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Wednesday, November 16, 2016

The best of villains

I can't wait to see the movie 'Love and Friendship,' based on Jane Austen's 'Lady Susan' novel, featuring a woman you'll love to hate.  Then I look at my favorite movies: 'Ever After,' and Disney's animated 'Beauty and the Beast,' and I begin to see a pattern: why are all the best villains narcissists? Is it just me or are there villains suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder peppering our favorite stories old and new?  Jane Austen has one in almost every book (Lady Catherine De Bourgh anyone?).  The Bronte sisters aren't immune (Jane Eyre's aunt and the husband in 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall').  Am I just attracted to such personages because of my own history or is there something so captivating and astonishing about such personalities that they have mystified storytellers and their audiences for years beyond count?  I will argue it is the latter, as the villains that are portrayed are fascinating in the extreme, drawing us in, before revealing their true colors and causing us to flinch back in loathing, but still a little regretful when at last the hero is triumphant and justice is served.  Why be just evil when you can be a narcissist?

They are captivating, fascinating, and eerily familiar.  We love them yet we loathe them all at the same time.  Even if they take the official diagnosis out of the Manual of Psychological Disorders (or whatever it is called), the condition is ancient and will continue on into the foreseeable future, whether modern psychologists choose to recognize it or not.  But if you want a truly memorable villain, afflict them with a little narcissism and see what happens.  Take the Star Wars villains for example.  While the mask clad Darth Vader is unarguably cool, most of the others, including the young Anakin, are pretty much not worth mentioning, but Emperor Palpatine endures while various of his minions last for half a movie and then we forget them; there is a reason this guy made it through six movies, a feat rivaled only by a certain odd couple of comedic droids.

The stepmother in 'Ever After' is my mother and Gaston from 'Beauty and the Beast' might be my father.  The writers of those characters did it to perfection, and the portrayal of each I consider some of the best acting I've ever seen.  Rather than just a cookie cutter 'evil villain,' the narcissist is complex, charming, and utterly reprehensible.  Why can't the new Star Wars villain be like that?  Emo-whiner boy really annoys me (just like grandpappy!), but then he is just another minion, we don't know much about the new Palpatine-esque figure (besides that he looks like Gollum); could he somehow have acquired the One Ring?  With all these alternative reality/parallel universe things going on, it just might happen.  Now there's a fan-fiction crossover novel worth reading!

Even Tolkien's Dark Lord (the one villain in all of literature whom we never really meet) is of that persuasion.  How else would Sauron fascinate us so, though we never get to meet the guy?  Now that is master storytelling.  So with all these literary narcissistic villains, I begin to think we all must be aware of the condition and even understand it, even if we haven't had much personal experience: it is strangely familiar, even if we've never personally encountered it or thought much of it.  It is wired into us, from the very first Story, 'ye can be gods,' it is just some of us take it far more seriously than others.  For it is the true narcissist that says, 'can be?  I am!'  Which is the very heart of villainy, and why it tempts and fascinates and repels all at the same time, for at our deepest level, it calls to each of us.

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