Friday, July 31, 2020
Learning to think like the villain
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| Every villain thinks they are the hero of the story and "Farscape's" Scorpius (left) and the MCU's Thanos are no different. |
A while back a friend and I had a very long conversation about writing and during that three-hour discussion we dissected the flaws in several recent sci-fi/fantasy movies and TV shows we’ve seen.
Being the witty, insightful and supremely intelligent literary critic I am, I declared that the problem with them was that the writers were either so focused on “The Hero’s Journey” or creating a visual spectacle that they gave short-shrift to the villains.
“Every villain thinks they are the hero of the story,” I opined “and writers seem to be forgetting this.”
Even the most successful and popular movie franchise of the last decade, Marvel Comic’s cinematic universe – or the MCU for short– falls victim to this.
Yes, the heroes in all these Marvel films are relatable, the stories are engaging and fun and they are filled with all the visual spectacle you’d want in a movie based on a comic book. But, with the exception of perhaps “Infinity War” and “Endgame,” the villains are kind of bland and don’t really seem worthy of the heroes’ attentions. They are generic bad-guys, whose actions hang on some hastily explained reason for hating the good guys. Worse yet, if you really start to examine the bad-guys schemes to get revenge on the heroes, they often don’t make sense.
Not all movies need fully fleshed out or sympathetic villains, I pontificated. But those stories that do have them are much more interesting because, not only do the bad guys test the hero’s mettle, they also challenge the hero’s ideas of right and wrong.
Look, it’s easy to mow down NAZI stand-ins with no thought as to whether it’s the right thing to do or if they deserve it. After all, they are space NAZI’s, and we know NAZIs are evil! So, go ahead, hack away with glee! Empty all your weapon’s clips into them! Hell, even blow up their secret base with no regard for collateral damage, because they deserve everything that’s coming to them!
But when heroes are forced to confront a foe who is doing the wrong thing for what could be seen as a valid reason, it’s harder to justify killing them out-of-hand. Ideally it should make the heroes pause and wonder if they are somehow complicit in the injustice that created their foe.
This is, I declared to my friend, why the “Infinity War” and “Endgame” films were among the best Marvel movies. Yes, Thanos is undoubtedly evil, but his plan to end half of all life in the universe stems from a noble idea. He’s seen how overpopulation will destroy the universe and wants to stop it in a manner that he thinks would be “random, dispassionate, fair to rich and poor alike.”This is a pretty high-minded goal for a villain. Usually they just want to take over the universe with little thought about the lives of the people in it. But Thanos seems to genuinely care about the people in it – or at least half of them anyway – so even through his plan is tragically flawed, the audience understands that he’s trying to save the universe just as much as the heroes are.
A similar thing was true with another of my favorite sci-fi villains: Scorpius from the TV show, “Farscape.” In his first few episodes he’s depicted as psychopath, dressed like some S&M fetishist, and evil with a capital “Muhahaha!” Then, as the show goes on, we are shown why he’s chasing and tormenting the good guy and his companions. He’s just trying to protect the universe from a race of lizard people who are even worse than he is. By the end of the series, not only does the audience actually start to root for him, but our hero actually starts to understand and appreciate his goals – if not his methods.
Well, needless to say, I was felling pretty superior and proud of myself for making all these profound insights until I heard my friend get extremely quiet on the other end of the phone.
Then very gently, and with a very, large sharp needle, he let the hot air out of my ego.
“You’re kinda falling into the same trap with your book,” he reminded me.
Okay, so he didn’t use those exact words, but he might as well have. He’s been reading my book as I write it, making helpful comments and encouraging me to keep going, and reminded me of a comment he made a while back: “We never really see what’s going on with the [bad guys]. You do mention why they’re fighting, but we never get to see things from their point of view.”
Like the Empire and their Stormtroopers in “Star Wars,” my bad guys were just another band of space NAZIs. They were only there to be cannon fodder for the heroes and present some obstacles for them to overcome while the pursued the book’s title Mcguffin.
He was absolutely, 100 percent right!
I was guilty of doing the exact thing I was complaining about.
How’s that for being a hypercritical gas bag?
Well, since I despise hypocrisy, I vowed to correct this obvious flaw and set about trying to add extra dimensions to my villains. I made a dozen half-hearted attempts at it, but nothing clicked. The things I came up with just seemed like more clichés, and didn’t really show why my bad guys thought they were the heroes of the story.
This had me stumped for a long time. I just couldn’t seem to figure out how to think like the villain.
Then, last month, the answer came to me as I started exploring my feelings of standing apart from my friends and family, feeling like the alien outsider.
All I really needed to do was try to see things from villain’s perspective without any baggage or bias from my pre-existing views. So, I just started with the idea that they had a deeply-ingrained distrust of the good guys and filtered all the events in the story though that lens. It didn’t matter whether that distrust was legitimate or not or whether their reasons were flawed or not. All I needed to do was to show them reacting to events based on those fears in predictable or emotional ways that anyone could understand.
Will this add more depth to my villains and make them more compelling?
I hope so.
But even it doesn’t, I think the whole exercise of getting into the head of a person whose views you don’t understand or agree with was worth it. Learning to see the world (or universe) through someone else’s eyes without vilifying them or their motivations, can only promote better understanding between different groups and increase one’s capacity for compassion and empathy for others.
And if there is something that is desperately needed in the real world today, it’s a lot more compassion, empathy and the ability to see someone else’s point of view.
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