Letter #243: Evil Most Fascinating

The Romance of the Bad

Spengler.

We’ve been talking about murderers and villainy: how they cannot help but point to the good because life is sacred and man’s essential nature is loving. Otherwise, we would not know evil when we saw it.

But there is an argument that seems to contradict that.

The question a crime writer is asked probably more often than any other is this: Why are villains in stories more compelling than heroes? Why is it when a film like Silence of the Lambs becomes popular, it’s Hannibal Lecter we remember, just as it’s Frankenstein, Dracula and Freddy Krueger who become the iconic centers of their stories?

The suggestion is that Hannibal or Dracula represent our “real” selves, the cannibal or vampire we suppress for the sake of social approval, but whom we’d gladly let loose given half a chance. The story lets us do this in an imaginary way. There can be no doubt that there is some truth to this. Even Satan in Paradise Lost is more interesting than Adam.

I used to have a glib response to this question whenever I was asked it in interviews or on writers’ panels. I used to say, well, maybe the problem is we allow our villains to have flaws but we portray our heroes with a kind of virtue real people just don’t possess, so they’re not as identifiable or appealing. Glib or not, there’s truth to this too. After all, Superman and Batman are more iconic than Lex Luther and the Joker. And when it comes to more human heroes like James Bond, Indiana Jones and, that greatest hero of them all, Super Mario, the villains in their stories are certainly secondary and sometimes completely forgettable. Who wants to grow up to be a gigantic spiked turtle?

But I think a more complete answer lies in our sometimes stagnant conception of the good. In stories where the villains are more interesting, they usually represent some repressed instinct of the flesh, the childish will to dominate or possess the momentary object of desire. The main role of the hero in such stories is to defeat that creature, so he becomes simply the repressive “good” person who contains him.

But Bond, Indiana Jones and, of course, Super Mario have a naughty, male, creative originality about them. The adventures they face take them away from lives of love, achievement and interest. If you removed the bad guys from their stories, they would still be characters you wanted to know (especially if your toilet was backed up).

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” So said the philosopher Simone Weil.

In a stagnant, emasculated society, where our very humanity is condemned as wicked — a society like ours today — gangsters and other villains might seem rebellious and fresh. But in fact, it is always love — love mad and dangerous — that is the engine of creation.

Love, Dad