The Victim Villain: How Should We Portray Evil?

Ah… the misunderstood villain. The guy who murders and steals and blows things up because he had a rough childhood. It’s becoming a bit of a cliche these days.

Can horrible life circumstances change personalities and behaviors? Sure. Every writer knows that your villain must have a backstory of some sort, because a guy who just walks around doing bad stuff doesn’t make sense. Your villain has to have a motive, after all.

But, as with many things, our culture takes this too far and ends up pinning the villain’s bad deeds on his past. The past itself is at fault — not the villain, for reacting to the past the way he did.

We know adverse circumstances will bring out the true nature of a man. He will either persevere and emerge stronger, or he will succumb and emerge defeated or bitter. Our culture forgets that. It even takes this philosophy of victimhood beyond the fictional and into our criminal justice system, claiming that murderers and rapists need ‘rehabilitation’ instead of death.

‘Oh no, guys, I shouldn’t kill him. I’ll get rehabilitated. *shivers of fear*’

Here’s a question for you: was Hitler misunderstood? Was he the result of a faulty social structure, in need of rehabilitation?

What about Sauron? The very concept seems like something out of a Babylon Bee sketch — the evil dark lord in spirit form lying on his therapist’s couch and getting asked about his parents. It’s ridiculous!

But then, if some villains, historical or not, aren’t evil because of some troubled childhood, why are they like that?

We Christians already know the answer: sin. Original depravity. The Fall. Evil.

Susan Wise Bauer wrote on the topic of evil for Christian authors in her Three Faces of Evil: Christian Writers and the Portrayal of Moral Evil. She sums up the current worldview of our culture very well:

“Evil is real, but we are all its victims.”

Have we seen that ideal reflected in our culture today? ABSOLUTELY. Evil, as our culture defines it, is the result of an error somewhere in the societal structure, and it’s up to government schools and propaganda to hammer defectors back into shape. We must rebut this message with truth, and we must also be careful not to let it infect our writing. To loosely paraphrase a Flannery O’Connor quote, sin is not a sickness, but a choice — a choice your villain made. He opened himself up to anger, to bitterness, to hate, to pride, to any vice, and let it rule him. Bauer continued by aptly stating that, “Satan does walk the earth, but he goes only where he is welcomed.” When any real person, or your villain, opens the door, Satan slips in and takes up residence. You can read C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters and see this illustrated vividly through fiction.

Too often in our culture today, villains are depicted as victims, and evil is swept aside as a mere error. But that is not how evil operates. There is such a thing as a supernatural, transcendant evil with a purpose beyond mere antagonistic destruction. That evil is out to corrupt each and every one of us, and due to our sinful natures, our doors are open.

I personally enjoy drawing comparisons between theory and beliefs, and how they are actually portrayed in entertainment. LotR got evil, sin, and guilt right — and so did Marvel early on, more or less. Frankly, Civil War dealt with the themes of guilt and evil in a more thought-provoking way than any film I’ve seen to date, and merely through the use of a few poignant lines. (credit to IMDb and Marvel Studios)

Bucky Barnes : What’s gonna happen to your friends?

Captain America : Whatever it is… I’ll deal with it.

Bucky Barnes : I don’t know if I’m worth all this to you.

Captain America : What you did all those years, it wasn’t you. You didn’t have a choice.

Bucky Barnes : I know… but I did it.

This wasn’t the only example, though it’s one of the more prominent ones. Still, we see Tony and Wanda troubled by the deaths they’ve caused, and even Vision struggling with his conscience.

Marvel, bad as it has become now, couldn’t deny guilt back then. We all feel guilt when we do something we know is wrong.

How do we know it’s wrong?

Even if we aren’t Christian or pretend not to adhere to a moral code, there’s just something in us that differs right from wrong, though sometimes it can be skewed or we can ignore it to fulfill our selfish desires. That something is a conscience, a reminder that we aren’t just random blobs of cells. After all, if we are just blobs of cells, why not do whatever the heck we want, killing and taking and cheating to further ourselves and our pleasure?

But these few lines stretch deeper. Was Bucky guilty for the deeds he did? Does he deserve to be punished?

Cap — and the fans — will argue that he wasn’t in control of his own mind. It’s clearly what the filmmakers want you to think. But Tony’s evident pain still shows that what Bucky did caused grief and hurt.

It’s an interesting dillema, but it can be brushed aside because, of course, it’s fictional. But still… as these lines show, Bucky is intended to be thought of as a victim.

Steve Rogers : Are you sure about this?

Bucky Barnes : [going into cryogenic stasis]  I can’t trust my own mind.

T’Challa : Your friend and my father, they were both victims. If I can help one of them find peace…

Bucky, they tell us, is a victim. And frankly, there’s genuine evidence that he is. He never opened the door for any evil — it all just happened to him.

But we live in the real world where Russians can’t program minds. We also live in a real world where we have souls. That’s a topic never dealt with in the Marvel films, because, of course, they don’t believe in God… (supposedly Steve does, if his line in the first Avengers film means anything, but nonetheless the filmmakers have control.)

The point is that our culture can’t explain away guilt, hard as they try to rig a situation so that the person ‘shouldn’t’ feel guilt. But why should we feel bad, according to them? If we’re a result, it’s the society who should feel bad — and of course, if morality is a social construct altogether — why feel bad about anything? If there is no God and no sin, there should be no guilt, no feeling of shame before a Higher Good Deity or sense of unworth and wrongdoing if there is no Moral Standard. And yet we feel guilt. This is something that materialist utopian culture can’t explain.

Furthermore, to follow their theories to an end, if there is no sin, then there is no guilt in the sense of the law. One cannot be guilty — responsible of any wrongdoing, and one can certainly not be deserving of death for it.

The recent Blue Beetle film displayed this mindset in abject obviousness. I hated this movie. Sure, it had flashy special effects and some humor, but there was absolutely no story. It was your cookie-cutter superhero story with an overwhelming dose of political correctness thrown in. There are two villains — the classic white oppressor business owner who descends practically into madness by the end of the film, and the more personal villain to the hero: Carapax. Through the use of a few flashbacks, we see that he was orphaned in his early childhood due to some unknown war, then taken in by the aforementioned white rich woman and turned into her general. He murders innocents without hesitation — including the hero’s father — and paves the path for his boss’s less-than-legal dealings.

But how does DC treat this?

In stereotypical form.

Jaime, the hero, is prevented from killing Carapax by the Scarab — the semi-alive alien thing that takes up occupancy on his spinal cord. Obviously, they’re infering that the more intelligent alien being is taking the ‘enlightened’ path. Why shouldn’t Jaime kill Carapax? The filmmakers answer that Jaime and Carapax are the same: oppressed members of underprivledged groups… so they’re exceptions who should be excused for their deeds or have them whitewashed over. They even admit this! See this statement from director Ángel Manuel Soto:

However, regardless of his past, Carapax absolutely deserved to die. So do all murderers. If our society just let murders go, everything would descend into chaos. And if murderers could just be pardoned without any sort of atonement, or have their debts just go ‘poof,’ then justice is broken and worthless.

Evil, then, completely loses its bite. At the same time, so does goodness. The writer knows how two opposites put beside one another highlight each other all the better. Therefore, when the line between good and evil is smudged, or even erased completely, there becomes no distinction between the two, and the beauty of the good and the darkness of the bad diminish. Your hero will not seem good if he is not opposing a villain who is bad. And if your villain is not bad, then your hero won’t appear all that good.

Now, why does our culture hate affirming evil, guilt, and sin? Simple. We don’t like responsibility. We don’t like guilt. We don’t like pain. We, due to our sinful nature, would like to do whatever we want, however we want, and not feel bad for it.

But frankly, this is the coward’s way out, especially for your hero. Frodo worked to overcome evil; he didn’t sit down, surrender to the ring, and play the ‘victim’ card. Gollum, now, tries to justify his murder and ease his guilt, as we see over and over when he says that it was his birthday, and the ring was his present, and so on and so forth. The LotR films represent Gollum as a wretched, sniveling creature, eliciting the proper disgust out of the viewers as they watch him whine about Sam’s treatment and his poor head. We should not be encouraged to sympathize with a villain who acts the victim. We wouldn’t stand for a hero who gave up and became a victim, now, would we? Characters like Jaime, who whine about how they’re oppressed, are disagreeable to us because they don’t buck up, pull together some courage and work ethic, and do something about their situation.

So what sort of characters should we be crafting?

Characters who are true to human nature and to the state of fallenness. Villains who commit evil deeds out of choice — because they always have a choice (again, Russian mind-control excepted.) And conversely, your hero should be the one who makes the choice to rise above whatever happened to him and do good. Heroes aren’t meant to stay in the Pit of Despair — the creators of the story circle/hero’s journey knew this, and so does anyone who knows anything about the various, but similar, types of story structure. The whole point of a story with a positive arc is overcoming — stretching beyond the past and whatever griefs and grudges remain there, and becoming a new person. This also means accepting responsibility. No cheap redemption. Justice must be served, consequences must result and be accepted.

The ‘misunderstood’ villain is a dangerous pitfall. Watch your writing, my friends, and pay attention to how the culture will try to worm their agenda into your mind. Stand for truth. There is goodness and there is evil. Never settle for anything that says otherwise. There is redemption — but there is justice. Don’t forget that we weren’t just absolved of our sins. Jesus paid the price, the price that must be paid for justice to be fulfilled. Our God is a just God, and all deeds have consequences, both in this life and in the next. These are fundamental tenets of reality and of being a human, and if we ignore this or pretend otherwise in our craft, we are weaving a lie.

Thanks for enduring with me, folks. I know that when I wax philosophical it can be a little tedious. Nonetheless, we need to know the weapons the Enemy uses and how to combat them. I’d love to hear any thoughts you have on this subject. Have you seen other instances of the victim villain in popular entertainment? Any other points or rebutting arguments to add? Add a comment.

Now then, ’til next time. Fare thee well. Live long and prosper.