I want somebody that looks at me the way Spike looks at Buffy. Eyes full of love and admiration, the adorable head tilt he does every time he sees a different side of her. He adores her. ❤
i think one of the reasons that spike is so compelling to me, and one of the reasons that i’m really glad he’s part of the show, is that he’s pretty much the only character that has a consistently poetic command of language. and by that i don’t mean that he speaks in a pretty or heightened way, exactly. he speaks frankly and irreverently as much as he speaks evocatively. i’m not talking about his insight either, given that i think we’re supposed to see his insight as unreliable or flawed or accurate-but-malicious about half of the time.
what i mean is that he phrases things interestingly, in a way that links unexpected concepts together. things like:
XANDER: Why blood? Why Dawn’s blood? I mean, why couldn’t it be like a, a lymph ritual?
SPIKE: ‘Cause it’s always got to be blood.
XANDER: We’re not actually discussing dinner right now.
SPIKE: Blood is life, lackbrain. Why do you think we eat it? It’s what keeps you going. Makes you warm. Makes you hard. Makes you other than dead. (quietly) Course it’s her blood.
that repetition of “makes you…” is a poetic sort of conceit. it’s got rhythm. it links “warm” which can mean either physical warmth or emotional warmth, and “hard” which suggests sexuality and more animal parts of living, and “other than dead.” it makes you intuit this more abstract notion of what it means to be “alive” and even: why the show is a vampire show in the first place. (there’s a whole other post to write about buffy’s obsession with the concepts of “dead” and “alive” and the way it uses spike in particular to express and explore that obsession).
he does this sort of parallelism again in the gift: “i know you’ll never love me. i know that i’m a monster. but you treat me like a man, and that’s…” that’s some cool overlapping repetition, where the “i know” parallel intersects with the “man/monster” parallel.
or go back to lovers walk. where he talks about “beautiful dresses with beautiful girls in them.” the show loves using demons to play on expected words and idioms like that. angelus talking about finding a heart “in a quaint little shopgirl” or dru saying “i didn’t like him. he got stuck in my teeth.” but spike is one of the few characters where it would make sense to use a repetition of “beautiful” as part of a “demons live in moral and linguistic opposite land” joke.
(actually one of the reasons i always thought spike and dru made perfect sense as a character combination is because drusilla also phrases things poetically. she says things that don’t make sense but actually do, and what’s more poetic than that? “you taste like ashes” etc. of course spike would be in love with her.)
or take his death wish speech in fool for love. that speech could never come out of any other buffyverse character’s mouth, and i love that he gives the show an excuse to use language in that way. “death is your art” is some intensephrasing. and like in his other speeches, the way he links death as art, death as a dance, and death as “on your heels” makes you intuit something complicated. the repetition paints death as this simultaneously constructive and destructive thing. something both kind of sexy and kind of terrible. it’s not an authoritative outlook on death by any means, but it is a poetic one. and i love that it exists in the show because it can stand in contrast to the stark, awful version of death in “the body” or the loving, sacrificial version of death in “the gift.”
because spike talks this way, he has this ability to bring things out in characters and scenes that wouldn’t be there otherwise. the beneath you church scene would probably have been unbearably overwrought if it had featured anyone other than spike. but because it does feature him, it allows the show to use unusual words and dramatic symbolism. or in episodes like smashed, as the tension mounts between buffy and spike, buffy starts speaking with an interestingly spike-like sense of repetition:
SPIKE: Oh, poor little lost girl. She doesn’t fit in anywhere. She’s got no one to love.
BUFFY: Me? I’m lost? Look at you, you idiot! Poor Spikey. Can’t be a human, can’t be a vampire. Where the hell do you fit in?
She throws him across the room.
BUFFY: Your job is to kill the slayer. But all you can do is follow me around making moon eyes.
SPIKE: I’m in love with you.
BUFFY: You’re in love with pain.
he also gives the show an ability to talk about the poetic instinct itself. that is, the way that putting things poetically can allow you to say unusually true stuff, but also can allow you to say false stuff in a dangerously seductive manner. it’s awfully pretty for spike to tell buffy “i don’t hurt you”…but we see not an episode later that that isn’t true. it makes sense to me that in season six, a season that is obsessed with the foolish and harmful parts of fantasy, spike starts out seeming gentle and attractive, but becomes an increasingly toxic figure. and basically finishes the season with all of his romantic images of himself destroyed.
(there’s something to probably say about his speech in touchedand how it’s him speaking poetically in a way that is not about him, and not about finding a chink in someone’s armor, and this being a resolution of his season six role)
fiction is full of bad-boy foils. characters who can speak freely because they aren’t bound by kindness or propriety. but what i like about spike is the way that the show is basically aware that he is that kind of character and complicates him accordingly. not always elegantly or anything. but fool for love for example works hard to reframe him as a Poet and a Lover (and also importantly…a fraud), to the extent of ret-conning his past, and that colors how we see the way he speaks going forward. i never feel like spike is just “saying cool stuff.” instead, i feel like his character captures both the yearning to say things that sound good, to pursue to grand notions, and also the need to deflate that instinct. and that tension is compelling.
of all the random things to wish season 7 had included (and i actually like season 7, for the record), i wish that they had managed to include, if not cordelia herself since she was off having some apparently terrible storyline, at least some sort of avatar of the southern california mean girl.
i say that because i read season 7 as buffy making peace with her shadow selves. and cordelia was buffy’s very first shadow. in season 3, her shadow-self was faith. faith was, more or less, the temptation to use power selfishly or irresponsibly. so the fact that buffy entrusts faith with power by the end of season 7 (handing over the scythe, etc) is a sign that she has resolved much of her own fear of power.
in season 6, her shadow-self was spike. spike was something like her yearning for escape and self-destruction. the temptation to check out of life. the isolation of keeping your problems secret. i see the fact that buffy forgives and speaks up for spike in season 7 as her forgiving herself by proxy, the exact flip-side of the way she used spike to punish herself the season before.
i don’t think it’s a coincidence that the first so often appears in buffy’s image. in some sense, she is fighting herself. and buffy isn’t the only one resolving issues with her shadow, all of the other characters are too. willow most obviously, as she tries to re-integrate magic into her life, and confronts the image of warren in the killer in me. spike of course as well. it makes a lot of thematic sense for him to spend the season afraid of spontaneously becoming a mindlessly violent demon.
i wish we’d gotten even more of that with all of the other characters. i wish that we’d gotten to see xander confront, say, his fears of uselessness or becoming like his family. an update on the zeppo. though there’s a bit of that in potential. same deal with giles. i wish he’d had some character focus prior to lies my parents told me, so him wrestling with ineffectuality or ruthless consequentialism would have hit harder.
but given that this is buffy’s show, i’m most interested in her arc. because of that, i can’t help but think it would have been cool to see explicit resolution with the parts of herself that are cliquish or self-oriented. obviously, buffy is a very selfless character. but she wasn’t always that way. in season 1, cordelia represented the temptation to only care about oneself and one’s problems, and the way that sort of self-obsession means that you don’t take the way you hurt other people seriously. given that buffy has struggled the whole show with when she should selfishly care about her own pain versus when she shouldn’t, it would have been really nice for buffy to have a moment of triumphant selfishness. as funny as that might sound. or at least for her to make peace with the idea of caring about her own personal well-being.
the season almostgets there. i think it would be fair to read the chosenspell as a moment of triumphant selfishness on buffy’s part, given that more slayers in the world means that she won’t be suffering in isolation anymore. and the season does remind us a lotabout how much buffy’s isolation hurts her. but it would have been cool for example, if her realizing that the chosenspell was an option was related to her realizing that it was not just possible, but okay to not suffer. because for all that she tells giles she hates suffering in season 6, and for all that she tells spike she’s moved beyond hating, ie punishing, herself in season 7, and for all that she is clearly not lying about either, the tension about how much she’s really allowed to suffer or put herself first is still central to the season. cf, her conversations with dead people scenes,and all the talk of the mission mattering more than anything else.
(i would have liked, for example, if buffy’s get it done cruelty or the empty places blow-up had been more clearly about how buffy has learned the lesson of selflessness too well. ironically, because she’s too preoccupied with her own personal experience. she tries to demand that others use her emotional toolkit, because she’s freaked that everyone is going to die, but doesn’t have the perspective to see that that toolkit is a product of a fucked up situation. that she’s perpetuating isolation instead of looking for something else. i think this isbasically what the show was going for. it’s actually one of the reasons i like the season. but again, not clear.)
anya would probably have been the best character to play this symbolic role, and the season does sort of use her that way. she has a whole episode called selfless, after all. but she pretty much just finishes the show as yet another reformed villain. her honesty and frank interest in things like sex and money never get a chance to be framed as something valuable. i can’t help but think the season would have been much thematically stronger if that had happened. similar to the way that andrew’s flaw (narrativization) gets to be used in a positive way at the very end, when he describes anya’s death as heroic.
“There’s this love story between Spike and Dru that is very sweet,” she (Juliet) explains. “It gets kinky as well, but it’s sweet. That balances out the evil that we do.”
Balance isn’t a word that suits Drusilla at all. When we first see her in Buffy’s second season she is sickly and weak and Spike has brought her to Sunnydale with hopes of making ‘all better’. Juliet plays the part in flowing glowns and with roving eyes as she teases dead birds and ties up her dolls.
“There is an element of what I call ‘touched’. Angel was obsessed with her, you see, so he killed her family and tortured her ruthlessly driving her to a convent for refuse. On the night she was to take her vows, he made her into a vampire. Now she has a sort of neurosis where she thinks of the daisies dying or her hair falling out. Spike rescues her from those moments.”
He does indeed. As evil as the couple may be, viewers are drawn into the deep love they have for each other. It is this ‘human’ side that makes them watchable week after week. They dance, they kiss, they play and yes, they do snack on a teenager now and again, but you can’t hold that against them. “When Spike and Dru are together we’re sort of gentle and sexual and it’s fun. Sometimes when you play a villain it’s very one-dimensional but with Dru I have a lot of other colours as well.”
-Interview with Juliet Landau by Cythia Boris, for Cult Times, circa1998ish.
