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Here's a thought: it's surprisingly rare to find a really good fictional villain that doesn't fall into one of various possible categories.1. Grudging admiration. A lot of fictional villains are definitely bad people, but it's hard not to admire their style. Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber, for instance, villain of Die Hard, cold-bloodedly murders a decent family man early on in the script, so we're clear that he's not supposed to be a loveable rogue - but his skill in planning, his dry sense of humour, his charming sophistication, his great charisma, tend to overwhelm such considerations and we end up liking him. Of course, people can be like that in real life and we generally end up regretting having liked them; The Last King of Scotland is a superb depiction of how dangerous it is to be seduced by the charm of a wicked man. In real life, someone who's villainous to others is probably going to be villainous to you in the end, but in fiction, the characters can't screw us over while we're enjoying their antics, so enjoyable bastards remain a common feature in fiction.2. Fascinating grotesquerie. The Last King of Scotland is a case in point: Forest Whitaker's performance humanises Idi Amin to a great degree, but he remains such a bizarrely frightening man that it's hard to actually dislike him. He's more like a force of nature: terrifying, but so extreme that it overturns the usual standards you'd judge somebody by. Such villains cease to be villains and become character studies. This can produce some outstanding works, of course, so there's nothing wrong with that - in fact, it often produces a more sophisticated film than one with a straight-up villain - but if we're looking for a villain, fascinating grotesques are probably not the place.3. Pity. Tim Roth's slithery crook Archibald Cunningham incomes to mind: the guy's a thief, a rapist and a ruiner of lives, but at the same time he's rather a sad specimen, ashamed of his illegitimacy and burdened by the fact that his mother is unable to tell him who his father is - there are three candidates, and his mother appears to be a good-time girl who isn't very clear on such matters. Archibald clearly loves his mother but finds it difficult to feel any pride in himself for being the son of such a woman, and many of his worst acts appear to be attemps to cover up his insecurity. No excuse, of course, but it's hard not to feel sorry for him. Pitiable villains can actually make things very interesting - a drama where you can see everybody's point of view is a thing to be treasured - but the sorrier we feel for such a character, the harder it is to peg them as a straight-up villain. The edge closer and closer to being an ensemble player, which is a slightly different thing.4. Vagueness. A Dark Lord we never see much of isn't really a character, they're a plot device. We may know them by their fruits, but it's hard to get much sense of someone's personality if they're continually off-stage and have no quirks, except in a generic 'they're bad' way. In terms of story it has its uses, but in terms of character development it's rather dull.The classic villain, one that we simply hate and really, really want to see lose, is a surprisingly rare bird. Two examples occur to me: Doyle Lonnegan in The Sting, played by the great Robert Shaw, and Marlo Stanfield in The Wire, chillingly portrayed by Jamie Hector. These are men we cannot admire, even as we recognise their power, intelligence and success; they remain normal enough that we cannot suspend the usual laws of morality - in fact, their horribleness demands that we apply those laws as they violate them left and right. We do not feel sorry for them: they outrage us. We just want to see them go down. How is this done?The main distinction, I would say, is this: these are men who do not love. They only want. By this I don't just mean that they seem to feel no love for people; they don't love anything.Stringer Bell in The Wire, for example, is an intimidating and ruthless figure, but it's hard not to feel some sympathy for him: his ambition to build a financial empire that will lift him out of the world he was born in, his genuine interest and enjoyment in the workings of the business world and his entertaining attempts to impose a board-meeting style on his volatile corner boys are all rather appealing. Stringer loves a few people - not many, but maybe one or two, even though he's prepared to put his own interest ahead of them - but he also loves business, and that gives us a point of identification: most of us love something.Marlo, on the other hand, is a detroyer who tears down what Stringer has built, but he doesn't seem to have anything in mind while doing this except total dominance. He keeps homing pigeons, but he doesn't seem especially fond of them; he has trusted lieutenants, but he doesn't seem fond of them either: he seems to keep them around more because they're dependable than because he cares for them. When Stringer plans, we can see he has a vision of a better future in mind; Marlo's plans are all about destroying his rivals just for the sake of being on top. An older man warns him that the prisons and graveyards are 'full of boys who wore the crown', to which Marlo simply replies that the point is, 'they wore it.' It's the crown for its own sake that he wants. Not what the crown can get him, be it a better life, the admiration of those around him, or anything warming, but just the crown, so he can be king. It's a cold and deathly ambition, hard to like.Doyle Lonnegan is a similar beast. Like Stringer, he's socially aspirant, but unlike Stringer his pretensions of gentility seem to give him no pleasure. Rather, he wears them like armour, as signs of his success, furiously angry when someone acts loutish but taking no joy in elegance. His behaviour towards others is aggressively controlling while cold, and, like Marlo, he's prepared to destroy anything and anyone if he feels his pride has been in any way compromised. Marlo will have a shop security guard killed for asking him not to shoplift; Lonnegan will have a man killed for stealing money that 'wouldn't keep him for two days'. Our friends in The Sting's analysis of Lonnegan could equally be applied to both villians: 'He's vindictive as hell ... He kills for pride.'It's this quality that makes them particularly hateful. Idi Amin as portrayed by Whitaker is somewhat lost in a fantasy world, driven by impulse and only intermittently aware of reality, but our cold villains are deeply engaged with other people. It's just that their engagement is entirely vicious. When they're aware of people they want to dominate them, and they're always aware of them. There's a kind of mean relentlessness that's particularly easy to dislike in these characters.It's interesting to note that both characters are also gamblers. Lonnegan is drawn into a trap by tempting his instinct to cheat at gambling; Marlo is something of an enigma because he's so unresponsive, but his main idea of recreation is gambling and his drive to succeed no matter what it costs, including the risk to his own life, is the drive of a man for whom the main aim is to win, rather than what he wins.And this is a big part of it. Nobody likes a bad sport; as any mother could tell a child, 'If you want to win all the time, nobody will want to play with you.' Gambling is a good expression of this character trait: a desire to interact with other people not just because they've got something you want but because it's important to you to triumph over them. Ultimately, what these villains want from other people is not their money or their flattery: they want the satisfaction of beating them.Which is to say, their happiness isn't just indifferent to the suffering of others, it depends on it.For a villian you really want to lose, it helps a great deal if the villain really wants to win - not just to get the money or to capture the princess, but to win. I read a study somewhere that I can't cite (anyone who can, please weigh in) that looked at competitive and cooperative dispositions. The gist was that if you put two cooperators in a situation, they'll cooperate; if you put two competitors together, they'll compete - but if you put in one of each, the cooperator will quickly begin competing because they realise they're playing with a bad sport and there's no point trying to cooperate. (This is the likely reason why competitive people believe that deep down is as competitive as they are: they never give anyone the chance to act otherwise.) I can remember a demonstration of this principle I encountered at a party: we were outside, and there was some badminton equipment lying around, so two of us started knocking around the shuttlecock. We weren't particularly keeping score or trying to knock it where the other couldn't reach; we were just batting back and forth for our own amusement. A couple more people joined the game, and it quickly became clear that they were determined to win. They played hard, they kept score, they crowed when they gained a point. The other girl left the game because it wasn't fun any more, but I got annoyed with them for turning a pleasant knock-about into a pointless challenge, and started playing to win. My reaction was basically punitive: 'You want to make me lose? Fine, let's make you lose and see how you like it.' I won, too. It was very satisfying, but frankly I'd had more fun when it was just an amiable rally; it was being competed with that got me emotionally engaged in the outcome.Now, the audience to a work of fiction may be cooperative or not, depending on their natures - but given a character who simply competes out of aggression and self-aggrandisment, and even the sympathetic audience members will switch quickly into competitive mode. A villain who's playing for something is easier to identify with: there's a reason why he wants to win, even if it doesn't excuse his methods. But a villain who wants nothing more than winning for its own sake isn't just being selfish in placing his desires ahead of other people's rights, he's being selfish in his entire attitude towards the world: it exists only for him to crow over, and nobody likes someone like that.We like people who like people, and we like people who like things. People who like nothing but winning for the sake of winning, dominance for the sake of dominance, are far harder to feel for. And that's a thought that can make for some really good villains.Anyone got other thoughts on good villainy?