For the sake of substance, I'm going to include the Wikipedia villain page here. And for the sake of being thorough, I'll also include the Wikipedia antagonist page as well.
And in case you're the lazy type, you may take my summarized definitions here. The antagonist is simply the character, characters, or force that provides opposition to the protagonist, who is basically the story's main character. A villain is basically an antagonist that's evil in some sense of the word.
I'll limit examples to villains from films, but I'll step out of those boundaries slightly in one instance. Anyways...
I've glanced at The Online Film Critics Society top 100 villains of all time, which seems to not have been updated since October 1st, 2002. But we need a reference point, so we'll use it anyway. For the purposes of simplicity, I'll just copy and paste the top 20 right here:
1 Star Wars etc. - Darth Vader - David Prowse/James Earl JonesI hadn't seen all these films, so I'll just comment on what I can.
2 Silence of the Lambs, The etc. - Hannibal Lecter - Anthony Hopkins
3 Psycho etc. - Norman Bates - Anthony Perkins
4 Die Hard - Hans Gruber - Alan Rickman
5 Blue Velvet - Frank Booth - Dennis Hopper
6 Night of the Hunter - Rev. Harry Powell - Robert Mitchum
7 2001: A Space Odyssey - HAL 9000 - Douglas Rain (voice)
8 Wizard of Oz, The - The Wicked Witch of the West - Margaret Hamilton
9 Nosferatu - Graf Orlock - Max Schreck
10 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - Khan Noonien Singh - Ricardo Montalban
11 Clockwork Orange, A - Alex - Malcolm McDowell
12 Usual Suspects, The - Keyzer Soze - (mystery/actor's name withheld)
13 Third Man, The - Harry Lime - Orson Welles
14 Schindler's List - Amon Goeth - Ralph Fiennes
15 Halloween - Michael Myers (aka The Shape) - Nick Castle
16 Batman (1989) - The Joker - Jack Nicholson
17 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Nurse Ratched - Louise Fletcher
18 Manchurian Candidate, The - Mrs. Iselin - Angela Lansbury
19 Jaws - The shark - himself
20 Se7en - John Doe - Kevin Spacey
Starting at the top is none other than Darth Vader. I'm not entirely sure he's the greatest, but he's definitely an iconic and solid villain. Sure, there are plenty of movies where the villain is the head of some enemy government or military, and that's a serviceable villain. But Vader excels because he's much more. Grand Moff Tarkin in the same movie represents the typical military strategist trying to impose the will of the Imperial Forces over the Rebel Alliance and our plucky heroes. But that's too typical. Peter Cushing played the part well, but his part was basically the token figurehead of the already established organization that provides antagonistic counterpoint to the film's protagonists. What sets Vader apart is not just the fact that he uses the Dark Side of the Force, but that he's less than human. By today's standards, he would be a walking cripple with an iron lung. He doesn't even have his own voice, can't breathe unfiltered air, and has no empathy. He's both literally and figuratively inhuman, yet he walks, talks, and interacts with other humans in the same manner they do.
As I write this, I'm reminded of Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith from The Matrix, also a pretty good villain. To summarize, the film's protagonists are Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, and whoever else are the rebelling, awakened humans who seek to free the farmed humans from the oppressive clutches of the machines, robots, and computer programs (the last one being key to the whole antagonist part of the film). Agent Smith is not only the program representative of the machines, antagonizing Morpheus and company, but he (it?) has his (its) own renegade agenda which threatens the goals of the machines. Now, it's been a while since I saw it, but if I remember correctly, I think the program wants its own independent existence or something. I'm too lazy to look it up, but I do recognize one thing about it: it's one thing to have two armies squaring off against each other (like the Rebels and the Imperials of Star Wars), but it's another to have the leading antagonist (read: Agent Smith) being just as problematic to his/its own side as he/it is to the protagonist side. Very chaotic.
The biggest strike against Agent Smith, in my opinion, is that the setting is too far removed from reality. Jaws is pretty good because it's basically a great white shark gone berserk. And we know that great white sharks are real and they are carnivorous. Agent Smith is a fictional character in a world so fictional that a good portion of the movie has to be spent explaining it and immersing the audience within it. Granted, the problem with Jaws is the shark is only a threat to anyone living on or visiting Amity Island (and even then, they have to be in the water), but it's at least a commonly accessible scenario.
That's not to say a villain has to be completely realistic, though. Vader is indeed a great villain, in spite of him being made of nonexistent, fictional technology, being a dark wielder of a supernatural power, and existing a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (where venturing into and colonizing space is common and practical). However, it doesn't take too much to be immersed in the setting to appreciate him. This is what makes Khan from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan so great as well: the setting is a little distant and nonexistent, but it's comparable and the wills and ambitions of the characters aren't too foreign. As a side point, I believe that much of great science fiction is just an alternate setting that can otherwise take place in historical fiction, Shakespeare, modern day cops n' robbers fare, etc. I've heard that Vader is based on Macbeth and Hamlet, I think. He could easily be a fascist megalomaniacal figurehead of some despotic nation. Likewise, what makes The Wrath of Khan so great is it's like a high seas pirate ship cannon battle between a noble commander and a ruthless pirate.
Like all my previous blog essays, this one is off the top of my head. Therefore, it's very much stream-of-consciousness. So before I forget, I'll get right on to two of my favorite villains in film: the alien monsters in John Carpenter's The Thing and--yeah, you guessed it--Heath Ledger's Joker. I'll try and go in order.
The Thing is a great horror movie (and if you haven't seen it, rent it and watch it on a good laptop through decent headphones, with the lights out, and no outside distractions). It's a familiar premise in horror, but there are two things going for The Thing in that regard: it's a relatively old film and so it precedes many other films following the same premise and also it just uses the premise perfectly. The premise is basically a small group of people gathered in an isolated location for a common reason (like the horny teenagers in however many of the Friday the 13th movies). In this case, it's a bunch of scientists and researchers stationed way out in Antarctica, cut off from the rest of the populated planet with no escape, stumbling upon an alien life form that crashed on Earth well before the transition from B.C. to A.D. This is one of those animalist, brainless villains that's more of a dangerous monster than it is an intellectual adversary (not to suggest the monster is stupid, just not verbose on its own). Those are always fun because it's not like the antagonist chooses to be a destructive force; it just is. And the monster's actions are two-fold: One, it overtakes and consumes a human, breeds itself asexually, and creates a perfect mimetic copy of the human victim, and Two, the realization of this creates an uneasy paranoia among the rest of the crew. This is the only horror movie I know of where you're not just worried about who or what's on the other side of the door, but you're also worried about whether or not the guy waiting next to you is actually human or alien monster. I'm sure Invasion of the Body Snatchers would be another such film, but it doesn't have that afraid-of-the-dark vibe.
Then there's the Joker. And I have to use Heath's for reference. Not so much because I don't like Nicholson's approach (because I do like it), but more because I'm trying to stick to movies and Heath's interpretation at least captured the spirit of the comic book Joker to a T. Here's a villain who doesn't care about mob rule, money, clout among a city's judges and politicians, women, drugs, some kind of honor, or revenge. He comes out of nowhere, manipulates people as he sees fit, and just causes mayhem. I think that a great villain has a high ratio of quantity and wickedness of deeds done to his/her/its reasons for committing them, and the Joker from The Dark Knight captures that aspect perfectly.
For comparison's sake, Killian from the Schwarzenegger flick The Running Man is a sensational host of a game show where convicts risk their lives escaping some dump of a compound from dangerous killers with WWF-gimmick weapons to kill the escapees. And he's doing it for ratings. Such a great villain. Too bad it's just a cheesy popcorn flick (but don't let that stop you from enjoying it). And for contrast, any movie where the villain is the leader of an opposing nation's army who's just fighting for his country is a mediocre villain (low ratio, you see). So is some stupid comedy where the villain is like Stifler from American Pie. Wait, that's an insult to villains. Scratch that.
[Dark Knight spoilers ahead]
Anyways, back to the Joker. Many other villains in superhero settings are just megalomaniacal people completely bent on killing the respective comics' heroes. And when you consider Lex Luthor, Magneto, Green Goblin, and whoever Jeff Bridges played in Iron Man, all of these villains had typical goals: money, power, and killing their respective protagonists.
Not the Joker. He has no grudges. Money means nothing to him. There's no pattern to his deeds. Heck, he doesn't even care about himself. So much so that Batman cracks an interrogation room's one-way mirror with his skull and he's completely unfazed! Not to mention he can manipulate situations to his will effortlessly, such as when he somehow reasons with Harvey/Two-Face after what he did to him and took from him. Even that scene when Batman flips his semi and lures the Joker to getting arrested has an unnerving detail: if you've seen the movie or you're able to think back that far after viewing the film later, you have to consider that while that's going on, Rachel is being rigged to that time bomb and those drums of gas, and Harvey's captors are preparing a similar setup at a location considerably farther away.
Then there's the threat on Coleman Reese who appears on the news where he leaves his fate in the hands of ordinary citizens and gives him a mere hour before deciding to blow up a hospital. And he doesn't even specify which hospital! What's more, he's caused enough mayhem to establish that he ain't bluffing.
The best part about the Joker in The Dark Knight isn't how he kills people. It's not how many people he's killed. It's not even who he's killed. It's why. And other than spreading chaos on a whim, he has no reason. These are the things he does for fun. I challenge anyone to compare the Joker in this film to any dangerous person played by Robert Deniro or Joe Pesce. I already had the pleasure of hearing Gary Oldman say Voldemort is like a Teletubby compared to the Joker. It's this sort of comparison that yields a fun guilty pleasure to those who like the Joker. I'm the last person to rank things in a list as I think it's a crutch of our culture to rank, rate, classify, and categorize everything. But at the same time, stating that a villain is worse than Deniro's character from Goodfellas or some Bond villain says a lot. After all, as a Batman fan, I already get a lot of pleasure comparing the Joker to Two-Face, Poison Ivy, the Mad Hatter, Scarecrow, Bane, etc.
So, if you're reading this and you're writing a script for some action-rich movie that has a protagonist or protagonists squaring off against antagonists or an antagonist, remember that sometimes less is more. We never learned who the Joker is in The Dark Knight. He has no normal identity like Two-Face or Scarecrow (Harvey Dent and Johnathan Crane). We never learned his motives. And we never learned for certain how the Joker really got those scars. And that makes him that much more terrifying. Because the only consistent thing about us human beings and fear is that we pretty much fear the unknown. If you know why a villain does what he/she/it does, or you have some understanding of who/what the villain is or where he/she/it came from, then that removes some of the mystery and the protagonists can use that knowledge to their advantage. But much like the dark, ghosts, aliens, or strangers lurking in shadows, we are absolutely terrified by that which we don't understand.
I'll conclude with the three key factors of a good villain, as I see it:
-Rooted in a setting not too far removed from our own. Or at least, rooted in a setting towards which we can easily relate.
-High ratio of wickedness and frequency of deeds to the villain's reasons for committing them.
And finally...
-Is never fully revealed. A good villain has at least one or two key characteristics that are never fully understood. The unknown should be used well with a good villain.
I beg the reader's pardon for my sporadic writing style. Hopefully, though, those who read this will find it interesting and thought-provoking.
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