Making a Good Bad Guy
Take your average hero. I don’t care if it’s Neo or Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter or Batman. Now set him down in a peaceful, quiet town and watch what happens.
What happens?
Neo continues to work at his day job, while doing small-time hacking on the side.
Luke works on the farm and on weekends races stock cars on the local dirt track. He keeps talking about joining the air force, but there’s always some piece of machinery on the farm that needs his mechanical skills.
Harry Potter continues to study magic and is one of the brightest pupils in his class.
Batman doesn’t even exist. Bruce Wayne is the founder and CEO of one of the largest corporations in the world. He does his job, donates to charities (including the Fraternal Order of Police), and sleeps soundly at night.
Wait… isn’t there something missing?
Damn right there is.
Heroes are easy. They’re a dime a dozen. It’s the villain that makes the story. Without Hans Gruber, John McLane is just a wise-cracking cop with relationship problems. Neo is lost in the Matrix. Luke Skywalker is just a farmer who likes to drive fast. Harry Potter is a nerd with funny glasses who studies magic. Batman doesn’t even exist without a villain to cause Bruce Wayne to put on tights when he gets home from his day job.
The tricky part is, what makes a good bad guy? Or, what makes a compelling villain?
It’s not enough to just be evil. There’s evil all over the place unworthy of being a foil to one of the above heroes. Does a villain have to be strong? Smart? Cunning? What is it that makes us love to hate them? Or hate to love them, as the case may be.
Let’s look at some of the greatest movie villains of our time.
One of the most memorable movie villains ever started out as a whiny teenager who thought the world owed him something. He was seduced by a power he didn’t understand, and crippled while losing a fight to his former teacher. He wasn’t particularly smart. He was just seduced by power. His name? Darth Vader.
Another of the most memorable movie villains of recent times is The Joker. Whether portrayed by Mark Hamill, Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger, this guy is a lunatic. He is driven by a love of chaos. He isn’t particularly intelligent, just cunning, crafty, crazy like a fox. He isn’t attractive or strong. But he drives the Batman nearly insane with his clever morality traps.
My favorite movie villain isn’t even a person. He/It is a computer. Or, more correctly, a Heuristically programmed Algorithmic computer. You can call “him” HAL 9000, or just HAL for short. HAL isn’t necessarily evil. He isn’t seduced by power or driven by greed. HAL is just trying to stay alive. He’s basically just Johnny 5 (from the movie Short Circuit) with an attitude. HAL is a computer that has developed sentience and is trying to keep from being, in Johnny 5′s words, “disassembled.”
So, what makes HAL, or any of these villains for that matter, so great? So memorable? So… hero-worthy?
For one, they all have extremely engaging personalities. So, is that the key to writing a good villain? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit to you one Agent Smith. This guy has less personality than the box that my breakfast cereal was packed in. Nope. It isn’t personality. Or at least, not entirely personality.
Are you ready? Do you want me to give you that magic ingredient for creating the best villains?
Well, I don’t have it.
That’s right. I don’t know exactly how to do it. It’s not a precise formula. It’s more of a guy thing. It’s more of the interaction between the hero and “his” villain. Like Ledger’s Joker says, they “complete” each other.
I can tell you one thing that all of these villains have in common, though. To their respective heroes, they’re all completely alien. No, I don’t mean they come from outer space, though to be fair, Darth Vader does. But that’s beside the point. What I mean is, the villain is something that the hero, the protagonist of the story, cannot relate to. The villain’s drives and motivations cannot be comprehended by the hero. Sure, Luke Skywalker knows what power is, and definitely comes to understand how a person can be seduced by the promise of it, but until he learns that he is a simple farmer with a taste for adventure. John McLane has arrested his share of criminals, but he has never been in such close proximity to someone so truly mad and devious. Harry has no concept of how someone can be as twisted and evil as Voldemort. Bruce Wayne has to never encountered a force of chaos quite like The Joker. Neo begins by not even knowing that the Matrix exists and must learn the nuances of the program that is Agent Smith in order to even consider eradicating it. And Dave? The protagonist of Kubrick’s masterpiece can program a computer, but has no concept of what it would be like to actually be one, and be threatened with destruction. Ironically, in sequels, Dave and HAL form a symbiotic relationship of part man – part computer.
Is that the magic trick? Alienness? Is that even a word? No, it’s just a potential first step to creating a memorable… a worthy villain.
What do you think? What are your favorite, your most memorable villains? What do you think are key ingredients that go into cooking up a good villain?
