This song is a fantasy.

Harry Warren and Al Dubin wrote ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ for the movie Dames (1934), a satire on theatrical censorship featuring Busby Berkeley’s choreography. In context, the song is a sweet serenade given by budding Broadway composer and impresario Jimmy (Dick Powell) to his dancer girlfriend Barbara (Ruby Keeler). Their love story is a slight vehicle for Dubin’s intense lyrics. But thematically the song suits the film – a comedy of errors about gazing at beautiful actresses.

‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ asks how somebody smitten sees the world. Or rather, what they see. As the (very infrequently performed) verse has it, love is selectively ‘blind’, an ‘optical illusion’. The choruses describe how, to a person in love, all things – stars, gardens, crowded avenues – confusedly ‘disappear from view’. This feat is performed cinematically in Dames, which magically vanishes people from the street and the subway as Jimmy croons to Barbara.

The song’s massive recording history kind of reflects this disappearing act. There are plenty of straight ahead interpretations by jazz greats – Louis Armstrong’s story of gentle flirtation, Frank Sinatra’s confident seducer, Billie Holiday’s effervescent party-goer, coquettish Carmen McRae. Mary Wells gives a big Motown rendition, while Etta Jones swings languidly, weaving in Billie Holiday’s invented lyric ‘big, bulging eyes’ towards the end. But the haunting doo-wop recording made by The Flamingos in 1959, exquisitely arranged by band member Terry Johnson, has influenced so many others that it almost comes to substitute for the original.

‘My love must be a kind of blind love’, it begins. ‘I can’t see anyone but you.’ Having collaged these two lines from the verse to the top, this version then unfolds the choruses. Its mesmerising sound suggests being underwater, at the top of a mountain, inside a cathedral of ice. But its defining aesthetic characteristic is the cold – which sort of makes sense of the really odd apres-ski mise-en-scene of The Flamingos’ TV performance in the clip above. According to the YouTube poster, that edition of The Dick Clark Show was shot in the sticky New York heights of July.

There are also plenty of recordings that are simple covers of The Flamingos’ version – from Boyz II Men’s to Tashaki Miyaki’s – while others, like Catherine Russell’s, draw momentarily on its variation of the melody. Liane Carroll’s fierce shuffle funk interpretation is absolutely stunning. Differently captivating is Oneohtrix Point Never’s hypnotic composition, which seems to bring an android into conversation with a sinister gang of monks.

For ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’, one of the finest episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), The Flamingos’ version is pretext for and backdrop to its story.

The spirit of James Stanley, class of Sunnydale 1955, is stalking the school’s halls. He is compulsively re-enacting the night when, crazed with controlling grief, he shot teacher and ex-lover Grace Newman. Both spirits are possessing current students, caretakers and teachers, almost always resulting in a death. Buffy correctly and angrily surmises that he wants forgiveness, a recognition based on her own recent catastrophe: sex with her boyfriend Angel, which transformed him back into murderous vampire Angelus, who then promptly killed her watcher Giles’ beloved partner, teacher and Clan Kalderash member Jenny Calendar.

James calls Buffy to the school by night, where she finds Angelus lurking. They become surrogates in James and Grace’s unhappy story, which uncannily echoes their own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM2eLr9nIsM

Following these events, Buffy, in shock, places the ethereal Flamingos’ record on a turntable, and gazes into a mirror, where she sees James’ reflection look back at her. But embodying Grace, Angelus’s vampiric undeadness allows both stories to be resolved. Instead of falling for the umpteenth time over the school’s balcony to her death, Grace/Angel returns, declaring love for James/Buffy and the shooting (sexual metaphor alert) an accident, releasing them both.

(Historical accuracy quibble: why not make James class of 1959? The answer is probably Back To The Future (1985). I mean, ok. But come on.)

In this phenomenal episode, ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ means obsession, grief, not-seeing, the same scene playing out across different bodies. Though different in kind, it shares spooky parallels with the song’s appearances in Dames.

First, Jimmy serenades Barbara on the Staten Island ferry, the Statue of Liberty in the background. Couples coo around them. Love is heteronormative sequence and sameness.

Later, extending the scene of Jimmy’s flight of fancy on the subway train, in which ads bearing women’s faces blend into Barbara’s, Busby Berkeley’s spectacular choreography presents a proliferation of Barbaras, suggesting women as interchangeable commodities, everywhere different but the same. As Lucy Fischer brilliantly puts it, the doppelganger girls’ ‘aimless, repetitive movement‘ embodies a kind of ‘zombiism‘.

The end of the Buffy episode sets all these stagings of surrogacy off. Buffy tentatively ventures to Giles: ‘part of me just doesn’t understand why she would forgive him’. Her sideways look of guilt reveals that really she is asking why Giles would forgive her. Anthony Stewart Head’s delivery of Giles’ patient response ‘does it matter?’ is magnificent. Anger, pain and loss commingle and dissolve in his performance. The scene evokes a unique unconditional love, but equally, how different stories of love can bear a resemblance.