I did see the movie around the time I read the book. The thing I remember thinking about Brando was that the fat guy from the Godfather couldn’t possibly be the same person. 
Woah, wait, what? Did Angel/us rape someone on-screen? Or are you talking about how we sympathize with him even after all the torture/death stuff? I admit I’m not as well versed in Angel as in Buffy, but I don’t remember a rape - but it would have made the (already more text than subtext) parallels between Spike and Angel just that much stronger.
Good example. I love the movie, not sure how I feel about him, but that scene made me incredibly uncomfortable. Apparently it made Sean Young uncomfortable, too, and she cried for a while after filming it and ‘allowing’ that to happen to her character (though I can’t recall where I read that, so grain of salt).
I don’t think Angelus raped anyone on-screen, but one can assume that he raped a lot of people back in the bad old days. Angel would certainly feel a great deal of guilt over this (among many other things, of course).
Hmmm…I’m not sure I agree with that assumption. We did see Angelus having fun with his victims, and it included a lot of torture and terror. Sure, maybe he raped, but then why wasn’t that ever said? Would it have pushed him too far into the unsympathetic category?
Didn’t he once tell Spike that he tortured and killed because it was fun, while Spike did it because he felt it was his nature? Or was it the other way 'round? I’m not sure which is more chilling…
Same here. A lot of people were pretty outraged by it, but I thought it was in line with their relationship, which was pretty angry and violent most of the time, but they were still wildly attracted to each other. I thought Tommy was an asshole for a lot of things, but not necessarily that.
Spike killed because he thought it was fun (I don’t think Spike tortured his victims. He didn’t even torture Angel. He got somebody else to do it). Angelus tortured and killed because he considered himself an artist and he was going to do it properly. Spike just wanted to smash and bash and have a good time–in other words, it’d be over quickly. Angelus wants to tie you down and then bend you, break you, hurt you in every way he can, make you crazy, kill your entire family, rape you, and if you’re lucky, simply kill you (instead of turning you).
It was said. Several times. They never made a secret of it. Plus, why would they care if Angelus is unsympathetic? Angelus was the biggest bad ass that ever there was. He was the boogey-man. They didn’t call him the Scourge of Europe for nothing. The writers had to make Angelus as evil and horrible as possible, with no redeeming qualities, in order to illustrate the very fine line that Angel walked.
It is canon that Angelus raped several people. He definitely raped the gypsy girl he killed. In fact, you see him kneel in front of her, push her skirt up, and push her legs open, and bites her thigh (that’s in Five by Five), and since Darla “wanted to watch” and there were other hints that girl was alive for a long time, I don’t think he stopped there. He definitely raped Drusilla before he turned her (which makes her “Daddy” issues more disturbing!). He raped Holtz’s wife, and I believe he told Holtz as much, and I don’t think that was just empty talk because Angelus never had “empty talk.” I mean, he also turned Holtz’s little girl so Holtz would have the pleasure of staking her himself, he wouldn’t be above raping his wife. Later, in S4, Angelus definitely told Fred he would hold her down and “rape her to death” and again, I don’t think he was joking. He implied he would rape Wesley if he “swung that way” (I’m assuming Wes wouldn’t consent to sex with Angelus on the show. In my head is different matter). He had a well-known thing for nuns (besides Drusilla) and it’s pretty clear that he enjoyed destroying their innocence.
Er, didn’t Spike get his name because he used railroad spikes to torture his victims?
Maybe. In Fool for Love, some guy said that he would rather get railroad spikes through the ear than listen to William The Bloody’s bloody awful poetry. He certainly earned the name “William the Bloody” because of his bloody awful poetry. So he could have:
A) Never tortured anybody except by way of poetry
B) Slammed spikes through that one fool’s ear for shits and giggles (though that’s something like Angelus would do. Other than kill his mum, we don’t know if Spike murdered everybody who ever mocked him when he was alive. Angelus killed his whole village).
C) horribly tortured a number of people with spikes. But if he did, it was when he was with Angelus (see Fool for Love: “Spike.” “What?” “My name is Spike now”). I imagine that Spike’s tendency to torture his victims fell off drastically after Angelus left them because Spike simply does not have the patience for a good torture session, and nothing on the show indicated that Spike ever did have the patience. Which is why his good plans often failed (“I just got so bored…”).
Can a rape scene ever be in line with an “angry” relationship? I mean, I haven’t seen it…but it sounds like it was more than just very angry sex…
Lester Burnham in American Beauty, who almost had (consensual) sex with an underaged Angela Hayes. If I just heard the story I would find it his behaviour unforgiveable, but the way he played the character made me sympathetic.
Okay, so they said it. Thanks. My questions were asked of the poster who said they didn’t say it, but assumptions were made. Erroneous information given, innocent questions asked in return.
Does Angel drink decaf?
No, he drinks blood, silly. He’s a vampire. 
No. And if you’re not careful, I can write an essay about his coffee drinking habits, too. 
What about Darla in season 2, after he’d fired the rest of the cast? He beat her up, had sex with her, then had an epiphany and ran off to make up with his former friends. Darla was okay with it, because she thought it meant Angelus was back, so on one hand: not rape. But Darla thought Angelus was back because he took her violently, without regard to wether she consented or not, so on the other hand: rape. Arguably, she was only okay with it because she thought she was being raped: she probably wouldn’t have consented to it if he’d asked for her consent, but since he didn’t, she did.
Damn, my head hurts.
It’s still a valid question. Does he refuse to drink blood from people who have recently taken caffeine?
Who, Angel? He drinks coffee all the time, and he gets grumpy when he wakes up and Cordy doesn’t have a pot made.
After watching “The Proposition”, my girlfriend remarked: “I think she deserved a little rape.”
Referring to the near/begining of the rape of Emily Watson at the end of the movie.
I should probably chime in to say that the crux wasn’t so much that she didn’t consider herself fully human, but that she wasn’t raised like a human—she mentions that (artificial) people raised in the creche “didn’t take sex too seriously” (or words to that effect) due to the kind of sexual “training” they received from childhood on ( :eek: ), which undoubtedly warps their perceptions of sex crimes they fall victim to.
Plus, whether by nature or nurture, she’s also a super badass. That’s likely to skew psychological reactions off the norm a bit.
In Tale of the Body Thief by Anne Rice, (the 4th book in The Vampire Chronicles) the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt is able to inhabit the body of a human therefore allowing him to feel, taste & sense things the way humans do for the first time in hundreds of years. One of the first things he does is seek out a woman to have sex with, it starts out consensual but she ends up pushing him away because he doesn’t have a condom on (by this point in the Chronicles it’s the 20th century and it’s been maybe 300 years since he last had sex so it’s understandable that he would not think to wear a condom.) and it ends with him forcibly raping her. It’s clearly depicted as a rape and he is disgusted with himself afterwards. It’s an odd scene, because Lestat is really the hero (anti-hero?) of the novel (plus the 2nd book in the series is actually called The Vampire Lestat) who by the end of the story really gains your sympathies.