The Chosen "O"
So, the other day I was making some icons, and I started thinking about whether there was a way to capture The "Chosen" Moment. You guys know the one I'm talking about, right?
So, here's the deal: Buffy, Spike, Faith and the Potentials are in the Hellmouth, fighting back the Turok-Han -- the manifestation of a Hobbesian past that is coming to drag us all back into the darkness. Suddenly, Spike's "self-destruct" mechanism activates, in the form of a shiny trinket that no self-respecting monster would be caught undead wearing. He cuts swathes of glow-y, golden destruction through the enemy ranks, bringing the finale's curtains tumbling down and affording Faith and the P-squad a brief window of time to make their getaway.
After they escape, there are only two people left in the Hellmouth's abyss: Buffy Summers and William Pratt.
There are lots of connections to be made here, most of them very obvious. Whedon & Co.'s infamous pop semiotics lead us by the nose straight to "Star Wars" -- both to Leia and Han's "I know" moment in Empire and Luke and Vader's "I can't leave you here, I've got to save you" moment in Jedi. Like those scenes, major revelations are about to happen at the mouth of this little stairwell, as well as a final reckoning with fate that was foreshadowed by Anya's death a few moments before.
Also, we are introduced to the Buffyverse's final meta-weapon: Spike's amulet. The weapon's nature is hinted at by Spike's pained reaction to its activation, and by his line, "I can feel it..... My soul. It's really there." As Spike reported in his song (Ep. 6.07), if his "heart could beat it would break (his) chest," and now we seem to be witnessing something like this happening in the Hellmouth. If the amulet were a gun, his soul would be the bullet. In that sense, what is happening to Spike is tangential to Melville's famous lines at the climax of Moby Dick:
He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.
Of course, it's not hate that powers Spike's "mortar." And the amulet does not remind us of a warship's cannonade, so much as it does a different kind of tool. He sweeps the beam of light from side to side, obliterating the oncoming Turok Han horde in the same way a firefighter might sweep his column of water to douse a blazing fire. So, added to Buffy's fire-axe (Scythe) is Spike's fire-hose (amulet) and his water (soul). Like the Scythe, the amulet transcends its role as a "weapon," and instead becomes a tool for saving lives, which is what being a hero is really all about. Filmed in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, this image of two firefighters fending off the forces of darkness at the gates of Hell is as searing as it is inspiring, especially since we now suspect that one of them isn't going to make it out of this place alive.
After the others flee the cave, Buffy tries to save Spike one last time, but he demurs. A look of concentration and understanding has come across his face. He can finally see the end of his own life -- something he could never see before because of the curse of immortality -- and the notion exhilarates him. He knows he is alive because he knows he is about to die. He knows his life has meaning because he knows his death will have meaning. Also, his ending is ironic, twistedly funny and bloody exciting -- all concepts he just plain learned to like along the way. It's clear this final moment is as close to perfection as he's ever got or will ever get, so he intends to relish every absurd, gloriously violent moment of it.
But... it's not that simple, of course. William may be ready to die, but Buffy isn't quite ready for him to go.
She takes his hand in hers.
Their hands burst into flame...
Fire means something beyond the usual motifs in the Buffyverse. On the one hand, fire is the representation of Buffy's fight to save lives, embodied by her line, "Gonna be a fireman when the floods roll back (Ep. 4.22)." In "Chosen", she wields a fireman's axe as her final weapon against the great fire that threatens to consume the world. The tool is a symbolic inversion of the "Class Protector" umbrella that Jonathan gave her at the prom (Ep. 3.20), when her classmates saw her as shelter from the storm.
But, before her sexual relationship with Spike begins, touching the fire "freezes" her (Ep. 6.07), an analogy for how the events of her life have hardened her heart and alienated her from her friends and family. In the same song Spike tells us how the "torch (he) bear(s) is scorching" him, all while Buffy marches towards her own immolation at the hands of the demon Sweet. Fire in the Buffyverse is a metaphorical device that connects binary extremes. It's the connection between life and death (external, existential), and between pleasure and torment (internal, phenomenological).
The paradox of the Buffyverse Fire is on full display in this climactic scene, as we see how the fire inside Spike, harnessed by the amulet, is now simultaneously burning him up and making him real. As always, Buffy was the catalyst for it. But now there is a new fire coming from their hands, and there is something weird and holy about it. It doesn't seem to scald either one of them, either physically or emotionally. It is symbolic fire that has taken shape in the real world, a poem made solid.
Spike turns to look at it, distracted from his whole meaning-of-life revelation by Buffy's tender touch and the magically weird weirdness it has sparked.
And then he looks at her, like he's seeing her for the first time...
Then, this happens:
This moment has always been such an interesting one to me, not least because it might be the best acted (and directed) moment I've seen on television. Amid all the heady symbolism, they manage to make the moment very small, personal, and satisfyingly real. Buffy's reaction to the fire reminds me somewhat of the Katz's deli scene in "When Harry Met Sally", when Meg Ryan's Sally crassly fakes an orgasm. As celebrated in pop culture as that deli scene was, it has always struck me as weak sauce -- Ryan's character was trying to demonstrate how easy it would be to trick Harry into believing she climaxed, but ironically her performance felt so flat and phony that it seemed to be proving the opposite point. By comparison, Gellar's visible release and the wave of euphoria that follows in this "Chosen" scene feels so genuine that it would put the world's most skilled porn star to shame.
At this point you might be asking yourself, "Has this post been an elaborate ruse, concocted just so Lostboy can brag about how he knows what a real female orgasm looks like?"
The answer is, "Yes, absolutely." But as long as we're on the subject we might as well delve a little deeper...
Buffy's release here isn't sexual, either literally or symbolically. Unlike in Dracula and much of the pop lore that followed it, sex is not sublimated in the Buffyverse; the citizens of Sunnydale and its monsters are all having lots of sex, both with their own kind and with each other. The catharsis Buffy experiences at the foot of the stairs is unique to her plight, which has to do with learning how to live in a world filled with loss, hard choices and terrible people without losing touch with her own humanity.
For several years now, she believed she's been losing the ability to feel love. It's a consequence of fighting monsters and losing loved ones, but also of repeatedly risking her heart, only to have it betrayed, misused or underestimated. Meanwhile, she has been fighting so many external fires that she forgot about the one inside -- not the flame that scorches you, but the hearth fire that keeps you warm. When she sees it manifested now, she realizes it was inside her all along. She just had to look for it, and accept that it was a part of her.
Buffy's always been capable of love, and indeed has been loving people all along. She just couldn't admit this to herself -- not only because admitting it would be admitting weakness, or because of the risks inherent in expressing love, but because the hero in her thought it might even be selfish to allow herself to love. Loving others in the past was dangerous, and not only to her. Loving Angel got Jenny and Kendra killed, and almost got everyone else in the Scooby gang killed as well. Even opening up the door a crack to Ben almost got Dawn killed.
The grand irony of the series is that, in a world filled with monsters and magic, love is the riskiest venture of all. You have to be brave to let yourself love, and be loved. The sudden realization of her own capacity to love is so big and shocking that it literally takes Buffy's breath away. Bravo to Gellar and Whedon for locating whatever method-y foothold that allowed this moment to happen.
Along with knowing comes feeling. She feels the love and, despite the sound of Hell's bright concave ripping apart all around them, despite the sky falling, she can't help but smile. That's because real love is a good feeling -- the best of all feelings. It's the flame that warms her without scalding her, and it came from within.
William can hardly believe what he's seeing. He has to believe it, though; at the bottom of it all, he is still a poet, and therefore he knows very well that love looks like a fire that doesn't burn you. Yet, he's still in awe of it and of her, without Buffy having to say a single word. Words aren't necessary when symbols come to life.
Like all tragedy, the tragedy of their shared revelation is in the timing. So, after the warm wave baptizes her, she weeps in its wake, because there's no time left to explore this love. But, again, it's not that simple. She still has to tell him, if only to prove to herself that she can say the words and mean them.
(From Ep. 5.18, "Intervention")
BUFFY: Yeah. Strength, resilience ... those are all words for hardness. (pause) I'm starting to feel like ... being the Slayer is turning me into stone.
GILES: Turning you into stone? Buffy-
BUFFY: Just ... think about it. (gets up, paces) I was never there for Riley, not like I was for Angel. I was terrible to Dawn.
GILES: At a time like this-
BUFFY: No.
GILES: You're bound to feel emotionally numb.
BUFFY: Before that. Riley left because I was shut down. He's gone. And now my mom is gone ... and I loved her more than anything ... and ... I don't know if she knew.
GILES: Oh, she knew. (gets up, puts his hand on Buffy's shoulder) Always.
BUFFY: I don't know. To slay, to kill ... it means being hard on the inside. Maybe being the perfect Slayer means being too hard to love at all. I already feel like I can hardly say the words.
GILES: Buffy...
BUFFY: Giles ... I love you. Love ... (robotically) love, love, love, love, Giles, it feels strange.
Buffy has learned along the way that it's not enough to say it without feeling it, and that it's not enough to feel it without saying it. Now that she can finally do both again, it's too late to enjoy it very much. But... damned if that means she won't say it.
Honesty. Openness. Courage. Resolve. When that renowned film historian, Madonna, sang, "Rita Hayworth gave good face," she couldn't have had such a scene in mind, but Gellar sure as hell embodies that line here.
Hah. Spike gets the bittersweet joke at play here, and it pulls an eyebrow. It's what he's been waiting to hear and feel all his whole, long life/undeath, and she had to pick now to say it?
At this point, Joss Whedon drags us back to the "Empire Strikes Back" semiotic trough and rubs our noses in it. There's an interesting story about the production of that film that has been corroborated too many times to be apocryphal. As the story goes, when Leia tells Han that she loves him, moments before he is to be frozen in carbonite (and potentially killed), the original response penned in the George Lucas co-written script was "I love you too." But on the set, director Irvin Kershner and actor Harrison Ford couldn't get the line to work. It just sounded too cornball and cheesy, and not at all Han Solo-esque. So, after a few takes, Kershner advised Ford to just improvise, and say whatever popped into his head. Ford came up with "I know," and everyone on the set cheered.
The story doesn't end there. Apparently -- in a foreboding preview of what we would come to realize about his choices as a filmmaker -- George Lucas hated the "I know" take when they screened it in dailies, and pushed hard to have the original line (his lame, "I love you too") restored in editing. Ol' Georgie Boy took it so far as to create two different reels of the film to screen for test audiences, one with his "I love you too" and one with Ford's "I know." The audience responded so overwhelmingly to the latter that Lucas was finally forced to swallow his pride and kill his own dumb line. The rest is cinematic history.
Fast forward to Sunnydale, 2002, and to another memorable and tragic "I love you." Well, of course William can't say something mundane like, "I love you, too." He also can't say, "I know," because that is Han Solo's legendary line. In an interesting choice, the old, snarky monster Spike momentarily takes the reins. He pretends to blow it off, while still managing to acknowledge that he gets it, and that he's grateful: "No you don't. But, thanks for saying it."
More honesty, resolve, understanding, courage, love, regret... Geez, Gellar, wouldja stop with all this brilliant acting? It's making me forget all about "Scooby Doo 2."
"Now, go!" Spike says.
This is the equivalent of a dying Vader's final lines in Jedi, when Luke tells him he has to save him: "You already have, Luke... Now, go, my son. Leave me." Leading up to this moment, Buffy has saved Spike many times over, and Spike has saved her a couple of times too. This final rescue belongs to the vampire-with-the-heart-of-gold, who snaps Buffy out of her orgasmic, revelatory carthasis of love long enough to send her on her way. He knows that "she has to keep on living," so one of them "is living." (Ep. 6.07) In that sense, his bittersweet "No you don't," is his gift to her. Just moments before, Buffy saved him by loving him, and now he saves her by letting her go.
There's a curious symmetry to this choice; in this moment, Buffy's love is representative of everything William finds worthwhile about the world, and in order to save it he must let go. The first time these two saved the world together (Ep. 2.22), Spike chose to save the world because he can't let go of it:
"The truth is, I like this world. You've got... dog racing, Manchester United. And you've got people. Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs. It's all right here."
Now, after the lessons of Sunnydale are complete, William willingly severs his connections to the world because love demands it of him. Love is stronger than any worldly pleasure, and there really is no meaning without it. Letting go of the world and letting go of Buffy are the same thing for him, and it paradoxically takes strength to do it, just as it took strength for Buffy to take her fatal leap from the tower (Ep. 5.22).
(Sorry just had to throw this SMG face in here one last time.)
Okay, I think I've babbled about this much-talked-about scene long enough. At this point, it's worth noting that, while I'm not a 'shipper of any variety, this moment in the Hellmouth is one that 'shippers famously haggle and fight over, sometimes so passionately that it tears apart fandom friendships and leaves everyone involved with a bunch of bad feelings. From the outside, it always struck me as a very strange and fruitless war; even if someone is totally invested in an imaginary relationship between Buffy and Spike/Angel/Riley/Ben/Parker/Principal Snyder/et cetera, it seems weirdly tone-deaf and a little bit cruel to want to take this incredible, climactic moment away from a heroic character like Buffy Summers.
Part of me knows that's not their intention; it's probably more about vicariousness than cruelty, and people wanting Buffy to love the character that they themselves might have "chosen." But, regardless of any possible romantic implications, this scene stands out as a moment of pure courage and triumph, during which Buffy grows as a person and takes the final step of her long journey into adulthood. Finding the love inside herself is her reward for a job well done, and sharing it with someone else is the ultimate gift. All the philosophers, politicians, pundits, academics and navel-gazers of the past seven years of the show fade away to insignificance in this moment, because all their hardheaded theories pale in comparison to the simple idea presented by Buffy's breathless O: love is its own reward.