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

Re: Oh yeah.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Good points, all. Especially your breakdown of how Hans fits into Die Hard -- you're dead-on about the tricks that allow him to be a character we want to watch, rather than one who needs to have died, like, eight scenes ago. (My only quibble would be in the phrasing that he only kills people who "deserve it" -- rather that he only kills people who played some part in their own deaths. Takagi didn't deserve to die; he just chose honor/loyalty over living. And even whathisface the cokehead doesn't deserve death; he just chose to risk his life, and it ended badly for him.)

Where torture is concerned . . . I dunno. I've hit a point where I'm not very willing to let the hero get away with it, either. Taken, with Liam Neeson, was the movie that made it clear to me how much my tolerance for that had dropped.

Re: Oh yeah.

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

Yeah I put "deserved it" in scare quotes for a reason. But you're right, that's not what's quite going on. Instead it's about letting the audience believe they have control over their fates. It's "if I was in that situation, he wouldn't kill me because I'd have kept my mouth shut" thinking. Its appeal may be slightly different from the horror-movie trope of "only teens who have sex get killed" but it's only slightly different.

Both of these tropes work because deep down, audience members are thinking "that wouldn't be me."

Re: Oh yeah.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

It also makes Hans not arbitrary. It's very hard to successfully pull off an arbitrary villain; it's much easier to follow one who shows logic in his decisions, even if the logic is cruel.

Re: Oh yeah.

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

Oh. And I just watched The Avengers. Loki hits many of the same beats, I think: he's got supervillain appeal, he has a mysterious plan and the only people he directly kills are SHIELD agents.

To this we add the classic "sympathetic villain" appeal (nobody wuvs him), and, more interestingly, the outranked villain maneuver, where Loki's allies are nastier than him and it's obvious he's a bit scared of them. Even though he's the main villain of the movie, he's in the Baltar role.

Re: Oh yeah.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Not to mention the implication that -- SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER -- it's possible that Loki himself was mind-controlled. His eyes aren't changed, but he does get his head smashed into the floor a dozen times or so, and after that he seems different.

Re: Oh yeah.

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

Oooh! I like that! It would explain why Loki's taken such a giant step down in his douchebaggery. From trying to be RULER OF ASGARD AND THE NINE WORLDS to "King of Tiny Little Earth" was a bit of a step down. Like Lex Luthor declaring that he was going to become manager of that tiny bagel shop over on 4th street.

I don't know that I'm fully persuaded though. If you have a mind-controlled Loki, why not send him to take over Asgard?

Re: Oh yeah.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that is what was going on. It's just a possibility you can read into the movie. If they wanted that to be the explanation, they ought to have made it a good deal clearer. (And who knows -- maybe there will be something in the deleted scenes that indicates either way.)