“I do not know what the heart of a villain might be, I only know the heart of a virtuous man, and that is frightful.” Count Joseph de Maistre
Villains, villains everywhere. There really are villains in all of our stories. Especially in the film age of the superhero. In the superhero age of film and television, you of course need supervillains. And interestingly, the morality with which we portray villains has changed over the past few decades. In the mid-20th century villains typically didn’t get a lot of sympathetic backstory. Especially in the age of the Western, where bad-guys wore black hats and good guys wore white hats and you didn’t need to know why the bad guys were bad, they just were. And there was no moral complexity—just good guys clearing frontier towns of bad guys. From the Lone Ranger onwards, the morality was pretty straightforward. Until Clint Eastwood came along and now, we had to deal with antiheroes and villains with backstories. We had to deal with moral obscurity. And while we don’t have time to do a full history of film in this country, I want to say that what we have now in film and television, with this emphasis on sympathetic villains is not new. It’s happened before. Perhaps not as broadly as before, and perhaps not with this level of moral ambiguity, but it has happened. And while sympathetic villains aren’t new they ARE indicative of where our culture is. Because the way we portray bad guys matters. It matters an awful lot.
Villains are crucial to stories. And giving the bad guy a backstory is NOT unchristian or immoral. Indeed, read your Bible. Lots of bad guys in the Bible have pretty extensive backstories. Often, we’re allowed to enter into the mind of the bad guy in the Bible and understand his or her motivation. And it isn’t simply the Bible, but Christian writers too have given us insights into bad guys.
Shakespeare famously created masterpieces of his villains, and frankly, since most people prefer his tragedies to his comedies, many of Shakespeare’s most popular characters are the villains! People prefer MacBeth to Benedick.
Milton gave motivation to Satan and attempted to explain how and why the prince of this world said, “So farewel Hope, and with Hope farewel Fear, Farewel Remorse: all Good to me is lost; Evil be thou my Good.”
William Makepeace Thackeray in his extremely underead—seriously if you haven’t read it go read it—Vanity Fair presents people who are all antiheroes. There is no one who is fully good and kind and noble and brave. Everyone in the story has some massive character flaw. And this disturbed people, but Thackeray didn’t care. He continued to live and write as he believed a Christian should: with unflinching honesty.
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are both dedicated to showing us human nature as it truly is. There are villains in the great Russians’ works, absolutely, but they are never sloppily made and almost never without understanding their motivations. And indeed, in some of the most complex characters we find that the protagonist and the antagonist are the same person, as in the case of Anna in Anna Karenina.
And of course, Tolkien and Lewis our latter-day saints presented us complex characters, Lewis giving us intense and even frightening looks inside the nature of villains in That Hideous Strength, and showing us how we can be the villain while thinking we’re the hero in ‘Til We Have Faces.
I say all this to say that villains are important to fiction, not only mechanically, but morally. Villains are important and great Christian novelists have always recognized this. And great Christian writers have not been afraid of moral ambiguity and complex characterization. Great Christian writers are not afraid to give the bad guy a backstory, because in the end whether you’re a hero or a villain depends not on your motivations, your experiences, your sympathetic qualities, or even your good attributes and actions. No, whether you’re a hero or a villain depends on whether your loves are ordered enough to aid the protagonist or so disordered that you oppose the protagonist.
Now, let me put that in slightly more plain English. Christian theologians at least from Augustine have understood that being a sinner and doing sin happens because our loves are disordered. Augustine’s point was that you can love everything and anything, as long as you love it in right proportion. You can and should love your parents but compared to Christ that love should be as hatred. You can love your dog but compared to your parents it should be as hatred. It’s a question of priorities.
And you see, that’s why villains that are interesting and make for good fiction are often so sympathetic. They have sensible motivations, they have loves, they want good and desirable things. But they want them at a cost that’s too high. Their loves are disordered.
And this means that villains can be used for moral instruction JUST AS EFFECTIVELY as heroes. Heroes teach us what to do and villains teach us what not to do, or what we must not permit or tolerate in ourselves. Heroes teach us what to desire and villains teach us what to despise. Heroes show us what to love and villains what to loathe. Heroes give us an example of adequately ordered loves and villains give an example of disordered loves.
I say all this to say that villains are very important to fiction. And all fiction tells a moral story. All fiction is, is just a writer doing theology with his imagination. All fiction revolves around conflict. There has to be conflict to have a story. Whether you agree with Aristotle that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, or if you go with a different and/ or more complex concept of story, the simple reality is that a story—or at least a story that someone will bother listening to—requires a conflict. If the story is just people sitting around living the good life, that’s a really pleasant painting, but not a very interesting story. It’s conflict and the need to overcome obstacles that makes a story worth listening to.
And because stories are essentially narrated conflicts there is no getting around conflict. But what is conflict? Why does it exist? And why should we care? And why is this theological? Come on, Lukey, get it together!
Ok, ok, I get it. I’ll try to hurry it up. You see, when a conflict happens, and this is true of real life as well, it happens because one person’s view of how the world ought to be conflicts with how the world is or how someone else thinks the world ought to be.
Let’s look at an example.
So, in Genesis. Cain thinks that the world is not the way it should be. Cain believes that he should live in a world where God accepts his offerings. But that’s not the world he lives in. He lives in a world where God accepts Abel’s offerings and does not look with favor on Cain’s. God tells Cain that if he does right he will certainly receive God’s favor.
So, we see at least two kinds of conflict here. The story shows us plainly that Cain is in a conflict with God. Cain’s view of how the world ought to be is different from God’s. Cain is also in conflict with himself because God has told him that he hasn’t yet learned adequate self-mastery. So, we have a man v God and a man v self; this is on top of the man v nature that we learned about when the ground was cursed. But then Cain murders Abel—man v man. But why? Because Cain did not want to live in a world where he was rejected, and Abel was accepted. He couldn’t force God to accept him, but he could prevent Abel from offering anymore blood sacrifices. Cain did what he did to make the world as it ought to be align with the world as it is.
Cain is the villain. But look at his motivation. He wanted to live in a world where his sacrifices would be acceptable to God. That’s a good and noble and laudable desire. It’s a good love. But that love was disordered. Cain put disproportionate love on being accepted and inadequate love on doing right. He loved being accepted more than doing the things that made him acceptable.
I could go on all day about this, but here’s the point. Villains are important because they teach us moral lessons about how to not to order our loves and the cost of having our loves disordered. Villains teach us what happens when good things are loved out of measure. Villains teach us about ourselves because all of us are a bit villainous. All of us are born sinners who do evil. All of us have our loves disordered to some degree. Villains show us that we don’t want to be that way—as the great theologian and popstar P!NK has said, “I’m a hazard to myself! Don’t let me get me! Don’t wanna be myself no more; I wanna be somebody else!”
It's important that villains in mature works of fiction are relatable and drawn as complex characters with complex and relatable motivations because that teaches us to shun the evil that we have inside of us. Simple allegory has its place, of course, and I’m not despising it. Black and White villains teach us to shun the evil and not allow it to tempt us with the insane reasonability of wickedness. There’s a place for Pilgrim’s Progress. But there’s also a place for Gollum. And one of the most important things in LOTR is Frodo and Sam learning to see themselves in Gollum and learning to shun the corrupting power of the ring.
And this is why, in the age of “representation” in Hollywood, where we have all of our box-ticking racial quotas it is so fundamentally absurd and puerile that Hollywood won’t cast nonwhite actors as villains. Now, I don’t agree with Hollywood that if someone doesn’t look like you that you can’t relate to them. But for the sake of argument, let’s say I do. My question to Hollywood would be: why can’t nonwhite actors play villains? Their answer would of course be something to the effect of: “we don’t want to reinforce harmful stereotypes” or, as Kumail Nanjiani ironically says, “If the bad guy is a brown guy, what message is that sending?"
Well, it obviously is sending the message that nonwhite people are fully human. It’s not setting people up with the false notion that all nonwhites are always heroes. If you believe in representation, it’s necessary if nonwhite people are going to struggle through the darker parts of their natures and shun the bad and cling to the good.
Pretending that nonwhites are infallible is a stereotype and a harmful one.
Now, apart from the fact that casting nonwhites as villains isn’t racist and to think so is smallminded, apart from the fact that preventing talented nonwhite actors from playing villains makes the art of film and television worse, apart from the fact that it’s a job and if nonwhite people are really all that concerned with racial perceptions then they simply won’t audition to play villains, and apart from the fact that it’s an actively racist and discriminatory hiring practice, and apart from the fact that as someone who’s done amateur acting, I can tell you with certainty that the villain is almost ALWAYS more fun to play than the hero, meaning nonwhite actors have less fun on set and apart from the fact that this practice doesn’t actually make logical sense with the representation mantras that woke Hollywood espouses—apart from all that, and much more that we don’t have time for, apart from all that it means that Hollywood doesn’t even understand stories.
They don’t really understand what villains are and why they exist. They don’t understand the moral function of a story. They don’t understand what’s actually happening and how fiction is formative of character.
And that’s sad. It’s sad that our society’s storytellers are imbeciles. It’s tragic. And it’s a tragedy that has had and will have consequences. Does it matter all that much if Kumail Nanjiani gets more parts…no, not really, not in the grand scheme of things. But it matters a whole lot if our storytellers are moral idiots. Because the truth is that Hollywood, Disney, Netflix, and Youtube are the pastors, preachers, priests, and philosophers of our age. They are shaping and shall shape this world into their image. And what a world it shall be.