Last week, the show explored the fall-out from the Buffy/Angel disintegration through Willow, and her relationship with her new Monster Boyfriend. This week, it’s Xander and Cordelia’s turn to reflect the season’s central romance. There is no Monster Girlfriend for Xander – as much as he insists that dating Cordelia is more dangerous than fighting vampires. Rather, it is Xander who takes the mantle of reflecting Angel in this episode.
The opening shot focuses in on Xander’s Valentines Day gift to Cordelia – a heart-shaped silver necklace. This is a significant piece of jewellery, as it represents a combination of Angel’s two major gifts to Buffy. First, the silver cross necklace he gives her on the first day they meet. Secondly, the silver Claddagh ring he gives her on their last day – which has set into it a heart, representing love. Just as Cordelia represents Buffy’s shadow, the romance in which she is caught is too a shadow of Buffy’s.
Interestingly, it also combines Spike and Angel’s respective gifts to Drusilla in this episode. Spike gives her a necklace, and Angel gives her a fresh human heart. Drusilla is Buffy’s dark mirror, and Cordelia her shadow self, so it makes sense that all three women are receiving these similar gifts of necklaces and hearts. Here though, the heart no longer represents love. It has been torn out of an innocent woman and placed before a demon, ugly and bleeding. It is the image of love turned horrific, just like Angel himself.
Both Xander and Angel have a consistent tendency to express their affections through presents. As much as “love languages” are a real thing, Gift Giving is most certainly theirs. With Xander, this goes back to his clumsy purchase of a personalised bracelet for Buffy back in Witch (itself a parallel to Angel’s necklace gift), and will be seen again in future episodes – buying Cordelia’s dress in The Prom, getting a new apartment for Anya in The Replacement, arguably the engagement ring he offers her in The Gift.
Angel too has his historic jewellery gifts, and more popping up in the future – buying Cordelia clothes and excessive amounts of food in season two of Angel being a good indication of his developing feelings for her. Here and now though, his penchant for gift-giving is turned dark and ugly, like the heart. Giles tells Buffy how Angel is prone to these dramatic displays of “affection”, which include mass murder and nailing puppies to things. We will see more of such displays next episode. In his twisted, evil mind, such displays likely constitute gifts. He’s displaying his love in the same way a man who writes a song for his crush is – the only way he knows how. The one physical gift Buffy does receive in this episode – a dozen red roses – ties into this motif. It’s the fresh human heart again – the image of romance, with an underlying promise of death.
It is an even more fitting promise than either Buffy or the audience first realises. It will be indeed be not long at all before someone receives a gift of their own, wrapped in a boquet of red roses. It’s not Buffy, though.
Angel quibbles over exactly what to gift Buffy in this episode – how best to send his regards. He doesn’t want to simply kill her as Spike suggests; such a simple act, as he says, “lacks poetry”. He wants to torture her and drive her mad, just as he did to Drusilla. He eventually lands on killing Xander – an option that feels a little bit random and underwhelming considering how long he spends thinking it up, but makes some sense if you consider how he tormented Drusilla by killing everyone close to her first. The most poetic aspect comes from the parallels between the characters – Angel killing Xander is poetic because Xander here is rhyming with Angel.
“Why don’t you rip her lungs out? It might make an impression.”
Spike and Angel, 2×16 Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered
“Lacks… poetry.”
“Your face is a poem. I can read it.”
Drusilla, to Xander, 2×16 Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered
When Xander asks Amy to perform a love spell on Cordelia, she assumes it’s because he is in love with her, and wants to spend eternity with her (a significant word choice given Angel’s eternal life). It’s not an act of love, though – even a twisted one. It’s an act of petty vengeance. He says himself that he wants to make her suffer for what she has done to him. This is Angel’s same motivation – as he says in Innocence, he wants to make Buffy suffer for making him feel like a human. Both men are inflicting punishment on the women they are supposed to love for exposing them to human emotions.
Xander’s hypothetical love for Cordelia cannot be eternal, as he is not. It could only last as long as he does. Angel’s love for Buffy theoretically could last forever. The question is – does it? Is he still in love with Buffy? If his love is eternal, then that implies it’s still around right now. Eternity doesn’t take time-outs.
“If you don’t wanna be with her forever, then what’s the point?”
Amy Madison, 2×16 Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered
“Forever. That’s the whole point.”
Angel, 3×01 Anne
Xander quickly shoots down any idea of “forever” for him. He’s not in love with Cordelia. I think that is clear from him defending his decision to date Cordelia with the fact that he can’t find anyone better(!), and from immediately forgetting Cordelia at all the moment Buffy shows some interest in him. This is opposing to Angel, who is singular and consistent in his affections. As Willow will tell us next episode, Buffy is still the only thing he thinks about.
Jenny declares in this episode that it is impossible to love two people at once, and it’s an interesting throwaway line to consider. Jenny herself is “in love” with Xander due to the spell, but enters the library with a distinct mission to make up with Giles. If she is correct in her suggestion that you can’t love two people, then that adds credence to Giles’ statement that the feeling triggered by Xander’s spell is not, in fact, love. She is under the influence of the latter, yet her real, genuine feelings for Giles cannot be erased – they break through anyway. Genuine love cannot be constrained by the facsimile of love.
Buffy too is still concerned about Angel – she doesn’t forget about him under the love spell. Willow is different – she seems completely unconcerned about Oz, and Xander has to remind her of him. This would suggest that Willow isn’t really in love with Oz – an idea that ties in well with a choice to read season two Willow as a closeted lesbian.
Xander’s love is the least real of all. His affections are random and scattershot. Because Willow seems to be a font of wisdom on this subject, he should remember what she told us in Phases – how Xander is always “so busy looking around and everything he hasn’t got”. His love constantly flits between Cordelia, between Buffy, between Willow, between Ampata and Mrs. French. It’s less about any of these individual women than it is about the idea of love itself.
I put forward the theory that this is the reason the spell backfires the way it does. The spell specifically commands to “bind the heart of Xander’s beloved”. And Xander’s beloved is all women. He is obsessed with the idea of being loved, by anyone at all. And so in true be-careful-what-you-wish-for fashion, he gets exactly that – being loved by everyone at once – and it’s just as horrifying as it sounds.
Xander is pretty immediately horrified by fantasy becoming reality himself. When he makes a typically Xander joke about Buffy giving him a lapdance and she responds with surprising affirmation, he is visibly terrified. So too when Willow tries to seduce him. He has no intention of indulging any of his fantasies, because none of them are based in reality. They are merely the image of love; not the substance.
“I know it’s not love. It’s obsession. Selfish, banal obsession.”
Rupert Giles, 2×16 Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered
Giles makes the episode’s theme clear here. He places a strict divide between love and obsession, and declares them mutually exclusive. The women under the spell are not in love, they are just obsessed. I think that’s pretty inarguable. So with the episode paralleling Angel and his relationship to Buffy so strongly, I think the episode comes down pretty hard on the side of “Angelus does not love Buffy”.
I think Buffy herself would take comfort in that viewpoint. It’s easier for her to set a strict divide in her mind between Angel and Angelus. Angel is good, is kind, and loves her. Angelus is evil, is cruel, and doesn’t love her. However, as we discussed in the Innocence review, such a clean binary is not compatible with what the show is telling us. There is no ‘Angelus’ – they’re still calling him Angel. And the question of whether or not he “loves” Buffy is more ambiguous. He differs from Xander in that his affections are consistent, and he differs from the victims of the love spell in that he is actually less willing to kill the object of his affections that they are.
Most people would probably say that anybody who treats someone with the level of cruelty that Angel treats Buffy here cannot truly love that person, and I sympathise with that viewpoint. Certainly, it is no basis for anything resembling a healthy and functional relationship. However, that viewpoint supposes that love is an inherently Good thing. That the only type of love is one that inspires Good actions. I don’t know if I agree. I tend to see love as a more neutral concept; an impossibly powerful force that can inspire all kinds of actions, both Good and Evil. Obsession is not love, but it can be a part of it, just as kindness can. Under this framework, it would be fair to say that Angelus loves Buffy, just in an Evil way.
I don’t think it’s possible to give a true answer on this, because love is such an all-encompassing and indefinable concept. It covers an indescribable array of emotions and actions, and I don’t know if you can filter it down to one single grain of anything. My or your personal philosophies on the subject matter less though than the show’s, and I think the show, at this point, is leaning to the idea that what Angelus feels is not love – but it’s remaining ambiguous. It wants us to consider the question. It is a question that the show will return to again, because Angelus is not the only evil thing with feelings for Buffy that some would call love.
If Xander is intended as a parallel to Angel in this episode, then it only makes sense that the parallel to Buffy would be Cordelia, which is perhaps where this reading breaks down a little bit. Cordelia’s arc is all about moving past the judgement of others, and not making decisions about her love life based on what her peers think. That’s not something Buffy ever really dealt with in regards to Angel – up to this point the only person that ever got close to judging her for her affections was Xander, and that never affected her decisions.
I think a parallel does emerge if you consider the broader theme of shame present in both relationships. Cordelia feels ashamed for being with an unpopular, nerdy guy in Xander. Buffy feels ashamed for sleeping with Angel, and “causing” his turn. Cordelia learning to let go of her shame and proudly own her attraction and choices is, just like Willow choosing to pursue Oz last episode, a reminder that the show is firmly against any idea of shaming Buffy for what has happened with Angel.
Both of these relationships carry with them a queer undercurrsent. There is a long-running and complicated relationship between monstrosity and queerness, and so Buffy being in love with a monster (both in the literal sense of his being a non-human, and in him now being fully monstrous), carries inherent queer metaphor, even if the show doesn’t dive into those waters as much as it will later. Cordelia triumphantly declaring that she will date whoever she likes, regardless of what others think, is also an experience that resonates with a lot of queer viewers. And interestingly, especially considering our recent discussions of the hypothetical Gay Xander timeline, there are quite a few parallels between Cordelia/Xander and Larry/Xander over the last few episodes.
“I just think it’s some kind of whacked that we feel we have to hide it from all our friends.”
Xander Harris and Cordelia Chase, 2×13 Surprise
“Well, of course you wanna tell everybody. You have nothing to be ashamed of. I, on the other hand, have everything to be ashamed of.”
“I know what you’re going through because I’ve been there. That’s why I know you should talk about it.”
Xander Harris and Larry Blaisdell, 2×15 Phases
“Yeah, that’s easy for you to say. I mean, you’re nobody. I’ve got a reputation here.”
“Maybe something in you sees something special inside me. And vice versa. I mean, I think I do. See something.”
Xander Harris, to Cordelia, 2×16 Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered
“It’s ironic. I mean, all those times I beat the crap out of you, it musta been because I recognized something in you that I didn’t want to believe about myself.”
Larry Blaisdell, to Xander, 2×15 Phases
These lines about characters recognising something in each other, and socially popular teenagers feeling like they are more at risk for living their true selves, have a queer resonance – both metpahorically with Cordelia’s arc, and literally with Larry’s. Cordelia claiming her self-identity at the episode’s end retains that power specifically because of the parallels she shares with, at this point Buffy’s only canonically gay character.
So while Cordelia learns to reject shame and embrace herself, Xander learns to reject fantasy and embrace reality. He may not love Cordelia, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have some happiness together. They’re seventeen, they don’t have to be in love. The episode closes, for the second time in a row, on the image of a happy couple – both moving past their childish desires to be universally loved and socially accepted – and forming some kind of relationship. With two secondary Scooby romances under our belt, happy and together in the wake of the season’s primary love story collapsing, our attentions must turn to the third. Naturally, they must complete the trilogy by re-uniting and ending the next episode in a passionate, loving embrace.
…Right?
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Insect Reflection 