!) and of course the quest of something effulgent.
I like him in FFL because he's a living paradox, shy and bold at once, vulnerable but hard to defeat, looking innocent and sexy at the same time, lost in his dreamer's mind and yet craving for sensual things, afraid of a possible pickpocket but intrigued by an exotic vampyress, lucid and still chasing effulgent visions. And JM played that in a wonderful way. I just don't find the same depth, the same ambiguity in LMPTM.
As for the famous "burning baby fish swimming all around your head", I still think it was supposed to mean the chip in FFL. And I think they used this idea again in LMPTM! The Prokaryote stone is meant to move within his mind, and when Willow makes it liquid it looks live alive....maybe it's just my wild imagination but I find it just looks like an "alevin" ie a baby fish, and a painful one thus "burning".
This device also made me think of The Matrix and Total Recall. In both movies, a mineral yet kind of magic trick (that looks like an insect in Matrix!) is inserted into the body (through the navel in Matrix, and through the nose in Total Recall), and in both movies it's linked to the memory or rather the "amnesia" of the hero.
Rosalind pointed out that William didn't quite behave like a Victorian gentleman should have in FFL. I agree with her here (yes I do) although we don’t interpret that in the same way. I see someone who is an outsider, who already kind of broke the rules of society, who is bold and pretty off etiquette because he thought that his feelings, his quest, his poetry, his passion for things of beauty were above that said rules. William's faux-pas at Cecily's party foreshadowed Spike's oddity IMO (“Spike”s oddity” hehe…don’t you think it sounds like a Bowie’s song?), Spike who is going to break the rules of the vampires world because his love is more important than anything. He was a little lost as a human and he became "so lost" as a vampire too (so spoke Drusilla in "Crush"...)...and in both societies he ended as an outcast, a freak. In FFL but he wasn't like them (“they are not like You and I”) obviously and Cecily couldn't stand it. Where he saw something above, she saw something beneath. William totally misunderstood her. He left the human society by going under Dru's fangs, and later Spike turned definitely away from the demonic world by winning his soul back for the love of Buffy.
He seemed to find his place in “Chosen” at last but later in Ats he was lost again, between worlds and non-corporeal!
Each time William has trust a woman or followed her, shifting his place in the world…
In Ats season 5 it's his relationship with Angel that was the key. Some people see them are brothers/enemies, others thought of a Arthur/Mordred relationship. I'm not sure I like the idea of Spike being Mordred....Connor fits better in that role IMO, even if Spike was a deceitful childe in "Becoming"!
Could Anne be a kind of Morgana for her beloved son in LMPTM? Or rather Drusilla? Making her galant and brave knight...Although Dru called herself his mummy and turned him I don't see that kind of relationship between them. I've always thought of this ship as a siblings incestuous relationship (so Arthur/Morgana might be a model indeed) mostly like the one shared by the poet William (hehe!) Wordsworth and his beloved sister Dorothy (Dorothy who was too a poet and insane by the way…double hehe!).
Besides Drusilla was the name of Caligula's beloved sister, another evil bloodsucker! Caligula even named his favourite child, his daughter, after his sister, Julia Drusilla...So I see "our" Dru as Angelus/Caligula's daughter/childe and as Spike/Caligula's sister/lover. If Caligula is the model of the monster, both Angelus and Spike might be his avatars.
BTW Hansel had a very interesting theory about the characters being the avatars of other characters. She thinks that Spike rejected Harmony because he saw her as his William’s persona, the one who was a fool sentimental, a weak dreamer whom Cecily and Vamp Anne despised, someone who is beneath him. Of course it’s paradoxical because it’s the William-in- Spike that makes him love women he idealizes. Like Dante, like the poet in the “Divine Comedy”, Spike keeps looking for his Beatrice.
And Harmony isn’t a Beatrice. Buffy is the true Beatrice for William, hence the chaste Spuffy relationship in season 7....Metaphorically, in the AR Buffy rejected Spike as a physical lover, she rejected flesh then and again in BY (while season 6 Spuffy and mostly season 2 Sprusilla could be seen as a Francesca/Paolo 'ship, the lovers in Hell)! Spike still thinks of her as a Beatrice in Chosen, this is why he doesn't believe her declaration of love IMO, he really thinks she's above him now. The three women he has loved were his muses:
- Cecily was his MUSE, literally...She inspired him with poetry, but she didn't believe in him. Therefore she was a false Beatrice.
- Dru was his Dark muse, his Dark Princess...Remember what he said in Crush: "It's the face of my salvation! She delivered me from mediocrity (....)Never stopped taking me to new depths ", but she deserted him twice, for Angelus in Season 2 and then she dumped him for a Chaos Demon...She has been a deceitful and a fallen Beatrice which made sense since Angelus turned the pure girl into a naughty and insane fiend.
- Buffy led him to search for a soul and to the sacrifice in Chosen, she believed in him and she didn't leave him to the FE. So she really was the ultimate and the true Beatrice. She is THE ONE.
Spike was definitely a fighter, a warrior and a survivor able to adapt himself, but he really never stopped being William the Bloody (Awful Poet), he never quit wanting a woman he could worship, and a woman who could see him and save him.
That's why, despite its flaws, I liked "Not Fade Away", just for that unforgettable scene with Spike reciting his poetry and getting back the last missing pieces of William, his words.
After reading
rahirah 's entry I went to dig in my archives and found that essay on William/Spike I wrote for the Buffy Cross and Stake Spoiler Board...Some people from my flist may already know it (so sorry to bother you with old rambling of mine), but many don't. So here's my thoughts on Sweet William.
First off here is a background…which is quite normal concerning William but there is more…Once upon a time, I got involved in an email "war" (ok I may have started it actually….) with/against some friends, about William, during summer 2002, so I gathered here some stuff from that “debate”. Rosalind, Hansel, Emma, ARN and AnInstant from the C&S were the other protagonists in the conflit mostly based on my favourite episode, Fool For Love, and on the William/Cecily scene. We actually fought over the line "They are not like you and I" and what it meant about William. Basically it was a friendly war on grammar and interpretation!
My "Ode to William" was nothing but a summary of my points...Here I've just added some stuff about the season 5 of Ats to my old post.
Fool For Love is an amazing episode, and it’s due to the writing, to the way it has been directed and played by the actors (especially James), but it is also the episode of a bloody revelation: William! The one who was always underneath, but who, once revealed in that episode, gave to Spike an incredible consistency. I loved William in FFL…but I didn’t recognize him in LMPTM. Destiny kind of reassured me though.
For me the William in LMPTM is less "real" than the William in FFL. The main reason is a poorer writing IMO and the fact that sometimes JM overacts a bit. I believe in William in FFL...especially in the Cecily scene, and I could forgive James for any poor acting, just because of the way he nods and looks at Cecily in this scene! It's a moment of "grace" IMO. Indeed he has aged between the episodes, and the new wig didn't help! But I think he's too manly in LMPTM....I mean, in the first scene with Mother...it doesn't make sense since this scene is prior the party in FFL. The lack of coherence here bothers me. I don't believe in this William. Spike is an immature character! This is why I like FFL William better than LMPTM William, precisely because he's too much adult in the last, and that doesn't fit in his journey IMO.
I'm going to ramble again on my metaphors, but I still think that Spike's vampyrness (this word probably doesn't exist, but it looks pretty!) represents in BTVS the Peter Pan syndrom revealed by
shadowkat67.
Spike has always been portrayed as ONE character, either soulless or ensouled (and even in FFL the script says Spike for William) while Angelus and Angel have been showed as two different characters, because Spike's storyline is about growing up. When you grow up, you change and yet you don't change. Angel's storyline was different. I 've always seen it as a study of the monster/man duality a la Jeckyll/Hyde, the soul being a plot device similar to the potion in Stevenson's novel.
William was a fool sentimental, and a BOY, like Peter Pan, hooked to his dreams (hehe....Peter Pan hooked....isn't that funny???!!!! Oh sowwy), who didn't want to grow up ie to give his fantasy up...In the alley he just traded his world dream of poetry for another illusion by embracing the darkness (Dru's bite/kiss). How naive he was! This feature was showed again in "Destiny". Of course he has been duped. The freedom offered by Drusilla was just an illusion...He lost his way then and became a slave, ruling by his urges, but he only realized it after the AR scene in "Seeing Red".
As a vampire he simply stopped aging just like Peter Pan. William was the first age of this character, soulless Spike was the second age, his TEEN AGE (the pseudo-rebel punk phase) and, like Buffy, he entered adulthood in season 7...By getting back his soul he got back his free will (freeing Will !) and could make real choices again, those choices leading him to die in the Hellmouth, to save Fred in "Hell Bound" , to stay with Angel in L.A until the end. Ensouled Spike was the third age of William, when the character was really becoming a man, his own man and a good man, because basically, as he told Cecily, he was a good person.
In LMPTM it’s obvious that freshly-sired William doesn't really want to be the Big Bad. He feels free and stronger but he still wants the kind of life he has always dreamed of ( a woman to love, and Mother!), he might even still write poetry!
After all, Angel says he liked Spike's poems in “Hell bound”....so William must have kept writing a bit after he was sired.
The BB attitude has much to do with Angelus and Darla whom he hadn't met yet in the LMPTM flashback! He built Spike persona against his past, against the image of the "limp and fool sentimental" his vamped mother despised and mocked but also against Angelus and Darla who acted like aristocrats (or like a poofter according to Spike in FFL!)...so he had to played the rebel childe, the lower class vampire against them. They’ve all been wearing masks and Spike has been William’s one.
The problem with the masks is that they end up to stick on the face and you can’t remove them (see “Lorenzaccio” one of the best plays written by Alfred de Musset about Lorenzo de Medicis!), you tend to become the role you play…and you can’t go back to what you was once. In Ats episode 6, we learnt that lesson from El Numero Cinco, a luchador who never took off his mask. Of course Angel is wearing a mask too, unless Angel is the mask that Angelus is forced to wear (according to Connor!).
But lets’ go back to William…it’s all about William!
I think that William didn't change that much actually....He was just a repressed man in Victorian RL but he was already full of passion, fire and hidden desires that he only expressed in his poetry which was really bloody awful for his peers....His poem for Cecily is quite ambiguous, obscene even!
"My heart expands/'tis grown a bulge in it/inspired by your beauty, effulgent."
The "growing bulge" inspired by the lady's beauty is really meaningful for me...ok now you're going to think I have a dirty mind and morgain is going to call me “perv” again!
I don't think William really realized what he had written then...but Cecily, this little "Sainte Nitouche" certainly did!
The siring released William, then he could "express himself" in a different way, with Dru for instance, but Spike was still William, he never stopped being William! The façade he put on was about his "Big Bad attitude" as it's obviously showed in "Restless" and in "Storyteller". He built this BB personality, step by step, through the new accent, the new name, the new look, against William and probably because of Angelus and Dru (this has been confirmed in "Destiny", William had to harden up, had to challenge Angelus, had to lose a bit of himself in order to survive and to be loved, and Angelus was his Pygmalion) , but basically the main features of his personality belong to William the poet: sensitivity, heart, obsession, imagination, impatience, anger (see the sour look William shoots the man who took his poem, before taking it back and following Cecily!) and of course the quest of something effulgent.
I like him in FFL because he's a living paradox, shy and bold at once, vulnerable but hard to defeat, looking innocent and sexy at the same time, lost in his dreamer's mind and yet craving for sensual things, afraid of a possible pickpocket but intrigued by an exotic vampyress, lucid and still chasing effulgent visions. And JM played that in a wonderful way. I just don't find the same depth, the same ambiguity in LMPTM.
As for the famous "burning baby fish swimming all around your head", I still think it was supposed to mean the chip in FFL. And I think they used this idea again in LMPTM! The Prokaryote stone is meant to move within his mind, and when Willow makes it liquid it looks live alive....maybe it's just my wild imagination but I find it just looks like an "alevin" ie a baby fish, and a painful one thus "burning".
This device also made me think of The Matrix and Total Recall. In both movies, a mineral yet kind of magic trick (that looks like an insect in Matrix!) is inserted into the body (through the navel in Matrix, and through the nose in Total Recall), and in both movies it's linked to the memory or rather the "amnesia" of the hero.
Rosalind pointed out that William didn't quite behave like a Victorian gentleman should have in FFL. I agree with her here (yes I do) although we don’t interpret that in the same way. I see someone who is an outsider, who already kind of broke the rules of society, who is bold and pretty off etiquette because he thought that his feelings, his quest, his poetry, his passion for things of beauty were above that said rules. William's faux-pas at Cecily's party foreshadowed Spike's oddity IMO (“Spike”s oddity” hehe…don’t you think it sounds like a Bowie’s song?), Spike who is going to break the rules of the vampires world because his love is more important than anything. He was a little lost as a human and he became "so lost" as a vampire too (so spoke Drusilla in "Crush"...)...and in both societies he ended as an outcast, a freak. In FFL but he wasn't like them (“they are not like You and I”) obviously and Cecily couldn't stand it. Where he saw something above, she saw something beneath. William totally misunderstood her. He left the human society by going under Dru's fangs, and later Spike turned definitely away from the demonic world by winning his soul back for the love of Buffy.
He seemed to find his place in “Chosen” at last but later in Ats he was lost again, between worlds and non-corporeal!
Each time William has trust a woman or followed her, shifting his place in the world…
In Ats season 5 it's his relationship with Angel that was the key. Some people see them are brothers/enemies, others thought of a Arthur/Mordred relationship. I'm not sure I like the idea of Spike being Mordred....Connor fits better in that role IMO, even if Spike was a deceitful childe in "Becoming"!
Could Anne be a kind of Morgana for her beloved son in LMPTM? Or rather Drusilla? Making her galant and brave knight...Although Dru called herself his mummy and turned him I don't see that kind of relationship between them. I've always thought of this ship as a siblings incestuous relationship (so Arthur/Morgana might be a model indeed) mostly like the one shared by the poet William (hehe!) Wordsworth and his beloved sister Dorothy (Dorothy who was too a poet and insane by the way…double hehe!).
Besides Drusilla was the name of Caligula's beloved sister, another evil bloodsucker! Caligula even named his favourite child, his daughter, after his sister, Julia Drusilla...So I see "our" Dru as Angelus/Caligula's daughter/childe and as Spike/Caligula's sister/lover. If Caligula is the model of the monster, both Angelus and Spike might be his avatars.
BTW Hansel had a very interesting theory about the characters being the avatars of other characters. She thinks that Spike rejected Harmony because he saw her as his William’s persona, the one who was a fool sentimental, a weak dreamer whom Cecily and Vamp Anne despised, someone who is beneath him. Of course it’s paradoxical because it’s the William-in- Spike that makes him love women he idealizes. Like Dante, like the poet in the “Divine Comedy”, Spike keeps looking for his Beatrice.
And Harmony isn’t a Beatrice. Buffy is the true Beatrice for William, hence the chaste Spuffy relationship in season 7....Metaphorically, in the AR Buffy rejected Spike as a physical lover, she rejected flesh then and again in BY (while season 6 Spuffy and mostly season 2 Sprusilla could be seen as a Francesca/Paolo 'ship, the lovers in Hell)! Spike still thinks of her as a Beatrice in Chosen, this is why he doesn't believe her declaration of love IMO, he really thinks she's above him now. The three women he has loved were his muses:
- Cecily was his MUSE, literally...She inspired him with poetry, but she didn't believe in him. Therefore she was a false Beatrice.
- Dru was his Dark muse, his Dark Princess...Remember what he said in Crush: "It's the face of my salvation! She delivered me from mediocrity (....)Never stopped taking me to new depths ", but she deserted him twice, for Angelus in Season 2 and then she dumped him for a Chaos Demon...She has been a deceitful and a fallen Beatrice which made sense since Angelus turned the pure girl into a naughty and insane fiend.
- Buffy led him to search for a soul and to the sacrifice in Chosen, she believed in him and she didn't leave him to the FE. So she really was the ultimate and the true Beatrice. She is THE ONE.
Spike was definitely a fighter, a warrior and a survivor able to adapt himself, but he really never stopped being William the Bloody (Awful Poet), he never quit wanting a woman he could worship, and a woman who could see him and save him.
That's why, despite its flaws, I liked "Not Fade Away", just for that unforgettable scene with Spike reciting his poetry and getting back the last missing pieces of William, his words.