As the author of some plays that actually get performed on a regular basis, I have a certain fondness for the characters I created in them. And in each– the Wolf in Peter VS. the Wolf and the Phantom in The Phantom of the Orchestra, there is a fairly interesting bad guy. In fact, they are the stars of the show. They are funny, they are occasionally charming, you have to admire their cleverness and creativity, and, not to give too much away, they both “get away with it” at the end.
But I will get right to the point of this post: when I watch the mass-produced crime dramas and other movies with villains, the bad guys are the dramatic version of food made out of high fructose corn syrup. There is no complexity, nor do they have any redeeming qualities. They are cheaply made. They are just black to the center. They do terrible things right from the get go, and this leads up to a very satisfying vigilante finale when the good guy heaves him off a cliff or tosses him in a woodchipper.
Bad guys weren’t always so rotten to the core. MacBeth was a good general, as was Othello. They served the state and were honored as such. Then, their “tragic flaw” . . . not a total lack of any redeeming qualities whatsoever . . . proved their undoing. Darth Vader is a good example of a modern day complex bad guy. Because he contains good that has been twisted into evil, he is far more interesting than a generic rotten-to-the-core bad guy with a black hat. Of course the fact that he is redeemed at the end kind of takes away the whole tragic element, but . . . I digress.
Now the next point of this post is, the benefit of bad guys who are somewhat good but also turned slightly bad is this: it is essential for these good-bad conflicts to exist in a bad guy partly because A) no one is entirely good or bad, therefore a truly “artful” bad guy is complex, not a one-dimensional vision of pure evil and B) it is essential to tell stories of people who are a mix of good and bad, because this makes it easier for us to recognize the potential we all have to make mistakes.
When we put all the evil in one external bad guy basket, this can have the effect of developing a sense of righteousness and unassailable moral superiority. When we let that happen, we become easy targets for people who seek to manipulate us, as we are so afraid of anyone discovering our imperfections.
So along with the ever-lowering quality of the music and the food, yeah, the skill of writers to create bad guys with any depth of complexity, reflecting the truth of life, is one more thing we are learning to live without.
© Justin Locke
