Everyone loves a good villain. When done right, they’ll almost always end up more popular than the protagonist. People love them. Heath Ledger won an Oscar when he played one and before him, Jack Nicholson got enormous praise for the same role.
Brad Pitt’s most famous role to date is one. People love villains because they do the kind of stuff we think about doing, but can’t or won’t. And they get away with it (at least until the very end, or when the sequel’s released).
These guys are badass.
This is, of course, vicarious living at its finest, but there’s nothing wrong with it. We all have a dark side. But how much would we really like this sort of person if they were real? I’m not even talking about a terrorist like Osama bin Laden; let’s think small. Let’s think about someone that’s just a jerk of epic proportions, someone we actually know.
The University of Massachusetts has the reputation for being a party school, so most of us know That One Guy, or TOG, for short. TOG is the guy who bases his entire self-worth on how much he is getting. This is the guy who will push you out of the way to get to a girl (sometimes literally). This is the guy who will hit on everyone around him who looks even slightly feminine. TOG is a bad person. Sex is the only thing that matters to him. Don’t get me wrong, sex is pretty damn cool, but to only care about one thing is kind of scary.
Nobody likes TOG. He ruins everything. He scares away your female friends. Maybe he gets drunk and attacks someone once he realizes he isn’t going to be getting any. He’d be a pretty good bad guy for most teen sex romps (in the model of Steve Stifler from “American Pie,” at least until the sequels) and treated for laughs. In real life, not so much.
In another genre, this guy is the Joker; a psychopathic clown murderer-terrorist, who is coincidentally hilarious when he’s not being utterly horrifying. Or maybe he’s Tyler Durden, the urban terrorist and anarchist from “Fight Club.” We root for the titular character of “Dexter” in the series of the same name because he kills bad people, but he’s still a serial killer. Colonel Miles Quaritch, the army leader from “Avatar,” was a genocidal warmonger, but people still liked him – some even going so far to say he was the movie’s real protagonist. These characters are all very popular, and it’s probably because of how on-the-edge they are.
Most people thought that the Joker was the best part of “The Dark Knight,” but anyone that blows up a hospital in real life is considered an unforgivable monster, even if they did it in drag. The entire point of Tyler Durden was that he was the product of a man’s insanity whose aspirations for anarchy were impossible and actually destructive to everyone around him. Yet there are still tons of kids who quoted him in their yearbooks, thinking he was not only deep, but also a hero.
If you think it’s only fictional characters that get this sort of treatment, you’re wrong. Che Guevara is seen as a symbol of freedom, his face placed in the center of many a t-shirt and poster. Somehow, the fact that a lot Cuban Americans refer to him as “The Butcher of Cabana” after he oversaw the execution of many of his enemies without the benefit of a fair trial, is ignored because he was charismatic and looked like a rock star.
There is a definite danger to blurring fantasy and reality. Some things sound great on paper, but very often the cost for such things is high. Tyler Durden believes that Western culture has become too materialistic. His solution is to destroy all the banks. Miles Quaritch truly believes that the only way to save humanity is to wipe out the Na’vi. Even the most well-intentioned extremist is still an extremist. There’s a reason that “badass” includes the word “bad.”
Eddie Hand is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].
