With spoilers for: The Dark Knight

A few weeks ago, I did a short piece on Jesse Pinkman and concluded that there are many, often conflicting ways of making a character likeable. Today, I just want to hit that point home a bit, by turning your attention to antagonists – and how they often come with characteristics which make us support them more than we probably should.

Proficiency

You know my powers, my dear Watson, and yet at the end of three months I was forced to confess that I had at last met an antagonist who was my intellectual equal. My horror at his crimes was lost in my admiration of his skill.

This quote follows Sherlock Holmes’ first encounter with Moriarty, and I love it because I think it perfectly encapsulates how most of us react to a good villain. Antagonists are usually the main source of conflict in a story, so it seems to follow that they should be incredibly good at what they do – incredibly good at stopping the hero from achieving his goals. However, by making them this way, writers often endow them with a level of excellence, lacking in most of the other characters, including the hero.

A good example of this is the Unstoppable Evil archetype, home to characters such as the Salamanca twins from Breaking Bad. These are the two silent, almost mechanical cartel hitmen, barely with a moment on screen where they’re not shooting someone, beheading someone or trying to find means to facilitate either of those activities. Natural to their line of work, they don’t have much going for them on a moral level – and they aren’t exactly providing the comic relief either.

However, they are incredibly good at what they do. Hell, they hardly have to speak to each other, they’re so accustomed to killing. Like a great sportsman or musician, every movement they make is calculated but relaxed, alert but assured. Similar is their Chigurhian attitude to life and law. You know there’s no bargaining with these people – they can’t be bought or reasoned with. And there’s something very powerful about that.

It seems most of us are a bit Sherlockian when it comes to the very worst of bad guys. Such characters appeal to our megalomania. They invite us to step into their shoes for a while – part metaphorically, to see how it feels to act without hesitation or restraint – but also literally, because they have cool skull boots.

Or it could just be that we appreciate people who are good at what they do, even if we totally condemn what they’re doing. It’s a hard one to test, but given what I said previously, I’d expect that the greater your desire for power is, the more these characters will appeal to you. Certainly feels right to me, but I’m not sure if it is.

Honesty

It’s not like the Salamanca twins are pretending to be charity workers in their spare time. Both are unambiguously killers and make no attempt to disguise that fact, even carrying out executions in public areas.

This is just an offshoot from the Power trait, really. These twin golems don’t tell lies or act dishonestly because they don’t feel like they have to; there’s no benevolence about it. Still, we seem to prefer our antagonists honest (c.f. The Departed, where the rat Damon is several times more loathsome than his boss.)

Intelligence

Again, this is just the Power point rebranded and given a pair of spectacles. An evil genius is still a genius. Personally, I kinda admire Moriarty, Gus Fring, Tyler Durden, Don Corleone. There’s a feeling that they deserve the status they have, which is severely lacking in a character like Commodus from Gladiator.

Genocide Neglect

Genocide neglect is basically the finding that we care more about the suffering of one human being than of a thousand combined. It’s an initially shocking statement, although explanations come easily. It’s easy to identify with a single individual, less so with an entire demographic. It’s also very relevant to our admiration of cinematic villains. Quite often they exhibit a form of nastiness that we just don’t have an emotional conception of.

For me, this is exemplified by the Dark Knight boat scene. In all honesty, I don’t really care if the Joker blows up a ferry of faceless hundreds. Obviously, I realise it’s a hideous thing for someone to want to do – but I just don’t feel it. (Actually, I’d argue that the Joker’s murder video is the most disturbing part of the Batman trilogy, in which you witness a short recording of one man’s humiliation and torture.)

In other words, super-evil villains – with their grandiose plans for mass destruction and world domination – often end up exploiting a moral loophole. As Barbara Kingsolver says, “we didn’t evolve to cope with tragedy on a global scale.”

So there you go. A few ways in which a villain can become likeable, although I can imagine others: maybe there’s a greater range to antagonists, which makes them inherently more intriguing; maybe their alien inhumanity prevents us from judging them in the same way as ordinary members of the public. I’m less convinced by these last two ideas, but maybe there’s something there.

I should point out here that I’m not criticising these kinds of antagonist. Anton Chigurh, Colonel Hans Landa, the Joker, Gus Fring are some of my all-time favourite characters. All I mean to say is that, if you want your antagonist’s defeat to be a truly cathartic, celebratory moment, probably best that you don’t make him too powerful, proficient, intelligent, honest – or even too evil. I truly believe that Nolan never killed off the Joker because he couldn’t, it just wouldn’t have made for a satisfying ending.

So, the question remains: if we can like characters as evil as the ones listed above, how do you make a character loathsome? That’s the question I want to turn to next, starting with a study of Joffrey Baratheon.