Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Discuss Their Favorite Television Show (Smart Pop series) (25 page)

I
F YOU
’
VE WATCHED
as many episodes of
Buffy
as I have, you’ve probably noticed an interesting phenomenon.

The monsters are all ugly. The good guys are all pretty.

Oh, I’ve had moments of disgruntlement with the
Buffy
verse.

For example, I’m a round person myself, and I’ve noticed Sunnydale doesn’t exactly cater to the overweight. Well, okay. Probably living over the Hellmouth would make you so nervous you wouldn’t eat much. And I’ve noticed that most of the Sunnydale populace is hardly what you would call racially diverse. Dawn has an African-American friend, and the villainous Mr. Trick is black. Mr. Wood, the last season’s ambiguous principal, is black, and does finally emerge (mostly) on the side of good. But with those few exceptions, and the rare black vampire, the population of the town is pretty bleached. Okay. . . maybe the Hispanics and African-Americans were smarter than the WASPs, and got the hell out of Sunnydale. In a way, that absence of color is almost complimentary.

But ugliness is a different issue. If you’re ugly, you’re evil.

Think of it, if you haven’t already. Buffy herself is lovely, of course. Her clothes are always cute. Her shoes never have scuff marks. Buffy’s hair and makeup are perfection. That’s understandable. She’s the hero!
Willow, Xander, Giles, Cordelia, Oz, Dawn, Angel, Riley, Spike—all variations on hotness.

You’d think that
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, of all shows—the only television show to ever acknowledge openly that high school is Hell and dating can be fatal—would show a little more sophistication in this department. But . . . no.

The tricky part is, some monsters aren’t
always
ugly; that is, not one hundred percent of the time. (Well, trolls and goblins are; and demons, most often.) But Glory, the god, is beautiful most of the time. Even Ben, the male whose body she sometimes inhabits, is a very attractive young man. And Anya, the former vengeance demon, is cute enough in her human form to pass as just another coed at Sunnydale High. Angel and Spike are indisputably fantasy figures for millions of teenage girls—and some boys, too.

Corrupted humans—that is, those who started out good—get to keep their ordinary looks. Think of Faith, the Slayer who turns to the Dark Side in a major way, until season seven. Ethan Rayne, Giles’s old college friend, is quite attractive, too, and evidently he was a barrel of fun when he and Giles were in their early twenties: but somewhere along the line, Rayne, too, felt the lure of Evil. The Mayor, Mr. Trick’s boss, is looking forward to his transformation into pure Evil for much of his residence in Sunnydale, but he gets to retain a passable human form until then; and the same is true of Faith’s evil Watcher, Gwendolyn Post, who seems like a perfectly proper woman at first.

But what happens when the completely transformed monster’s true evil nature comes to the fore? Angel’s forehead bulges, his fangs elongate, and he gets that squinty-eyed look. (Even though Buffy kisses him when Angel’s transformed, he’s definitely showing his ferocious side.) Ditto for Spike—when he’s ready to attack, he bulges to the north and sprouts fangs to the south. Vengeance-demon Anya gets the cracked complexion of a snickerdoodle. Glory is simply monstrous. Seth Green, so adorable as Oz, makes a pretty nasty werewolf. In the first season, the four bullying high school students who are feared by the whole campus turn into hyenas—is that a great metaphor, or what? And they’re really, really hideous.

You’ll notice that, of these, Glory is the only one who has no Good side, or even normal side, to justify her pretty face. She is unique among Buffy baddies. Of all the monsters who have a physically attractive aspect, she alone has no redeeming features.

The rest of the monsters don’t even give “cute” a nod.

The two gray-faced murdered children in the episode where Joyce tries to burn Buffy at the stake? They twine together to reveal their true form, a hideous German demonic figure.

Adam, the “perfect man” created by Dr. Walsh, handsome Riley’s secretly demented boss in “The Initiative” (4-7)? Well, “perfect” Adam is intelligent, logical, and ferociously strong—but he’s mad, and bad, and conscienceless. And, needless to say, completely hideous. Dr. Walsh, herself, I don’t classify as evil. Dr. Walsh does not believe that of herself, and would only acknowledge that she was acting for a higher Good; and she retains her ordinary, middle-aged woman looks.

The serpent Glory sends after the Key, the serpent who can identify Dawn as being the object that Glory wants more than anything. Well, it’s a twenty-foot-long serpent with a face. Need I say more? Ditto for the snake god Mikusa who lives below the fraternity house in
Buffy
’s second season.

Glory’s minions are “hobbits with leprosy,” as Xander describes them—and that’s pretty accurate.

Count Dracula—sure, he’s supposed to look seductive. But he’s whiter than a toothpaste ad (much whiter than the other vampires), and his hair is frizzy.

Principal Snyder? Malignancy embodied in a small man with snaggle teeth and bat ears, his face contorted in a permanent sneer.

And the eerily gliding monsters of “Hush” (4-10), whom I find most frightening of all—they’re hideous in an almost classical, terrifying way. They’re truly children’s nightmares, with their silent smiles.

So why are the monsters almost invariably ugly?

I know that lots of different people wrote the scripts, but I assume they all had to follow a certain set of guidelines. I think the bad guys were doomed to be ugly. I think this may be Joss Whedon’s way of telling us we all have an Evil side; that when we allow our darker side to dominate our behavior, we become ugly all the way through. This is a powerful thought, though not exactly an original one, and if it was a predetermined goal of the show, it’s worked.

But, in my opinion, if this is Whedon’s tactic, it’s also misguided. Buffy makes lots of mistakes, while still remaining a hero. Lovable Xander, loyal Willow, literal Anya, intelligent Giles—all of them have faults and failings. And, like these
Buffy
characters, we all know that we’re less than perfect.

Wouldn’t we learn a more graphic lesson if the monsters retained
their more attractive aspects even as they showed their most monstrous behavior? Evil is not so clearly denoted in the real world.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons why we love
Buffy.
We know who’s evil. The bad guys and gals
look
evil when they’re
acting
evil. Not only that, in many cases we’re forewarned. We get a clear signal that their worst nature is coming to the fore when they
turn
ugly (i.e., the vampires, Oz). Of course, this makes the villains easy to spot, so they’re easier to fight and defeat.

Surviving in this world—even just surviving high school—would be a cinch, if villains all operated according to Sunnydale rules.

There have been signs that Whedon’s view is growing more sophisticated. In recent years, the archenemies have become more attractive . . . or, at least, more mundane. Warren, for example, looks the same all the time—nerdy. Maybe it’s no coincidence that Warren and his sidekicks Jonathan and Andrew are the least satisfying opponents beautiful Buffy has faced. Warren is a great illustration for the “the banality of Evil.” When he originally entered the lives of the Scooby gang, it was as the despicable—but understandable—inventor of a beautiful robot, a robot who indignantly insisted that she was created to be a girlfriend, not a sexual toy. Warren programmed this robot to believe that a good girlfriend doesn’t cry, a good girlfriend is always sexually available, and a girlfriend only speaks when she’s spoken to. Furthermore, she always wants to do what Warren wants to do.

In creating a completely loving and yielding woman, Warren has created his own monster. Soon, he is bored with the poor thing, while she lacks the capacity to change her feelings toward him. This robot is the central sympathetic figure of an excellent episode, while her human creator, Warren, emerges as a creep. He’s managed to connect with a real, flesh-and-blood girlfriend (and we wonder how, when we get to know Warren better in future episodes), and the robot has been abandoned in Warren’s dorm room. When she tracks Warren down, she finds she’s been betrayed. When her anger at this rejection leads her to violence, she’s allowed to run down. But she’s beautiful to the end; she’s no real monster but a created artifact.

Warren, on the other hand, yields to more and greater Evil, in a rather unbelievable descent from a nerdy guy who wants a cute girlfriend to a brainy and amoral creep. Yet he still looks like the college kid next door—at least if you live in a white, middle-class town like Sunnydale. But in the end, even the human and average-looking Warren becomes a hideous monster, although not because he becomes
some supernatural being. His inner ugliness is revealed by force when Willow flays him alive. Finally, Warren’s outside matches his inside in horror.

Unlike most of the vampire cast, Angel and Spike have good sides, and those good sides predominate the longer the characters last in the series. The more the two vampires behave well, the more we are allowed to see them in their handsome personas. It’s no coincidence that the Good side of their nature is manifested in their love for Buffy Summers, the Slayer. Buffy, though no intellectual, is pretty, strong, brave, and loyal. Her flaws (invariably picking the wrong man, being too quick to judgment) only make her more appealing.

The only episode I can recall in which Buffy even looked disheveled is the one in which she drank a lot of beer—beer that had been treated with magic. She and the cute guys she’s drinking with (Buffy is going through one of her periodic attempts to be a normal girl) all turn into Neanderthals. (The boys end up looking gross. Buffy doesn’t, though she’s sloppy and her hair’s a wreck.) The lesson’s clear here: drinking turns you into a primitive and unpleasant creature, stupid and brutal.

And ugly.

It’s pretty unfortunate that Whedon uses physical unattractiveness to signal moral decay. It’s too simple a code. No one would ever believe the Master was up to any good, or the hammer-wielding troll that goes after Willow and Anya. I think today’s audience could figure out the Bad Guy, even if he (or she) was most attractive. Glory, in her human guise, was a step in that direction, and Warren, Mr. Average, is even further along the trail. But both Glory and Warren took that last step.

They became ugly.

And Ugly, in
Buffy
, is Bad.