Pain, Love, Trust and Barriers in Dead Things

back to episode 6.13 - Dead Things

by Linda Barlow

I haven't been able to stop thinking about Dead Things -- what a wonderful, multi-layered and complex episode. Buffy's desperate journey, Spike's increasing humanity, the complexity of the Buffy-Spike relationship, the absence of metaphorical villains as humans (with souls) perpetrate the Big Evil.

Spike and Buffy have six scenes together: Post-lovemaking in his crypt, the infamous Bronze scene, the amazing crypt door scene, which flows into the demon fight/Katrina's body scene; Buffy's dream, and finally, the confrontation in the alley.

I see the first and the final scene as mirroring each other in significant ways, while the two other scenes fill in the picture and show the characters and their relationship from several different angles. It's all about love, and pain, and trust, and the barriers that keep people apart.

In the crypt:

That scene under the rug - things breaking, crashing, moaning, panting - Buffy and Spike are doing their dance, breaking things, trashing Spike's crypt, as usual. How do they end up under the rug? They were so swept away by their desire for each other they couldn't make it to the bed. But this is also emblematic of what Buffy's trying to do - sweep all her feelings for Spike under the rug so she can continue to deny the relationship exists.

For the first time since we've seen them together sexually, they are joking, teasing, laughing, talking. They even pay each other erotic compliments. What a joy this must be for Buffy, considering the how sexually inadequate her former lovers made her feel.

And yet... "You know, this place is okay for a hole in the ground." I hear this and flash back to OMWF, when she and Spike fell together into an open grave, a hole in the ground, she landing on top of him. Briefly, she felt his body pressed intimately to hers...the forbidden pleasure of it...and then she fled, as she's been doing ever since.

Spike's crypt has a bed, but they keep missing it. The only time we've seen them make love in a bed was when we didn't see her. "You're only here because you're not here." (Gone). Does Buffy feel that if it were a normal relationship, they'd make love in a bed, not in a grave or a wrecked house, or up against the wall in an alley? Later, in her dream, Spike is naked in bed with her, loving her tenderly, just like a real boy.

"Isn't this usually the part where you kick me in the head and run out, virtue fluttering?" No, actually, that will happen later, in the alley.

In the crypt, Spike, being Spike opens mouth, inserts foot: "The things you do. The way you make it hurt in all the wrong places. I've never been with such an animal." His tone is sexual; the idea of pain doesn't bother him; rather the contrary -- he's getting aroused all over again. But his comment foreshadows their final scene in this episode, where she will be a animal and will indeed make it hurt in all the wrong (non-erotic) places. "I'm not an animal," she insists, but Spike knows her better than she knows herself. He's got bite marks. She, not he, has been big with the fangs.

"What is it to you? This thing we have."
"We don't have a thing."

First "the things you do" now another use of the word "thing." Ironically, she rejects the term because, in this context, a "thing" is not negative at all. A "thing" between lovers is a connection, perhaps even a relationship. Buffy doesn't want to admit that she's got a thing going with Spike.

"Do you even like me?"
She gives him a thread of hope. "Sometimes."

It's more than he's had for a long time - more than he's had since she trusted him with the secret she could tell none of the Scoobies. But Spike wants much more than "I like you sometimes." Will she ever love him? What would it take? What are the prerequisites to love? She thinks he's evil. That he's a thing - essentially a "dead thing." "I know you'll never love me," he told her in the The Gift. If he were not a monster, would she love him? How can he convince her he's no longer a monster? Does he *want* to convince her, or does he want her to accept him as a monster yet treat him like a man?

He, after all, accepts her.

What would it take? Trust? He pulls out the handcuffs. It's significant (for later) that these are police handcuffs - not the kinkier leather bondage restraints or the metal shackles he used on her in Crush. "Do you trust me?"

Submitting to bondage requires enormous trust. Not only are you vulnerable and at the mercy of your partner if he means you harm, you are also erotically helpless. You can't return your lover's caresses, you can't take charge of what's happening, you can't orchestrate the action. For a control freak like Buffy, so often the sexual initiator, this must be particularly hard.

Besides, the last time Spike put her in bondage, right there in his crypt, he gave her a cruel ultimatum - love me or Drusilla will kill you.

"Never," she says, but it sounds like her typical "Don't." or "Stop that." When she submits to it (as we know she does when we see her rubbing her wrists the following day), Spike's hope for the relationship surely takes another leap upward. Despite her insults, her denial, her constant running away from him, she does trust him.

In the Bronze:

Real or dream? Not sure it matters. But it's interesting that either Spike himself, or Buffy's perception or fantasy of Spike, is now subtly changed. He is supremely confident in this scene. He is very much the erotic dominant, controlling her, initiating the act, taking her from behind in a position that gives him total access, giving her orders. It's there in the look on his face; in the tone of his voice. Buffy responds submissively, at least at first, getting off on it, sinking into the pleasure of it. She is wearing black ribbons or cords around her neck in a manner that suggests a collar. She is his.

"You try to be with them, but you always end up in the dark. With me." It' s true, and she already knows it. Spike wants her in his world; he's told her that she belongs there over and over. That's half true. In fact Spike is no longer part of his own world - he's caught between worlds just as Buffy is. They could, as lovers do, make their own world, but Buffy isn't ready for that yet. They're out of this world, as the lyric of the song says in the crypt door scene.

Below them on the dance floor, the Scoobies are dancing, but it's not the sort of dancing Buffy and Spike do. Their dance is much wilder, more passionate, more dangerous, ferocious at times. "That's not your world," he tells her. "You belong in the shadows. With me."

She has long suspected that he's at least partially right. She fears he might be wholly right. He -- the dreamlike, dominant, powerful Spike of this scene -- is giving voice to her worst fears. The First Slayer told her in Restless that The Slayer doesn't walk in this world. She is alone. She has no friends. Buffy rejected that. But in some respects, Spike wants it to be true because if it's true, she's vulnerable to him. Ever since School Hard, he's been unable to get to her because "A Slayer with family and friends -- that wasn't in the brochure."

Contrast the Bronze scene with the part of her dream where she is dominant and he is the one wearing the handcuffs and the collar. There, Buffy holds the power. Spike is submissive, her slave. Helpless, sleeping, his chest bare, his heart vulnerable to being staked. If she is truly the destructive first Slayer, out of this world, in the darkness, then she needs no lover. She dreads the possibility that she might have to kill Spike, but she can't ever forget it. No one who has been through what she went through with Angel/Angelus can ever forget.

The Crypt Door

The scene at the door of the crypt is the most romantic scene Spike and Buffy have ever had together, even though they are on separate sides of a barrier. They don't see each other; one of the problems of their relationship is that they don't truly see each other. But Spike's perceptions are more acute than Buffy's. They always have been. He can sense her. He knows she's coming to him, and for a few moments he just wants to savor it. To feel her, revel in her. They each put their hands against the door as if trying to reach through the barrier that separates them. The yearning is palpable on both sides.

Usually she kicks down his door, enters without an invitation, something he cannot do. This time she stops at the barrier puts her hand there. And there is a further barrier -- Buffy is wearing a glove. Spike's hand, like his heart, is bare.

The barrier between them is real. She is living, even though she is "She who hangs out in cemeteries." He exists on the other side of that border marked by the crypt door. "I died so many years ago/But you can make me feel like it isn't so." But it is so. Spike can never come into the sunlight. "I kill your kind." "And I bite yours." They have made a truce -- she doesn't stake him and he doesn't bite her, but this is who they are.

And yet...that yearning between them is so strong. Buffy has let down her barrier with him and invited him into her house, into her life, into her body. She is still guarding her heart. But her heart is vulnerable, as is his. The heart on the tombstone, the song playing in the background - - "we are home now;" "the barriers are all self-made." Is the barrier real or is it self-made? Can it be brought down? How? What would it take?

The fight in the woods

Something very significant occurs as Buffy flees the temptation of crypt. She tries to get her mind off the "Evil bloodsucking fiend," wishing for something to distract her. And it does. A girl screams for help. Buffy looks up to heaven and thanks God for the distraction. The scream allows her to do what she does best -- be the hero and help the helpless.

And then it all goes wrong. With her soulless fighting partner at her side, Buffy battles the demons summoned by the now-evil geeks - who do have souls, black ones. During the one chance that she has to speak to "Katrina," Buffy assures her that it'll be ok, she will get her out this. In other words: trust me.

Buffy is devastated when she thinks she has killed an innocent girl. "Trust me," Spike tells her, taking charge. In the past, she has been the general and he's taken orders from her; now, as he did in the Bronze scene, he takes command.

Spike has a moral code, although it's not the same as Buffy's. It is relatively simple: protect the people you love. How? Do whatever it takes. We saw Spike's protective instinct all through season 2 with Drusilla. We began to see with Buffy as early as season 4 in Something Blue. Under a demon attack, Spike, betrothed to Buffy, feared he couldn't protect the woman he loved. We saw it in the climactic final scene of FFL. And in Crush when he realized Dru was indeed going after chained-up Buffy. His protective feelings increased as his love for Buffy grew.

There is something very human about his behavior here. The drive to protect those we love from harm is a powerful one. Buffy should know this. She chose to protect Dawn in The Gift even though she knew that Dawn's death could save the world from total destruction. Spike's actions are understandable. What about Buffy's?

Buffy's Dream

Buffy's dream is, I think, the key to understanding what happens later in the alley. As she sees it, an innocent girl who screamed for her help is dead. It was Buffy's wish to be freed of her obsession with Spike that links Katrina and Spike in the dream.

As the Slayer, Buffy has been entrusted with task of saving people from demons - it's a sacred trust. She's a vampire slayer, she's supposed to kill creatures like Spike, not love him. "He's everything I'm supposed to be against," she tells Tara, anguished, at the end of the episode.

On the other hand, she's supposed to save women like Katrina, not kill them. In the dream, she tries to stake Spike but instead she stakes Katrina, who trusted Buffy to save her. Buffy can no longer trust herself to be faithful to her noble calling in life, the one thing she's always excelled at - slaying the bad guys and saving the good.

Worse, Spike knows what she has done. Dream-Spike tells her "It will be our little secret." What power that would give him over her! If she allows him to protect her, she will not only be turning her back on her moral responsibility (much the way the troika did) but she will also be admitting that she belongs in the shadows with him. She is truly lost, and the dream handcuffs are a reminder of the usual thing handcuffs are used for - restraining criminals.

She wakes, horrified. It's the middle of the night - panic time, guilt time. Buffy knows what she must do: "Dawnie, I have to," she says, using the same words that she used on the tower before she killing herself to save the world. Now she must save her soul by confessing her crime and accepting her punishment -- otherwise, she, too, will be what she most fears becoming: an evil, soulless thing.

Scared Buffy doesn't take the time to think it through, to question why she experienced a time shift (something she's experienced before), or what kind of demons she was dealing with. Control freak Buffy must resume her role as general and take the action that seems both morally appropriate and necessary to assuage her guilt and fear. Righteous Buffy is willing to sacrifice herself again...she has done it before.

Note: Buffy does not appear to recognize Katrina, whom she met when April, Warren's first robot girl, attempted to kill Katrina. (April almost succeeded). Those events happened on a devastating day in Buffy's life: the day of her mother's death. It was directly after the Warren-Katrina-Aprilbot mess that Buffy went home, walked into her living room, and found Joyce's body lying on the sofa. Her mother, whom she could not save. Her mother, whom she might have been able to help if she had not had to deal with Warren, Katrina and April. If she had come home a little earlier that day.

Is it possible that Buffy's unconscious mind makes the link and contributes to her deep distress and guilt over Katrina's death?

In the alley

Outside the police station, Buffy confronts not her lover but her worst nightmare - someone who is determined to stop her from doing what she firmly believes is right. Spike himself is the barrier here. He is not going to let her pass.

As I mentioned in the beginning, there are several places where the alley scene reflects the first scene between Buffy and Spike in the crypt. Perhaps the most significant is the "under the rug" reference. Buffy has been the one to insist that their affair be swept under the rug - a secret that she keeps from her friends. Sexually, she has been in heaven, and, as in OMWF, "not one among them knows, and never can be told."

Now Spike wants to sweep something else under the rug - her supposed crime. From his perspective, it's another secret between them, which, for Buffy's sake, no one can ever know.

The comparison with what happened with Faith and the Mayor's assistant is impossible to avoid. Although Spike is acting from very different (and much more defensible) motives than Faith did, he unfortunately uses the same arguments she used - what's one life compared to all the lives you've saved? Buffy knows it doesn't work that way. If you take an innocent life, there are moral consequences. She must take responsibility for her actions. And it's her choice, not his to make.

Within their own individual moral frameworks, both Buffy's and Spike's actions at the start of this scene are understandable. "I can't let you do it. I love you." Spike failed to protect Dawn when he was given that responsibility by Buffy. There is no way he is going to fail to protect Buffy now that she's in trouble.

Both, however, are acting recklessly also. Spike moved the body, and if there's one thing he ought to know about, it's dead bodies. Surely he should have realized Katrina had been dead for some time. Buffy should have questioned the circumstances. She's experienced other weird time lags recently. Hello, Sunnydale; things aren't always what they seem.

But the stakes here are very important for both of them. He's not going to lose her; she's not going to lose the last shreds of her self- respect. They are probably both terrified. It's the irresistible force and the immovable object, and the battle is inevitable.

In fairness to Buffy, it's Spike who takes the first aggressive action, throwing her back into the alley twice. He even lets his demon out - his weapon, as he referred to his vampire face in FFL. He didn't vamp out during their last big battle in Smashed. Here, he's prepared (initially at least) do whatever it takes to stop her from sacrificing herself again.

But the sight of his game face makes it easier for her to be the Slayer to his Vampire. This is what she's supposed to do - fight vampires, kill them. She is not supposed to kill young human women.

At the same time, Spike is mirroring her, as Faith mirrored her darker side. She is a killer. Spike is a killer (although it's been a long time, and he has changed). He has just cleaned up a body she left behind. In the past, she has cleaned up his bodies (specifically, Ford in Lie to Me). When he puts on his demon face, he is mirroring her worst fears about herself: i.e., she is an animal who leaves bite marks like a vampire does; she is a killer.

To make it even more complex, here's Spike, in an alley, vamped out, preventing a woman from leaving the alley - this recalls the scene in Smashed where he cornered a woman and attempted to bite her. He claimed to be evil in that other alley, and he tried to prove very hard to prove it. This time it's Buffy who insists that he's evil, although, by the end of the scene, surely even she doesn't believe it.

"I love you." "No. You don't." He can't. He's been lying to her, lying to himself. A vampire without a soul can't love.

Then he surprises her: "You think I haven't tried not to?"

Her terror-trigger goes off. He's been telling her he loves her for more than a year now. He's proven it over and over, and she knows it. He's seen her at her worst. He knows her darkest secrets. He has always accepted her. He has always been there for her. And now suddenly he's admitting he has tried not to love her?

She slams into him and throws him across the alley. "You can't understand why this is killing me, can you?" And she's too furious to explain - his inability to understand that she's the Slayer and that the Slayer is GOOD, despite everything he's told her, despite her own fears about having come back wrong. And then he calls her his girl, and she totally loses it. She becomes the animal he said she was, making it hurt in all the wrong places.

"There is nothing good or clean in you. You are dead inside. You can't feel anything real." She is projecting -- talking about herself. "This isn't real, but you can make me feel" was the line she used when she first approached him for sexual comfort in OMWF. She's the dead thing. She's the one who can only feel when she's in his arms. "Put it all on me," he urges her, and she does. She projects her feelings onto him, as she's been doing for weeks. Generously, loving her, he opens himself up to her rage.

The scene began with Spike prepared to battle her with all his strength. Why does he change his mind and take this beating?

In Waiting in the Wings, Angel tells the prima ballerina that she must change the dance that she's been doing for the past 100 years. She does, and breaks the spell. The metaphor of the dance has been used between Spike and Buffy ever since FFL (if not before -- he first saw her dancing in the Bronze in SH). The dance represents both their physical battles and their sexual moves on one another. The most dramatic example is the final scene of Smashed.

In DT, Spike changes the dance. He stops participating. He no longer wants to dance to the death with the Slayer the way he did with the Chinese Slayer and the NYC Slayer. But if he fights her now, that's what it could devolve to - Buffy is out of her mind much as he was the last time they went at each other with Spike in vamp face in Out of My Mind. He tried to bite her then, and she could very well try to stake him now. For the moment, the shaky trust they have established is gone. This is one dance that is not going to turn into passionate sex in the alley.

But even with death in the balance, it's totally against Spike's natural inclinations to back down in a fight - he loves to fight and he's always ready to risk his unlife. But his natural inclinations are out of whack. If his natural inclinations had been operating, would he have dumped Katrina 's body without feeding from her? Hello, vampire, interrupted meal in the crypt, dead girl, no interference from the chip. We know from the autopsy report that Spike did not drink before he tossed Katrina in the drink. Yes, he's in game face, but how much of a vampire *is* Spike these days?

His unexpected surrender forces Buffy (eventually) to realize what she's doing to him. She is horrified. He can't maintain the demon face; he turns human, looking almost as battered as he looked when Glory was finished with him. Does the sight of that bruised and bleeding face remind her that this was how he looked when she gave him her first kiss? Does he now mirror her in another way -- his pain -- bloodily evident -- reflecting her pain at being here, being alive again, having to be responsible for her actions?

The brutal beating she delivers reveals the truth - Spike has changed. There is a human under the vamp face, a generous and loving human who can even see some shred of love in her actions: "You always hurt the one you love," he manages to say. It sounds almost lighthearted.

As the First Slayer put it in Intervention, "Love is pain, and the Slayer forges strength from pain. Love, give, forgive. Risk the pain. It is your nature."

It is Spike's nature, too. In fact, there's a part of Spike that genuinely thrills to the pain of living. Ample evidence of this - going back to FFL, head thrust thru window on NY subway - his scream of exultation. Buffy takes every opportunity to slam him for this, denying that it's human or normal to feel this way. Despite the First Slayer's words, Buffy is still trying to escape the pain that come with being alive. The hardest thing in this world is living in it - why? Because living hurts. Spike, hurting, is alive. He is overflowing with human feeling.

Could he possibly believe she loves him, or will love him? Does he believe that if she has this much rage inside her for him, she must feel something else, something more than "I like you sometimes?" Why not? He did. Believing himself de-chipped in OOMM, he leapt upon her and tried to tear her throat - furious, hating her, aching to end his obsession with her. Instead, it was his denial that died. Is Buffy on the verge of the same break-through?

But she's not yet ready to accept that old cliché about hurting the one you love. She remembers why they're there, and heads into the police station. And Spike realizes he has failed: she is walking away from him again, reminding us of his line from the first scene: "Isn't this usually the part where you kick me in the head and run out, virtue fluttering?"

In her final scene with Tara, Buffy finally cracks, breaking down and feeling something with someone other than Spike. She confesses, but not to the police. "I'm wrong," she insists. Tara offers her absolution -- "it's ok if you love him...and it's ok if you don't." And Tara -- who was also the voice of the First Slayer in Restless -- offers her the first outsider's perspective on Spike, a perspective that confirms what Spike himself has been insisting for months: "He's done a lot of good, and he does love you." Wow. Independent confirmation.

Buffy finally understands that using Spike, if that's what she's been doing, is wrong. Spike isn't a dead thing and doesn't deserve to be treating like one. "Using him? What's ok about that? It's wrong. I'm wrong." It marks a turning point. She's still not certain what Spike is, now that he's changed, or how she really feels about him. Does she love him? In Intervention Buffy feared that she had lost her ability to love.

FIRST SLAYER: 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?
FIRST SLAYER: Only if you reject it. Love is pain...

Buffy has been rejecting Spike's love for months, even while accepting him as her partner in so many ways. To love him she must accept the pain, risk, fear, guilt, and possibility of loss that love causes. Is she ready for that yet? Is the final barrier about to collapse?

Perhaps not, but at least the door is beginning to crack open.

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