There are villains on my mind.
Of course, I love my share of heroes too. I love watching them beat the living daylights out of vengeful villains and their relentless cronies. I cheer for them when they accept insane challenges and overcome outrageous odds for the sake of defending whatever high minded cause they have undertaken to defend. I shed bucketfuls of tears when they make silent and selfless sacrifices, the magnanimity of which is only felt by selfish families or misunderstanding girlfriends towards the end of a movie, mostly when the hero is about to die or already dead.
Our lives, however, are in shades of gray. We all have a bit of morbidity in us, a bit of a tendency to blur the lines between right and wrong. We might not exactly root for so-called Evil while watching our movies, but at times we do cherish the sumptuousness of our devious villains. And then there are filmmakers who will leave the decision to choose sides to the audience, and some others who will create, maybe even inadvertently, antagonists who will enthrall you and envelope your senses far more than the protagonist does. Cinema, as we know it, would have been incomplete without them.
The first name that crops into my mind is Norman Bates. It is true that the emotionally abused serial killer from Alfred Hitchcock’s legendary movie Psycho is overpowered and duly institutionalized by the end of the movie, but do we really remember the Detective and the victim’s sister who finally got the better of him? It is Bates sardonic smile, his glacial stare, and his eerie ruthlessness that has achieved iconic status in the history of film noir.
Clichés require villains to look like one, talk like one, and prominently act like one. Naseeruddin Shah in Sarfarosh is my favourite exception. His Gulfam Hassan is a soft spoken, sophisticated ghazal singer, a true admirer of art, a true patron of aesthetics. His appearance, his words, his love for all things beautiful evokes nothing but admiration, and yet he is a dangerous terrorist, a man who will go to any end to make his mission a success. A lot of people may beg to differ, but to me, the fact that such ingenious beauty and such insidious hatred can coexist in the heart of a man makes him a more memorable character than the protagonist Ajay Singh Rathod.
Villains do not always hunt alone, they often come in pairs. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, from the movie Bonnie and Clyde (though the movie is inspired from real characters of the same name), left an indelible impression in my mind. Bunty and Babli, inspired from this movie, may have portrayed the pair of outlaws as adorable conmen who makes their living out of fooling clueless idiots, but in actuality, they were brutal and ruthless robbers who even killed indiscriminately to achieve their ends. And then there are the characters of Martha and Abby Brewster in dark comedy Arsenic and Old Lace – a couple of extremely jovial and kind hearted old spinsters, absolutely devoted to cooking and knitting and fussing over their beloved nephew. In addition to that, they are also serial killers who kill old and lonely men who have no family or friends and bury them in their cellar. The beauty of these characters is that they do not believe they are doing anything wrong – for they genuinely believe that their murders are social service, a selfless sacrifice on their part to free some suffering souls from the burden of life. Never has “evil” had a more adorable, a more lovable pair of faces.
Then again, villains do not always need to be anti-socials. Case in point, Nurse Ratched from the movie One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, played by Louise Fletcher. From the face of it, she is a devoted social worker, a nurse who looks after patients in a mental asylum, a taxing and precarious job to say the least. Yet as the movie progresses, we find that she is more a tyrant than a nurse, who uses oppression as therapy and incarceration as medicine. I remember feeling suffocated as I watched the movie, even though I don’t remember her raising her voice beyond normal or losing her composure even once through its course, such was the power of her presence.
On a personal note, though, if I am to choose my favourites, I will be partial to characters that are pure, undiluted, and inexcusably evil. They might or might not have had guiding philosophies, they may or may not have survived their face-offs with their protagonists, but one thing remains constant – they did not cross over to the “good side”, they were not redeemed even till their dying breath.
Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (immortalized by Anthony Hopkins). Educated. Doctor by profession. Cannibal by choice. Watching him talk about eating a particularly fine piece of human liver with a glass of good wine is stuff that can send ripples down your spine.
Ralph Fiennes as Nazi Commander Amon Goethe in The Schindler’s List. The man makes you hate him with a passionate fervor, more so because you know he is not really a fictional character, that there were thousands like him who executed probably the most horrific mass genocide ever witnessed in history. The director plays with our emotions, though, by giving him a slim chance at redemption in our eyes, when he develops a vague soft corner for a Jewish girl in his captivity, but is bounded by doctrine to hate her very being. Of course, he does not change his stand, but this subtle touch makes this villain so wholly realistic, so completely unforgettable.
Alex De Large(Malcolm McDowell) in The Clockwork Orange. Unapologetic criminal – robber, rapist, smuggler, there is no crime that he has not dabbled in. And yet when he is subjected to the experimental “aversion therapy” that aims to pathologically make him violently sick even at the thought of hurting anyone, you actually feel sorry for him. It is more like questioning yourself, is it right to force good on someone, even if it is not by his choice? Weirdly enough, I remember myself feeling relieved on finding out that he was only temporarily cured, and that he still can hurt others if he wants to.
However, all of the above villains combined will never succeed in having as much hold over my being as one single man can. Everyone else in this list has some motive or the other behind their antagonism, but not this man. Not money, not power, not prestige – he is as naturally evil as others might be naturally good. No word befits this man – calling him brilliant is an insult, calling him extraordinary is an offense. He is not merely evil; he is an anarchist, an anti-humanist, a rebel whose only cause is destruction, a nihilist who only wants to “watch the world burn”. He is The Joker, immortalized by Heath ledger in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Detractors may say whatever they like, but humanity should be grateful that he resides merely in fiction, and in fragments of our worst nightmare.
Yes, long live our heroes. Without them, we surely would not have survived the brashness of reality. We all need to believe good will conquer evil, even if it does not, for where else can we find the courage to move on? This article, however, is a tribute to all my favourite villains, without whom our heroes would have no one to pit their strengths against, for there can be no matter without antimatter, and light can never be appreciated if one does not know darkness. But most importantly, this is a tribute to the one man who has redefined evil to me, and to millions around the world. To The Joker (and irrevocably to Heath Ledger), agent of chaos, who thought the only sensible way to live in this world was without rules…
“Madness is just like gravity. All it needs is a little push…”
The Reluctant Wordsmith 