branchandroot

Luck of the Draw

Isn’t the end of this story one of the most beautiful you’ve ever seen?

OK, before anyone starts thinking I’m crazed, or perhaps just that I’ve read too much Edgar Allen Poe, I do not exactly get a kick out of watching characters kick the bucket. In fact, I will say that poignancy alone does not a beautiful ending make.

It’s the reality of the message itself that grabs me.

I suspect Spike knew full well he was unlikely to walk away from an assault on the Red Dragon alive. I do not, however, think that his going anyway was an expression of despair or some kind of follow-my-love-into-death nonsense. Remember that it’s the moment when Annie dies that Spike decides he has to go after Vicious himself; as Julia says, “You don’t need weapons like that just to run away.” Remember also what Spike says to Faye–”I’m going to see if I really am alive.”

To be alive is to desire and intend and risk. To coast along without those things is to act out death, no matter whether your heart’s still pumping blood.

This is what I mention in passing on Spike, Julia & Vicious: When She Drives. Spike has, I would say, been coasting. He likes the rush of a reckless venture, as he shows in “Jamming with Edward” when he isn’t happy with a high-bounty mission until he gets to go flying under suicidally dangerous circumstances. He isn’t especially concerned with what might happen tomorrow, witness our introduction to Spike and Jet in the very first episode and their little brangle over how much of their last paycheck had to go to cover the damages Spike racked up in the course of capturing their target. He isn’t what you might call careful.

We can read the ending as the logical conclusion of Spike’s addiction to danger. He’s finally found the ultimate risk and the perfect ending for any danger junky: he succeeds and then dies before this ultimate triumph and high can go stale. Spike doesn’t strike me as such a shallow character that this could be his primary motivation, though.

We can also read the ending as a moral about the emptiness of life without love. In support of this we have Spike’s parable swap with Jet, wherein he tells the story of the cat who lived many lives until he met a lady cat and loved her, lived happily with her, mourned her death and was never reborn again. Note the difference between the cat and Spike, though: the cat lived happily with his mate. Spike’s last fight with Vicious also features an exchange that could contribute to this interpretation. Spike says “Julia passed away,” pauses and then says “let’s end it all.” Vicious responds, “If that’s your wish.” But for all Julia was obviously a major influence on Spike, and for all that he says she’s like his other half, I think his parting words to Jet and Faye should prevent such a simple reading. “There’s nothing I can do for a dead woman….I’m not going there to die. I’m going to find out if I really am alive,” he says. There is apparently something besides Julia herself that will let Spike know whether he’s alive or not. I would read Spike’s exchange with Vicious less as Spike giving a reason for his desire to end it than as the authors showing us one of his reasons (far more typical of these authors). I suggest that Spike is trying to reach Vicious one last time, using one of the most powerful experiences shared between them: Julia. It’s when Vicious doesn’t respond that Spike gives up on ever getting him to do so and says they should end it all. Vicious’ prompt agreement says to me that he has been a long time at the location Spike just reached at that moment; the fact that he frames his action as merely an agreement with Spike’s desire also says to me that he has just reached the point of non-desire, non-action, non-life that Spike has spent so long in. Spike isn’t there any more, of course, as Vicious recognizes: “So, you are finally awake,” he says when Spike comes to him. They seem to have swapped positions.

We can really only speculate over what fire in Julia burned bright enough to backlight Spike’s life for him; we see very little of her. Spike describes her by saying “For the first time in my life I saw a woman who was truly alive” (25); Faye tells Jet that Julia is “a beautiful, dangerous but normal woman that you can’t leave alone” (26). Perhaps the fire Spike goes seeking is Vicious himself; he’s certainly the one besides Julia that we see in Spike’s sepia memories. Or perhaps the most perfect figure of what drives and draws Spike to come after Vicious is not Julia, who, as he says is dead and beyond any help, but Shin. Just to make sure we take notice of this character, his name is the word that, depending on the kanji, means both truth and death in Japanese. It’s Shin who betrays Vicious to protect Spike and point him toward Julia. It’s Shin who comes to Spike and covers his back on the way up the Red Dragon HQ to confront Vicious. It’s Shin whose last request Spike carries out: “Please defeat Vicious,” Shin pleads as he’s dying, and adds, “actually, I wanted you to come back.” I infer from that that Shin wanted Spike, not to opt out, but to come back and lead the syndicate. Shin has intention and passion–enough life to die. In that moment, so does Spike.

That’s the point that caught me. Spike does find out that he’s alive…and so he dies.

I believe this ties in with the recurring comments about Spike living in a dream. In the preview of “Ballad” we hear Spike saying “Life is always a dream I can never wake up from, never get back to reality.” When Spike and Vicious meet, Vicious says that angels who are cast out of heaven must become demons, adding “ne, Spike?” to give us the clue that he’s talking about the two of them. Spike responds that he’s just living in a dream he never awakened from, and Vicious offers to wake him up right then. The implication that he’s offering to kill Spike is pretty clear when Spike tells him to wait and Vicious asks why, is Spike planning on begging for mercy?

Here we have waking up equated with dying, but staying in the dream seems to amount to the same thing. Consider “Brain Scratch” and Spike’s words to Spangen: “If you want to dream, dream alone.” Jet notes that “all he could do was dream” since Spangen is paralyzed. Even Ed chips in, at the end, and wishes “This time, have a sweet dream.” In this case, dreaming is something done to escape helplessness, yet that seems to be precisely what Spike objects to. He tells the boy to dream alone rather than pull other people into his dream, to their detriment. This ethic implies that Spike’s life-dream is something he does alone, in isolation. This certainly lines up with the idea that Spike has been coasting, not truly engaging with or investing himself in the people around him. The tag line of “Mushroom Samba,” Life is but a dream, also implies that his dream is hallucinatory–is not something he can consider reality. If Spike’s dream is, in fact, his past, this all makes a good deal of sense; he does not think his past is something he can affect, and yet it’s something that will never leave him. Something he can never wake up from.

It seems that his idea of what a dream is has changed a bit, though. In “Real Folk Blues I,” we have his (gray) memory of asking Julia to flee with him, and he tells her “we’ll live out a life of freedom somewhere. Just like watching a dream.” So dreaming used to mean something neither isolated nor hallucinatory. Now, however, he seems to see his own words as a sort of cosmic irony, and turns the statement around. Now he believes that the dream always was a will-o-the-whisp, was never something he could have touched or lived in. This doesn’t change until the very end. That, I would say, is the part Julia truly plays in Spike’s path to Vicious. Annie gets him started, with her death and her words, “Everyone has lost the sense of where they want to be. Like kites without strings.” That’s the smack in the face that starts Spike waking up. Shin’s loyalty to him and consequent death is the final blow, the thing that hardens Spike’s determination. In between those two, though, we have Julia’s death.

Spike’s flashbacks in “Ballad” accompany a repeating shot of his left eye. When he comes back up to consciousness and out of his dream/flashbacks, in “Jupiter Jazz,” we see his right eye opening. In “Sympathy” his green flashbacks end with a zoom from the mechanical eye to his right eye, and then he wakes up. In “Pierrot” it’s Spike’s right eye that looks down the barrel of le Fou’s gun and reflects like that of the cat who observes le Fou being experimented on, and le Fou’s left eye that we see close-ups of. All this rather postmodern image/symbol montage-ing adds up to a great deal of ambiguity; not once do we ever get a definite answer as to which eye is mechanical. My guess is that it’s the left eye, since his right eye is twice associated with awakening from the past (in “Jazz” and “Sympathy”) and his left that’s mirrored by the medically maddened le Fou. In any case, the shot in which Spike sees Julia die focuses on his left eye, the one that he tells her sees the past (13). This is what leads me to think Julia’s part is to shatter the distinction Spike has drawn between dream and reality. The scene of Julia’s death crosses the past/present boundary. In the last episode, Spike tells Faye that one eye is a replacement, that one sees the past and one the present (which indicates that the mechanical eye may also contain some kind of recorder if my guess is correct, and the shot here pans from left to right as he speaks). “I had thought that what I saw was not all of reality,” he goes on. “I thought I was watching a dream that I would never awaken from. Before I knew it, the dream was over.” And then he tells her he’s not going to die but to see if he’s alive. On the one hand, he’s saying that he thought the past, what the left eye sees, was not real but rather a dream…albeit an inescapable one. On the other, his phrasing indicates that he no longer thinks this. The dream is over, he says. He has seen the present, Julia’s death, with his left eye and as he remembers her death and her words, “this is a dream,” we see his right eye: past and present have crossed and become one. He is no longer dissociated, no longer dreaming. He has awoken, and now must act instead of merely watch.

Please,
Don’t wake me from the dream;
It’s really everything it seemed.
I’m so free;
No black and white
In the blue.

There isn’t a song that fits the final shot of this story better than “Blue” itself; so I chose a song for this page that fits a different part of the ending, one we don’t exactly see: Faye and Jet and Ed and Ein going on. The title song of this page is by Bonnie Rait, off the album of the same name.