Villains (2 of 6)

The following is related in many ways to the preceding crumb, but these ways do not immediately reveal themselves.

For several years, I've been working on a series of genre novels. It doesn’t matter what genre. It seems to me that all genres (except perhaps romance) have this in common: the plot revolves around a struggle between protagonists and antagonists. I would almost say that what distinguishes the “literary” novel from other genres is that it lacks this struggle. A literary novel may have antagonistic characters (the step-mother in Jane Eyre, Mr. Wickham in Pride and Prejudice, Helene and Anatole in War and Peace), but the plot does not turn on the struggle against them; it turns, rather, on struggles amongst and within the protagonists. The question is what Jane and Mr. Rochester will do with their affection for each other; whether Mr. Darcy will stop being a prig and Elizabeth will allow her understanding of him to change; how Natasha will go on after her disgrace; etc. The antagonists are merely catalysts or side-acts to the real action.

This is, in fact, how real life works. We make an enemy, for a time that enemy may be a significant figure in our lives (though usually this is only because they are also our lover, our parent, the object of our desire, etc.); then we part ways or we make peace. Our lives are about other things, in which our enemy may have played a role, but hardly the central one. And this non-centrality of our enemy allows us to see them as human and finite. With time, often, we forgive them; or we forget them; at the very worst, we go on seeing them as a crazy asshole; but even this finally, with enough distance, turns to pity.

But it is not possible to take such a view of the antagonist of a genre narrative, the antagonist who is not merely an enemy but an adversary, whose aims (be they murderous or merely dishonorable) are so threatening that it becomes the whole focus of the story we are in to stop him. Of such an antagonist, we must have a different view. He is not a finite human being, but something infinite, because his significance, for us, for our story, is absolute. Whether he is a serial killer in a thriller or an evil wizard or a high-school bully, he is a version of Satan.

What I mean is that such a narrative, which depends on such a figure, always refers to a Manichaean morality of supernatural proportions.

Attempts are often made, e.g. in more “high-brow” Hollywood thrillers, to “humanize” these characters, to give them a backstory, passions and affections of their own, but such efforts always dissolve in the end, because the narrative structure is fundamentally opposed to it. Thus, to take a silly example, in The Dark Knight Rises, the villain Bane is provided with a great deal of personal majesty, a compellingly dark ethical worldview, and immense personal suffering through which he seems to have earned all this; and yet, in the final action, all of his moral and psychological complexity must vanish, because the struggle against him drowns all moral nuance, all psychological reality; and all his majesty must vanish too, because all his well-laid plans must be overthrown and he must be soundly defeated.

For all its faults, this story-structure is preternaturally compelling. As Hollywood discovered at the end of the 1970s and has never since forgotten, it holds a power to enthrall beyond all other story-structures. But why? What is this vision of life that it presents us with, where struggle is always clearly defined, where courage consists only in making the decision that is clearly right, so that courage is no different from strength? Why do we find such patent fiction so appealing? It seems too easy to say that, in a world of relentless moral ambiguity, we long for simple choices. Or that in a world where nothing seems definitely worth doing, we long for a project whose urgency rises to supernatural definiteness. Clearly, the function of such stories is to pacify, to lull; and clearly this— passivity, lulling— is just what our civilization wants from its stories. And yet, I think there is something more complicated going on here.

Over and over, in the course of writing these novels, the figure of a pure, anointed evil seems to call to me from the shadows of my unformed thoughts, as if I thought it were the secret way to recapture some solid significant feeling that I long for but cannot put a name to. It seems to glitter there in the shadows— that darkness, that ancient evil… and yet, if ever I open the door, if ever I invite it out of the shadows into the narrative, it shows itself a dull, false, empty thing, the very opposite of the feeling I was dreaming of.

It’s as if, in the struggle against an adversary, we seek a return to the epic mode, to a realm in which self-reflection can finally cease and action and speech take on the immediacy that Kierkegaard and others have suggested that it possessed in the ancient world. But the means are invalid, the project fails. It is not that self-reflection returns unbidden; it is that, in its absence, something far more dishonest and stupid appears. What emerges is not the light-heartedness and vividness of the classical world, nor its strange moral complexity, nor its unconstrained and yet utterly unsentimental emotionality, its access to tears without a drop of schmaltz, nor yet its grasp of simple human passion—all of which, I think, are what we unwittingly are seeking—only an addictive pageantry of a lurid pose-striking and meaningless excitement.

But the question remains how to tell a story.