Opinions on villains

“A villain is the one who knows the most and cares the least.” – Chuck Klosterman

 I get a lot of good blog ideas from radio quotes. That one came in a July 9, 2013 NPR segment interviewing Mr. Klosterman, who has just written a book about real and literary villains. I don’t agree with all his views, but that particular line struck a chord.

Thinking about it, the reason behind the first half is obvious, at least for fictional villains. The villain is nearly always the one who is moving the plot along – he/she has a goal and a plan for getting there, and it is his/her evil plans and plots that the hero must first discover and then thwart. Of course the villains know the most about what is going on; they are the ones making it go!

The second bit is a little more problematic. Cares the least about what? Obviously, villains care about getting to their goals, whether that’s power, money, the girl, elephants, or all four at once. Usually, though, villains don’t care about any bad effects their actions may have on other people (sometimes, not even the people on their own side). Or they care a little, but not enough to stop. Achieving their goal is the most important thing; the ends justify the means.

It helps if the villain’s goals are something that most readers would likely consider either undesirable or not worth doing evil things to accomplish. A “villain” who has a thoroughly admirable goal – say, getting desperately needed food to a starving village – has to do a lot of really evil and outrageous things in order not to be viewed as a hero…and even then, he’s likely to graduate from “villain” to “antagonist,” simply because his ultimate goal appears to be unselfish.

This is one of the problems that occasionally crops up for fiction writers: the fact that readers, whoever they are, tend to identify with characters who believe in, value, and work toward the same things the reader believes in, values, and tries to work toward. If the villain’s goals and motives are too close to those of a particular reader, then that reader will likely be turned off by the author portraying him/her as evil…even if the villain is wiping out towns and bribing government officials and doing other horrible things that the reader would never, ever dream of doing.

There’s a truism in fiction that villains are often the most interesting characters, especially for authors and for actors who play villains. Mr. Klosterman’s theory is that adults want to understand themselves better, and that villains help us do that. Another theory I heard recently was that villains are interesting because they have an internal tug-of-war between good and evil. I think those may be true for some readers, and some villains, but they ignore a couple of other important factors.

First, in most fiction, the villains do not actually spend a lot of time on-stage. They cast a long shadow when they’re not around, because the heroes are always trying to figure out their plan, or planning to stop them, or escaping their traps, but it’s hard to get in-depth, up close, and personal with a character who isn’t present. There are exceptions, of course – Shakespeare’s MacBeth and Richard III come to mind – but in those cases, they’re the central characters, the anti-heroes of their own mistaken stories.

Second, some villains are just plain bad – they have no apparent internal tug-of-war between good and evil. Emperor Palpatine of Star Wars comes to mind. You can read things into the character (because he’s mostly orchestrating things from behind the scenes), but I don’t think anyone is going to learn a whole lot about themselves or the world from the Emperor we see on screen (except maybe “Don’t join the Sith”).

Then there’s the fact that, for the last couple of decades, the fashion in heroes has been for the reluctant Everyman – the ordinary guy forced by circumstances beyond his control to face villainy and evil and overcome it. Frodo and Harry Potter both follow this pattern. Heroes who are smart or rich or charismatic have to have some negative trait to balance things out, the way Iron Man/Tony Stark has his abrasive personality and heart problem, or Miles Vorkosigan has his brittle bones.

Villains don’t have comparable limitations – they can be as smart, talented, handsome, rich, famous, charismatic, etc. as the author wants or can make them, with no need for offsetting disadvantages. Being a villain is, after all, enough of a disadvantage all by itself. The question then becomes, why would someone with all that going for them turn to the dark side? That’s a question that a lot of writers find interesting, even if they can only explore it in the villain’s backstory. Also, it is fun to write about somebody smart, talented, handsome, etc. every so often, and if you can’t do it with your hero…