Wretched hives of scum and villainy

Being a fiction writer, I think about villains a lot.

Of course, the proper word is "antagonist," but "villain" is a lot more evocative, bringing to mind such characters as the the dastardly Snidely Whiplash from the brilliant Adventures of Dudley Doright of the Canadian Mounties.

Left to right: Snidely Whiplash, Dudley Doright, Fair Nell Fenwick, and Dudley's horse, who is named... Horse.  They just don't write comedy like that any more.

One of the things that I've always tried to do with the villains in my own novels is to make them three-dimensional.  I don't like stories where the villains are just evil because they're evil (unless it's for comedic effect, like Mr. Whiplash).  My college creative writing teacher, Dr. Bernice Webb (one of the formative influences on my writing) told us, "Every villain is the hero of his own story," and that has stuck with me.  Even with the most awful antagonists I've written -- Lydia Moreton in In the Midst of Lions comes to mind -- I hope my readers come away with at least understanding why they acted as they did.

Of course, understanding their motivation, whether it be money, sex, power, revenge, or whatever,  doesn't mean you need to sympathize with it.  I wrote a while back about the character of Carol Last from Alice Oseman's amazing novel Radio Silence, who I find to be one of the most deeply repulsive characters I've ever come across, because what motivates her is pure sadism (all the while wearing a smug smile).

Oseman's story works because we've all known people like her, who use their power to hurt people simply because they can, who take pleasure in making their subordinates' lives miserable.  What's worse is because of that twist in their personality, a frightening number of them become parents, bosses, teachers, and -- as we're currently finding out here in the United States -- political leaders. 

The reason this whole villainous topic comes up is because of a paper published in the journal Psychological Science called "Can Bad Be Good?  The Attraction of a Darker Self," by Rebecca Krause and Derek Rucker, both of Northwestern University.  In a fascinating study of the responses of over 235,000 test subjects to fictional characters, Krause and Rucker found that people are sometimes attracted to villains -- and the attraction is stronger if the villain embodies positive characteristics they themselves share.

For example, Emperor Palpatine is ruthless and cruel, but he also is intelligent and ambitious -- character traits that in a better person might be considered virtuous.  The Joker is an essentially amoral character who has no problem killing people, but his daring, his spontaneity, his quirkiness, and his sense of humor are all attractive characteristics.  Professor Moriarty is an out-and-out lunatic -- especially as played by Andrew Scott in the series Sherlock -- but he's brilliant, clever, inventive, and fearless.

And what Krause and Rucker found was that spontaneous and quirky people (as measured by personality assessments) tended to like characters like The Joker, but not characters like the humorless Palpatine.  Despite his being essentially evil, Moriarty appealed to people who like puzzles and intellectual games -- but those same people weren't so taken with the more ham-handed approach of a character like Darth Vader.

"Given the common finding that people are uncomfortable with and tend to avoid people who are similar to them and bad in some way, the fact that people actually prefer similar villains over dissimilar villains was surprising to us," said study co-author Rucker, in an interview in the Bulletin for the Association of Psychological Science.  "Honestly, going into the research, we both were aware of the possibility that we might find the opposite."

What seems to be going on here is that we can admire or appreciate a villain who is similar to us in positive ways -- but since the character is fictional, it doesn't damage our own self-image as it would if the villain was a real person harming other real people, or (worse) if we shared the villain's negative traits as well.

"Our research suggests that stories and fictional worlds can offer a ‘safe haven’ for comparison to a villainous character that reminds us of ourselves," said study lead author Rebecca Krause.  "When people feel protected by the veil of fiction, they may show greater interest in learning about dark and sinister characters who resemble them."

Which makes me wonder about myself, because my all-time favorite villain is Missy from Doctor Who.

Okay, she does some really awful things, is erratic and unpredictable and has very little concern about human life -- but she's brilliant, and has a wild sense of humor, deep curiosity about all the craziness that she's immersed in, and poignant grief over the loss of her home on Gallifrey.  Played by the stupendous Michelle Gomez, Missy is a complex and compelling character I just love to hate.

What that says about me, I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

On the other hand, I still fucking loathe Carol Last.  I would have loved to see her tied to the railroad tracks, Dudley Doright-style, at the end of the book.

But I guess you can't have everything.

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Scum and villainy

For today's Fiction Friday, let's consider: Bad Guys.

One of the problems I find with a lot of writing is that the antagonists are completely unbelievable.  Take, for example, the Orcs in The Lord of the Rings.  I know I'm stepping on hallowed ground by even suggesting a criticism of Tolkien, but have you ever asked yourself why the Orcs were so pissed off at everyone?  Now, I'm not talking about Saruman's Orcs, who were promised rewards; but just your run-of-the-mill, cave-dwelling, dull-witted nose-picker sort of Orc who lived in the Misty Mountains and who presumably didn't give a rat's ass who won the Battle of Helm's Deep.  They somehow still hated the Elves and all the rest, just 'cuz, and were willing to die by the thousands because of it.

Well, I'm not buying it.

That kind of villain becomes almost a Snidely Whiplash caricature, mwa-ha-ha-ha-ing over the predicament of the protagonist for no obvious reason.  And while this worked to comic effect in Dudley Do-Right, it kind of falls flat in a serious story.

Stories which carry some emotional weight -- which, presumably, is what most authors are aiming for -- need to have an antagonist with as much depth as the  protagonist.  To me, the best stories are the ones where you end up feeling some understanding for the antagonist.  You still don't want him/her to win, but you think at the end, "I almost felt sorry, there, when (s)he was ripped apart and eaten by rabid weasels."

Take Darth Vader, for example.  How much less powerful would that story have been had you not felt a little sad that he had taken the path he did, when he died in Luke's arms?

A writer I know, who shall remain nameless, suffers from the worst case of One-Dimensional Villain Syndrome I've ever seen.  Every story she's ever written has an arrogant, patriarchal, middle-aged white male as the villain.  Furthermore, these APMAWMs are always guilty of victimizing and demeaning women, but the women always end up Showing Them A Thing Or Two, leaving the APMAWM in question to retreat in disarray.  It's as predictable as clockwork.  The result, unfortunately, is that besides the stories appearing completely formulaic, it leaves us wondering about what the APMAWMs do in their spare time, when they're not looking around for women to degrade.  Nothing, is my guess, because these dudes seem to have no other characteristics than (1) the required anatomical equipment and ethnic group identification, (2) arrogance, and (3) patriarchiality.  They have no other motivation, no other personality traits, and (most importantly) no sympathetic characteristics at all.

Note that I am not objecting to this on the grounds of my meeting three of the above-mentioned characteristics of APMAWMs.  Nor am I saying that men who do those sort of horrible things don't exist.  (Much though I wish that were true.)  It's the fact that their villainy is all they have; there's nothing else to them.  For what it's worth, I respond with equal eyerolling when I read a story from the 30s or 40s which features the femme fatale stereotype.  I want to find out what these women do, when they're not lounging on the tops of barroom pianos smoking cigarettes in long holders, looking for naïve young men to lure into fornication.  What do they like to eat for dinner?  How do they pay the rent?  Do they get together with friends on Saturday morning to drink coffee and discuss how the fornication went that week?  Do they subscribe to Femme Fatale Weekly?

Saying that a character is evil "just because this character is evil" isn't enough.  What motivates him/her?  Power?  Revenge?  Lust?  Greed?  And why has this become a driving motivation?  Just as no one is evil "just because," no one becomes evil "just because."  An antagonist needs a backstory, a reason for their actions.

As my college creative writing teacher put it, "Always remember that all villains are the heroes of their own stories."

And they can't be thoroughly evil.  Sauron aside, no one is 100% evil.  Even the worst of the worst have some positive traits, and those can be used to set off the bad things they do, to heighten the tragedy of their characters and actions.  Maybe the bad guy hates his neighbors, but loves his dog.  Maybe she is greedy as King Midas but never forgets to send her mother a gift on her birthday.  Maybe he's a thoroughgoing APMAWM but has given everything to the family business, so he can pass it along to his children.  And so on.

Life is full of contradictions, and good writing reflects life.  This applies to the bad guys as well as the good guys.  Antagonists should be as richly three-dimensional as protagonists -- it's one of the hallmarks of deep, interesting, and believable fiction.

*************************************

One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

 

Wretched hives of scum and villainy

Being a fiction writer, I think about villains a lot.

Of course, the proper word is "antagonist," but "villain" is a lot more evocative, bringing to mind such characters as the the dastardly Snidely Whiplash from the brilliant Adventures of Dudley Doright of the Canadian Mounties.

Left to right: Snidely Whiplash, Dudley Doright, Fair Nell Fenwick, and Dudley's horse, who is named... Horse.  They just don't write comedy like that any more.

One of the things that I've always tried to do with the villains in my own novels is to make them three-dimensional.  I don't like stories where the villains are just evil because they're evil (unless it's for comedic effect, like Mr. Whiplash).  My college creative writing teacher, Dr. Bernice Webb (one of the formative influences on my writing) told us, "Every villain is the hero of his own story," and that has stuck with me.

Of course, that doesn't mean you need to sympathize with the motivation the villain has, whether it be money, sex, power, revenge, or whatever.  For example, I find this villain one of the most deeply repulsive characters ever invented, because what motivates her is pure sadism:

But it works because we've all known people like her, who use their power to hurt people simply because they can, who take pleasure in making their subordinates' lives miserable -- and because of that twist in their personality, a frightening number of them become bosses, teachers, and political leaders.

The reason this whole villainous topic comes up is because of a study published in the journal Psychological Science this week called "Can Bad Be Good?  The Attraction of a Darker Self," by Rebecca Krause and Derek Rucker, both of Northwestern University.  In a fascinating study of the responses of over 235,000 test subjects to fictional characters, Krause and Rucker found that people are sometimes attracted to villains -- and the attraction is stronger if the villain contains positive characteristics they share.

For example, Lord Voldemort was ruthless and cruel, but he also was intelligent and ambitious -- character traits that in a better person are considered virtuous.  The Joker is an essentially amoral character who has no problem killing people, but his daring, his spontaneity, his quirkiness, and his sense of humor are all attractive characteristics.  Professor Moriarty is an out-and-out lunatic -- especially as played by Andrew Scott in the series Sherlock -- but he's brilliant, clever, inventive, and fearless.

And what Krause and Rucker found was that spontaneous and quirky people (as measured by personality assessments) tended to like characters like The Joker, but not characters like the humorless Lord Voldemort.  Despite his being essentially evil, Moriarty appealed to people who like puzzles and intellectual games -- but those same people weren't so taken with the more ham-handed approach of a character like Darth Vader.

"Given the common finding that people are uncomfortable with and tend to avoid people who are similar to them and bad in some way, the fact that people actually prefer similar villains over dissimilar villains was surprising to us," said study co-author Rucker, in an interview in the Bulletin for the Association of Psychological Science.  "Honestly, going into the research, we both were aware of the possibility that we might find the opposite."

What seems to be going on here is that we can admire or appreciate a villain who is similar to us in positive ways -- but since the character is fictional, it doesn't damage our own self-image as it would if the villain was a real person harming other real people, or (worse) if we shared the villain's negative traits as well.

"Our research suggests that stories and fictional worlds can offer a ‘safe haven’ for comparison to a villainous character that reminds us of ourselves," said study lead author Rebecca Krause.  "When people feel protected by the veil of fiction, they may show greater interest in learning about dark and sinister characters who resemble them."

Which makes me wonder about myself, because my all-time favorite villain is Missy from Doctor Who.  

Okay, she does some really awful things, is erratic and unpredictable and has very little concern about human life -- but she's brilliant, and has a wild sense of humor, deep curiosity about all the craziness that she's immersed in, and poignant grief over the loss of her home on Gallifrey.  Played by the stupendous Michelle Gomez, Missy is a complex and compelling character I just love to hate.

What that says about me, I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

On the other hand, I still fucking loathe Dolores Umbridge.  That woman deserved to get eaten, one bite at a time, by Hagrid's hippogriff Buckbeak.  Being sent to Azkaban at the end of the last movie was too good a fate for her.

*****************************

Finding a person who is both an expert in an arcane field like quantum physics, and is also able to write lucidly about it for the interested layperson, is rare indeed.  Such a person is Sean Carroll, whose books From Eternity to Here, The Particle at the End of the Universe, and The Big Picture explore such ideas as the Big Bang, the Higgs boson, and what exactly time is -- and why it seems to flow in only one direction.

In his latest book, Something Deeply Hidden, Carroll looks not only at the non-intuitive world of quantum physics, but at the problem at the heart of it -- the "collapse of the wave function," how a reality that is a field of probabilities (experimental data agrees with quantum theory to an astonishing degree on this point) somehow converts to a reality with definitive outcomes when it's observed.  None of the solutions thus proposed, Carroll claims, are really satisfying -- so physicists are left with a dilemma, a theory that has been experimentally verified to a fare-thee-well but still has a giant gaping unexplained hole at its center.

Something Deeply Hidden is an amazing read, and will fascinate you from page 1 until you close the back cover.  It will also repeatedly blow your mind in its description of a universe that doesn't behave at all like what common sense says it should.  And Sean Carroll is exactly the author to navigate these shark-infested waters.  This is a book you don't want to miss.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]