Good vs Evil
Black and white good versus evil stories are something my
parents actively avoided showing me when I was younger. Of course, they are
basically impossible to avoid altogether so I got my fair share in the form of
Char’s uncle in Ella Enchanted, the step mother in The Parent Trap (the Lindsey
Lohan version), and Shan Yu in Mulan (the only Disney movie I saw until I was
eleven). The problem with villains
in kids movies is they are 100% evil, something never actually seen in real
life. Villains in real life aren’t
so cut and dry; we accept them to be horrible, even (debatably) worthy of
death, and yet they all had some kind of redeeming quality. Hitler appreciated
the arts, was an excellent public speaker and managed to radically improve the
German economy during his rise to power. Of course, simultaneously, he was
convincing the German population at large of his atrocious philosophies on the
superiority of specific sects and classes of people as well as single handedly
creating the one of the most tragic human rights violation in history. Even in
one of the most horrible men even, we can find characteristics that make him
seem, if for a second, not so bad after all. If we look again to entertainment
we can find many villains that are liked, even loved, in spite of their
terrible crimes. We’ve got Darth Vader, Loki, the Joker, Hades, Vizzini, and
maybe hundreds more.
I recently binge-watched the new
Netflix series Narcos, a 10 hour-long episode dramatic recount of the pursuit
of the Columbian drug lords in the 1980s, in which the main character
fluctuates between an American member of the DEA and the primo Don Drug Lord
himself, Pablo Escobar. The strange thing about the show is it is quick to
villainize the hero and quicker to exalt the villain. Even after (SPOILER
ALERT) Escobar resorts to terrorism and blows up a plane of innocent people,
including the unsuspecting, naïveté young father he convinces to blow up the
plane in the first place. Everything goes down hill from there but, even as a morally
righteous viewer, you are somewhat attached to this “family man” who runs a
giant cocaine cartel, kills instead of working things out and regularly cheats
on his wife. Similarly, the good guys aren’t great either. You go from seeing
the main character, Murphy, uncomfortable with the torture of a guilty man to
get information on an even guiltier man to Murphy pointing his gun at a
completely innocent man angry that Murphy hit his car.
It’s not that either character is
evil or good. We have assigned certain attributes to someone we consider evil,
at best self-centered and unlikable, and at worst, chaotic murders with
particular prejudice or immoral beliefs. I think everyone has some good and
some bad and calling someone “good” is just as significant and serious a claim
as calling someone “evil.” The distinction between the two can be impossible to
gauge and someone truly evil or someone truly good does not, in my opinion, truly
exist.
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