Rooting for the Bad Guys

     One of the things that can distinguish a really good film from a mediocre one is villains that are more than just cardboard cutouts. A fully realized antagonist can be the difference between a forgettable flick and one that is a classic. Sometimes the combination of a juicy role and the right actor can result in a performance that upstages the film’s “hero”, or even steals the show outright. Can you imagine A Few Good Men without Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessup, Wall Street without Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko, Robin Hood (the Costner version) without Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham, or Goodfellas without Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito? Maybe you can, but there’s no way that you can imagine them being as iconic.

     I can’t say for certain if having an infatuation with villains is an attribute that is particularly American. Maybe other cultures have a similar inclination. I can say that Americans have been doing it for quite some time, going back at least as far as “the old west”, where outlaws like Jesse James and Billy the Kid were turned into legends that appear in popular culture occasionally, up to the present day. Maybe it is part of an American’s self-image- independent and rule breaking- maybe these “villains” allow us to safely engage in the fantasy that we too could stick it to “the man”, or society, or conventions?                
     I don’t want to overstate the case, but I wonder if there isn’t a potential downside to this admiration of villainy. We’re a country that is now more economically unequal than at any time in almost a century. We’re also a country that is trying (too easily, in my opinion) to come to terms with the fact that we created a massive security state that has engaged in torture. Like I said, I don’t want to lay too much blame at the feet of Misters Douglas and Nicholson, but how much of our response to these situations is related to the images of a slick-backed, suit-wearing shark comforting us with the direction that “Greed is Good”? How much of the blind eye that we have turned to the our nation’s abuse of human rights can be seen as confirmation of a fictional Marine Colonel’s eruption that we “can’t handle the truth”?