i think one of the reasons that spike is so compelling to me, and one of the reasons that iâm really glad heâs part of the show, is that heâs pretty much the only character that has a consistently poetic command of language. and by that i donât mean that he speaks in a pretty or heightened way, exactly. he speaks frankly and irreverently as much as he speaks evocatively. iâm not talking about his insight either, given that i think weâre 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 Dawnâs blood? I mean, why couldnât it be like a, a lymph ritual?
SPIKE: âCause itâs always got to be blood.
XANDER: Weâre not actually discussing dinner right now.
SPIKE: Blood is life, lackbrain. Why do you think we eat it? Itâs what keeps you going. Makes you warm. Makes you hard. Makes you other than dead. (quietly) Course itâs her blood.
that repetition of âmakes youâŠâ is a poetic sort of conceit. itâs got rhythm. it links âwarmâ which can mean either physical warmth or emotional warmth,  and âhardâ which suggests sexuality and more animal parts of living, and âother than dead.â it makes you intuit this more abstract notion of what it means to be âaliveâ and even: why the show is a vampire show in the first place. (thereâs a whole other post to write about buffyâs obsession with the concepts of âdeadâ and âaliveâ and the way it uses spike in particular to express and explore that obsession).
he does this sort of parallelism again in the gift: âi know youâll never love me. i know that iâm a monster. but you treat me like a man, and thatâsâŠâ thatâs some cool overlapping repetition, where the âi knowâ parallel intersects with the âman/monsterâ parallel.
or go back to lovers walk. where he talks about âbeautiful dresses with beautiful girls in them.â the show loves using demons to play on expected words and idioms like that. angelus talking about finding a heart âin a quaint little shopgirlâ or dru saying âi didnât like him. he got stuck in my teeth.â but spike is one of the few characters where it would make sense to use a repetition of âbeautifulâ as part of a âdemons live in moral and linguistic opposite landâ 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 donât make sense but actually do, and whatâs more poetic than that? âyou taste like ashesâ 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 characterâs mouth, and i love that he gives the show an excuse to use language in that way. âdeath is your artâ is some intense phrasing. and like in his other speeches, the way he links death as art, death as a dance, and death as âon your heelsâ 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. itâs 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 âthe bodyâ or the loving, sacrificial version of death in âthe gift.â
because spike talks this way, he has this ability to bring things out in characters and scenes that wouldnât 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 doesnât fit in anywhere. Sheâs got no one to love.
BUFFY: Me? Iâm lost? Look at you, you idiot! Poor Spikey. Canât be a human, canât 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: Iâm in love with you.
BUFFY: Youâre 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. itâs awfully pretty for spike to tell buffy âi donât hurt youââŠbut we see not an episode later that that isnât 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.
(thereâs something to probably say about his speech in touched and how itâs him speaking poetically in a way that is not about him, and not about finding a chink in someoneâs 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 arenât 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 importantlyâŠa 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 âsaying cool stuff.â 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.
