Malevolence

[swan_tower]

(The following post talks about The Avengers on its way to the actual point, but does not give spoilers.)

Interestingly, one of the moments that has stayed with me the most strongly from The Avengers is the speech Loki flings at Black Widow.

He has other Villain Speeches in the movie, of course. But this one stands out for its sheer, unbridled malevolence. He doesn't say those things out of megalomania or fraternal resentment or any other such understandable motivation; he says them because, quite simply, he wants to hurt her.

I've said before that I tend to write antagonists more often than villains. That is, I write characters who think they're doing the right (or at least the necessary) thing, who happen to be wrong about that. There are exceptions, of course; Nadrett doesn't give a damn what's right, only what he can get away with. But I have a harder time writing that sort of thing.

Which means -- of course -- that I want to study how it's done. So this is a Recommend Stuff to Me kind of post: what books/movies/TV shows/etc have those moments of pure malevolence, where the character is just trying to hurt somebody? Off the top of my head, there's Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles ("Stop sidling, my swan. I am going to hurt you, but I am not going to kill you, just yet. You are going to provide me with a deal of merriment still."), some of Angelus' moments in Buffy, and pretty much everything the main villains do in Tokyo Babylon and X, but I'm having trouble thinking of more. (Actually, that's a lie. I can think of plenty of sadistic villains. It's just that most of them are sadistic in a shallow, uninteresting way, and I want ones that really manage to get the knife between the ribs.)

Where have you seen this done well?


Edited to add: Please to be avoiding spoilers as much as possible. This discussion will necessarily involve a degree of revelation, but if you can use phrases like "the main villain" instead of the name (where the villain is not obvious from the start), etc, that would be much appreciated.

Comments

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

It depends on how dark you want to go. A lot of us don't *want* to spend time with truly evil people, so we prefer antagonists to outright villains. True evil is often banal, too, so while I find the "villains" of True Stories like Wild Swans horrible, I don't know that they'd make good fictional villains. At least, they wouldn't make good *super*villains, of the sort you secretly kinda root for and find compelling and charismatic.

I have one suggestion though: the main villain of In the Company of Men.

Also, I just watched Snowtown, a hard-to-watch Australian film based on a series of (real) serial killings in the 1990s. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1680114/) It's a compelling portrait of evil, and one of the most realistic things about it is that the villain's motivation is basically very simple: he enjoys power. Anything that demonstrates his power - insulting people, seducing people, torturing and killing people - is fair game.

I bring it up not because the film features torture but because it struck me as an utterly convincing portrait of a non-Hollywoodized psychopath. And because it's seen through the eyes of a bystander, most of the powerplays in the first part of the film are very domestic and ordinary. They're social challenges, and at heart, they're nasty. It's an interesting film but one I'd only recommend if you honestly think you can sit through it.

[tooth-and-claw.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the movie rec. That looks amazing.

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

It's good, and disturbing. The characters can be hard to follow sometimes, so I'd recommend reading up on the Snowtown murders case before you watch it. And I'll also put a massive trigger warning on this film. A lot of the bad stuff happens off-screen, but there's a rape scene and a torture/murder scene. The latter is *really* horrible, less for gory detail (there's some) than for the emotional distress inflicted on the pov character, and via him, the audience.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Wow, yeah, that film sounds hard to watch. I'll keep it in mind, though.

It's definitely true that real evil of that sort is not actually what we're looking for most of the time in our stories.