In the old days villains had moustaches and kicked the dog. Audiences are smarter today. They don’t want their villain to be thrown at them with green limelight on his face. They want an ordinary human being with failings. — Alfred Hitchcock
Villain. It does smack of Snidely Whiplash, snickering and twisting his fiendish mustache, doesn’t it? Evil and mean. And very one-dimensional.
I prefer antagonist. The character who comes into conflict with the protagonists. Papa Montague and Papa Capulet weren’t villains. They were antagonists. The mother who pays the bad boy to leave her daughter forever isn’t a villain. She’s an antagonist. Well, sure, but what if you’re writing romantic suspense or thrillers? You need a villain then, right?
Wrong. That’s when you need a morally ambiguous antagonist the most.
Why?
Action movies are a dime a dozen. Shoot’em up, bang-bang, save the world. And I love them. The Die Hards. The Lethal Weapons. Anything with Steven Seagal. I’m there. But there are two that I could watch in a marathon rotation for days. Why? Because of the morally ambiguous antagonists.
In 1996, some casting god put Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery in The Rock. As if that wasn’t reason enough, this movie also has, IMHO, the single best example of characterization shown through dialogue. When they’re explaining the mission, and Nic’s character says “I drive a Volvo. A beige one,” you know everything you need to know about the man.
But I digress. (Surprise!) The reason this movie is a keeper is Ed Harris’s role as Brig. Gen. Francis X. Hummel. The man who took Alcatraz and its tourists hostage and threatened to destroy San Francisco. A villain, right? Not by a long shot. Every single time I watch this movie I weep for the man. The writers took a character and made him do a misguided thing for the right reason. And not just his right reason. The plight of our veterans is an issue that touches (or should touch) every American. And when his plan gets blown to hell and you see the torment of a man who was just trying to make things right, it’s heartbreaking. You can’t root for him to succeed–nobody wants San Francisco blown away. (Well, nobody I know, anyway.) But you can’t root against him, either, because we believe in what he believes in. (And, of course, one of the secondaries gets to be The Villain, who’s stereotypically after the money, but that’s just actiony crap at the end.)
The other movie with a great antagonist is Air Force One. Harrison Ford turns in a good performance as the Commander-in-Chief, but Gary Oldman’s role as Ivan Korshunov is very good. Okay, the movie wasn’t great. Pretty plastic action-figurey, and a little hokey with the Air Force One thing. But what keeps me watching the movie over and over again (I will admit to owning this one) is the desperate fight of the Russians and the -ikstani’s (I cannot and will not name all those countries) to save their countries. A lot of people don’t realize it, but the end of the Cold War wasn’t necessary a great thing. The threat of nuclear annihilation kept the world aligned under the Superpowers, and kept the economies of the US and Russia strong. Korshunov is a man driven by the need to save his country. To regain what they once had before they all starve or are killed by the infighting.
What would you do to save your country? Would you hijack a plane and kidnap a country’s leader if you thought you could negotiate something you believed your floundering country desperately needed? Would you threaten, even harm, one family, if it could save thousands…maybe millions? He did a bad thing, for his good reason.
There are plenty of Snidely Whiplashes out there. “I’m going to destroy the world! Why? For money, of course!” Snore.
With romantic suspense still riding high at the top of the romance food chain, the choices for readers are varied and many. Have you read any with truly memorable antagonists—”villains” so well-motivated and morally ambiguous you found yourself empathizing with the character, even knowing (s)he would lose in the end? Or do you prefer not to get in the villain’s head, wanting instead a straight battle of good versus evil?
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I’m a firm believer that every character can be improved by a little moral ambiguity—antagonists and protagonists alike. Good for the sake of good is even more boring than evil for the sake of evil.
The only example that comes to mind right now is Light Yagami from Deathnote, ridding the world of terrible criminals (yay!) to establish himself as The New God (boo!). I find him completely despicable. He makes my skin crawl. But he’s certainly memorable and the topic of a lot of heated discussion.
I’ll have to come back with book examples. That part of my brain hasn’t woken up yet…
Okay, I’ll fess up to every once in a while wanting a straight up good vs evil read, just like every once in a while, I like to read fairy tales. There is something comforting and easy about those stories.
But mostly I prefer the good people driven to do bad things baddies. The folks that got started down what they thought was the right road, only to find out it wasn’t but realizing that it was too late to turn back.
Probably my favorite baddie of all time was Ramses as portrayed by Yul Brynner in the Ten Commandments, opposite Charlton Heston. Oh, my, I love hot villains!
Thinking about this, the one book that jumped out at me was Leon Uris’ QB VII. You really can’t tell who the villian is through most of the book, and I spent a large amount of time rooting for the wrong guy. Great book, but it seriously ticked me off. I like villians to be identifyably evil. Evil with a side of angst maybe, but evil nonetheless. The Rock was a great movie, and Ed Harris did a great job as the General, but I never saw him as the real villian. When push came to shove, he was ready to back down, so his creepy henchmen took over.
Oh, I just thought of another one: Harold in King’s The Stand. Total scuz right up until his end when he realizes he was mislead.
I’m not a fan of the misunderstood anti-hero. Give me a villain who revels in his villainy. Like The Kurgen in Highlander- “it’s better to burn out than fade away!”
Or Alan Rickman in Die Hard. Or anything else he’s been a villain in. YUM.
My favorite villain of all time, though, is Shere Khan from Jungle Book, as voiced by George Sanders. There’s just no menace like civil British menace.
If an antagonist is done right, as a viewer/reader, I can understand why s/he is so determined to achieve their goal, why it is so important to them and why the hero CAN’T walk away, because regardless of the reasons, the antagonist is doing something harmful.
I’m not much into the ’save the world’ suspense thrillers. Maybe it’s because I prefer things that seem a little closer to home, and I can’t imagine me getting caught in anything like that.
I don’t like all good and all evil characters — and when I write, I don’t even use a ‘villain’ POV. I don’t always have an individual villain. I think all heros and heroines have to have flaws and do things that might seem ‘less than honorable’ at times (which depends a lot of the reader’s definition–I’ve been slammed for showing a hero drinking), but there needs to be a reason for it.
Likewise, there’s good in the bad guys, too. I don’t need to like them, just need to see there’s more to them than the stereotype.
This is a good question for me. I think there are real people out there who are evil with no particular motivation (Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy) and they are fascinating nonetheless.
Two examples of film villains I couldn’t take my eyes off are Anthony Hopkin’s Hanibal Lector and Javier Bardem’s kooktastic villain from No Country for Old Men. Why are these guys coldblooded killers? I don’t know, but they still make very creepy, very compelling characters.
Okay, I admit right up front that I am squeamish. If the villain is very evil–and some just Are, even in real life–I don’t want to go into the villain’s head. I just don’t. I will skip that part of the book, because–well, I’m just a wimp, okay?
Which is why I don’t do villain POV in my own books, if they’re really villainous villains. Even if they’re more ambiguous–doing the wrong thing for the right reason–I don’t like villain POV. It’s an icky place to be, and frankly, I think it’s scarier if you don’t know what the villain is thinking/doing.
But if the villain is more of an antagonist than a villain, then I don’t mind reading their POV. Pamela Morsi once said that she did not write villains. She didn’t like them, and didn’t think most of us ever encountered anyone who was Truly Villainous. Misguided, wrong-headed or tyrannical, perhaps, but not villainous. And her books show it, from her Americana romances to her contemporary women’s fiction stories of today. And it works for the stories she writes.
Since I write fantasy, I think I can get away with more truly Evil and Villainous Villains. I’ve used Actual Demons in the past, and probably will in the future. The new series I’ve got coming next year from Tor will have morally ambiguous villains, though. Villains who live by the “end justifies the means” motto…
I like villains who have clear and understandable motivations. Even psychopaths can have reasons for doing what they do which can give the reader a bit of compassion for them. I’m not fond of the mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash villain. But something I like even less than that are the ’stock’ secondary characters that occasionally populate romance novels–the conniving other woman with the fake nails, the evil MIL, the man the heroine thinks she’s in love but is so obviously a shallow/horrible person, the domineering father… whenever I write a secondary character, I try to make them a bit different, and not just in terms of adding a sense of humor or a hobby, but redeeming them in some way… in category length fiction, though, it can be hard to add that extra layer and I think we can rely on stereotypes without even realising it!
Kate
I read a quote somewhere about how to characterize the villain/antagonist in your book, and that was that the ant should believe he/she is the actual hero of the story. No matter how misguided or evil or whatever, if you interviewed the ant he/she should be able to say with confidence “I am the hero of the story, I am doing what needs to be done.”
I think that will force the antagonist to be an interesting character and the storyline to become better.
Two of my fav TV shows have antagonists / anti heros rather than villains. I personally find it much more compelling than straight-up uber-bad guys (though those can also be entertaining from time to time)