"I want to make art. And I want to make trouble."
Today we’ve moved beyond The Age of the Antihero
to center someone even worse: The Sympathetic Villain.
"Playing fair is a joke invented by rich people
to keep the rest of us poor."
The antihero story typically makes us wonder where
its murky or mixed hero will end up on the
good-versus-evil spectrum.
We’ve also discussed the Antihero 2.0 narrative,
which doesn’t expect its character to improve
and encourages more distance and moral judgment.
"I’m not gonna change."
But a story that empathizes with a straight-up villain
asks us to identify with a person we know clearly is wrong,
without offering any excuses or ambiguities.
"I thought it was gonna bother me,
but it really hasn’t."
Increasingly, we’re seeing stories with a villain-protagonist,
who might not be contrasted with any likable, featured hero.
The story might try to get us on side
by making the villain a victim
"He did this to me so he would be king."
or a lesser evil who faces off against someone worse.
"Who are you?"
"A dangerous man."
"It says that on your business card?"
"You should be scared right now."
Or they might face off against a hero,
but be what’s called an anti-villain,
the flipside of the antihero: a villain with heroic tendencies.
"It's about two billion people all over the world
who looks like us.
But their lives are a lot harder."
A story about a Sympathetic Villain
is a bold experiment, but it might not always work --
especially if it goes to such extremes
to make them sympathetic that they’re no longer
really a villain or if it mixes up
their villainy with weird social cues
that lead to the story sending a confused message
"Does it sting more because I’m a woman?"
Yet at its best, the sympathetic villain story
is a means for articulating a fascinating critique
of society and its mores. It can make us see
ourselves in the villain -- and the villainy in ourselves.
"If anything in this life is certain,
if history has taught us anything,
it’s that you can kill anyone."
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We’ve come up with a set of criteria
for when the Sympathetic Villain story works best,
and when it doesn’t.
Number one: Actually let them BE a villain.
[Strained]: "You broke my f[BLEEP]ing legs!"
"Oh boo hoo!"
[Judgmental stares] "What?!"
If the writing can’t decide whether this person
is a villain or an antihero
or a victim, it can end up
muddying the waters
and making us wonder why this story exists.
But while preserving this villainy,
the writing should also:
Number two: Make us empathize or understand.
"The rich and the powerful, they do whatever they want.
Guys like us? You and me? They don’t care about us."
That doesn’t require making the character likable --
and it’s often best if it’s clear that they’re wrong --
but we do need to participate in why
they make the choices they do.
"He took and took from me until I no longer existed.
That's murder."
Finally, this type of story should:
Number three: Use this person’s villainy
to articulate a clear theme or message.
The whole point of putting a spotlight on a more complex
or compelling villain is to reveal something
incisive about the darkness in human existence and society.
"Look, now, y'all gonna have to come up off some serious
f[BLEEP]in' dough for this, all right?
I will make sure you're properly compensated."
So the story needs to be intentional about
what philosophy its villain and the characters
they’re pitted against represent.
"We're going to fight capitalism with socialism."
There are several different ways that stories convince us
to side with the villains -- with different emotional results.
One increasingly popular approach is to make them the protagonist.
"They say, if you wanna tell a story right,
you gotta start at the beginning."
In recent years, a number of villain-protagonist narratives
have given us an origin story for
or centered a known villain character
who was previously more two-dimensionally evil.
"From the very beginning I realized I saw the world
differently than everyone else. That didn’t sit well
with some people."
We can see an early example of this trend in the
2003 musical Wicked, based on the 1995 novel,
which considers if the ultimate cardboard villain --
whose actual name is “The Wicked Witch of the West” --
might have a different point of view about what happened
in The Wizard of Oz.
"Who killed my sister?"
The sympathetic-villain protagonist gets a chance
to tell their side of the story.
"It was Maleficent's love which broke that very same curse.
But that detail was somehow mysteriously forgotten."
Some of the most influential streaming hits of the 2010s --
like House of Cards, Game of Thrones
and Succession --
all hooked audiences on the drama of centering
enjoyably bad villains who never pretended
to be otherwise.
"I choose violence."
To be sympathetic, the villain doesn't
have to be a person we like in real life.
Cambridge Dictionary defines a character being sympathetic
as "described or shown in such a way that
you are able to understand the character's feelings,
with the result that you like them."
"She pretended to love me. All I ever wanted from Beck
was to be seen, really seen and accepted."
And to an extent, just the act of making
a villain the protagonist, at the center of
a story structure, is enough to make you
connect to them.
But a second technique a number of these stories
use to elicit
greater feeling is to: Make them a victim.
A victimized-villain story banks on the fact
that we often feel for people who’ve been hurt.
"The world took everything away from me!
Everything I ever loved!"
And today’s victimized-villain plots often channel a broader pattern
of how our society cruelly mistreats people
of a certain class, race or gender,
to trigger our sense of injustice.
"Nick Dunne took my pride and my dignity
and my hope and my money."
"They don’t give a s[BLEEP]t about people like you, Arthur."
In Black Panther, Erik Killmonger’s quarrel
with the movie’s hero is rooted in justified outrage
over the unfairness of having lost his father
as well as having grown up as a black man
in a racist society.
"These items aren't for sale."
"How do you think your ancestors got these?
You think they paid a fair price, or did they take it,
like how they took everything else?"
Killmonger is perhaps one of our time’s best examples
of the antivillain, who operates in the same space
as a traditional villain against a hero-protagonist,
"BURN IT ALL!"
but whom the movie makes us feel for and understand.
"So ain't all people your people?"
In their mind, the victimized-villain
feels their morally unscrupulous behavior
is justified because of what they’ve been through.
[Subtitled Ape-speech]: "For years I was a
prisoner in their lab. They cut me, tortured me."
It’s also true that a lot of people who do bad things
have been victims of traumas or abuse.
And ultimately these stories emphasize
that villainy is a cycle, often perpetuated
from the top down.
Still, if the “victim track” goes too far in fully
humanizing characters or blaming their behavior
on external causes, it risks making the
sympathetic villain not a villain at all.
"No truer love."
Sometimes stories are more interesting and coherent
if they don’t overjustify or mitigate this character’s evil,
but really own the badness.
"The reason we loved all these villains
when we were kids was because they were bad,
not in spite of it."
Thus, rather than softening their villain’s edges,
some of the most effective sympathetic villain stories
use a third technique. They:
“Trick” us into villainy. Here the villain-protagonist
starts out as appealing,
charismatic or heroic in order to get us on side,
and the story cons us into continuing to
root for the villain even as they become more
and more overtly evil.
Perhaps the best example of this would be Michael Corleone
in The Godfather.
He’s presented to us as an idealist --
the decorated soldier who’s not like his mafia family.
"That’s my family, Kay, it’s not me."
When he does eventually turn, it’s under pressure
to defend his family.
As the trilogy goes on and Michael becomes a ruthless,
cold-blooded boss, he alienates, hurts,
and even murders members of that very family.
"Only don't tell me that you're innocent.
Because it insults my intelligence,
and it makes me very angry."
Yet we retain that romantic image
of him as the tragic hero, forced down this path
by a world that’s immoral.
"We was all proud of you, being the hero ‘n all,
your father too."
Most masterfully, the story gets us to root for
his evil choices themselves, as we're made to feel
that people who betray or wrong him deserve punishment
for not living up to his sense of honor.
"I know it was you, Fredo.
You broke my heart. You broke my heart!"
So it's not that we like him in spite of his villainy;
we like that he unlocks a villainy in us
that might feel quite good.
"I don’t feel I have to wipe everybody out, Tom.
Just my enemies."
You can also make a case that some of the characters
who defined the age of the TV antihero
took us in with this same trickery technique,
and were actually sympathetic villains
in antihero clothing.
"I am not in danger, Skylar, I am the danger."
Like Michael, Tony Soprano starts out feeling
like a slightly more optimistic spin on the mafioso --
he loves his family, and despite the nature
of his business, he seems to conduct it
in a semi-decent way: he looks out for the
other guys in his crew, seems to make rational
and fair decisions,
"Fifteen grand is too much."
"I'll talk to Uncle Junior personally, and maybe I can
get it to around 10."
and strikes both his coworkers and us
as strong leadership material.
"More is lost by indecision than wrong decision."
These facts let us justify how much we might like
or enjoy watching Tony even while we watch him
do blatantly horrible things.
But over time, he leads everyone in his life to misery,
if not death.
And his therapist Dr. Melfi concludes that he’s a sociopath.
"Apparently the talking cure actually helps them
become better criminals."
So the gradual yet shocking reveal of that show
is that we (like Melfi) have been suckered into
making excuses for the fact that he was a straight-up
villain all along. Game of Thrones followed
this trickery path
in an extreme way by turning its inspirational heroine
Daenerys Targaryen into a villain
in the final season -- but many fans found her shift
too sudden and drastic.
"Children, little children, burned!"
"I tried to make peace with Cersei.
She used their innocence as a weapon against me."
So that reaction shows that it’s important
to include viewers in the character’s transformation,
letting us understand and participate in
why the character’s villainy gets expressed.
And this leads to our fourth technique:
Give us an ideological or mission-driven
Sympathetic Villain who’s motivated by a
beautiful-sounding idea.
"May her arrow signify the end of tyranny
and the beginning of a new era."
This villain probably thinks they’re a good guy,
"Your planet was on the brink of collapse."
or at least, they started out that way.
"I will answer injustice with justice.”
But ultimately, the takeaway is usually that pursuing
an abstract greater good isn’t worth it,
if you have to act like a villain to succeed.
"You created a world without murder...
And all you had to do was kill someone to do it."
Stories about the sympathetic villain
are a warning -- setting out with
good intentions isn’t enough, and it’s easier than you think
to end up on the wrong side.
A key reason the villain exists in the story
is to challenge the hero philosophically --
to express a mindset or counterargument
that the hero must confront and defeat.
"There is no good and evil, there is only power,
and those too weak to seek it."
So making your villain compelling is a powerful way to make
their counterargument stronger
"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”
-- forcing us to really consider this
ideological challenge so that the hero’s
ultimate moral victory means more.
"As much as I wanted to be Gordon Gekko,
I'll always be Bud Fox."
At its best, the sympathetic villain story
can be deeply effective at articulating
a wider critique of society.
From The Godfather to Goodfellas
to The Sopranos,
sympathetic mafia villains yield a scathing critique
of the American dream, and how it uses the
romance of family as a smokescreen
for a ruthless, selfish capitalism.
"It’s not personal, Sonny, it’s strictly business."
"It’s business, we’re soldiers, we follow codes -- "
"Does that justify everything that you do?"
On the other hand, it’s easy for the message
of a sympathetic villain story to get messy,
especially if it’s unclear which character --
and which philosophy -- we’re meant to root for.
Some stories try to solve for this
by pitting the sympathetic-villain-protagonist
against an even worse villain.
"For all your noise and bluster, you're just a silly little girl
with no one around to protect her."
Other stories make the villain’s case stronger
by cutting down the hero figure.
Billions introduces its central shady hedge fund manager
Bobby Axelrod as a rags-to-riches underdog,
"I carried your grandfather's bag quite a few times.
Your bag too, Chad, in the summer
after middle school."
while his supposed “good guy” antagonist,
US Attorney Chuck Rhoades, is portrayed as a
child of privilege who’s just as unscrupulous
and determined to win by any means necessary.
"I am willing to stare into the abyss
beyond conventional morality and do what needs to be done."
But making the villain too likable (or the hero too unlikable)
can obscure what the intended takeaway should be.
"What have I done wrong? Really? Except make money.
Succeed.
All these rules and regulations --
arbitrary."
Director Akira Kurosawa wrote that in his film
Drunken Angel, the "innate and powerful
personal qualities"
of the actor playing the villain, Toshiro Mifune,
were actually a problem
because "the theme of the film became somewhat indistinct."
[Subtitled Japanese]:
“He acts tough and swaggers around,
but in his heart I know he’s unbearably lonely."
Arguably, Black Panther risked falling into this trap
with charismatic villain Erik Killmonger --
since a number of viewers left thinking he was right,
though in that case it seems intentional that
Killmonger’s world view is not written off.
"When black folks started revolutions,
they never had the firepower...
or the resources to fight their oppressors.
Where was Wakanda?" The Dark Knight walks this line
due to the charisma
of Heath Ledger’s Joker, but the movie takes
pains to disprove the Joker’s philosophy
that only social norms hold us back from doing evil.
"This city just showed you that it's full of people
ready to believe in good."
2019’s Joker gives the same character’s mindset
more validity by making him the protagonist
and casting a damning light on Bruce Wayne’s
unfair privilege.
"You have a problem with Thomas Wayne?"
"Yes I do."
Yet by reframing this story so drastically that the hero
is held in contempt and the villain
has good reasons, does the film risk
implicitly endorsing the villain’s actions?
"What do you get -- "
"I don't think so -- "
"...when you cross-- "
"I think we're done with -- "
" ...a mentally ill loner -- "
"That's it -- "
[Yelling]: "With a society that abandons him,
and treats him like trash?!"
"You get what you fucking deserve!"
Since the villain’s philosophy is such a key part
of why they exist, when a story centers
or emphasizes a villain, it’s especially important
to be attentive to how they relate to wider cultural cues.
“The US army circulated an internal memo
based on an FBI warning citing potential incel violence
at an unnamed theatre during opening weekend.”
I Care A Lot incorporates feminist rhetoric and
a gay love story into its portrait of
heartless “guardian” Marla Grayson,
who preys on elders to make money.
"You're my guardian robber!"
-- but this arguably ends up making the film feel
both misogynistic and homophobic.
After first priming us to expect a moral about
America’s healthcare and legal systems,
"I’m helping you feed the money monster,
but I hardly see any of the gold for myself.
Gimme a taste."
it confusingly sets up her fight with Peter Dinklage’s
inept Russian mafia boss as vaguely feminist.
"You can't convince a woman to do what you want,
then you call her a bitch and threaten to kill her."
And it then further confuses its message
by giving us reasons to sympathize with the
various angry men who attack her,
"Hey, bitch!"
since she’s preyed on their mothers.
"She has a loving son to take care of her.
I just don't understand how the court can entrust
my mother to this stranger."
By contrast, Gone Girl’s use of an angry woman
villain-protagonist
(also played by Rosamund Pike)
works because the movie’s central theme
is how men stoke female rage.
"He became someone I did not agree to marry.
And found himself a newer, younger, bouncier cool girl."
Like I Care a Lot, The One risks sending
a weird message about gender politics
as it also stars an evil "girl boss"
villain-protagonist who gets attacked by
and hurts disgruntled men while spouting feminist rhetoric.
"You want power and success."
"Yeah. I'm supposed to apologize for that.
Men never do."
But like Gone Girl, it does a better job
of using its villain’s behavior to express a clear theme:
CEO Rebecca sells a fairytale of romance
of finding your perfect chemical match,
but she falters because she doesn’t know
the real meaning of love.
"You didn't care about him. You just thought
of yourself, you always do."
While it’s helpful to put us in the villain’s place
and include us in their feelings, the Sympathetic Villain Story
is often best served by avoiding any mixed messages
that this person might be “right”
or someone we’d want to emulate.
This line in The One,
"You think you’re a bad person but you’re not"
is intentionally followed by a flashback confirming
that, nope, she definitely is a bad person.
(and if we had any doubt, the season ends playing
a cover of “Friend of the Devil”).
[Singing] "A friend of the Devil is a friend of mine."
Throughout cinema, some of the most
successful stories with villain-protagonists
work because they don’t bother to make this person
traditionally likable.
"I like to dissect girls. Did you know I'm utterly insane?"
Whereas Joker’s Arthur Fleck is positioned like an
underdog to root for, one of the film’s inspirations,
Taxi Driver, takes pains to make us uncomfortable
with protagonist Travis Bickle’s repulsive views.
"They should clean up this city here
because this city here is like an open sewer,
you know, it’s full of filth and scum."
Films like American Psycho and A Clockwork Orange
use somewhat terrifying villain-protagonists
to put an idea under a lens.
"I have all the characteristics of a human being
but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion,
except for greed and disgust."
The age of the antihero was grounded in a desire
to understand what creates these people.
Yet this new age of the sympathetic villain
is more about understanding the structures that
enable bad people.
And there’s actually optimism in this trend.
It shows we’re willing to look honestly
at villains onscreen and off -- to hold ourselves
and our society accountable, instead of making
antiheroic excuses.
The Sympathetic Villain story makes us identify with a devil
in order to confront the demons within --
and just might offer us a useful exorcism.
"My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a
better world for anyone.
In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others."
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