Appraisals | What Makes the Perfect Villain?

This article will feature spoilers to several films, books, and television programs.

 

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There is a scene from the movie Unbreakable which has stuck with me as a writer for quite some time:

I've often wondered what it is, exactly, that makes the perfect threat. It is postulated in this clip that there are two kinds of villains, who in turn exist on two distinct levels—the "soldier", who poses a physical threat—and the "mastermind"—who poses a psychological threat. To the characters in Unbreakable, there is nothing worse than a mastermind; but even a soldier villain can make for a terrifying antagonist.

The Soldier

Take Anton Chigurh, the prime antagonist from the hit Cohen Brothers film No Country for Old Men, for instance. This man is practically a force of nature. Often unsparing, always unfeeling, unrelenting, coldly practical—and yet somehow principled, though no one can guess what codes drive his seemingly chaotic actions—he leaves no loose ends untied and no vows unfulfilled. For Llewellyn Moss, one of the film's two main protagonists, Chigurh is a man who will go to any end to see him dead. He is an effective and, often, creative killer, going so far as to invent two of his own unique weapons—an air gun originally meant to kill livestock, and a shotgun outfitted with a silencer—to accomplish his goals.

However, the threat he poses to any given person, while it may cause a sort of primal terror instilled by self-preservation, is only a physical one. He is clever, he is creative, but he is not a mastermind. Chigurh is, ultimately, a lackey. A hitman. An assassin. While he's almost supernaturally good at his job, he is never seen pulling any strings, never caught messing with the hero's head. He only exists on one level, and is, therefore, an incomplete danger.

What of the mastermind?

The Mastermind

One of my personal favorite examples of the mastermind would have to be Scar, from Disney's The Lion King (OG Scar, not that flat and soulless "live action" Scar that Disney, quite frankly, insulted me with). Scar is condescending, conniving, and manipulative of friend and foe alike (the ultimate cause of his downfall). However, a pure mastermind is all brains and no brawn—which usually works out fine for heroes, but can only take a villain so far. Masterminds—in the stories where the good guys win, anyway—always end up outmaneuvered.

Scar's power lies purely in his penchant for deception—his ability to lie effectively. Remove this power, and he becomes nothing. He puts it best, himself, after refusing a direct physical confrontation with his brother, Mufasa: "When it comes to brains, I have the lion's share, but when it comes to brute strength . . . I'm afraid I'm on the shallow end of the gene pool." Whenever he is actually forced to get his paws dirty, he always resorts to cheap shots, or waits until his foe is completely at his mercy. When he ends up on the losing side of a fight, however, Scar grovels and bargains pathetically, waiting for an opportunity to catch an opponent off-guard and overwhelm them while they're vulnerable. These kinds of tactics almost allow him to succeed, but his quick thinking is ultimately defeated by quicker thinking.

What about a villain who is both a physical and a psychological danger?

 The General

Behind every soldier is a general, who possesses both the knowledge of combat and a keen tactical mind.

Enter Slade Wilson, of Teen Titans fame. He is a ghost, always there and never there. In almost every confrontation the Titans have with him, they are almost never dealing with the real Slade. For example, Cyborg apparently manages to defeat Slade in hand-to-hand combat, only to discover when he removes the mask that he had been fighting an android all along. When their paths truly do cross, however, he is a more than formidable opponent. He possesses superhuman strength and reflexes, and has mastered several forms of martial arts alongside a range of weaponry. In addition to this, Slade has a genius-level intellect and prodigious technological expertise, creating highly advanced robotics and world-ending superweapons at his leisure. At one point, he even comes by the power of pyrokinesis after dealing with a dark supernatural entity. He is a calm and patient evil, rarely if ever raising his voice, and always several steps ahead of his opponents. Over the show's whole run, he is never truly thwarted by the Teen Titans. He is, for all intents and purposes, an unstoppable danger to the mind and the body—and yet, even a villain like Slade is not a complete threat.

There exists, I would argue, a third kind of villain. Let's call it the "devil" villain, who exists to destroy or corrupt the hero's soul.

The Devil

Whether or not one believes in the existence of a soul is irrelevant—in a world (even a fictional one) where souls exist, a threat that targets the mind and body but stops before it reaches the spirit is an incomplete danger. Not entirely dissimilar from the mastermind, the devil makes it his or her objective to subtly sway the hero away from the path of righteousness—particularly through the use of deception and emotional manipulation. The devil may make pretenses of friendship with the hero, perhaps offering them something they want or need in exchange for their services. It could be argued that Slade was a devil at one point in Teen Titans, but while trying to accomplish the corruption of a hero's soul, he was doing it in the service of a power higher than himself. In that instance, he was a sort of intermediary, and, ergo, not the true threat to the hero's soul.

But we've already discussed Slade.

Let's talk about Chancellor Palpatine/Darth Sidious. Say what you will of the prequel trilogy, Darth Sidious' slow manipulation of Anakin Skywalker into becoming Darth Vader is an exemplary  example of a villain corrupting a hero's soul. We first see Sidious in The Phantom Menace, where he gains a position of political power by becoming Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic. This high office, in turn, allows him to communicate more directly with the Jedi Order, and after Anakin displays his first hints of turning to the darker aspects of the Force (forming exploitable worldly attachments, acting out of passion and anger, taking revenge), Palpatine is then able to begin seducing Anakin away from the Light with stories of powerful Sith lords, who were so strong in the Force that they were able to protect everyone and everything they cared about—even, he claims, from death. For Anakin Skywalker, who was unable to save his mother from death and slavery, and who feared the possible loss of his wife and unborn child, these promises struck all the right chords. Slowly and surely, Darth Sidious whispered lies in Anakin's ear and turned the promising young Jedi away from his destiny to bring balance to the Force, eventually turning him into Darth Vader, the most feared Sith lord the galaxy has ever known.

Like the mastermind, the physical threat a devil poses is usually subjective (Palpatine—a powerful Dark Side force user and consummate swordsman—being another good example of this), and sometimes nonexistent. When a hero overcomes a devil, the devil's "true" self is revealed. It is often small and pitiful, revealing that the only power a devil has is that which the hero gives to it. This is revealed again through Palpatine, who is shown to be a pathetic and shriveled old man when he is at the mercy of Mace Windu. However, that does not minimize the actual threat a devil poses. A soldier can hurt you and kill you, and a mastermind can play games with your head, but only a devil can make the noblest hero into one of the damned.

Darth Vader himself would later come to pose a physical, psychological, and spiritual threat to his son, Luke Skywalker—which brings us to the next and final tier of villainy. The complete evil. The "paragon."

The Paragon 

Existing on all three planes of danger, a paragon is, for reasons already discussed, the most perfect antagonist a hero will ever face—and few villains embody the paragon better than the Un-man, from C.S. Lewis' Perelandra.

© Neal Anderson, 2012

While not quite as iconic or monolithic as the aforementioned Darth Vader, the Un-man exists in my own mind as one of the greatest unsung villains in literature. He is a tireless, pervasive, and diabolical foe, made all the more disturbing by Lewis' use of the Uncanny Valley (an unsettling feeling derived from engaging with something not quite human). In Perelandra, the spacefaring philologist Dr. Elwin Ransom is sent by angelic entities acting on behalf of Maleldil (Space Jesus) to the planet Venus (or Perelandra, as it is known in the Old Solar tongue), where an analogue of the Garden of Eden has been established; and if the first Garden had a demon in snake's clothing, the new Garden has a demon in human's clothing—the physical form of one Professor Weston of Thulcandra (Earth), to be precise.

While it remains unsaid whether or not the demonic entity possessing Weston is Satan himself or merely one of his underlings, the spirit driving the Un-man's actions remains quite malicious and terrifying regardless of its true identity. During Ransom's first encounter with the Un-man, he seems to conceal his true nature, but as their conversation unfolds, anomalies in Weston's human facade begin to reveal themselves—things so unlike the Weston which Ransom knows that it causes him terror and "a sensation almost of disgust." As they go on, the thing wearing Weston's skin even admits—in a runaround sort of way—that he is not what he seems:

"You didn't notice, dear Ransom," said Weston, "that I'd improved a bit in my knowledge of extraterrestrial language. You're a philologist, they tell me."

Ransom started. "How did you do it?" he blurted out.

"Guidance, you know, guidance," croaked Weston. He was squatting at the roots of his tree with his knees drawn up, and his face, now the color of putty, wore a fixed and even slightly twisted grin.  "Guidance, guidance," he went on. "Things coming into my head. I'm being prepared all the time. Being made a fitting receptacle for it."

And finally, like something out of The Conjuring, the disguise flies apart:

A spasm like that preceding a deadly vomit twisted Weston's face out of recognition. As it passed, for one second something like the old Weston reappeared, staring with eyes of horror and howling, "Ransom, Ransom! For Christ's sake don't let them—" and instantly his whole body spun round as if he had been hit by a revolver-bullet and he fell to the earth, and was there rolling at Ransom's feet, slavering and chattering and tearing up the moss by handfuls. Gradually the convulsions decreased. He lay still, breathing heavily, his eyes open but without expression.

Ransom doesn't even want to believe it, at first. The implications of his enemy's true nature are far too terrible to face:

Something which was and was not Weston was talking: and the sense of this monstrosity, only a few feet away in the darkness, had sent thrills of exquisite horror tingling along his spine, and raised questions in his mind which he tried to dismiss as fantastic.

When at last he confronts the Un-man in broad daylight, the truth is undeniable:

If Ransom said nothing, it was because he could not speak. He saw a man who was certainly Weston, to judge from his height and build and coloring and features. In that sense he was quite recognizable. But the terror was that he was also unrecognizable. He did not look like a sick man: but he looked very like a dead one. The face which he raised . . . had that terrible power which the face of a corpse sometimes has of simply rebuffing every conceivable human attitude one can adopt towards it. The expressionless mouth, the unwinking stare of the eyes, something heavy and inorganic in the very folds of the cheek, said clearly: "I have features as you have, but there is nothing in common between you and me." It was this that kept Ransom speechless. What could you say—what appeal or threat could have any meaning—to that? And now, thrusting aside every mental habit and every longing not to believe, came the conviction that this, in fact, was not a man: that Weston's body was kept, walking and undecaying, in Perelandra by some wholly different kind of life, and that Weston himself was gone.

The next time Ransom sees "Weston," he is speaking to Tinidril, the Venusian parallel of our own world's Eve. Already he speaks to her of the glory and beauty of Earth, trying to make her imagine a world where she has broken Maleldil's only rule—to dwell on the "Fixed Land," one of the only solid landmasses on the planet. Thus far, the Un-man has posed only a spiritual threat—first by trying and failing to sway Ransom to his side with intellectual spirituality, and second by changing tactics and targeting Tinidril herself. By beginning his temptation of the Lady, he adds another layer to the danger he poses—psychological danger. Ransom must henceforth duel minds with the Un-man, and the task becomes an almost physical struggle:

This was the beginning of a series of days and nights which Ransom remembered with loathing for the rest of his life. He had been only too correct in supposing that his enemy required no sleep. Fortunately, the Lady did, but she needed a good deal less than Ransom and possibly, as the days passed, came to take less than she needed. It seemed to Ransom that whenever he dozed he awoke to find the Un-man already in conversation with her. He was dead tired. He could hardly have endured it all but for the fact that their hostess quite frequently dismissed them both from her presence. On such occasions Ransom kept close to the Un-man. It was a rest from the main battle, but it was a very imperfect rest.

The Un-man employs no end of clever tactics and fronts to sway the soul of Tinidril, the Lady, away from the path of righteousness and obedience to Maleldil, all focused around the twin goals of discrediting Ransom in the eyes of the Lady and instilling in her an illusory sense of tragic duty, akin to the figures of classical drama such as Antigone, where she must fall for the sake of her husband and their descendants and attain a greatness which Maleldil secretly desires for her—a "greatness" realized in the human race after our own fall.

The Un-man seems an inhuman and malevolent intelligence, older than the Solar System, frightening beyond measure, and with machinations that span across entire planets—and this is certainly true—but the inner layers of the Un-man's deeper nature are much more unsettling. His arsenal of clever arguments, we come to find out, is not the "real" devil, here. Pure evil is not so simple as that.

It looked at Ransom in silence and at last began to smile. We have all often spoke—Ransom himself had often spoken—of a devilish smile. Now he realized he had never taken the words seriously. The smile was not bitter, nor raging, nor, in any ordinary sense, sinister; it was not even mocking. It seemed to summon Ransom, with horrible naivete of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them.  It was not furtive, nor ashamed,it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation. Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything other than half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence. It was beyond vice as the Lady was beyond virtue.

"A horrible similarity to innocence" is the phrase which captures my attention most; it is the first clue to the Un-man's true nature. Ransom could never have expected such a vile and hollow antagonist to contend with.

What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out—its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?

This is where the devil falls apart, but not the paragon. The paragon is more than just a threat to the soul, and uses the reality of his or herself as another weapon: think of the anguish on two fronts which Luke Skywalker felt when he learned that Darth Vader was his father. Was he capable of the same evil? Could his father be redeemed? What would he do if he was forced to confront Vader again, now that he knew who he really was? For Ransom, the evil beyond humanity which is the Un-man grew only more loathsome and horrible as its true self was made known. Indeed, Ransom wishes he had never known the true nature of the Devil and demons:

[Ransom] had full opportunity to learn the falsity of the maxim that the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman. Again and again he felt that a suave and subtle Mephistopheles with red cloak and rapier and a feather in his cap, or even a somber and tragic Satan out of Paradise Lost, would have been a welcome release from the thing he was actually doomed to watch. It was not like dealing with a wicked politician at all: it was much more like being set to guard an imbecile or a monkey or a very nasty child. What had staggered and disgusted him when it first began saying "Ransom...Ransom..." continued to disgust him every day and every hour. It showed plenty of subtlety when talking to the Lady; but Ransom soon perceived that it regarded intelligence simply and solely as a weapon, which it had no more wish to employ in its off-duty hours than a soldier has to do bayonet practice when he is on leave. Thought was for it a device necessary to certain ends, but thought in itself did not interest it. It assumed reason as externally and inorganically as it had assumed Weston's body.

Here we have seen the Un-man realized as an almost purely internal threat; the only physical danger he'd posed to Ransom was sleep loss, and that much was self-induced. It is only when Ransom at last resolves to confront the Un-man physically that it truly becomes a paragon. Psyched up by a communion with the unseen presence of Maleldil, Ransom seeks out and finds the Un-man strangling a Venusian bird, and brings about the entire capacity of the Un-man as a triple-tiered threat.

Ransom found himself acting before he knew what he had done. Some memory of boxing at his preparatory school must have awaked, for he found he had delivered a straight left with all his might on the Un-man's jaw. But he had forgotten that he was not fighting with gloves; what recalled him to himself was the pain as his fist crashed against the jaw-bone—it almost seemed to have broken his knuckles—and the sickening jar all up his arm. He stood still for a second under the shock of it and this gave the Un-man time to fall back about six paces. It too had not liked the first taste of the encounter. It had apparently bitten its tongue, for blood came bubbling out of the mouth when it tried to speak. It was still holding the bird.

The Un-man does not immediately engage Ransom in fisticuffs—rather, he falls back upon the words and mind-games of his devil and mastermind aspects, hoping to lead him away from this path, for if the Un-man's vessel were to be destroyed or made useless, then the spirit driving it would have no more foothold in this new Paradise, and would be expelled back to Thulcandra and trapped once more within the limits of the Moon's orbit.

"So you mean to try strength," it said in English, speaking thick.

"Put down that bird," said Ransom.

"But this is very foolish," said the Un-man. "Do you not know who I am?"

"I know what you are," said Ransom. "Which one of them doesn't matter."

"And you think, little one," it answered, "that perhaps you can fight with me? You think He will help you, perhaps? I have known known Him longer than you, little one. They all think He's going to help them—till they come to their senses screaming recantations too late in the middle of the fire, moldering in concentration camps, gibbering in mad-houses, or nailed on crosses. Could He help Himself?"—and the creature suddenly threw back its head and cried in a voice so loud it seemed the golden sky-roof must break, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani."

And the moment it had done so, Ransom felt certain that the sounds it had made were perfect Aramaic of the First Century. The Un-man was not quoting; it was remembering. Those were the very words spoken from the Cross, treasured through all those years in the burning memory of the outcast creature which had heard them, and now brought forward in hideous parody; the horror made him momentarily sick.

And with that, their struggle began, and the Un-man became the perfect villain.