The Vanishing Villain
Here There Be Dragons.
Back in the day, that wasn't a good thing. Dragons were thought of as nasty, loathsome critters, all too ready to torch the nearest village and munch on its residents. The Western mind believed the dragon to be a beast from the abyss—an infernal creature symbolic of everything wrong with both the natural and supernatural world. They were, simply, evil.
Turns out, they were just misunderstood.
In DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon, a Viking lad named Hiccup befriends an injured dragon he names Toothless. The creature ends up being the best friend a boy could hope for: a fire-breathing Lassie with wings. Through Toothless, Hiccup learns that dragons aren't the monsters he always thought them to be.
"Everything we knew about you guys is wrong," Hiccup says.
Hiccup's desire to understand his adversaries—and, in the end, his ability to domesticate them—is the basis for a grand fable fit for our times, with life messages straight out of our best preschools. Listen. Be patient. Try to understand what you're scared of. Think before you thwack.
'Course, if Toothless had come from a more medieval mindset—more evil, if you will—he would've eaten Hiccup, pausing only to spit out his shoes. And the film would've been named, perhaps, How to Eat Your Human.
Not that that could even happen in a mainstream movie these days. Truth is, it's hard to find a bonafied villain anywhere in entertainment now. Oh, there are plenty of characters who are "quirky" or "misunderstood" or perhaps even "unpleasant to be around due to unresolved issues." But most seem more in need of a good shrink or hug than a judgment-laden slapdown.
Which begs the question: Are there still villains out there that can't be helped with a hug? Are there dragons too dangerous to tame?
Villainy, Old School
We all like to think of ourselves as the "good guys." It comes as naturally to us as squinting in the sun. We, after all, know all our own motivations—and those motivations excuse (or at least mitigate) our actions when we stumble. "We may do bad things," we tell ourselves, "but we're not bad people."
Sometimes, we might well amend that sentence with the words, "Not like those other guys." Because the blame game comes just as naturally to us. After all, if we're the good guys in our own lifelong stories, those who oppose us must be (by default) the bad guys. They cut us off in traffic. They snap at us in budget meetings. They break up with us or divorce us. And as such, we need not bother to understand their motives or minds. We're the good guys, remember? We must be right.
And so, we're often led to dehumanize our enemies. We demonize our adversaries. We kill our dragons.
It's this attitude that led to several generations of pretty unambiguous films. Cowboys vs. Indians. Cops vs. robbers. Americans vs. everyone else. It wasn't just the films' images that were black and white. Those stark colors were part of the very ethos of entertainment.
Was it right or wrong, this line in the sand that divided the good from the bad? The white hats. The black ones. Did we need more gray in our diets? Or would softer tones just confuse everybody?
A Kinder, Gentler Bad Guy
"Hardly anybody is pure evil or pure good," Dragon co-director Chris Sanders told Plugged In. It's one of the reasons why he pitched the idea of Lilo & Stitch, featuring a monstrously misunderstood alien, to Disney. "I felt like, Why couldn't the 'villain' be the hero?" he said. "There's really no villain in the film. It ends with him being the good guy. And I like that."
While we may all think of ourselves as the good guys, the truth is clearly more complex. And as we grow ever more truthful with ourselves (in this unremittingly self-aware age), we grow to understand that the war between good and evil isn't just a cosmic one, but a personal one.
Christians, perhaps, have a head start in grappling with this concept. We are, after all, taught that we're not just inhabitants of a fallen world, but products of it—flawed beings perpetually prone to failure. Secularists wouldn't put things in quite those terms. But they, too, would say we're creations of our environments. Our upbringings, our experiences, our traumas all have a massive impact on how we act and react. In other words, there are reasons for our misbehavior—mitigations, if you will. They don't necessarily excuse our actions, but they do make them, perhaps, more understandable.
The result of this cultural journey? More and more, we see our movie screens and television sets stuffed with flawed antiheroes (Jack Bauer) and sympathetic bad guys (Tony Soprano), all offering cogent commentary on the schisms within us all. Rarely anymore do we see the prototypical villain, and when we do, it's often only for the first half of the story.
In Disney's Meet the Robinsons, we also meet "Bowler Hat Guy," a villain straight out of a Victorian melodrama: black cape, thin mustache, pallid features. He's a terrible human being, right? No, just a misunderstood orphan, it turns out. The guy's black hat (Doris) is the real evildoer. And she's not even human.
Everywhere we turn, we're given motives for madness. This evildoer was abused. That one's just doing his job. He's crazy. He's been misled. He—
Here there be dragons, we're told, and they are us. Be understanding and feed them fish.
Fair enough. I can spare a few fish on my soaring salary as a writer. But what do we all do when a truly real evil comes around? And would we even recognize it if it did?
The Scaly Truth
"Monsters once served an important purpose," wrote Jonah Goldberg for the Los Angeles Times. "The word's Latin and French roots meant a grave warning or omen. Monster stories once told us that evil exists and that we shouldn't assume all motives are good and kind."
How ironic, Goldberg suggests, that we now use monsters to teach our children their ABC's on Sesame Street. Dragon should've ended, he argues, with the Vikings climbing aboard their newly domesticated lizards and viciously pillaging Europe—"Because that's really what Vikings do."
So in our struggle to better understand and define evil, we may have inadvertently rendered ourselves more vulnerable. Because there is evil out there—evil beyond the foibles of a faltering will. Or, at least, evil that can't be excused because of it.
In the 2008 blockbuster The Dark Knight, we meet a dragon—one of the very few we see onscreen anymore. We're given no backstory for the Joker (though he tells a few himself), no motive. As the good folk in his wake desperately try to figure out what makes him tick, the Joker goes his mad, merry way, killing and destroying at will. His adversaries, at first, want to understand him … does he need a hug? A shrink? How can we destroy the evil and save the man? Only Alfred, at first, sees that the man is evil.
"Some men," he says, "just want to watch the world burn."
In just a few short decades, that's become an odd concept for the modern mind. We live in a world of unfamiliar things. Some—most, I'd like to believe—are just that: unfamiliar. We learn about them, we grow more familiar with them and, in so doing, we rightfully lose our fear. But every now and then we meet a monster.
Let us hope that when we do, we remember how to recognize it.