Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Spike as Spectacle: Inverting the Gendered Gaze/Fetish Paradigm

Film and television theory have long been preoccupied with the consequences of gender in the construction of the cinematic subject. The onset of feminist film theory in the 1970s generated an influential field of thought in textual studies and exerted influence across disparate arenas of interest including psychoanalysis and poststucturalism, foregrounding the relevance of the gendered subject in the construction of textual meaning.

A seminal paper borne out of this field - Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema - takes particular issue with the specter of the female body as fetish object in classical narrative cinema, positioned for the pleasure of the male spectator and his similarly gendered on-screen protagonist. Gleaning theoretical interest from Freudian models of the fetish and the Gaze, Mulvey traces a history of manipulation of the female body in cinema in pursuit of a figure of pure spectacle - lit and posed so as to render it capable of halting the narrative entirely, causing a disjuncture of narrative flow in its incongruous fashioning, loaded as it is with the fruits of male heterosexual desire.

As usual Buffy the Vampire Slayer takes this basic assumption of televisual narrative and gives it a good old flying kick to the head.

XANDER: Spike is strong and mysterious and sort of compact but well-muscled. BUFFY: I am not having sex with Spike! But I’m starting to think that you might be.

(Intervention, episode, 5.18)

Spike is a liminal subject. He is a vampire with a (newly reinstated) soul, a vampire in love with a slayer - his mortal enemy, a man in love with a stake-wielding super heroine who saves the world (a lot). He is cautiously gendered - "love’s bitch but man enough to admit it", and in this transgressive and indeterminate space of sex, gender and power, Spike occupies a position more akin to the female love interest in classical narrative cinema. Spike is spectacle in the Buffyverse.

The writers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer have never been afraid of a shirtless vampire hero. Way back in the day, Angel would often be seen half dressed performing tai-chi, reading poetry or some equally effeminate gesture. Commensurate with his characterised broody nature, he would always be set in half-light, often candlelit and with a furrowed brow. Many BtVS writers have been humorously quoted as favouring a male shirtless scene wherever possible.

Since Angel’s departure to Los Angeles (and his own show) Spike has pulled up a piece of rug in Sunnydale as a sometimes member of the Scoobies, and resident eye candy for the masses. His relation to Buffy has always been sexually charged, and problematically so. On first spying her dancing with friends in local indie hangout, The Bronze, he frames her as the traditional female fetish object, desirable and available for his devouring gaze. He gets suitably pummeled by the power-charged miss. She is the controller of the gaze in the Buffyverse, and it is through her that the narrative traces desire.

In its essence, BtVS is concerned with devaluing and inverting traditional models of the gendered televisual (and cinematic) subject. The valley girl whom we expect to be sliced-and-diced within seconds of her appearance on screen is in fact the one chosen to defend the world from nasties and Big Bads. And as proven in her relationship with Spike as it developed in Season 6 of the show (and notable the first to have been produced specifically for cable network UPN, rather than the famously white-bread WB network it formerly called home) she wields sexual power and prowess with skill and influence.

There has been much made in the BtVS fan community of the violent and perverse sexual relationship of Buffy and Spike. Speculation over the validity of a reading of domestic violence, close attention paid to the power struggles posed between the two, and anger pitted against disbelief over an attempted rape scene in the final episodes of season 6, highlight the difficulty inherent in reading a relationship with essentially inverts traditional heterosexual modes of engagement in cinema and televisual media.

Following Mulvey’s logic of the fetish object and the desiring Gaze, it is Buffy who possesses the latter, contradicting the traditional models of gendered enactment of these positions. It is she who largely solicits Spike’s attention, commanding his adoration of her and using it at her will, consistent with the actions of the classical male protagonist. So many of their ’encounters’ are fashioned with her at least partially dressed (and always modestly so) while he is bathed in (artificial) light naked save for a conveniently placed candle in the foreground, or an angled leg. His body glows, luminous and framed with care. He tilts his head, a faint smile on his face. He is coded not as a woman per se, but as an object of Buffy’s perverse desire.

The many times Buffy storms into his crypt (carefully adorned with lustrous fabrics and groups of tall candles, echoing the bourgeois boudoirs of the "white telephone dramas" of classical Hollywood) he is framed and lit with delicate gestures while Buffy initiates contact. Spike himself seems to confirm this style of cinematic treatment of his body when he talks with Buffy about his distaste for fluorescent lights in the episode Doublemeat Palace - "they make me look dead".

The soft glow that seems to envelope Spike in these moments when Buffy desires him directly mimic the devices employed in framing the female body that Mulvey discusses in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Complicating narrative flow in a moment of pure spectacle the body of Spike further verifies the centrality of gendered play at the heart of the series.

Explaining these phenomena as a simple gendered ’trade’ (ie Buffy as masculine subject, Spike as feminine object) denies the complexity of gendered identity and sexuality set up in the Buffyverse. Inversion and perversity operate as norms where queerness informs the very structure of identity (in the sense of non-normative identity and relations, and not strictly ’gay’ identity). It is no surprise that Spike is employed as a fetish object for the enjoyment of Buffy and the aligned spectator, for the strucure of the Buffyverse accommodates it so readily, imbued as it is with complicated and manifold identity. And now with added Spike nudity thanks to cable!