In my house, Die Hard is a holiday movie. It’s not really Christmas until Hans Gruber falls from Nakatomi Tower. Not that we especially like watching someone go squish from a thousand feet up, but because Hans is one of the greatest bad guys to ever grace a screen, and he deserved no less than an intensely dramatic ending.
Villains are vital to successful story-telling. Heroes aren’t interesting unless they have someone to fight, after all. Imagine how boring the Pevensie children’s visit to Narnia would have been if the White Witch hadn’t been there. Without Richelieu and Milady DeWinter, the musketeers would have spent the whole book drinking in a pub.
Villains can’t be just bad, though. As many wise people have noted, the villain must believe is the hero, or at least that his goals are most important. No one likes a Snidely Whiplash** bad guy, because he’s dull and uninteresting. The best conflict comes from the clash of ideologies. Look at Magua in The Last of the Mohicans, He’s determined to achieve vengeance against the English officer who abused him and caused his wife to leave him. A perfectly relatable goal, right? Except the story is told from Bumppo and Chingachgook’s points of view. So Magua is the villain. He dies screaming defiance, as he well should. His intentions, while cruel and bloodthirsty, are only wrong because he’s not the hero. That;s what makes an exceptional villain – we reach a point in the story where it’s hard to know for certain who deserves to win.
So tell me, who are your favorite villains?
** If you don’t know Snidely, look him up. Darn whippersnappers.