Good vs Evil-Lucy Whitman Sandmeyer

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.