Bad Guys
by patricklee on Dec.23, 2009, under Patrick Lee
The first Die Hard certainly had one of the all-time great villains. I think what made Hans Gruber scary was that he was very focused and smart. He didn’t take anything that happened personally; he had a clear goal and moved toward it relentlessly, no matter what was going on.
He also didn’t do a lot of grandstanding; the story didn’t seem to be an ego trip for him. He just wanted to steal six hundred million dollars and get away with it. Which gets to the heart of what made him compelling: he seemed, at least in the context of a movie, real.
Believability is probably one of the best ways to make a bad guy grab the reader’s attention. It’s scary when you find yourself thinking, as a reader, “There are actually people like this out there.”
(As an aside, this is part of what’s so gripping about true crime writing, except in that case you’re thinking, “These people ARE out there.”)
So, the more real, the better. That holds true even within stories that are wildly fantastic. General Woundwort from Richard Adams’s classic Watership Down comes to my mind readily. Here’s a guy who, to human eyes, might have been a fluffy little bunny, but he pretty much embodied the worst qualities humanity exhibited in the 20th century (which is rather saying something). But even Woundwort didn’t spend any time talking himself up, or behaving cartoonishly (nevermind that he ended up in a cartoon later on). Adams infused him with the motivation and (lack of) morals of a ruthless dictator, and pulled no punches in doing so. As a result, you can read that book as a grownup and still be scared as hell of that guy. He’s intimidating for the same reason real-life dictators are: his thugs are everywhere, and even the innocent are buffaloed into cooperating with him, so that the good guys never know who to trust.
Imagine pitching that story to an editor: “So, the bad guy is a fascist rabbit… but it’ll feel real, I swear…”
Talk about giving the rest of us no excuse to let our villains lack believability.
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December 25th, 2009 on 10:21 pm
Woundwort in Watership Down is a classic villain, I loved that book all the more when I came to realize that it wasn’t just about adorable fluffy bunnies (I had read parts of it as a kid and just remembered the whimsy of having bunnies as characters, which was then reinforced by reading the Redwall series like 19 times), and that WOundowrt was an extreme badass.
One of the more recent villains that really caught my eye was Hans Landa of the SS in Inglourious Basterds. Here was a character that wasn’t just all scowls and bullets like most of the other jack-booted SS villains of more, uh, realistically (?) based World War II movies; he was smart (aggravatingly so) and had an enthusiasm that bordered on childlike that was amazingly fun to watch.
Tybalt from Romeo and Juliette was always one of my favorite villains as well, but Shakespeare is ripe for excellent villains so I think that’s easy pickings.
December 27th, 2009 on 12:42 pm
Tybalt was totally the Hans Gruber of his day (and pretty much the four centuries since).
Here’s a fun connection, on that point. When I was in ninth grade, my English class studied Romeo and Juliet, and at one point the teacher let us watch a videotaped performance of the play. When Tybalt made his entrance during the opening fight, the entire class went “Whoa… Hans.” A slightly-younger-than-in-Die-Hard Alan Rickman was playing the part.