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.
Charlaine Harris, who writes one conventional mystery series and one humorous/vampire/romance/adventure mystery series, lives in southern Arkansas with a husband, three children, a ferret, two dogs, and a duck. The duck stays outside. Charlaine won the 2002 Anthony Award for Dead Until Dark, the debut novel of her vampire series. Almost needless to say, she loves Buffy.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
POWER
OF BECOMING
Is Faith hot? Is Angelus more fun than Angel? Is Dracula a master-bator? Is Buffy great literature? Acclaimed author Jacqueline Lichtenberg explores these questions (OK, actually just the last one) and along the way explains Buffy’s magical initiation, the evolution of television, and the fundamental flaws in the Willow-Tara relationship.
BUFFY, THE VAMPIRE SLAYER is not “just” a television show. It is part of the process whereby television as an artistic medium is finally coming into its own in the world of Great Literature.
So what is Great Literature? As we learn in our first high-school literature courses, to qualify as Great Literature the events of the story must cause the main character to change inwardly, emotionally, either to
be shattered or strengthened by the events. The characters learn lessons and become different people.
Great Literature is also identified by the effect on the reader—that the reader feels the characters’ emotions and understands the impact of the lessons on the character—understands inwardly how it comes about that this kind of person becomes that kind of person because of the events in the story. Thus the work is memorable. The characters’ journeys of becoming are indelibly stamped upon the reader’s mind.
Beyond that, to be labeled “Great Literature” the piece has to contribute some distinctive evolutionary change to its field of literature and out-last its contemporaries.
Buffy’s field of literature is the television dramatic series, and I believe I already see evidence that the show is contributing to a process whereby television is becoming a medium that can support Great Literature.1
In the 1960s commercial television discovered that the shows that made the most money were the ones that were “anthology series”— with the episode constructed so that at the end of the episode the ongoing characters are restored to the same emotional and physical condition they were in at the beginning. This allowed the individual shows to be aired in random order in reruns and still be understood by a new viewer. Thus the stories that could be told were disqualified from being called “literature” at all—never mind “great”—because the characters must not learn, grow, change, or become.
Gene Roddenberry often explained that Star Trek: The Original Series would not have been aired, or survived to go into reruns, if it had not been an anthology series. Hollywood was bewildered by the effect that Star Trek had on the teens of the 1970s, and tried many other things to capture that enthusiastic audience again. They fumbled for twenty years, but in the 1990s they finally got it.
I suspect the Internet allowed the producers very close contact with fan opinion, and they finally began to listen to what fans were saying. And some of them had been fans!
J. Michael Straczynski hung out with his fans via the Babylon 5 (pilot 1993, first episode January 1994) newsgroup and really listened. Babylon 5 was not the tremendous commercial success it needed to be to complete its five-year mission, but it broke new ground. It was successful in creating intricate characters whose personal stories affected the course of history, and it broke out of the anthology-series mold and used the story-arc format (pioneered in prime time by Dallas) to tell an SF/F story. It treated telepathy, time travel, reincarnation, supernatural beings, and alien mysticism as pragmatic elements of reality.
The Buffy The Vampire Slayer feature film came out in 1992.2 Joss Whedon has indicated he wasn’t able to materialize his vision of Buffy in that film, and is widely quoted as saying the director “ruined it.” But in 1997, when the Buffy TV show aired, he had more artistic control. Of course, that’s partly due to moving from film to television. But what happened between 1992 and 1997 in television to prepare the way for Buffy?
Forever Knight (pilot August 1989, first episode May 1992), with the vampire as good guy. Quantum Leap (1989–1993), an anthology series using the SF-premise as a vehicle to tell a personal story of change. Highlander (1992–98), a hero with monogamous tendencies and a sense of honor. Lois and Clark (pilot September 1993), again a hero with monogamous tendencies and a serious attitude toward wielding power. X-Files (1993), introducing not just UFOs but the supernatural to the mass audience. Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1994–99) and Sliders (1995), introducing alternate realities, dimensional gates, alternate history. Xena: The Warrior Princess (1995) and Star Trek: Voyager (1995)—the woman as hero and authority figure. The Stand by Stephen King (1994), introducing the elbow room that the horror format can give to serious drama. La Femme Nikita (1997)—at last a young female hero, tough as nails, forced into an untenable position and doing something about it, carefully, wisely.
Each of these (except Stephen King’s of course) was marginally successful, appealing to a small but seriously dedicated audience. Each has spawned fanfic on the Internet and anguished write-in campaigns at cancellation. Each marginally successful show gets Hollywood moguls thinking about what element caused that success and what caused failure, and how to extract the successful part and combine it with something else to create a blockbuster. And they always measure themselves against a blockbuster like The Stand.
The WB network launched in 1995, countering the earlier launch of the UPN network. The WB deliberately targeted the lucrative demographic teen group and gathered more affiliate stations than UPN.
Joss Whedon brought The WB an idea that combined the vampires which had dominated children’s books in the 1980s, a successful film, and a universe in which magic is blatantly real rather than disguised as science. Buffy might have been pitched as Forever Knight meets La Femme Nikita in a Lovecraftian world that would leave King in the dust.
He gave The WB the strong female lead that had made Xena popular and that Star Trek: Voyager had chosen to emphasize with Captain Janeway, the first woman to captain the Enterprise. And don’t think The WB didn’t know in 1996 that USA Network was incubating La Femme Nikita. But Whedon gave The WB a young hero, young enough to grab the huge audience that had grown up on children’s vampire books and a strong female lead character who could kick ass as neatly as Hercules.
He started with a very clear cut, uncomplicated, emotionally pristine conflict—Buffy vs. the Undead. She can smash and destroy with all her might and she is not committing murder. Walking horrors attack her and she doesn’t have to stop and worry about ethics, she just stakes them. You don’t have to be a teen to appreciate the clarity of these moments.
But then Whedon adds Angel—and suddenly things aren’t clear anymore. Suddenly our powerful hero, Buffy, has an internal conflict. Suddenly this show is elevated to the level of adult drama and we have family entertainment, not a kiddie-show. Here is a teen confronted with an adult’s problem, and nobody can help her with it. She is on her own—as any hero must be.
All great literature explores the depths of human nature, the source of our evil impulses, the source of our noblest aspirations, and the synthesis of Good and Evil that is the dynamic balancing act called Personality, the fuel for all relationships.
But until the commercial-driven business of television found that their most lucrative audience is 14–30-year-olds, we’ve never had Great Literature in the performing arts developed specifically to depict the process of “Becoming” as teens experience it. Well—maybe Romeo and Juliet but they didn’t make it to adulthood.
And overall, through all its seasons, that is what Buffy is about—“Becoming.” It wasn’t just the title of a magnificent two-part cliff-hanger episode—it is the theme of the entire show. The characters change character, change personality, change relationships year after year as they “become.” And it’s that process of change, of becoming, that is the key identifying characteristic of Great Literature—but who would think that you could have Great Literature about teens?
One of many illustrations of Buffy as Great Literature can be found by comparing Buffy and Willow.
Buffy herself was barely a teenager when she acquired enormous Power—magical Power, physical Power, and the Power that comes from being Unique. She isn’t “a slayer”—she is “the Slayer.” We’ve watched her become a woman, surviving a series of classically textbook-perfect magical initiations.3
She’s had to learn to use her power without it using her. She has sent her vampire lover to Hell to save the world (“Becoming, Part 2,” 2-22).
She went into a symbolic Hell in “Anne” (3-1)—the symbolism of the tar-black rectangle she had to dive into to rescue the slaves from that Hell dimension is perfect for a ceremonial magical initiation. When she returns, she’s become Buffy again because she confronted her worst fears. This shows that the initiation took root deep within her psyche where it will grow. In the seventh season we have seen the results as Buffy accepts her identity as the Slayer and nurtures her possible successors. The
traditional Initiate must train a successor, and Buffy has tried.4
The magical power of her love is focused through the silver love-token5 she divests herself of while mourning Angel, separating from him—letting go, coming to terms with the consequences of her decisions and actions (“Faith, Hope, and Trick,” 3-3). That magical focus allows Angel to breach the dimensional gate and return from Hell. Remember the magical power of silver.
Angel later revealed that the power had let him go. The being wanted Buffy and the world to suffer and the being thought more suffering could be created by sending Angel back to Sunnydale (“Amends,” 3-10).
Buffy, as most young people, has to leave home to confront her identity and returns having become someone else, forever changed. She met the First Slayer and came into possession of her full power, again forever changed (“Restless,” 4-22).
She has buried her mother (“Forever,” 5-17), torn by regrets that can never be mended—learning the meaning of regret. She has sacrificed her life to save Dawn (“The Gift,” 5-22) and the universe, a decision made out of all these changes she has undergone. She was dragged back from Heaven by her best friends (“Bargaining,” 6-1, 6-2)—completing the death initiation, one of the highest degrees in ceremonial magic.6 And she sacrificed her uniqueness to give all potentials the power that she has—and did not regret it.
In any other TV series (except possibly a soap opera) each of these events would have been the whole of a five-year series run.
But through the high-pressure rapidity of these events, we have watched Buffy evolve. She has matured faster than the mere years could account for. She has become harder, more self-reliant, more accustomed to wielding power—and more daring. The power she carries does not make her happy, or even relieve her of pain. It doesn’t create joy, either.
This is Buffy’s story—the hard, harsh, demanding, arduous life of the magician-in-training, which is closely parallel to the training of a martial-arts master.
Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Discuss Their Favorite Television Show (Smart Pop series) Page 16
