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Writing
From the Real World
Bring on the Bad
Guys
-Victor D. Infante
There
is no one in Hollywood cooler than Christopher
Lee. No one. It’s not that he’s the best
actor out there, although he’s fabulous,
but rather, it’s that he gets to play all
the good villains. Think about it. The man’s
done more than 200 films, and which ones
do you remember off the top of your head?
Darth Tyranus—a predecessor of Darth Vader—in
the new Star Wars. Saruman in Lord of the
Rings. Dracula. If you’re good at this game,
you came up with Fu Manchu.
These
aren’t just great villains, these are some
of the characters that define what a great
villain is. It’s not just that the characters
were evil, but that he made evil seductive,
as seductive as the Devil in Milton’s Paradise
Lost. As seductive as cheesecake. (Mmmm.
Cheesecake.) Lee plays the kind of bad guys
whom you kind of want root for, the kind
of baddies that make evil look not so bad.
Christopher
Lee makes evil cool., and that’s how we
like it. All of the best villains are cool,
whether it’s the classy Dracula waiting
until the conductor lowers his arms to begin
speaking to Van Helsing, or the punkish
Spike smirking in disbelief as he tells
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “I want to save
the world.” The best villains are witty,
elegant, sexy and terrifying. Terrifying
in how much of ourselves we often see in
them. If you watch Smallville, who would
you rather hang with, Clark Kent or Lex
Luthor? Hell, if you’re inclined that way,
who would you rather sleep with?
The
problem is, very few Real Life villains
are that cool. Even the flashiest of serial
killers, once the lights are on them, are
just sick little men. The charisma of a
Charles Manson seems just plain creepy beneath
the harsh light of day. Osama bin Laden?
Friends who speak Arabic tell me he speaks
persuasively, but “cool” isn’t really the
word for it. From what I gather, most real
life hitmen and assassins are grubby, unlikable
people with few social skills, very much
as depicted in Soldier of Fortune. How then,
as a writer, are you to construct a villain
worth watching?
In
a lot of ways, it comes down to looking
at the world subjectively, rather than objectively.
To quote the great Hunter S. Thompson, “It
was the built in blind spots of the Objective
rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither
into the White House in the first place.
He looked so good on paper that you could
almost vote for him sight unseen...You had
to get subjective to see Nixon clearly,
and the shock of recognition was often painful.”
Perhaps,
then, the best tact towards constructing
a villain is to search your feelings for
what makes you uncomfortable, and conversely,
for what you find seductive. You don’t need
to snort cocaine to know what it’s like
to say, crave cigarettes, or chocolate.
Likewise, you don’t have to know for a fact
whether or not the Bush Administration had
prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks to imagine
reasons why they might have. Truth is important
in journalism. In fiction, it’s what feels
true that matters. If it feels true for
your story to have a villainous politician
trying to score political points off of
tragedy, run with it! And if you don’t want
him to sound like Dubbya, why not try having
him sound like, oh, I don’t know. Pat Robertson?
Or James Carville? Or maybe the villain
is a woman who sounds seductively like Paula
Zahn? And hey! Maybe the sexy, sleek Armani
look of so many GQ photo shoots tops the
image off! Now you’re cooking with gas!
In
the real world, the biggest villains are
in Real Estate and Civil Law. They’re boring
as toast, but with a little look at the
world’s own gray, it’s people who aren’t
presented as such, you’re villains can be
much, much more.
(c)
2002, Victor D. Infante
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