Buffy The Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon recently gave a lengthy interview to the GeeksOn podcast, and half the blogs in my Google Reader are talking about it (yes, the mostly the nerdy ones). You’d assume that the geeks would be most excited about what Whedon had to say about future movie projects, or maybe the his new TV series, which stars Buffy/Angel vet Eliza Dushku. Wrong. All anyone is talking about is a throwaway diss from Whedon on the subject of John Hughes’ Weird Science:

I hate Weird Science not a little. I find it offensive. The boy fantasy of building a girl. Obviously, we were doing the nasty version of it, because I find it grotesque.

When Whedon says “we”, he’s talking about a storyline on a late season of Buffy, in which ancillary character Warren built a robot version of Buffy for the sexual gratification of Spike. Warren eventually got flayed by Buffy’s lesbian witch friend Willow, and the Buffybot was destroyed by demons, so I guess everyone got their comeupance for engaging in the “grotesquerie” of the robot girlfriend game. Except for Spike, who moved to LA and partnered with Buffy’s other vampire ex-boyfriend to fight evil lawyers. But whatever. Back to Weird Science…

John Brownlee is right that Weird Science is a “stupid, harmless, fun little film, and certainly isn’t worth taking as seriously as Whedon is taking it.” But I just watched a couple of clips on YouTube––I haven’t seen the movie in full since sometime in the early 90s, when I think it was on TBS’ Dinner and a Movie every third weekend––and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is worth taking a little bit seriously.

In the first scene of Weird Science (embedded above), our heroes ogle an all-female gymnastic class, and fantasize about inviting the girls in view to take a shower with them and then go back to their place for an orgy. But at the end of the fantasy, Anthony Michael Hall says that “when the smoke clears”––ie: when the boys have satisfied their virginity-based fantasies of multiple partners––the end goal is that the two prettiest girls in the room will fall in love with he and his friend. It’s actually kind of a fascinating object lesson in the complexity of desire. And then Robert Downey Jr. shows up and takes the boys’ pants. But still..

It’s not an accident that Danny Elfman used the famous “It’s alive!” sample from Frankenstein in his Weird Science theme song (a plot song that, in my opinion, rivals any by Huey Lewis, but that’s a topic for another time). The Universal monster films were in depth studies of the darkness of human nature, wrapped in a package bankable enough to fill 1930s matinees. Weird Science self-consciously tries to reinvent that concept, but wrapped in a 1980s teen sex comedy veneer (the making-of Kelly LeBrock scene directly steals tropes from both Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein). This is borrowing/rewrapping process is something that Whedon should be familiar with–isn’t that allegedly why Buffy was good, because it took dark philosophical concepts and wrapped them in a supernatural soap opera with built-in merchandising tie-ins?

I guess I don’t really know–I always preferred Angel, because it was basically Raymond Chandler with vampires, full of the cheeseball “LA is hell” mythology that I love, and the jokes seemed a little bit less forced.