HOLDING OUT FOR A ZERO
Contributing editor Nev Pierce explores why we need, want, love to watch people being bad
THE PRESIDENT IS a shit Bond villain. neo-nazis have been profiled in The New York Times. We live in an age of dark money, information warfare, collusion and confusion, secrets and lies. The Trump Ascendancy has been bloody exhausting.
In this world where vices are dressed as virtues and real news is labelled fake while fake news changes nations, there is something comforting about simple, out-and-out, good, honest villainy. After all, our number one villain — as voted for by you, dear readers — dresses in black, speaks like he’s gargled lit methane and beseeches his son to value “the power of the dark side”. His aims are out in the open. The dark side, ironically, is very, very clear.
Cinema has always done villainy well. Want to know who to cheer and who to boo? Let us help you. In seminal 1903 short The Great Train Robbery villains wear black hats and the heroes white — an audience-friendly convention carried on in Westerns until after World War II (and the terms ‘white hat’ and ‘black hat’ are now used to define hackers ethical or nefarious).
Post-war, villainy became more confusing — the rise of the anti-hero, the doubt that the state was benign, the sense that the system was out to get you. The ’70s birthed the conspiracy thriller and as much as Klute, The Conversation and The Parallax View are all classics, they don’t actually present us with particularly memorable villains. The world is the antagonist. America was mired in a war, the press was under attack, there was a crook in the White House — distrust defined the culture. Any of this feel familiar?
Into this context Darth Vader arrived in 1977 and was, in his own way, more heartening than any hero. He was so obviously evil. And yet… there was a seed of hope.
There are, according to a 2016 paper in the journal Evolutionary Behavioural Sciences, evolutionary reasons for our fictional fascinations. Jens Kjeldgaard christiansen, a researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark, suggests in Evil Origins: A Darwinian Genealogy Of The Popcultural Villain that we, as a species, are wired to be compelled by the mysterious and the dangerous.
But Kjeldgaard-christiansen also tells Empire that redemption is part of what makes Darth Vader (who is his own personal favourite villain, coincidentally) so appealing. “As a villain he is the ultimate menace: cold, powerful, supremely determined. As a character, he comes to represent the optimistic idea that even those who seem most lost can be redeemed. Whether true or false, it’s a powerful message.”
Vader’s redemption came with his downfall, though — the thrill was seeing someone evil repent; not seeing someone evil created. Screen history shows we don’t necessarily want to know what makes our villains tick. The Star Wars prequels went on to reveal Vader to be an emotionally constipated emo kid
desperate to get his end away — Jedi Eat World, if you will — and put cinema’s most influential franchise to sleep for a decade. Similarly, while there are righteous defenders of Sir Ridley’s Alien prequels, it appears that the over-elaborate explanation of the origins of the Alien has damaged the beast in a way no M41A Pulse Rifle could manage (although what pleasures there are to be had are in the emergence of a similarly chilly villain, Michael Fassbender’s fastidious, fascistic artificial intelligence, David).
We don’t need to know what makes our villains — we can simply enjoy them. Just relish watching a villain perform a perfidious plan perfectly. Die Hard’s Hans Gruber is perhaps the best example of this, with the everluscious Alan Rickman playing someone who appears at first to be driven by ideology before being revealed as — and scorned for being — a common thief, leading to the greatest comeback (“I am an exceptional thief, Mrs Mcclane. And since I’m moving up to kidnapping, you should be more polite”). We can only pray Gruber doesn’t become a victim of Hollywood’s relentless search for marketable IP and feature in the longgestating Die Hard prequel. After all, the chances are by the time you finish reading this sentence, someone will be trying to make a TV show out of Anton Chigurh’s difficult teenage years — the quest for the perfect mop-top and his murderous vengeance on those who cannot cut it.
“It’s clearly a mistake to suppose, as many have done, that a compelling villain has to have some kind of intricate backstory to justify their villainy,” says Kjeldgaard-christiansen. “I think that what makes a villain compelling has less to do with what the villain is than with what they represent. Villains have to stand for something. The Joker, for example, is an agent of nihilism. He questions whether we are, at core, moral beings, or whether our morality is ‘a bad joke, dropped at the first sign of trouble’. The Joker’s battles with Batman are essentially about the answer to that question. It’s not just a battle of characters, but one of ideas, and that raises the stakes considerably.”
Some men, it seems, as Alfred tells us in The Dark Knight, just want to watch the world burn. This brings us, neatly, back to the man who is currently in the Oval Office — a man who made 2017 feel like the longest year ever and could conceivably, at the push of a button, make this one the shortest. It’s comforting to imagine Adam Mckay has a team of politically and psychologically savvy
writers with keypads poised to push out a caustic comedy within six months of impeachment. Still, even for someone who balanced farce and tragedy so effectively in The Big Short — and has just shot the story of former Vice President Dick Cheney — the political villainy currently on display in reality may prove a touch too implausible. And it remains to be seen whether even Christian Bale could be persuaded to commit completely to the part of a man who looks like a used condom that’s been dragged over a moulting cat.
For Cinéma du Trump we have to look at The Manchurian Candidate (now a documentary) and The Dead Zone (wishfulfilment for some, though Trump would probably have bounced back from using a baby as a human shield, such is the moral bankruptcy of the modern Republican party). Then there is, of course, Back To The Future Part II. It’s long been speculated that the film’s crass, obnoxious, bullying millionaire version of Marty Mcfly’s nemesis, Biff Tannen, was modelled on Trump, but co-writer Bob Gale confirmed it in an interview with The Daily Beast. “We thought about it when we made the movie! Are you kidding?” Biff styles himself as “America’s greatest living folk hero” and uses his ill-gotten funds to turn Hill Valley into a venal dystopia, but there is one mismatch between movie and reality — Biff runs successful casinos, whereas Trump’s went bankrupt.
1976’s All The President’s Men is the ultimate real-life conspiracy thriller and Steven Spielberg’s quasi-prequel The Post is the most prominent recent film dealing with political villainy. It shows the back of the President through the White House window (and lord, wouldn’t we like to see the back of this one).
It’s telling, though, that our top ten doesn’t feature a single ‘real’ villain. The closest to an exception is Hans Landa, though Christoph Waltz’s loquacious and urbane Nazi can’t really be considered reality in a film where Hitler is machine-gunned to death. It’s hard to relish, or find solace in, films about real tragedy, disaster or suffering. We want our cinema villains to provide some escape — some fun or some gloriously distracting fear. We want our livers — or our scenery — chewed. We want to relish, to boo, to cheer… We want — whisper it — a little bit of panto.
“Stories about heroes and villains are, at their core, prosocial messages,” says Kjeldgaard-christiansen. “Most hero/ villain stories are essentially morality plays in which the virtues, embodied by the hero, defeat the vices, embodied by the villain. Thus, villains are part of larger structure that confirms the validity of our moral convictions and cements the comforting notion that, in the end, everyone gets their due.”
In this moment that feels like a particularly appealing prospect. So while we can expect plenty of depressed, troubled, ambiguous thrillers in the coming years, perhaps we should also look out for some new, easy-to-identify, iconic cinema villains. There is something comforting about it — and something cathartic.
“I think we allow ourselves to resonate to some of the villains’ more intriguing characteristics,” says Kjeldgaard christiansen. “Villains channel our desire to master our environments. And not having to feel obligated to anyone but ourselves.” It seems there is, basically, a release in watching people do whatever the hell they want. Great cinema villains let us have our cake and eat it too. They give us the thrill of danger, the moral certainty life so often lacks, the simplicity of blackand-white outcomes instead of a confusing, constant grey. They give us control. They give us, ultimately, what reality often denies: justice. With the world seeming racked by secretive agents of chaos, with good and evil disguised by language and noise, there’s something especially appealing, especially now, about fictional villains. They exist to be seen, they exist to be booed, they exist to be enjoyed but, most of all, they exist to be defeated.