Are we the baddies? Pop culture’s grand reckoning with good and evil.

 

Are we the baddies? Pop culture’s grand reckoning with good and evil.

If pop culture is any guide, we tend to be more honest with ourselves through our villains than our heroes. In crimefighters and caped crusaders, writers invest humanity’s most aspirational qualities, creating an ideal against which we can measure our own efforts to be and do good. In their antagonists, however, we see the flawed shadow-selves that we can’t help being. Jealousy, pettiness, vanity, selfishness: our commonplace mortal frailties undergird even the most megalomaniacal of super-foes.

It’s a pathology dating back to Milton’s Satan, as Donald Sutherland’s stoner professor notes in that key philosophical text, Animal House. “Was Milton telling us it’s more fun being bad than being good?” he wonders. Sure, he then declares Paradise Lost “boring and longwinded”, before losing the attention of his own bored students, but even so, his point stands: each medium matures as it goes, and although literature got there first, it has in recent decades been joined by cinema and television in recognizing that the world is more nuanced and interesting when not merely boiled down to right and wrong.

Well over a century ago, conveying good and evil could be as easy as putting one man in a white hat and another in a black hat. Proto-western The Great Train Robbery (1903) pitted a gang of outlaws against a posse of local fellers in hot pursuit, a standard good guys/bad guys setup that viewers just getting acclimatized to moving-picture technology could follow. The decades to come translated their biggest crises and anxieties to the silver screen, with villains to match. The annihilating aliens of 1953’s The War of the Worlds embodied post-second world war unease over the destruction the bombs had wrought, and the 2005 remake updated that dread for the age of 9/11 and terrorism. American Psycho’s homicidal Wall Streeter Patrick Bateman exposed the carnivorous underside of Reaganism with a decade or so of hindsight.

Elsewhere, there emerged borderline antiheroes such as Michael Corleone and his spiritual son Tony Soprano, killers we nonetheless gravitated to for their turmoil or depth or charisma. They spent the 20th century complicating Manichean poles by attracting and entrancing us, but as the 21st has progressed, brutal white men have begun to lose their luster for rising generations of viewers. The axis has tilted, a reckoning long overdue.

Just as the themes of each decade informed what new shapes that danger would take, the major arc of the 2010s – a belated interrogation of the past – has cast everything before it in a fresh light. Take Japan’s proudest reptilian son, Godzilla, a nuclear Frankenstein’s monster born of humanity’s scientific hubris during the then-ascendant atomic age. His rampage came as a warning then, but the latest crop of Hollywood-produced vehicles for the leviathan star upgrade that subtext to text. As Vera Farmiga’s scientist explains, Godzilla and his fellow beasts have emerged from the Earth’s core to extinguish the threat homo sapiens pose to the planet. She compares them to antibodies combatting a virus, but it would be more accurate to call them Earth’s biggest ecoterrorists. Squint, and their stomping's start to resemble good deeds.

More than a century on from The Great Train Robbery, the symbolism of the white and black hats has been reconfigured by HBO’s miniseries Watchmen. Its deconstructionist superhero narrative opened with a faux-silent film in which real-life African-American rough-rider Bass Reeves, the valiant Black Marshal of Oklahoma, rounds up a corrupt white-hatted sheriff who’s been stealing cattle. It is the opening salvo to a more complex perspective about the intersection between race and law enforcement, and an urgent reassessment of a longstanding brutality that most recently inspired nationwide protests this past summer.

A couple of decades and $200m after Starship Troopers, writer-director Ryan Coogler brought this dynamic to the fore with Marvel’s Black Panther in the form of Killmonger, an ominously named challenger to the throne of the secluded African nation Wakanda. He is not bent on anything like world domination, just the liberation of the black diaspora over their white oppressors through any means necessary. Killmonger’s views may be extreme, and yet from a critical-theory perspective they are not entirely beyond the pale. The meme that “Killmonger was right”, half inside joke and half revolutionary slogan, entered the common lexicon within months. He was not the first villain to claim compelling motives – The X-Men’s primary nemesis Magneto always committed his crimes in the name of empowerment for his fellow mutants at the expense of humanity – but the explicit real-world component made the tensions richer and realer.

The saying goes that the moral universe bends towards justice, a gradual trend that has grown more perceptible as modern mindsets give attention and protection to those who deserve them, and fewer second chances to those who don’t. This societal lurch in the direction of fairness carries our art with it, and poses the question of where we will go with our evolved principles. Everyone is striving to build a kinder and more merciful future, but no amount of rehabilitation or re-education can obscure the eternal truth that the villain has always been – and will always be – within us. We can cultivate a sensitivity to our transgressions, but so long as we are made of flesh and blood, we’ll keep transgressing, our evil twins on screen waiting to follow our example.