Link Thyme

Here's a song about evil by dark humor songwriter Voltaire. 

Voltaire!

Robot Monster

Ro-Man from “Robot Monster”

I’ve seen a lot of B-movies thanks to the show Mystery Science Theater 3000.  Many of them were monster movies.  They are the biggest staple of the genre.  All the movie needs is its title monster and the plot comes built right in as the monster roams around and terrorizes people until it finally gets destroyed.  Out of the dozens upon dozens of B-movie monsters I’ve seen, the Robot Monster form a movie of the same name is one of the few that stands out from the pack.  Mainly for being so… stupid. 

It’s the character design that does it.  The Robot Monster is a guy in a giant gorilla suit wearing a diver’s helmet.  This is supposed to be scary. 

The whole movie is terrible.  It goes so far into sheer cobbled-together ridiculousness that it transcends to that enlightened B-movie state where it is entertaining again.  It’s still torture to watch at the same time.  In an odd twist of fate, I’ve seen this movie several times, through the MST3K satire lens as well as the uncut original.  It was shown completely unironically in a class I took on comics-wiring.  My teacher even passed out 3D glasses so we could appreciate the special effects of the Billion Bubble Machine.

“Robot Monster” is a black-and-white flick from the 50’s about a boy who somehow gets transported to an alternate apocalyptic Earth.  This may or may not have been the work of that bubble machine.  The early details of the plot are vague to the point of nonexistence.  The boy and his family are the last survivors on Earth after humanity is destroyed by the Ro-Men or Robot Monsters, a race of aliens with advanced weapons.  The way my teacher explained it, the movie was made to feed off the Cold War paranoia that we could be wiped out by nuclear weapons at any time.  That’s still not enough to make the gorilla suits threatening to a modern audience. 

A single Ro-Man is sent down to Earth to deal with the family, while they are trying to hatch an escape to a moon base.  Ro-Man lumbers around for a while until, in a shocking, never-before-seen plot twist, catches sight of the daughter and falls in love with her.  He decides to kidnap her instead of kill her, and this throws him into an immense conflict of character.  Being a robot, he’s not supposed to have any form of emotion or individuality.  If he disobeys his orders, the other Ro-Men will destroy him for being irrational and thinking like a human.  Ro-man now thinks his race is flawed and wishes they were free to laugh and feel like the humans they destroyed.  He doesn’t know how to deal with the clash between his Ro-Man nature and his newfound emotions.  He tries to sum it up in the stilted, halting lines:

“I cannot…yet I must.  How do you calculate that?  At what point on the graph do ‘must’ and ‘cannot’ meet?  Yet I must… but I cannot.”

Brilliant scriptwriting.

That’s about as far as the plot gets.  It fizzles out as the ruler of the Ro-Man decides to skip all this conflict and kill everybody.   Dinosaurs show up for no reason and the whole thing turns out to be a dream from that boy, which brings the movie to a quick end without resolving anything. 

Even though the movie feels like a drain of precious hours of life that could have been spent doing something else, but it has its memorable quirks.  The Ro-Man suit is silly, but it is unique, which is something compared to the long line of creatively bankrupt monster designs that use rubber suits, unconvincing makeup or recycled stock footage form nature programs.  It adds a dose of campy fun to a mundane sci-fi plot because it is played completely seriously.  The movie never seems to realize that the gorilla suit undercuts any semblance of dignity or depth of emotion.  If it can’t be good, it can at least be weird an entertaining.  “Robot Monster” was memorable enough for my teacher to show it to his class after seeing it decades ago as a kid. 

Dolores Umbridge

Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling

Umbridge comes right on the heels of Aunt Maria because she strongly reminds me of her.  They are cut from the same cloth, the villain masquerading as a prim older lday.  Umbridge is even described when she first shows up as “looking like someone’s maiden aunt.”

This being Harry Potter, Umbridge is the better known of the two characters.  She shows up in the fifth book, the volume people hate due to an overdose of Harry’s adolescent angst.  I was fifteen myself when it came out, so I didn’t have a problem with the book at the time and read it all in one night.  My neck got sore form craning over the book for hours on end, but I couldn’t put it down, fueled by the desire to see the awful Umbridge brought down and the heroes given an inch to breathe easily again. 

Umbridge was a more effective villain than Voldemort ever was.  He was mysterious and threatening before he came back and people were too afraid to whisper his name, but the build-up never delivered once he was walking around.  He was just another Dark Lord and did generic evil things in his quest to rule on high, for the sake of being evil.  The sixth book spent a lot of time exploring his past and motivations to give him more depth, but it failed to make him a less generic antagonist.  Everything about his character is crafted to put a neon sign over his head to point out that THIS IS THE BAD GUY.  He’s made of shortcuts in the writing that quickly establish him as evil without having to go any deeper.  Everyone knows snakes mean villainy.  It’s classic, but that doesn’t necessarily make the character compelling.  What is unexpected and more provocative is a person with fluffy kitten decorations on wall who tortures children in her care.

Dolores Umbridge is an unlikely person to be an effective villain—no one is scared of kittens—and yet its believable when she is.  She uses appearances in the same way as Aunt Maria.  She starts off as an irritating sign that the government is leaning in on Hogwarts and everything about her annoys the teenage students, like her patronizing tone of voice or habit of polite coughing to get attention.  It’s hard for a person to pinpoint why exactly they are put off by her, because out loud, it’s hard to justify hating someone because of her ugly sweater. 

Umbridge doesn’t immediately come across as a villain, but she isn’t very good at manipulation.  It doesn’t take long for everyone to figure out she’s a power-hungry tyrant, or that she’s willing to hurt her students.  Even when her true nature is obvious, they still can’t get rid of her.  She’s backed by the authority of the government.  She’s not as powerful as some of the other characters in the series, but she uses every resource available to her and abuses her position to make people miserable, in petty and small-minded ways. 

The struggle against authority is constant in Harry Potter.  The series doesn’t even need an outside force like Voldemort to be full of antagonism, in more subtle ways.  The students struggle against their teachers, a universal frustration for anyone in school, and they all face conflict with corruption in their government.  Voldemort, master of the dark arts is not someone you’d expect to encounter on the street, while Umbridge could be that lady in a pink sweater telling you your paperwork is wrong at the DMV.  

Aunt Maria

Aunt Maria from Aunt Maria (also titled Black Maria) by Diana Wynne Jones

This is the person who sprang to mind when I first tried to think of the most evil, horrible character I could think of.  Since it’s more obscure, I don’t think it’s anti-climatic to start with my top villain.  Aunt Maria, who insists on having her name pronounced “ma-rye-ah,” is a little old lady who uses deceptive appearances every bit to her advantage.  She’s a difficult villain to explain because she works in ways that are subtle while at the same time does things that are blatantly horrible. 

The book follows a girl named Mig as she goes to visit her great aunt Maria over her spring holiday.  It sounds innocent enough, but things are strange from the start.  She is already creeped out because the small town Aunt Maria lives in was the last place Mig’s father was headed when he had a car accident that sent him hurtling over a cliff into the sea.  The town itself is full of zombie-like people who all seem to fear Aunt Maria and her social circle of elderly ladies, and her house is haunted.  What’s worse, Aunt Maria was Mig and her family to stay forever.   

What works best about Aunt Maria is her ability to convince people that she is right and they are wrong.  She has actual magical powers like the ability to turn people into animals, similar to a traditional witch, but she hardly needs them.  Her real strength is a shrewd form of manipulation that borders on hypnosis.  She projects the image of a kind, cuddly old lady who Mig describes as looking like a teddy bear.  Aunt Maria uses this is guilt-trip people people into doing whatever she says, making them feel obligated to take care of her.  How could anyone begrudge their own aunt?

Her habits start off as merely annoying, such as fussy demands for a prompt breakfast in bed every morning.  Mig and her family complain about Aunt Maria behind her back, but feel guilty about doing so.  They don’t suspect anything more sinister lurking amidst the frilly pillows and dollies in her house.  Over time they discover how much she’s done to control the town and how much she’s willing to do to stay in power, from killing people, crippling them, or burying them alive.  The tension keeps rising throughout the story as Mig gets more trapped in the situation. 

 Through it all it is impossible to reason with Aunt Maria, who has a case of selective hearing.  She’s convinced everything she does is justified and essential to maintaining a peaceful town.  She won’t acknowledge any faults or evidence to the contrary.  It’s like trying to argue with someone with old fashioned vales who refuses to see that times have changed.  Aunt Maria makes everyone feel like a misbehaving child in front of her, even adults.  She doesn’t need an army and she doesn’t even need to yell.  She gets people to do her bidding because they feel obligated to listen to their elders, and in the main character’s case, because she’s family. 

The author Diana Wynne Jones specializes in villains-as-family and uses it in many of her books.  Antagonists are stronger when they have a previous relationship to the main character, particularly if they are family.  It makes it more dynamic and complicated for the main character.  It’s hard to fight a member of one’s family because even if you don’t like them, you’re not supposed to.  Blood is thicker than water and it’s an ancient idea to protect one’s family and their secrets.  Bad behavior from relatives is supposed to get a free pass on the pure basis of being family.  These invisible bonds are supposed to be undeniable.  It’s an added struggle for a protagonist to overcome this bias and do something about a relative’s crimes.   

Categorization

What qualifies a villain to be discussed here?  Lots of things.   The simplistic dictionary definition of a villain is someone who is the antagonist of a story or doing immoral deeds.  It’s that shifty guy up to no good.  The term connotes a certain amount of power.  It’s the guy in charge who’s orchestrating everything, rather than the henchmen army.  Although there are instances where a henchmen or a minor villain is the more interesting character than the big bad at the top of the pyramid. 

The villain can be the protagonist.  It’s all a matter of perspective.  Assigning blame and righteousness is a murky undertaking.  No one thinks they are the villain.  Everyone justifies their own wants and actions in their head, no matte how deluded those reasons seem to other people.   A recent trend in fiction is to examine a story from that antagonist’s perspective and look at a new side of the story, like Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, or Joss Whedon’s “Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.”

There’s debatable territory with anti-heroes.  I will stay away from those, since they have the dreaded h-word in the name.  Villains also imply control and intelligence, so beast-like monster shouldn’t be included in this category either.   They will probably end up in here anyway, because I have seen far too many b-movies in my life not to talk about them. 

The villain generally has to be a single identifiable character or organization, be they human, alien, animal or vegetable.  Larger forces like nature and society are too vague for my purposes.   Anti-heroes aside, a character can be their own worst enemy and struggle against the dark side of their own personality like in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 

With that out of the way, let’s observe some bad guys! 

"Who is your favorite villain in fiction?”

I like to ask people this question.  The answer is always entertaining, and says a lot about both the person and the work the character comes from.  I have been asking it for a while and messily cataloging the answers in notebooks and edges of paper.  The person has to be fictional, but it can be from any kind of media.  It doesn’t have to be favorite in terms of liking them.  It’s all about who sticks in people’s heads, who haunts them, or who they thought was cool rather than scary. 

There’s something memorable and compelling about a well-done villain.  Even though they are by definition the bad guy, they are intriguing and compelling.  Conflict is an essential element in fiction, and while you can have your man-vs.-nature or man-vs.-society, most stories involve a specific antagonist. They are the face that ruins everything for the hero.  The hero has to destroy the death ray and resolve the plot, but it is the villain driving to plot forward and providing the motivation.  The person who makes the ray gun.  The more effective the villain, the greater the hero seems for defeating them. 

Where would superheroes be without the colorful rogue gallery?

Villains are a hallmark of my favorite kind of fiction, that categorical lump known as ‘genre’ writing: sci-fi, fantasy, thriller, horror, you-name-it. 

They provide a comforting vision of the world, with the idea that evil is easily recognizable, classy, elegant, and wears a nice suit.  Would that were true.  As I write, I’m currently in the middle of a cold war with an insane roommate, embroiled in the arduous process of getting her to move out.   Had she comes up to me waving a cape and twirling a moustache, I never would have signed the lease to live with her in the first place. 

The antagonist doesn’t have to be obvious and stuck in black and white morality.  Some of the best kinds are subtle, people you don’t see coming, or ones who blur the lines of morality into a murky grey.    This blog will be devoted to exploring all kinds of antagonists, in a search of what makes them effective and how they contribute to an overall story well told.  This is all purely for fun and improving writing.  It is not in any way endorsing dastardly activity in the real world.