currently thinking about buffy summers

She begins the episode with a conversation about love. She references her relationship with Riley, in which she considers herself to have been incapable of loving him, alongside being unable to give him what he needed from her. In addition to the portions where Buffy mentions Riley specifically, I’ve highlighted below some of the language that is reminiscent of the reasons for Buffy and Riley’s break up:

BUFFY

Yeah, strength and resilience, those are

like words for hardness. I'm starting to

feel like, like being the Slayer is sort of

turning me to stone.

GILES

Turning you to stone? Buffy…?

BUFFY

I'm just… look, think about it. I was

never really there for Riley, not like I

was for Angel. I was terrible to Dawn…

GILES

Look, at a time like this you're bound

to feel emotionally numb -

BUFFY

Before that. Riley left because I was shut

down. He's gone and Mom's gone and I

really loved her, but I don't know if I…

if I let her know…

Fundamentally, Buffy and Riley broke up because he felt that she was unable to be vulnerable with him, and taking care of a vulnerable partner is what he needed in a relationship. (This sounds silly only because it is; additionally, the real reason was that he was a misogynist, but that’s not actually relevant here. The important thing is what Buffy believes the case to be, regardless of how accurate it is.) Buffy worries that she is too “hard”, unable to let herself be loved, and unable to express love. This worry is ultimately a reflection of her grieving: her final concern is that she wasn’t able to express her love to her mother, who’s now gone. But she uses her experience with Riley as a vehicle for accessing this anxiety. In a reflection of the show itself, Buffy uses romance as a lens to understand larger questions in her life, just as the romantic plot lines of the show are a frame for exploring larger themes.

Here’s where we get to Spike: her impulsive choice to kiss him reflects her defiance of these points.

Her fears should have been fundamentally assuaged by her meeting with “The Primitive,” who answers her questions:

PRIMITIVE

You are full of love. You love with all

of your soul. It's brighter than the fire,

blinding. That's why you pull away

from it.

BUFFY

I'm full of love? I'm not losing it?

PRIMITIVE

Only if you reject it. Love is pain

and the Slayer forges strength from pain.

While it affirms her ability to love, it doesn’t actually address that opening concern that Buffy has, about hardness. It’s the undercurrent of her fears about why Riley left: that she’s too strong to be loved, because being loved requires vulnerability. (This is perhaps a conflict between the fear that Buffy has about loving and the truth of the matter; perhaps it doesn’t require weakness, like Buffy thinks. Regardless, she has this remaining concern.) But, when Buffy goes in disguise as the Buffybot to interrogate Spike about what he told Glory, he tells her this (emphasis mine): “Buffy—the other…the not-as-pleasant Buffy. Something happened to Dawn it'd destroy her. I couldn't live, her being in that much pain.” He mentions, specifically, Buffy’s fragility: it’s not just that it would hurt Buffy, but that she could not bear it. There is, in fact, something that Buffy would not be strong enough to face, and Spike can see that. He can see her vulnerability (perhaps as a holdover from his experience as big bad) which, in this precise moment, is exactly what she needs to hear. It is after receiving this bit of information that she’s moved to kiss him.

But it’s not just this moment of being seen that affects her. For the first time, Buffy has witnessed Spike behave in a way that appears to her to be a true expression of love (“That was real.”). Everything from before has been warped, or conniving, but Buffy understands physical sacrifice and selflessness as proper manifestations of love (in what is a suitable moment of foreshadowing, perhaps also emphasized by the fact that she can read it for a romantic gesture but not use it to understand her own fate, once again putting the romantic before other interpersonal relationships). Faced with this, and currently grappling with the issue of whether she can give or accept love, Buffy chooses to accept this act as one of loving. But she can’t just receive it passively, as this is also one of her concerns, so she goes further and reciprocates it. Crucially, Buffy knows what Spike wants from her (where Riley wanted an amorphous vulnerability) and understands how she can give it to him (again, where Buffy was unable to access the vulnerability that Riley wanted). Spike told her, in so many words in “Crush,” that he wanted “a crumb.” Just a crumb, something he can hope for. For someone admittedly as closed off as Buffy, this is actually something she can provide. Just the barest amount of affection.

She’s usually so adamant in the face of Spike’s sexual advances—and she will be, again, when he subsequently calls her an ‘animal’—but here she is unsure. Not, I think, unsure of whether she wants to engage in this talk, but how to do it. It appears to be a completely new situation for her. She doesn’t know how to do dirty talk, or even how to talk about sex with a partner, even with a partner and situation as low-stakes as Spike. (The situation is certainly intense and fraught for Buffy, but she has none of the factors that usually create real stakes in this particular situation: desire not to hurt someone’s feelings, concern that you’ll disappoint your partner or otherwise hurt your relationship, fear of embarrassment. She is, in fact, primarily seeking a sexual relationship with him because it comes without any of those risks for her. It’s comfortable in her time of suffering because he doesn’t hold any of those cards.)

It reflects a certain sexual naïveté, something in line with the parental adage “If you’re not mature enough to talk about it, you’re not mature enough to do it.” It’s sexual immaturity to be able to have wild sex but not be able to talk about it. What’s most telling is that she attempts to engage with Spike when he does this, and she succeeds, but briefly and awkwardly. As he escalates, not even really becoming specific but more focused in his praise, Buffy becomes incapable of reciprocating. She even comes across as incapable of understanding why he’s talking the way he is. Saying “I’ve never been with such an animal” is very clearly dirty talk, and the superlative, going along with that, isn’t necessarily even true. (I say this to underscore that I understand why Buffy would react violently to being called more animalistic than Drusilla, a literally insane Vampire who specifically enjoyed eating children.) But Buffy responds like she doesn’t understand the metaphoric and hyperbolic space of dirty talk. Excess is a facet of it, necessarily.

This immaturity is paralleled in another direction with Spike, who questions Buffy about her feelings for him in a way that appears almost childlike in its simplicity. There’s a stark swerve from his confidence in the sexual realm to his total insecurity in and lack of understanding of the emotional. “Do you like me?” is a grade school student’s question. If we understand it as a genuine question, as Buffy clearly does, it also reflects his actual inability to understand what’s happening, just as Buffy fails to comprehend why he’s engaging in dirty talk with her. His follow-up question, “But you like what I do to you?” in both text and performance comes across as someone with a guess asking for a confirmation. But it’s so clearly the case, that she has some sort of dislike of him and extreme sexual chemistry with him, that his uncertainty reflects a real deficit in his understanding of her. It’s almost unbelievable, though I think it gains context alongside his response to Buffy’s request to “tell me you love me” later in the season. (In this latter instance, he is confused and flattered by the question, not understanding it as cliché. He visibly fails to understand why she makes this demand. It’s a simple bid for validation, which he over-interprets.)

At the end of “Dead Things,” Buffy’s immaturity reaches a peak, and she has a meltdown in the form of a tantrum, shouting and hitting with no regard for the effect on herself or others. In this moment, she needs a parent. She needs someone who can tell her: “We never touch another person in anger. Use your words.” But instead, she has Spike, who is also stunted. He sees her tantrum and thinks it’s a reasonable action, that she should be free to hit him as much as she likes. He doesn’t know that this isn’t an appropriate way to express feelings. He doesn’t know that it won’t help her feel better—he only sees that she’s emoting, and in the language of violence which is familiar to him, and encourages it. It underscores their incompatibility at this point in time, that they’re both too immature to relate to or help one another.

At the beginning of the episode, Spike asks Buffy to go patrolling, using a sort of dirty joke or innuendo (“rough and tumble”). Buffy’s response is notable because rather than chastising Spike for his behavior, she becomes flustered by it. It’s the most straightforward indication that we’ve seen in the series to confirm that Buffy has sexual interest in Spike. (Her kiss in “Intervention” should probably also qualify, but her motivations there were still potentially unclear. This response can’t be read in any other way.)

Buffy obviously takes on the role of a hypocritical parent when she scolds Dawn, her younger self, for kissing a vampire. (Buffy’s first kiss with Angel is what precipitated her learning that he was, in fact, a vampire.) But what I find interesting is that Spike has a parallel of his own: he tells off the young vampire for causing mischief on Halloween, when Spike himself went out on Halloween, in the second season. In a doubling of the parallel, Spike even intended to kill Buffy on that occasion, just as this vampire wants to kill Dawn. They’re both taking an unearned moral high ground, but it’s also a reflection of the fact that they’ve both apparently grown up: Buffy doesn’t get involved with strange boys who turn out to be vampires, and Spike doesn’t cause trouble on Halloween, or even try to kill the slayer anymore.

Of course, this doesn’t quite hold up. Buffy is interested in Spike, which we saw in her flustered response to his innuendo and her desire to seek him out to patrol. In this latter case, we’re told that Buffy doesn’t need to patrol—there’s no reason to suspect trouble on Halloween—and yet she expresses an interest in patrolling with Spike anyway, twice. The second instance is particularly relevant because it comes as a response to Xander and Anya’s engagement. Buffy’s been confronted by a successful, progressing romantic relationship, and it makes her want to find Spike. It’s clear that a part of her desire to leave their engagement party stems from her general emotional distance, but this of course she could do on her own. Before she gets a lead on any danger, what, exactly, is Buffy planning to do when she gets to Spike’s crypt? Spike’s offer to patrol with Buffy is similarly flimsy, and contradicts his chastisement of the young vampire: he knows that there aren’t supposed to be any demons out, which should include himself. It seems that they’re both affecting a maturity that they don’t have.

Spike’s introduced the episode “School Hard”, whose title is a reference to the movie Die Hard. We see this played out in the climax of the episode: Spike is cast in the role of Hans Gruber, a man with an accent bringing a group of vampire “terrorists” to spoil Buffy’s school event. Buffy pulls some John McClane antics by crawling through the air vents to ambush the villains, and then repairs her relationship with her family member, who helps her save the day. Pretty straightforward. But in “Intervention,” Spike is now held hostage by the villain and—get this—makes his escape by pulling a John McClane–style elevator dash: a bloodied Spike pulls apart elevator doors, throws himself down the shaft, and comes to rest on a moving elevator. And then he drops himself, torn and beaten, through the escape hatch, ready to fight some more when the elevator doors open.

“No, see, it can't end like that, because all of Quasimodo's actions were selfishly motivated. He had no moral compass, no understanding of what was right. Everything he did, he did out of love for a woman who'd never be able to love him back. Also, you can tell it's not gonna have a happy ending when the main guy’s all bumpy.”

She’s referring to Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, and the description of Quasimodo—while sort of analogous to Spike, particularly for their shared “bumpy”-ness—feels off, but the comparison outside of this narrow lens is actually pretty fruitful.

If Dawn is Buffy’s inner child, then they’re manifestations of the same stress, but Dawn’s is the adolescent foible and Buffy’s is, ahem, more adult. While we generally think of Buffy’s relationship with Spike as self-destructive in the context of their sexual relationship in the sixth season (which contains physical violence and literal destruction), I think it’s valuable to trace it back to the fifth season, when Buffy first initiates a sexual contact with Spike, in "Intervention." Because, of course, the fifth season is all about self destruction and the death drive—Buffy’s finale “gift.”

Spike has referred to himself as manly on a few occasions with Buffy: notably in “School Hard” when he told Buffy that weapons “made [him] feel all manly” and in “Checkpoint” when he describes watching over Joyce and Dawn as “a boatload of manly responsibility.” Spike’s relationship with gender is pretty complicated, but it’s clear that he’s interested in being perceived as masculine—manly—even if he goes about it ironically (“I may be love’s bitch, but at least I’m man enough to admit it” from “Lovers Walk”). In the final stretch of season 5, Buffy trusts him with a lot of “manly responsibilities,” not least of which is the stereotypically fatherly driving of the RV.

But what should we make of the “monster” half? There’s one other use of the word monster in the episode, and it’s when Dawn is describing Ben to Glory, “He's a monster. At least you're up front about it.” Ben is, of course, also a man, and one whose relationship to his gender is fraught, with his sometimes-feminine body. (I haven’t really investigated the way and extent to which the Glory/Ben situation is transphobic, but it certainly is: a man who becomes a woman, who is then very dangerous, feels like a terf talking point.) He’s a man whom Dawn treats like a monster. We can make the comparison that Spike is a literal monster who has the metaphorical qualities of a man, while Ben is a literal man who has the metaphorical qualities of a monster. (I would personally challenge whether someone who is half a god is also fully human, but the show does not. There’s a hard line in this episode that Ben is a human and therefore immoral to kill.) They also each achieve their contradictory state by helping a counterpart woman: Ben is a monster for aiding the monstrous Glory, whereas Spike is a man for aiding the heroic Buffy.

Ben and Spike aren’t the only two who have a monster/man dichotomy. Xander is notoriously shaky in his masculinity, and it’s usually tied to his adolescence. In relation to Angel, he was the “boy” who was in opposition to the “man;” he looked up to Riley as a model of adulthood, always particularly admiring his masculine qualities. In “The Gift,” he even postures about his masculinity by talking about his bowling—while not a particularly macho activity, it has the same “manliness” as driving an RV, a throwback quality that applies to the mid-century father of a nuclear family. And then, in the middle of the episode, he takes a huge step forward, away from boyhood, when he proposes to Anya. It’s both the act of a man (children don’t get married, but adults do: and Xander’s relationship to masculinity is about growing up into it) and, by proposing to Anya of all people, he attempts to make a literal monster his “other half.” Here we see another direct reversal of Ben’s position: Xander chooses to be tied to a monster, and it serves to make him into a man. (We could even say that jilting Anya later on is monstrous, so it’s proximity to her which keeps him on the “man” side of the divide.)

While a poem at this period needed structure (rhyme and meter), there’s no one structure that every poem needed to fit, and so he might have been able to put his sentiments into a slightly different form to accommodate his style. A real writer concerned with rhyme, rather than a dilettante doing something amateur, uses rhyme as a function of meaning—words and lines become associated because of their rhyme, and this affects how we understand them, and an artist is aware of this and cares which associations she makes. A real writer comes to a final poem as a union of content and form, not ad libbing rhyming words together. Spike is painstakingly trying to mimic a form for his own ends, not creating an art object. The way that Spike reacts to Drusilla’s advances tells us that Spike does think of himself as some sort of artist, or visionary, but it’s also clear from his interaction with Cecily that he knows he’s not an inspired poet. (The episode shows us that he’s perfectly capable of spinning a nice phrase, but only on his own terms. His attempt at poetry is an attempt at wooing, not an attempt at writing.)

So Spike isn’t really a writer, and instead he’s a guy failing to express himself. His bad poetry, in this light, has two implications. The first, metaphorical, is that his feelings weren’t worthy of being expressed in poetry. We know from the episode that his feelings for Cecily were shallow—love isn’t an emotion that you can truly feel for someone from afar. It was, to borrow from another Buffy episode in this season, just a crush. (While feelings can certainly be unrequited, it’s the distance between his perception of Cecily and who she actually is that tells us his feelings don’t have anything to do with her and are instead just a projection.) The second implication is that what he needed was really another mode, probably the physical. His attempt to woo Drusilla by killing the slayer during the Boxer Rebellion is successful. And, in the present day, Spike is most eloquent with Buffy when he’s fighting her: the moment in which they are most in sync (and of course communication is about understanding, which can exist without words) is their fight scene. Spike can telegraph his entire fight with Nikki Wood because he knows precisely how Buffy will respond to each of his movements; Buffy, reciprocally, never falters. It’s an illustration of the dance that Spike described, but it’s also a language that Spike has found which finally works for him. And Spike is actually more eloquent (in the way of words, not just metaphorically) when he’s fighting or talking about fighting. Everything that was missing before, in his human life, he has here: a new means and a better subject.

In fact, the traditional language of romance continues to fail him—when he tries to kiss Buffy, she’s disgusted. It was only through violence that he could communicate clearly. There is, perhaps, an underlying notion that Buffy is willfully ignorant of Spike’s intent and over-corrects disgust because she does, in fact, feel some attraction for him. Her response to him parallels Cecily’s, but we know that, for Buffy, this is an aberrant behavior. She’s not usually this mean, and, if she is, it’s only ever to Spike. Buffy’s mean girl act feels like that—an act. If it’s not, we then actually read a very strange new thing from her behavior, which is that there’s a facet of Buffy’s self that only comes out around Spike. This is simultaneously a true expression of a hidden part of herself and a part of herself which fails to express truth, through cruel hyperbole. A jibe may have aspects of truth, but it’s always an exaggeration and shuts down communication. So, when Spike couldn’t have communicated well with Cecily, it was because he didn’t know her well enough, but in Buffy’s case it’s because she’s putting up barriers to communication (that’s also a theme in her relationship with Riley this season). I like this reading because it helps to set up and explain Buffy’s later behavior, and because it un-tidies the parallel. It allows for more meaning because we can contrast the differences—it tells us as much about Buffy as it does about Spike. If Buffy and Cecily are truly the same, then the lesson is that Spike is also the same, regardless of his badass persona. But, their difference complicates it.

Taking all of this into account, I want to briefly touch on the link between violence, love, and communication for Spike as it appears in the final scene of "Fool for Love." Spike is only able to communicate his affection with Buffy smoothly while he’s holding a gun meant to kill her. His words of concern are sincere, and perfectly appropriate (saying an appropriate thing is an anomaly for Spike), but Buffy rejects them. This performance certainly seems to reflect that Buffy is channeling her distress into being mean to Spike, not that she fails to understand his offer, but it's a continuation of the barrier that Buffy has maintained against Spike's advances. However, when Spike places the gun to his side—and even the act of putting down his gun is awkward, it gets caught up in his coat—he has to resort to patting her on the shoulder; without the specter of violence, he is left adrift to express love as ineloquently as ever. This shoulder pat is where we see the biggest change for them. Because the love he’s expressing is true and unselfish (support for someone he does care about, in her time of need, without expectation of reward), Spike’s awkward communication is actually perfectly clear. And Buffy now silently accepts his compassion, where she rejected his voiced concern. Buffy’s guard is down, but she’s not able to speak to him or even look at him. It’s the inverse of their “dance” in which eloquence and meaning are married. Despite the lack of style (perhaps we could call it using blank verse), they’re as in sync as they were while fighting. The silence they sit in seems to be companionable, and is doubly interesting for its being the result of both spoken and unspoken desire: Buffy expresses that she does not want to talk, which Spike (almost shockingly) respects, but he also continues to provide the comfort of company.