Why Our Villains Are Different Now (Thanos, The Joker, Killmonger) – Wisecrack Edition

Villains. Often the best part of a movie. I can't live with them, I can't give them to a pack of rabid hyenas. Generally. Villains are the people we love to hate or fear, with an occasional modicum of empathy. But lately something has been going on with the

villains

. If you've found yourself following the logic of a diabolical plot or feeling more empathy than usual toward a movie's antagonist, you're not alone. Today's

villains

, from Killmonger in Black Panther to Screenslaver in Incredibles 2, have become strangely identifiable, each equipped with their own compelling critiques of the world. "People will always trade quality for ease." Villainy is and always has been a reflection of the value systems and fears of the time.

So how did we get from this to this and what does that say about our past and our world today? We will find out in this Wisecrack Edition on the cinematic history of villainy. And a warning, there are a lot of spoilers here, for movies old and new. To understand how we got here, we have to explore multiple eras and see how film villains embody the spirit and anxieties of the time. Now, a quick disclaimer: none of these trends are absolute. Villains may break molds or reach back into the past for inspiration, but what we're discussing here are notable trends among some of the most enduring films of each era.

Let's begin our journey from simple mustache-twirling villain to complex, radical philosophizer by looking at the 1950s and early 1960s, the height of the non-hot war. In the post-World War II, party-in-the-suburbs era of American history, describing our world seemed simple enough. We were the heroes who saved the world from the evil Nazis and now we had the task of defending ourselves from the also evil U.S.S.R. It was very black and white, just like our villains. Well yes, literally, but also metaphorically. The movie screens were full of bad Russians, bad Asians, and very bad aliens.

What do all these mischievous guys have in common? They are the "other": an inherent, inexplicable evil that feeds on the destruction of America and our apple pie values. Sometimes, that “Other” took the form of an amorphous red stain for the communists or the creature from the Black Lagoon. Other times, the “other” was an alien born in a capsule and designed to look exactly like you, as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers: “Where do they come from?” – which some critics said represented fear of brainwashing and communist infiltration. Also in the 1950s, the film industry went back to basics and produced several Bible sagas with runtimes of four hours or more.

These expensive epics proved enormously popular, with three of them ranking among the ten highest-grossing films of the decade. Perhaps this was in part because they perfectly embodied Cold War propaganda, which depicted a showdown between God-fearing Americans and godless communists. Ben Hur showed an aristocratic Jew being persecuted by an evil Roman commander, while Quo Vadis pits new Christian converts against the evil emperor Nero and his Roman empire, and The Ten Commandments shows good old Moses looking down on the Egyptian emperor Ramses. All of these films portrayed the noble “Judeo-Christian” facing off against a cruel and powerful despot of a non-monotheistic religion.

These villains were representatives of larger groups of bad people who wanted to cancel the baseball and tupperware parties. Even when the villains were not explicitly foreigners or pagans, they were simply communist and anti-American double agents, as seen in a spate of Cold War propaganda films. Later, the spy mania of the 1960s would also reflect Cold War anxiety, with James Bond facing off against several agents of SMERSH, the imaginary Russian intelligence agency. What all of these films had in common was an us-versus-them mentality, with bad communists portrayed as purely and simply evil. The one-dimensional foreign/communist/alien/blob villains took a backseat in the late 60s and 70s when we saw a definite shift in villain representation.

It was appropriate for a time of great social turbulence and soul-searching, when the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam made visible some of the not-so-perfect aspects of America, such as racism and war. This period also saw a striking decline in public trust in the government, a phenomenon that dramatically changed movie villains when outrage over the war joined outrage over the Nixon tapes. In particular, the films of the 1970s shed light on the corrupt social systems with which Americans were increasingly disillusioned. Evil politicians and public officials loomed large. The popular political thriller All the President's Men brought the Watergate scandal to the big screen in 1976.

Fictional stories also addressed institutional corruption, as in Steven Spielberg's Jaws, which depicts a corrupt mayor who cares more about income. of tourism than to prevent people from becoming shark bait. . More depictions of the evil and powerful occurred in Chinatown, in which the sinister billionaire rejects the audience's judgments of him by claiming that his evil acts were provoked by his environment. "Most people never face the fact that, in the right place and at the right time, they are capable of anything." The suggestion is that circumstances of power make the villain, rather than any innate nature. Crooked cop movies were another popular way to portray the power struggles that took place.

Serpico, based on a true story, describes a world in which police corruption is an assumed fact. "You shoot without looking? You shoot without warning, without a damn brain in your head?" In this world, bribes and brutality are the coffee and donuts of police work, to the point that Al Pacino's Serpico is distrusted because he is not willing to accept bribes. The corrupt cops were mainstays of the big screen, appearing in The Godfather, White Lightning, The French Connection and The Conversation. Apparently, the institutions had lost their presumption of good will. As a result, we began to see villains who embody the broken systems that people were angry about.

Take Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, who turned a benevolent profession into one that turns vivid individuals into drugged-out, dependent ghosts of their former selves. In an equally bleak depiction of institutionalization, East from Alcatraz turns prisoners into sympathetic heroes who fight the efforts of an evil warden. Something similar can be seen in Cool Hand Luke. In both cases, the person in charge of imposing law, order or social norms becomes the villain. The 1970s further muddied the waters by blurring the line between hero and villain until the distinctions became meaningless. These characters are portrayed as conflicted and flawed protagonists with questionable and even appalling morals.

Even when they weren't particularly powerful, the bad guys of the '70s were portrayed as conflicted individuals struggling to navigate between good and evil, or alternatively as villains of circumstance. One could argue that Breaking Bad's Walter White starts out as an antihero, a cancer-stricken chemistry teacher who begins dealing meth to help support his family, but eventually, after the fifth ruthless murder, he transforms into a villain. protagonist. In Martin Scorsese's 1976 film Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle is one of those heroic villains or villainous heroes, depending on your perspective, swinging on the pendulum from violently evil to violently good as he goes from plotting to killing. shooting a presidential candidate and then plotting. to rescue a 12-year-old prostitute.

In the previous year's Dog Day, rookie criminal and hero/villain Sonny Wortzik botches a bank robbery and spontaneously takes all the workers hostage. However, we soon learn the reason for Sonny's flirtation with crime: he needed the money to help his wife Leon undergo sexual reassignment surgery. "Sonny immediately wanted to get me the money for the operation." We discover that Sonny is a quality guy who pays his parents rent and doesn't usually go around robbing banks. He's not your past villain. Meanwhile, one particularly popular series, Star Wars, stands out as being markedly simplistic in this era of more complex villains.

It might seem to contradict our theory, as it presents a pretty basic, black and white, good versus evil paradigm, even if it goes against the grain later on with the Ewoks reminiscent of the Viet Cong. The 1980s took a hard step back from the antivillain by reveling in more cartoonish villains who directly embodied the biggest threats of the era. Effectively, it ushered in an “us versus them” paradigm by capitalizing on fears surrounding the War on Drugs. Unsurprisingly, the villains of the era wanted a piece of that sweet drug money in movies like Scarface, To Live and Die in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills Cop, and Raw Deal.

This depiction of evil drug dealers could be seen as a ying-yang response to the unlikable cops of '70s movies. Take Tango & Cash, which featured two rogue cops who are treated as irrepressible protagonists, despite participating in exactly the same violence that Serpico condemned. However, they are portrayed as the best cops in town because their unconventional tactics have cost local drug lord and rat-kissing villain Yves Perret a lot of money. Then, said boss, as if he had learned the bad cop movies of the 70s, gets them falsely framed for murder. Ultimately, the film takes a hard line on the side of the police and a “by any means necessary” model of policing. "I've been a police officer for 12 years and I think it's the best organization in the country." At the same time, the decade saw the resurgence of Cold War anxieties, with some historians even referring to the Second Cold War eras.

When President Ronald Reagan increased military spending and ended arms control, Americans rediscovered their fear of nuclear war. At the same time, the “evil Russians” had their moment in the sun with movies like Rocky IV, which remained the highest-grossing sports movie to date. 2009. He has also been accused of pure anti-Soviet propaganda due to his villain, the Soviet boxer Ivan Drago, who was decidedly not a charmer: "I must break you." The film Red Heat really won the villain jackpot in its portrayal of Soviet drug lord Viktor Rostavili, who, in a trifecta of evil, also murdered the protagonist's partner.

But arguably the clearest example of '80s Cold War villains came with 1984's Red Dawn, which imagined Soviet forces invading the United States and, worse, taking pictures in our national parks. The film's director, John Milius, explicitly saw the film as a warning to Americans to take the threat of a Soviet invasion through Central America seriously. For you alarmist, consider that Milius was the direct inspiration for this guy: "Smokey, my friend, you're entering a world of hurt." Despite some return to the "other as enemy," there are hints of 1970s skepticism toward institutions in the 1980s: when the villains aren't pure caricatures from a Nancy Reagan fever dream, we see them continue to exploit corrupt institutions for personal gain.

Gordon “Greed is Good” Gecko, for example, uses the corrupt financial industry to satisfy his own gold-plated desires. Meanwhile, Die Hard's Hans Gruber emerges as one of the. most enduring villains of the decade when he and his cronies take over a high-rise building and take hostages during a Christmas party. He operates under the guise of a terrorist taking revenge on an evil corporation "because of the Corporation's legacy of greed. Nakatomi all over the world... are about to receive a lesson in the real use of power." Curiously, his moral authority crumbles when it is revealed that, like Gordon Gekko, he is really only after hard cash. "So that's what this is about, Hans?

A fucking robbery? Why did you have to bomb the whole building, Hans?" "Well, when you steal $600, you can just disappear. When you steal $600 million, they'll find you, unless they think you're already dead." In the 1990s, American cinema swapped reds for homegrown terrorists to adapt to a decade in which domestic terrorism and “postal correction” dominated the headlines.Fittingly, in cinema, it was an era of disaffected middle-class types and “bombers next door,” a prime time slot for complex anti-villains fighting small, localized battles by radical means. Take Speed's villain, for example, Howard Payne, played by Dennis Hopper. This former bomb squad officer turned extortionist and psychopathic terrorist is partially motivated by a sweet $3.7 million, but also expresses a sense of superiority: "You still don't get it, do you.

Jack, huh? The beauty of this. A bomb is set off. That's his meaning, his purpose." That's...bananas. But it's a hint of philosophy, of motivation beyond hard cash. Howard is a more complicated hint than, say, Gruber in the sense that he genuinely (it seems) you want “meaning” and “purpose.” He just tries to get them in the worst possible way. The same goes for Kevin Spacey's extremely sadistic John Doe in the 1995 film Se7en, who sees himself as a "chosen" warrior in the crusade against everyday sin. and we tolerate it because it's common, well I'm no longer leading by example.” By the end of the decade, Arlington Road became the pinnacle of the domestic horror genre, whose villain serves the barbecue at the block party while carrying out. plans for his militant group's latest deadly attack.

He claims to be pursuing a noble and lofty goal: "I'm a messenger, Michael. I am a messenger! There are millions of us, waiting to take up arms...ready to spread the word." But within his critique of the government is also a critique of the supposed niceties of Clinton-era prosperity. "Are you happy in your suburban life? and without God?" Suburban problems also abounded in American Beauty, which presented the enemy as Lester's neighbor, the homophobic Frank Fitts, a hoarder of Nazi memorabilia, who kills Lester after he rejects his romantic advances. In In both cases, the villains feel victimized by the system or circumstances, and seek justice on their own terms.

Sometimes, these villains even have genuinely noble causes, as they criticize the systems that have wronged them. Rock, from 1995, in which Ed Harris's General Hummel, a disgraced USMC brigadier general who holds the entire city of San Francisco hostage, says: “Fifteen vx gas rockets in the heart of San Francisco.” Francisco. “You have 17 hours to deliver the money.” — demanding that the families of slain Marines be compensated for their deaths. Here we come to an interesting question: whether noble ends justify violent means. In this way, the film acts as a prelude to the same issues that current villains explore, although usually on a much broader scale.

Movies could not not be changed by an event as crucial as 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror. With the 2000s came a new shift in movie villains, as the United States faced an existential threat to its sense of security and power in the world. Fittingly, the first two installments of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy captured the popular imagination in this decade. In 2005's "Batman Begins," we see the dangerous metropolis under attack by the international terrorist group "The League of Shadows" and its leader, Raz Al Ghul, who, in a remarkably direct metaphor, wants to blow up the tallest building in Gotham. . skyscraper.

Arguably the most notable villain of the decade came, of course, with Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight. The Joker manifests himself as “the spirit of terrorism,” the embodiment “of anarchy and chaos of a particularly destructive and nihilistic nature,” as critic Douglas Kellner writes in his book Cinema Wars. “The only sane way to live in this world is without rules.” In case the comparison between the Joker and real-world terrorism wasn't clear enough, Kellner points out that the film is replete with 9/11 iconography. Nolan's film also showed us one of the two coin-flipping evildoers with the character Harvey Dent aka Two-Face.

A depiction of how confrontation with the evils of the Joker can corrupt even the noblest person, Two-Face. tries to “decide the fate of people through immersion in a completely meaningless existence of pure contingency and nihilism.” No Country for Old Men's Anton Chigurh also uses a coin to decide the fate of his victims. , self-defense, or some kind of practical goal, leading one character to comment: “The man might even say he has principles, principles that transcend money or drugs.” In fact, Chigurh is simply an active nihilist who believes that, if all morality is artificial, flipping a coin is as good a way as any to decide who lives or dies.

But you don't need a coin to affirm what is random or what doesn't make sense. Take Martin Scorsese's 2006 film The Departed, which featured the inimitable Jack Nicholson as gangster boss Frank Costello, from the ruthless murder ("She was feeling funny") to his refusal to subscribe to any rules. "I don't want my society to shape me, I want to shape my society." Frank actions seem shaped by the belief that life is meaningless. "How is your mother?" "She's about to come out." "We all are, act accordingly." Frank, who we later discover was an FBI informant, sees life as one long struggle during which any action that keeps you only one more day is completely excusable.

Of course, many other villain archetypes marked the 2000s. But if the 2000s were a time when the villain creed wasn't a creed at all, we've come a long way since then. Today, our villains are the product of an increasingly divided America bracing for impact. With trust in government, media, and religious faith at an all-time low, the villains reflect America's innate skepticism toward systems, any system, all systems! Villains simply embody overly radical and often incredibly violent solutions. The polar opposite of a 1950s villain, who represented an evildoer infiltrating an inherently good system in hopes of corrupting it, today's villains increasingly face objectively evil systems that they want to change for the better.

The only thing that makes these characters villains rather than zealous heroes is the way they carry out that change, the classic "you'd be really cool if you weren't trying to kill half the world" admonition. , Black Panther's Killmonger, played by Michael B. Jordan, has a completely legitimate critique of how the world treats its black citizens and Wakanda's passivity as they suffer. In fact, Killmonger would say that the real villains of the film are the sitting Wakandans. a stockpile of vibranium while pretending to be a defenseless Third World country. Where Killmonger's outlook becomes arguably complicated is in the media: he wants to ship weapons from Wakanda around the world and instigate a militant uprising "The world is going to start over, and this." Time, we're at the top.

The sun will never set on the Wakanda empire." Although T'Challa defeats him and stops the plan, he goes to the UN to admit Wakanda's true capabilities, and even establishes a Wakandan outreach center in Oakland, suggesting the end of the Wakandan isolationism. So Killmonger's radicalism actually brought about a less radical, but positive, policy change Then there's Mission Impossible 6's new utilitarian villain, August Walker/John Lark, who wants to destroy ⅓ of the world in hope. for the other 2/3 to come together after the attacks. Or as he says: “There can be no peace without, first, great suffering and the greater the suffering, the greater the peace.” War, who wants to kill half the world to solve the resource shortage plaguing the universe?

Or the villain Screenslaver from Incredibles 2, who uses hypnotic screens to mind control his minions? His personal problem with the system? life in consumable media has turned us all into passive and lazy observers, and that superheroes are an integral part of the equation that keeps us docile and meek. His plan to change the system: mind control superheroes, cause a huge accident, and ruin superheroes' public approval ratings. so that people learn that they have to protect themselves. What all these villains share: a largely foreign plan that appeals to our country's growing fears that the world is ruined beyond repair and that the only way to fix it is to tear it down.

In this brave new world of villainy, we can empathize with the villain's criticism of the system and his desire to change it. In this "through the looking glass" reinterpretation of villainy, the heroes are almost inevitably played lightly. flawed protectors of a status quo that no one is really happy with. In the grand scheme of things, contemporary villains seem to be an odd reflection of 1950s villains, who want to corrupt good institutions (the Killmonger types want to bring about good change in corrupt institutions), they just do it very badly. manner. At the same time, our contemporary villains seem to have merged the complexity and sometimes seeming innocence of '90s villains, while expanding on the social critiques of the '70s and opposing the nihilism of the '00s.

They believe there is a cause worth fighting for, and if they drafted

different

plans to create social change, they could re-emerge as... complex heroes. So what do you think? Are today's villains more interesting than the evildoers of the past? And what do you think is next for Hollywood's bad guys? Let us know in the comments and as always, peace!