Charles Beaumont's "The Beautiful People"

BLOT: (04 Jun 2011 - 10:44:15 AM)

Charles Beaumont's "The Beautiful People"

Charles Beaumont wrote a lot, got his hands in both pulp magazines and in Hollywood, and then died kind of young. I imagine, but I could be wrong, that he would be best remembered by my generation as a guy who wrote several Twilight Zone eps. You can look at his impressive and fairly prolific outpourings on his Wikipedia page.

One of his stories was "The Beautiful People". In a solar-system spanning society, humanity has overcome most things (including sleep and food) and achieves this partially through regular pill dosages and partially, mostly, though the Transformation. This is where they are assigned a perfect body that lives long, avoids disease, sees and hears better, is probably a bit stronger. Is more beautiful, more symmetrical. All in all, an "improvement". Then there is Mary Cuberle, an 18-year-old girl soon to turn 19 and to get her own Transformation, except...

"Little girl," said the handsome man, "do you actually mean to tell us that you prefer that body?"

"Yes sir."

"May I ask why."

"I like it. It's hard to explain, but it's me and that's what I like. Not the looks, maybe, but the me."

Toss in some subplots about how odd the society is (they make children watch footage of horrible incidents like men being ripped apart by meteor storms to make the children "grateful or something), how petty, and how vapid (books have been banned for what seems to be something news and reality show tapes); and you have a story. The best part, though, happens right near the end when Mary finally realizes what is wrong with this "perfect" society. A part that is particularly chilling and infuses the whole thing with a bit of a horror vibe.

All the beautiful people. All the ugly people, staring out from bodies that were not theirs. Walking on legs that had been made for them, laughing with manufactured voices, gesturing with shaped and fashioned arms...

But—what will you do with me?"

"That was all explained to you."

"No, no, with me, me!"

"Oh, you mean the castoffs. The usual. I don't know exactly. Somebody takes care of it."

It is like that joke that true terror is coming home to find out someone has stole all of your furniture, and replaced with stuff that looks exactly the same.

Speaking of Twilight Zone, this story was made into an episode, with the ending and some build up heavily tweaked. Frankly. when I started reading it, I thought it was going to turn out something like "The Eye of the Beholder", the TZ ep where an ugly person turns out to be beautiful and it's the rest of the people who look like monsters.

Charles Beaumont's "The Beautiful People" (via Project Gutenberg)

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: June 2011