Whether you love or hate ‘em, superhero movies excel at one important element: You usually know who the good guys are.
Sure, it’s not always that simple, and I can rattle off a dozen exceptions right now. Superheroes can become supervillains (I’m looking at you, Wanda Maximoff), and villains become heroes. And sometimes, superhero stories can poke at traditional notions of morality and ask, “hey, just who is the good guy, anyway?” (Watchmen–a terrible movie based on a groundbreaking graphic novel–is a prime example.)
But for the most part, superhero stories have excelled at giving us refreshingly straightforward morality tales. We know who to cheer for. We know who to boo.
In real life, it’s not so easy to pick out heroes and villains. And evil—true to its slithery, sneaky nature—can be sometimes hard to pin down.
Several Oscar Best Picture nominees explore the nature of evil—and the frustrating reality that it doesn’t often announce itself as such. It reminds us that evil lies. It cheats. It can hide underneath a veil of loveliness, even as good sometimes comes dressed ugly. And while a lot of these Oscar noms have some serious problems (check out our full reviews, of course, before watching), their explorations of our fallen, twisted world can be pretty interesting. [Caution: Some spoilers follow.]
When it comes to showing us evil on screen, few films did it better in 2023 than The Zone of Interest. This little-seen, German-language film (and one of our Plugged In Movie Awards nominees) introduces us to Rudolf and Hegwig Höss—a couple seemingly living an idyllic family life right next door to the Auschwitz concentration camp in World War II.
Rudolf is responsible for Auschwitz’s horrors, keeping the furnaces burning with unspeakable efficiency. But in the movie, Hedwig might be even more diabolical—picking through the belongings of the dead, taking a mink coat for herself and always on the lookout for chocolate. The film never takes us into Auschwitz. We never see its atrocities (though we hear plenty of screams and gunshots). And that remove forces us to see just how removed the Höss’s are from what they’re doing. We never see a hint of conscience from either them—only a moment of panic when Rudolf realizes that he and his family are frolicking in a river where the remains of his victims are washing by.
For those who don’t believe evil—real evil—exists, The Zone of Interest reminds us that it does. And in the simple pleasures of Rudolf and Hedwig’s shared life, we’re reminded that it sometimes can live right next door—hiding behind a veil of domesticity.
But sometimes that evil comes even closer. That’s what we see in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. The story dramatizes another true story—one based on the mysterious (and not-so-mysterious) deaths that took place within Oklahoma’s Osage Nation in the 1920s.
Ernest Burkhart works for a wealthy land baron, William “King” Hale and is married to a rich Osage woman, Mollie. And while Ernest seems to care for his wife on some level, his real allegiance comes down to money. For years, Ernest and Mollie live in what would appear to be domestic tranquility—children coming along at regular intervals and Ernest seemingly devoted to Mollie as she contracts a mysterious illness. And while Mollie was well aware of dangers outside her front door, she didn’t expect the dangers in her own bedroom.
The evil in Anatomy of a Fall is even more elusive. This French film introduces itself as something of a murder mystery—and that it is. Samuel Voyter is certainly dead—the victim of a fall outside his own chalet. And murder is certainly suspected: His wife, Sandra, is the most obvious culprit. And the mystery? It lingers to the credits and beyond.
“I’m not a monster,” says Sandra (played by Sandra Hüller, who also plays Hedwig in The Zone of Interest), and she might be telling the truth. Then again, she might not. And while that uncertainty might not lend itself to a satisfying conclusion, it feels all-too-true to this fallen world. In The Zone of Interest, the evil is, ultimately, obvious—no matter how many flowers it hides behind. In Anatomy of a Fall, we just don’t know.
A hint of that uncertainty plagues Robert Oppenheimer in the movie titled after him. He’s working on the atomic bomb—in part because he recognizes the evil America and her allies are facing in World War II. “I don’t know if we can be trusted with such a weapon,” he says at one point. “But I know the Nazis can’t.” But throughout the film, he wrestles with the consequences of the thing he helped invent. He ushered in the Nuclear Age—a heritage he struggled with on some level for the rest of his life.
The bomb itself is not evil. It’s just a collection of stuff, brought together just so. But the people who wield it? Oppenheimer knows that in the hands of the wrong people, terrific evil could be wrought. In one scene, he quotes the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
We’ve seen some examples of how evil can hide behind a smiling face. But sometimes the opposite can be true.
In The Holdovers, plenty of students at the exclusive Barton Academy see history professor Paul Hunham as evil. He berates them. He forces extra work on them with little provocation. He even smells bad. But when one of those students—Angus Tully—is forced to spend Christmas break at Barton with Mr. Hunham, Angus sees a different side to the man. Sure, he can be clueless. He can even be mean. And yeah, he does, literally, stink. But he can be compassionate, too, and surprisingly giving and even sacrificial when the needs arise. Hunham isn’t the one-dimensional ogre that Angus initially assumed he was. He’s a person—weak and flawed, yes, but with something better lurking underneath it all.
A little like us, right?
Truth is, evil is a part of us all. We can be selfish. Rude. Duplicitous. Sometimes the pain we’ve experienced in our lives has twisted us. And sometimes, we’re just jerks. And I hope I’m not the only one here who remembers moments where we should’ve done better—but didn’t.
Evil may slither sneakily through many Oscar nominees—but it slithers through our own hearts, too. Sometimes, like Hedwig Höss, we might’ve seen evil in our own spheres and did nothing to stop it. We, like Ernest Burkhart, might’ve hurt someone we loved.
The good news? That’s not all there is in us. God made us, after all, and He designed us to be better than we sometimes are. Moreover, He gave us the ability—the free will—to fight against the warping pain we’ve experienced and our own worst inclinations. With His help and His grace, we can be better.
I think most of us have sometimes been the villain in someone else’s story. But we never have to be. We can don the white hat. We can ride to the rescue. We can show someone the beauty and glory and goodness that God asks us to show—to be His pierced hands, His pierced feet.
And unlike 2023’s Oscar-nominated movies, our stories are still going. The credits haven’t rolled. We can make the next act a glorious one.
3 Responses
Yet another well written article published by PluggedIn online.
Excellent piece, Paul. That moral simplicity is one of the reasons superhero movies are so insidious. They train us to see the world in black-and-white, us-vs.-them terms, which is not ideal in a culture as polarized as ours.
You spotted a thread of moral complexity — which is different from moral relativism — running through a lot of last year’s most acclaimed movies. Complex characters help us think about good and evil in a more nuanced way. They humble us and invite us to examine ourselves from another perspective. Are we the villains in another person’s story? Can we change that perception while staying true to our own values?
William Faulkner said the only thing worth writing about was “the human heart in conflict with itself.” The same concept applies to movies.
Good article.