Your kids teach you a lot. About what they start out with, and what we put into them. And it happens all the time if you’re able to keep listening. And some of it is shit you seriously did not want to know. Like loving the bad guy.
Lilah loves the villians. Whatever the story or movie or play, she loves the bad guy. Wants the bad guy stuffed animal. Threatened to storm out of the theater when it appeared the evil cockatoo from the “Rio” movies had been killed. Sure she’s in love with the damn Ewoks, but she’s also a little in love with goddamned Darth Vader.
This is very disturbing to me. We did not cheer on the bad guys when we were kids. They were to be reviled and loathed. Granted, the foils were more crudely drawn then, too. Their backstory was simple, not replete with sympathy or realism. And suddenly they just turned evil, ready and wanting to do evil, only interested in evil itself. Which is just as silly, I suppose. As if we lived in so simple and easy of a world that someone could be born evil. Look out for that baby he’s a bad one! He’ll throw his full diaper at you, and somehow move the car out of park on a hill, crushing you all. That infant’s gonna rule the evil empire one day.
Today the villians are often more carefully wrought than the heroes. Their backstories painstakingly woven to elicit understanding and empathy. To show how an individual got there, why they do the horrible things they do. There is a noble aspect to it, but also a scaringly apologetic level to it. It is bad, it is sad, it is all our fault.
Most of anything, and what Lilah really showed me, is that the villians are interesting. So dreadfully, horribly fascinating. They get the great accents, sing the best songs, get the funniest lines, have the most intriguing past. Memorable creatures that stick with you. Rattlesnake Jake from Rango. Lotso that smells of strawberries and still rules the stuffed animals in her bed. The shallow and hilarious Gaston. The redone Maleficent, with the whole Sleeping Beauty story turned on its head, the good guys now the bad guys who made poor beautiful Angelina wicked. And, inexplicably, he-who-must-not-be-loved Voldermort. Lilah often relished pretending to be him as she chased her sister around the house, hissing.
What is the need for this? Where is the catharsis, either in the work itself or the reaction it invokes in the audience, my tiny one included? Do we really have to feel sorry and entertained at the bad guy? And is this all Shakespeare’s fault, anyway?
Perhaps we are raising a generation of weak apologists justifying the terrifying and even murderous rampages of those monsters among us. Where the attention and even affection bestowed upon these dark agents elevates them, worships them with the fragrant spotlight. Or, perhaps the artists, and consequently we as the audience, are trying to figure out how these creatures, how these people came to be. In our lexicon and in our midst. Perhaps we can only understand why they exist by discovering how they came to be. How we made them. Are we diagnosing the sickness, or falling in love with it?
“I know he’s bad, Daddy. But he’s soft and smells like strawberries. And I like things that are soft and smell like strawberries. Can I get him? Please?” Lilah asked that day in the Disneyland gift shop outside of the Buzz Lightyear ride, clutching him too hard and tight. His evil eyebrow leered at me from under her chin. What am I, gonna say no and create a real monster?
“OK Lilah. I know you won’t leave him by the side of the road.”
“No Daddy never never never never never…”
And now he smirks at me from atop the pile of beloved stuffed animals on her bed. Lord over the stuffies she nests with. I offered to fix his ominous unibrow, but Lilah refused.
“He’s not bad, Daddy. Not my Lotso.”
He looks bad to me. Smells good but looks bad. Our anti-heroes that we left by the side of the road. Maybe Lilah can fix him.
Shakespeare? Hmmm. I myself blame John Milton. Read Paradise Lost. The only interesting character is Satan. He DOES things. Adam and Eve just float around in a drugged (I mean Classical) stupor, but Satan is busy, and he has goals.
Read Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm to Lilah and see if she likes the cold and rules-laden aunt. It’s a little harder to trace her meanness, but it’s easy to see the damage she’s done. It may be too un-cartoon-like, though; no last scene change of heart and easy redemption. Still the story has a lot of imperfect good guys who do things, as well as less than omnipotent bad guys. And everybody is busy. We like that.
Ah, but Shakespeare made them so very bad. So very interesting and so very very bad. Perhaps we are trying to “correct” that comforting vilification strewn about in iambic pentameter? Or sell more stuffed animals?
And I was subjected to Paradise Lost many times, though I grew to love it. Everything sounds better in peerless prose. Didn’t the Devil feel “how awful goodness is and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely: and pined his loss.”
One thing is for sure, Milton and John Donne were nothing but infidel troublemakers. 😉
I really enjoyed this, Matt. Some good writing — even with that damned eye brow!!