Since I have recently done posts on genocide, airport security, and - worst of all - the US News law school rankings, it's time for a lighter subject. Bryan Caplan asks his readers what if any fictional villains they identify with.
This turns out to be a tougher question than I at first thought. In considering my own list of seemingly sympathetic fictional villains, it turns out that they all fall into one of four categories that undercut their villain status.
NOTE: This post contains a spoilers for Jane Austen's classic novel Pride and Prejudice, Frank Herbert's Dune, and Oliver Stone's famous 1987 movie Wall Street. Continue at your own risk below the fold.
I. The supposed villain turns out not to be villainous at all.
The classic example is Mr. Darcy in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. He seems to be the bad guy during the first half of the book, but it turns out that the main character got him completely wrong.
II. I sympathize with the villain because I disagree with the story's ideological message.
Sometimes, I sympathize with the villain over the hero because I oppose the message the story is intended to convey. For example, I sympathize with evil financier Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's Wall Street as against the neo-Marxist union leader played by Martin Sheen. Gekko's decision to shut down Blue Star Airlines (the main supposedly villainous action he commits in the story) seem to me perfectly justified, and indeed a boon to consumers and the American economy. That, of course, is not the message Oliver Stone intended to convey. Basically, this comes down to my disagreeing with Oliver Stone's anti-market ideology, though I think he's a great filmmaker.
Similarly, I sympathize with the carpetbagger and scalawag bad guys in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. That's because I oppose her racist/pro-Confederate ideological message, and sympathize with those who sought to modernize the economy of the South and give southern blacks equal rights under the law (an objective Mitchell explicitly condemns in the book, even though it's only implicit in the 1939 movie).
III. The villain isn't really responsible for his actions.
This, presumably, is one of the reasons for Bryan's sympathy for Gollum in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Arguably, Gollum wasn't responsible for his actions because he was in thrall to the Ring of Power. I dissent from that view, but it's a common one among Tolkien readers.
IV. The villain turns out to be the lesser of two evils.
Sometimes, a villain commits genuine sins and bears full responsibility for them, but I have some residual sympathy for his cause because it's not as bad as the alternative. As I discussed in this post, that's why I tend to sympathize with the Emperor and the Harkonnens in Frank Herbert's Dune. They are evil, repressive, and (in the case of the Baron Harkonnen) depraved. But their tyranny is not as bad as Paul Atreides' Fremen Jihad, which ends up killing billions of innocent people.
However, I can't see myself sympathizing with villains whose actions don't fall into one of the four categories above. Can you?
UPDATE: I think some of the commenters are missing the distinction between villains we can empathize with (in the sense that they have motives that we can understand), and those who we sympathize with. For example, I can understand Lenin's or Hitler's motivations for what they did. That's not the same thing as sympathizing with them.
And, plus Vader is forgiving. After all, he did accept Captain Needa's apology.
Another category, or maybe just a variant of your category I: someone presented as a heroic character turns out to really be the villain. Neil Gaiman seems to particularly like this one, as he does it with Mr. Wednesday in American Gods and Hunter (and to a lesser extent, Islington) in Neverwhere. While it becomes clear that their actions villainous at the end, this does not entirely overcome their sympathetic portrayal through most of the story.
The other category of sympathetic villains I think you missed are those who try to pursue noble ends through ignoble means. Examples include Magneto from the X-Men comics, and The Operative from Serenity. Depending on the story, the line between this type of sympathetic villain and an anti-hero can be pretty blurred (Magneto has often been portrayed as an anti-hero for instance). I think it really depends on the story's point of view. If the character pursuing a noble end through ignoble means is the protagonist, then he's an anti-hero. If he's the antagonist, then he's a sympathetic villain.
As Vader says in Return of the Jedi, "The Emperor is not as forgiving as I am."
On the whole, I think that readers are more drawn to anti-hero protagonists than they are to pure heroes. The former are much more human than the latter, and while they may be cruel and malicious, that humanity allows the reader to support them. Like Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination.
I like the Inuit(?) harpooner bad-guy in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. And Pontius Pilate in the Bible. And the Matrix itself, just because I really wanted Neo/Keanu to lose.
In this respect I say the character is sympathetic. I recognize in him similar professional disappointments and personal recriminations I've felt in myself. To be sure, in my own case the visceral reactions to being passed over for a job or getting cut off in traffic are quickly checked, and never grow into any sort of irrational animosity towards a whole class of people, but I recognize what could happen if I were not careful.
So I propose a fifth category: V. The villain is presented as fatally flawed or evil, but still clearly human, so as to make a point about the banality of evil.
Perhaps our difference is due to the fact that I consider results to be more important than motives. Yes, the Baron's motives are more reprehensible than Paul's. But his results are not nearly as horrendous.
Moreover, even if Paul's motives are relatively benign, those of the Fremen (which include imposing their Jihad on all of humanity) often are not.
These people, I think, fall into either Category I or Category IV, if their ends really do justify the questionable means. Where they don't, I'm hard-pressed to sympathize with them.
Two sympathetic villains that I don't think fall into any of your categories are Satan in Paradise Lost, and The Operative in Serenity. Both are clearly villainous, I agree with the ideological message of both stories (particularly Serenity), both villains freely admit responsibility for their actions (The Operative, paraphrased from lack of memory: "I don't expect to live in that world. I'm a monster, Captain Reynolds"), and the villains are not the lesser of two evils. But both are sympathetic. Maybe if you amend category I to "Based on the villain's beliefs, he isn't acting villainously"?
Part of the theme of Firefly and Serenity is that meddlesome social idealism becomes horror. The Alliance perpetrated a terrible, destructive war of conquest on the Independents, and justified it to themselves as "bringing the blessings of civilization". In experiments to create "better people", they turned a planet into a charnel-house that breeds monsters. And, of course, for the sake of keeping nasty secrets from disturbing the public, they send men who kill children and burn villages.
of the other characters. I think Blake said the Milton was of the devil's own party but didn't know it. And then there's
humpback Dick. Bill might have written a piece of Tudor propaganda, but Dick is magnificent.
For example, I always liked Apollo Creed in all the Rocky's. Even the second one.
But perhaps 'villian' in this context is not appropriate (Creed, thought the antogonist to Rocky is not morally corrupt).
I also found Little Bill (Gene Hackman) in Unforgiven hard to all out dispise. I really think Bill thought he was doing the right thing for his town, even though he made some really bad judgements.
The Alfred Bester character in Babylon 5 doesn't seem to me to fit into any of the four categories, and fans love him.
I'm not sure Severus Snape fits into any of them either, and he's a fan favorite. It's true that there are ways he fits into category 1, but he's a despicable person, and nothing you find out about his ultimate motives anywhere in the series removes that. Yet he's got plenty of fans.
I think the chapter where he gets introduced is this one:
Chapter Four
Libertarian fans of comic books might get a kick out of the writing, incidentally. I certainly do, even though I'm not libertarian. Then again, he is my little brother...
Sounds like the "High Evolutionary" in Marvel comics: Evolved to a distant, future post-human state of mankind, he spend his time on various plots to bring the rest of humanity up to his level, just so he'd have somebody to hold an intelligent conversation with. They never could quite make up their minds whether he was a hero or a villain. But then, would a human really fit into categories established by a band of proto-apes?
George III also comes to mind.
I have always had sympathy, as a Notherner and then Midwesterner, for the South. I think the idea of Southerners as the racist, backwards "villians" of the country to be simplistic at best. I have a lot of sympathy for people from the region who are tired of being derided as if they were an embarrassment to the rest of the country.
And when Trent Lott was vilified for his remarks at a birthday celebration for Strom Thurmond, all I could think was, "Give the man a f'n break."
Javert, in Les Miserables.
Jessup, in A Few Good Men.
Law and order types. Best line of the century: "You can't handle the truth!"
J. T. Walsh in anything but especially Red Rock West, Sling Blade, and Breakdown.
Any Disney villain -- can you blame them for wanting to snuff the insipid brats who've never accomplished anything other than being pretty and willing to put out for a handsome, powerful prince?
Annette Benning in American Beauty -- Okay, she's more an antagonist than a villain, but she's more sympathetic than Spacey's self-absorbed wanker. Her husband deliberately gets himself fired, then goes out and spends his severance pay on a sports car and drugs, leaving her as the sole bread-winner for the family, stuck in a job she absolutely hates and is not good at. Then he has the temerity to criticize her for being concerned that he was going to spill wine on furniture -- she should've gone out and keyed his car and then told him, "It's just things." If he hadn't died (and hopefully he had a juicy insurance policy) they would've been living in a slum apartment in six months, and Thora Birch would've had to work at Wal-Mart instead of going to college.
Unfortunately the studios didn't like the moral ambiguity, so they demanded the scenes showing magneto to be a petty bad guy (abandoning mystique, sending in the level 1's as cannon fodder). Edit those scenes, and it's a very good movie.
As for myself -- Magneto. In some of his forms. Then, granting the world he worked in, IV definitely applies.
I think this is true of almost all villains... or at least, almost all real villains and almost all fictional villains who are written with any attempt at characterization and believable motivation beyond "look how evil I am, mwa ha ha."
People don't think themselves villains. People think themselves justified. Villainy is in the eye of the beholder. The rare exceptions would have to be clinically psychopathic... and even then, probably would think other's definitions of villainy to be simply irrelevant rather than identifying with the idea.
Another category (which, come to think of it, both Edmund and Iago sort of fall into) might be villains who are avenging real injuries, even if their revenge is excessive, taken against innocent people, etc.: Clytemnestra in the Agamemnon, Medea, and Echidna in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (before she turns good) are examples.
But he's also portrayed in a very sympathetic light, with explanations for a good deal of his behavior, some understandable and some not.
Klaus Wulfenbach from Girl Genius is another example. He's well aware of his negative actions, considers himself a villain compared to the average hero, and his actions are generally leading to a bad situation... but because we're allowed to understand why he acts this way, and might even agree with him if we were stuck with the same dataset, he's much easier to agree with.
Dexter from Darkly Dreaming Dexter and the show built around that is likewise a horrible, horrible person. Even if you like vigilantism, he's still a self-described serial killer with little emotion, nearly a sociopath. His pet turtle starved to death rather than deal with him. He only kills 'bad people', but his personal situation would make it easier to put them taken out by the police. On the other hand, he's given a viewpoint that you can understand, and that makes it easier to agree with some of his actions.
Ozymandias in Watchman may or may not count, depending on how you perceive him.
HTML doesn't deal with URLs that contain commas instead of periods. 8-(
Chewbacca was a slave of the empire before Han Solo rescued him.
My contributions:
Professor Weston from C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy. He's frighteningly evil in Out of the Silent Planet, but by the end of Perelandra you can't help but sympathize with the guy.
Gaston from Beauty in the Beast. Probably the most realisticly evil of all Disney villains (everyone else is just pure caricature, where Gaston's evil is much more human), yet in the end, he's just a guy who can't overcome his barbaric instincts to win the girl he loves.
I mean yeah, he's a pirate, but it's hard to say that little snot peter pan doesn't need a whuppin'.
-m@
The villian who has been driven to his villiany by being a victim (making the entire story a tragedy, because even when the hero wins, there is still a feeling of loss):
Captain Nemo (yes, he's a villain)
Magneto
Khan in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (although that thing with the earwigs was over the top).
Magua from The Last of the Mohicans.
Richard III is often sympathetic, and in The Merchant of Venice, I sympathize with Shylock.
Definitely Larry the Liquidator from Other People's Money.
HAL 9000.
Yubaba in Spirited Away. There are also sympathetic antagonists in Mononoke Hime, like Eboshi Gozen, but she's not really a villain.
After all, she doesn't have a medical degree, yet the hospital expects her to tend to the patients' mental health.
Mr. Tinkles in Cats and Dogs fighting the canine collectivists for the good of felines and humans alike.
The Storm King Ineluki in Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn Trilogy.
Additionally, the "four categories" look like someone designed a standardized A-B-C-D multiple choice test, and autistics can't fathom this type of thinking and don't do well on multiple choices. But I can see there are numerous people whose memories are apparently cued by the multiple choices, a testing format designed for the mentally deficient requiring use of things like mneumonics to trigger appropriate recall. This is all a msytery to one with autism, since my own memory does not work this way, but rather is 100% photographic.
Moreover, I have a very difficult time understanding the social emotionalism some of the posters are apparently receving conjured up by other posters, since due to my autism I don't have this ability and really I'm a lot more like Spock, upon whom I think most of this thread would be lost.
But from my autistic ability to match patterns, this looks very much like a very high level U.S. Marshal-psychiatrist sting effort (notably immediately post-the new surveillance bill that was just passed) to ascertain if there are any licensed lawyers/law grads/law students blogging on this blog who are of interest to law enforcement. I do not recognize most of the thread posters as regulars.
In closing, I am perplexed why none of you have cited to the ultimate good guy vs. bad guy story, The Count of Monte Cristo. This story, at least for me, defines the approach a good person should undertake when dealing with a bad person -- the rule of law.
This turns out to be a tougher question than I at first thought. In considering my own list of seemingly sympathetic fictional villains, it turns out that they all fall into one of four categories that undercut their villain status."
Everyone has offered "sympathetic" fictional villains, but I think someone should point out this is quite different, conceptually, and probably different practically, from Bryan's question about what fictional villain a person can "identify with".
For example, one can easily imagine identifying with Lord Voldemort's fear of death and, perhaps at least at times, identify with his undervaluing love. This doesn't mean one necessarily thinks such characteristics make him "sympathetic".
Certainly, Ilya can change Bryan's question, but the way he phrased matters he made it seem (I think) as if they were the same question. They are not. To use Mary Katherine's excellent example, one can easily identify with The Count of Monte Cristo even while, valuing the rule of law, not sympathizing with him. Or vice versa.
Must challenge your judgment on Wall Street: "I sympathize with evil financier Gordon Gekko ... as against the neo-Marxist union leader played by Martin Sheen. Gekko's decision to shut down Blue Star Airlines (the main supposedly villainous action he commits in the story) seem to me perfectly justified, and indeed a boon to consumers and the American economy."
First, Gekko's main villainous action is that he's a criminal. Towards the end of the film, we read--"THE U.S. ATTORNEY'S OFFICE TODAY ANNOUNCED CRIMINAL CHARGES AGAINST CORPORATE RAIDER GORDON GEKKO AND STOCK BROKER BUD FOX, FOR CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT SECURITIES FRAUD, TAX EVASION, VIOLATIONS OF SECURITY ACTS, AND MAIL FRAUD" ... after we've watched him conspire to commit various of those crimes.
Second, why do you believe that Gekko's proposed break-up of the airline is "justified" and a "boon to consumers"? He can only make the deal go by lying to his would-be partners (the employees); and it falls apart when they find him out. Conversely, Gekko's rival financier (Sir Larry Wildman, elegantly played by Terence Stamp) puts together a profitable buyout that ousts bad management and keeps the airline flying by dealing honestly. Where's the "anti-market" ideology in that?
Third, I can't find any support in the script for calling Carl Fox (Martin Sheen's character) a "neo-Marxist". He's honest, he's a hard-nosed union leader ("The only difference between the Pyramids and the Empire State Building is that the Egyptians didn't have unions") and he's got pretty good read on Gekko ("this guy is about greed. He's in and out for the buck and he don't take prisoners. He don't give a damn about Northstar or us"). And he favors the Wildman deal. Where's the neo-Marxism?
I'd suggest watching the movie again.
Not in the movies.
Very interesting. I cannot say that I empathize with Hitler in any sense, although this may be that I haven't read enough writing that was from his point of view, sympathetic toward him or even generally a lot of political history about his rise to power (and it has been some time since I read any at all). However, I have always felt that his story was a lot less "sympathetic" (in this context, empathetic, obviously it isn't sympathetic at all) than the communist story.
It is funny though, that even a I am one of the few still totally stuck in the cold war fighting the good fight against communism, I am very empathetic toward Lenin and toward all of the communists. That is, in fact, why it is my cause. It is because I can empathize with their struggle and their cause, their motives, that I am so driven by it. And of course, the complement to that being that I know how misguided it is, and find the reasons for it fascinating.
I've always felt a little sentimental towards Pyrrhus from Plutarch's life of Pyrrhus. I'm not sure Plutarch intends him to be a villain, as they share a Greek identity. But to the Romans he would certainly be a bad guy, and from our standpoint I think we can reasonably view a serial military adventurer and self-interested would-be-conqueror as a villian.
Also, I'd suggest that humerous villains can be sympathetic outside the four categories. In comedic works you have those like Dr. Evil from Austin Powers. In non-comedy, you have kooky figures like Caligula from I, Claudius.
I also have a category for villains who are fun to watch. You don't necessarily root for them to win, but it's awfully fun when they survive for a while longer. During the brief period where I thought Severus Snape might actually be a bad guy (basically, books 3 and 4) this was my attitude towards him. Same goes for Screwtape -- you're sad when the Patient dies in the end, because then all that's left is the Toast and you're at the end of the book. Admiral Thrawn from the Star Wars EU novels (and Captain Pellaeon) come to mind, though they're so three-dimensional and our heroes often do some really screwy stuff, and it's again hard to classify them as "villains."
I have not read them but Bester's character may fit better if you include the three books about the Psi Corps.
Perhaps I misunderstand the subject but I am surprised nobody mentioned Londo Mollari. Here is an apparently evil character who is manipulated into starting a galaxy wide war through his own shortcomings and ultimately volunteers to sacrifice his free will in an attempt to ameliorate what he is responsible for.
My own personal favorite is Ellis Wyatt but that depends on if he is considered a hero or villain.
I know the rule of law is important blah blah blah but I also like to see the bad guys put away, and the bad guys Quinlan put away all deserved it.
You can find out from the books about some of the Star Wars back stories, such as Chewbacca's. This is an interesting book to read. I read it in the middle of my 1L year to break the monotony.
As for Star Wars, I've always contended that the Jedi/Rebels were the bad guys. The new trilogy affirms that belief even moreso. But that's another subject for another day.
He's so popular, that one Japanese fellow (Daisuke Enomoto(?)) who was going to go up to the space station planned to cosplay as Char when he got there.
All things considered, though, I don't think there's much that undercuts his villain status. In the first series, covering the "One Year War" in the Gundam timeline, I think he participated in Operation British, in which a 30 km long space colony is dropped on Earth, destroying Australia or something, and killing millions. He was also notable for his involvement in the Battle of Loum, which killed millions of civilians, at the least, and possibly billions. And he's doing it all as part of a circuitous revenge against his (mostly evil) bosses. He also has a penchant for young girls (Lalah Soon, Haman Khan).
Nevertheless, to use the distinction presented here, I think a lot of fans don't merely sympathise, but also empathise. In the beginning of the second series, Zeta Gundam, which is set 7 or 8 years after the first, the new main character clearly sympathises with him, because he points directly to Char's quest for revenge and singles it out as praiseworthy. For whatever reason, that -- and his apocalyptic dream of bettering the human race through emigration into space -- is kind of appealing to a lot of people.
I'd freely admit he's one of my favourite villains. I don't particularly identify with him myself, but I know there are those who kind of do.
One of my favorite pieces of fan fiction ever is The Darth Side
If Lucas had had that guy write the script for movies 1, 2 and 3, people would actually have liked them.
Wow.
(As a big fan who had a young crush on MJF... I am just shocked that someone even would think of it)
Sure, good choice.
And that makes me think of another promising topic for discussion: what about really unsympathetic heroes? In Vanity Fair, Becky is really the most likeable character: I, for one, find Amelia a loathsome, worthless halfwit (a common condition, I'm afraid, among Victorian-novel heroines). Anyone else?
I imagine that actors should always have some sympathy for their characters. My only role was Jabe in Orpheus Descending. He is not a nice person, but it seemed possible to be somewhat sympathetic and quite evil.
In that category I nominate the dog Bartholomew fom Woodhouse.
Gekko almost certainly didn't do anything illegal, though it's not clear whether the filmmakers realize this. See here.
why do you believe that Gekko's proposed break-up of the airline is "justified" and a "boon to consumers"? He can only make the deal go by lying to his would-be partners (the employees); and it falls apart when they find him out.
Blue Star seems to be a poorly run airline with a bloated workforce. Gekko intends to sell the planes and other assets off to other firms that will use them more efficiently and at lower cost -thereby benefiting consumers. He'll also invest the capital tied up in the pension fund in more profitable investments, thus improving the allocation of resources in the economy as a whole. As noted in the link above, the deal falls apart only because Bud Fox violated his fiduciary obligations to Gekko.
Gekko's rival financier (Sir Larry Wildman, elegantly played by Terence Stamp) puts together a profitable buyout that ousts bad management and keeps the airline flying by dealing honestly. Where's the "anti-market" ideology in that?
There's anti-market ideology throughout the script. That's the whole point of the movie. Yes, Stone seems to approve of the Wildman deal. But that deal is only put together through 1) the actions of the unions, and 2) Bud Fox's violation of his obligations to his client, which is not exactly the free market thing to do. The message of the movie is NOT that things will be hunky dory if only you deal with Wildman instead of Gekko. That's trivializing it.
Third, I can't find any support in the script for calling Carl Fox (Martin Sheen's character) a "neo-Marxist". He's honest, he's a hard-nosed union leader ("The only difference between the Pyramids and the Empire State Building is that the Egyptians didn't have unions") and he's got pretty good read on Gekko ("this guy is about greed. He's in and out for the buck and he don't take prisoners. He don't give a damn about Northstar or us"). And he favors the Wildman deal. Where's the neo-Marxism?
The character makes numerous anti-market comments throughout the movie. The one you quote is one of the best known ones. He also denounces the profit motive and claims that financiers are worthless and don't produce anything of value. Yes, he favors the Wildman deal. But Marxists have always been willing to deal with capitalists when it was in their interest to do so. Remember Lenin's line about buying from capitalists the rope to hang them with. I don't claim that the character endorses marxism in every respect. But he certainly has a class conflict-based view of the world, and Bud describes him as a taking a "workers of the world unite" perspective.
As a member of Quess Paraya(the fairest of all of Char's young flames) Fan Club, I have many thing to say about Char. But I will make it brief not to bore non Gundam fans.
I had always taken the view that Char's motive in Char's Counterattack is not to evict every one on Earth, even if he feels they should. His goal was to free Spacenoids from the domination of the Earthnoids, to develop their Newtype potential, so to speak. So I always have this fanfict idea about that if Char succeed, Earthnoids will be forced to build underground city, essentially get a taste of Spacenoid life-style. Finally freed of Earth Federation, Spacenoids thrived, converted their space colonies into migration ships and eventually left the solar system, colonizing other planets. They developed their Newtype power to a higher level, shrink the Mobile Suits down to human size with advanced AI. In the mean time, the Earthnoids became afraid to venture out from their "Cave of Steel." Until one day, one of the the Spacenoid, now called Spacers, is murdered. So they have to ask for the help of one Elijah Baley to solve it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Caves_of_Steel
Since we are broaden the issue out of Western cannon, I always find the relationship between Japanese psyche and Godzilla interesting. Clearly, no Japanese (beside a few Otaku like us) would like to see a real-life Godzilla wandering around Japan creating mayhem. But Japanese popular culture truly embrace Godzilla.
But yes, there's lots of this sort of thing in anime - you get entire series built around two factions who aren't necessarily good or bad, but have a lot of both mixed in. There's a few where the good guys go the whole show only to discover that they were, in fact, bad guys all along. Heck, one of the shows I'm working on right now has a set of totally-100%-sympathetic antagonists, and another set that opposes them (and the nominal "good guys", who are actually good in this case) through completely noble motives.
If you are the one whose handle I recognized(works for ADV, while went for law school in mid/late 90s, I believe we had already discussed along the same line on rec.arts.anime.misc
Tomino's works certainly challenge the view of good and evil, I got exposure to his "Umi no Triton" at young age.
Museikinin (Toshokan) Kanchou
Thanks for a thoughtful reply; but it doesn't convince me, and I'd like to explain why.
Gekko almost certainly didn't do anything illegal, though it's not clear whether the filmmakers realize this.
I once went to an action movie with a physician who complained because, when the hero was brought into an emergency room battered, the intubation was performed unrealistically.
Wall Street is fiction, so it takes some liberties ... with intubation procedures, with securities law, whatever. In the fiction, Gekko commits repeated serious crimes. That's why, when Bud Fox wears a wire, the Federal investigators are so pleased with the results: they've recorded Gekko making statements that are incriminating (in the fiction).
Which comes back to the original point--Gekko is a villain because he's a criminal, not because he's a takeover artist. Otherwise, there's no point to the contrast between him and Sir Larry Wildman, who's also presented as a hard-nosed takeover artist ["when you took CNX Electronics, you laid off 8,000 workers, Jessmon Fruit about 6,000"] but honest.
Blue Star seems to be a poorly run airline with a bloated workforce. Gekko intends to sell the planes and other assets off to other firms that will use them more efficiently and at lower cost-thereby benefiting consumers. He'll also invest the capital tied up in the pension fund in more profitable investments, thus improving the allocation of resources in the economy as a whole.
I'm afraid that a couple of pre-conceptions got the better of you here.
First, your argument rests on the premise that Bluestar is worth more dead than alive, so shut it down and re-deploy the assets more productively [Gekko's plan]. It's undoubtedly "a poorly-run airline". But why do you ignore the equally-plausible view that Bluestar has good market prospects ["we can beat the majors at a price war"] if only management would stop fumbling them? That's presumably Wildman's view--otherwise, why would he proceed with a deal that keeps the airline flying?
Second, where did the "bloated workforce" come from? I don't think it's in the script. I suspect you've been taken in by the standard excuse of failed managements in airlines and elsewhere, who routinely blame their employees and unions for their own strategic blunders.
As noted in the link above, the deal falls apart only because Bud Fox violated his fiduciary obligations to Gekko.
Only true if Bud Fox, as the proposed new president of the airline, had some fiduciary obligation to Gekko, which is unclear (to me). Recall that Bud turns on Gekko when he learns that he won't be president because there won't be an airline. He's been lied to by Gekko, the same as the employees .. and the deal falls through when he reveals that to them.
The [Carl Fox] character makes numerous anti-market comments throughout the movie. The one you quote is one of the best known ones. He also denounces the profit motive and claims that financiers are worthless and don't produce anything of value.
Carl Fox's remarks aren't somehow "anti-market". They're plausible perceptions held by millions of real-life market participants ... very few of whom would favor converting America into a Marxist economy.
As a union leader, he recognizes that he's in an endless tug-of-war with management over money; but also recognizes that he needs them. Rather like Gekko's, or any financier's, view of the people he transacts with.
He's against a money-centered approach to life, but that's hardly Marxist. For example, it's a view that Jesus shared.
And Carl's denunciations aren't of financiers in general, they're of Gekko. Who is, after all, a liar and a criminal.
******************************
Anyway, thanks for the discussion. And for the link to the Daniel Davies post, which was good clean fun.
Leadership is not being the first lemming over the cliff, and it's not standing on a tall rock by the cliff edge shouting "onward!" It's stopping a mile or so before you get there and asking "Where are we going, and why?" The problem is not knowing how close you may be to the cliff and deciding to act anyway.
Oh -- another vote for Girl Genius and Klaus Wulfenbach!
The witch from Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods.
Although we don't meet her, the Wicked Witch of the East also has my sympathy since she had to put up with singing midgets who seem to have prospered under her. Besides, wouldn't you be wicked if people kept calling you Ding-Dong?
I think the Nome King was also tragically misunderstood.
I once went to an action movie with a physician who complained because, when the hero was brought into an emergency room battered, the intubation was performed unrealistically.
Wall Street is fiction, so it takes some liberties ... with intubation procedures, with securities law, whatever. In the fiction, Gekko commits repeated serious crimes. That's why, when Bud Fox wears a wire, the Federal investigators are so pleased with the results: they've recorded Gekko making statements that are incriminating (in the fiction).
Possibly. But it's far from clear even in the context of the movie that Gekko will go to prison. And in real life, his actions would have been legal.
your argument rests on the premise that Bluestar is worth more dead than alive, so shut it down and re-deploy the assets more productively [Gekko's plan]. It's undoubtedly "a poorly-run airline". But why do you ignore the equally-plausible view that Bluestar has good market prospects ["we can beat the majors at a price war"] if only management would stop fumbling them? That's presumably Wildman's view--otherwise, why would he proceed with a deal that keeps the airline flying?
Throughout the movie, Gekko is portrayed as a highly competent investor. His judgment about whether Blue Star is worth more dead than alive is likely to be sound. As for Wildman, what makes you think he won't follow the same approach as Gekko (acquiring control, then reneging on his deal with the union)? He's portrayed as very similar to Gekko in his focus on profit and lack of scruples?
As noted in the link above, the deal falls apart only because Bud Fox violated his fiduciary obligations to Gekko.
Only true if Bud Fox, as the proposed new president of the airline, had some fiduciary obligation to Gekko, which is unclear (to me). Recall that Bud turns on Gekko when he learns that he won't be president because there won't be an airline. He's been lied to by Gekko, the same as the employees .. and the deal falls through when he reveals that to them.
Fox had a fiduciary obligation to Gekko both as president of Blue Star (of which Gekko had become the majority stockholder, if I understand correctly), and as Gekko's broker.
Carl Fox's remarks aren't somehow "anti-market". They're plausible perceptions held by millions of real-life market participants ... very few of whom would favor converting America into a Marxist economy.
Yes, Fox's views are shared by many people. That doesn't make them any less anti-market. His longterm economic ideology isn't very clear in the movie. But he certainly shares many Marxist assumptions, including a focus on class conflict and a belief that financial entrepreneurs produce nothing of value.
As a union leader, he recognizes that he's in an endless tug-of-war with management over money; but also recognizes that he needs them. Rather like Gekko's, or any financier's, view of the people he transacts with.
He only needs them in the sense that he can't get rid of them. Not in the sense taht he believes they have a genuinely valuable role to play.
He's against a money-centered approach to life, but that's hardly Marxist. For example, it's a view that Jesus shared.
Jesus may have been anti-market (in some ways) as well. Nonetheless, it's clear that Fox denounces the profit motive as a whole, not just "a money-centered approach to life." To interpret him as NOT being anti-market, I think, misses the whole point of the movie. It is not merely about Gekko's sins as an individual. It's about what Stone sees as more general flaws in a market-based economy.
As I blogged in that same post, some of Lewis' Calormene villains have definite virtues. Rishda Tarkaan in The Last Battle, eg, is not only brave in battle, but is also a pragmatic skeptic - not that CS Lewis intends that as a compliment (c/f Devine at the conclusion of That Hideous Strength, who shares a similar fate).
Your statements about the pension fund are very telling. One of the great crimes committed by corporations over the last twenty years or so is underfunding their pension funds. Why should they be allowed to renege on contracts made with employees simply to improve their balance sheets? How is this even legal or ethical? If you found out that your broker was stealing from your stock fund, I am sure you would not be too happy about it and even consider it criminal. How and why is it different when a corporation deliberately underfunds its pension fund or in the case of Wall Street, illegally diverts the funds to more risky investments. And you can be certain that executives make sure their corporate pension funds are fully funded.
It is worth more to Gekko alive than dead. The operative question (in fact the whole question at the time of Wall Street and being raised again) is whether characters like Gekko (and the new hedge and private equity firms) are good for society as a whole. By concentrating only on their personal wealth and believing that "greed is good" and that only the bottom line matters, a false economy is generated. You need look no further than the recent run up (and current problems) in the real estate market as proof positive that simply driving up the price of something or focusing only on how to extract the most money out of a commodity can be a fool's game.
Besides, the airline industry has never made money and it has certain societal benefits (like roads) that transcend one man's desire to make money.
And Gekko didn't focus on class conflict? He reveled in destroying the union. And your hatred of unions and the rights of workers show that you are focused on class conflict too.
- Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber in Die hard and Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood.
- Sir Harry Paget Flashman VC
- Iago and Richard III
We need a system where the victims have the right to haul those villains into court and make them pay the price they made their opponents pay. Anything less is worse than no government at all.
My second nomination of course goes to the Ming the Merciless, Emperor of the planet Mongo. While he gave me a very hard time, he did have the good sense to provide me with a lab and send that playboy Flash to the arena.
(a) Captain Vidal in Pan's Labyrinth. Of course Guilelmus Tauri thought he was making a straightforward anti-fascist film. The problem is, while Vidal is a sadist who kills innocent people and tortures prisoners, the Spanish Republican partisans whom he's fighting were (as the film does not mention) backed and supplied by Stalin, who at the same time was doing no less evil things a few hundred miles to the east. As a moderate liberal, I want to believe that one can defeat armed Communists without resorting to Fascism. The problem is that a hardhead like Vidal doesn't share this faith.
(b) Robert Thorn in The Omen. Both Gregory Peck and Sheer Evil Crib play the Ambassador as a decent, careful man. But within the frame of the story, the facts presented are such that, after two hours, we in the audience find ourselves cheering for Robert to drag his five-year-old son into a church and stab him with seven daggers. We are disappointed - actually, chilled - that the bobbies shoot Robert first, so that Damien survives.
Part of the problem with War of the Worlds (the movie) is that that character is mashed together from two characters in the book, who have opposite flaws. The curate (at least, he's some kind of clergyman; I can't remember exactly) completely loses it with fear, to the point where he's endangering himself and the main character; the other one, the military guy, seems at first like a sensible pragmatic, willing to face what's going on ("This isn't a war, any more than there's a war between men and ants), but you eventually realize that his plans for resistance are just fantasies to keep his spirits up.
Probably explains why Nazis make better film villains than terrorists. If terrorists don't have a specific grievance or objective (which they often don't), they might as well be earthquakes or volcanoes.
All three have the following in common: (1) pillars of society; (2) they were in a lot of trouble for real bad things they did; and (3) predictably they were such worms they couldn't face the music.
So communists are de facto bad no matter what--even though of course the fascists were supported by Hitler?
Why is Vidal in the movie a sympathetic villain? Why are the socialists (the Republicans were socialists, not communists, support from the Soviet Union notwithstanding) automatically tainted just because some of their support comes from the USSR. Does that mean the U.S. and Britain are evil because we were allies with Stalin in WWII?
I can't believe I didn't think of that one myself! My favorite character in my favorite musical, I guess I've completely stopped thinking of her as a villain, but for at least half of the show, that's all true.
Now the real question is can you sympathize with the princes? ("I was raised to be charming, not sincere.")
The villain I like best is Richard III, both because, as portrayed by Shakespeare he's so self-conciously and unrepentedly evil, and because the historical reality is that he was not at all as portrayed by Shakespeare: he was a good king and soldier, a loyal and affectionate brother to Edward, and almost certainly he did not have his nephews or anyone else murdered--although he certainly did kill people in war. Shakespeare's Richard III is Tudor propaganda.
While it is nearly impossible to overlook or rationalize Heathcliff's cruelty, the depth and intensity of his tortured love for Catherine generates a great deal of pathos.
I thought of this yesterday when watching The Pursuit of Happyness. In this case, though, I didn't loathe Gardner, but didn't particularly like him either.
Someone already brought up Lester from American Beauty. I was glad he died. (I hoped everyone in that movie would die.)
Evil supported by Evil was fighting Evil supported by Evil! Really there's nobody to root for in a contest like that.
I would say that he's one of the good guys in that series - especially since he eventually overthrows the People's Republic.
The meaning I assigned to the quote and the above are not mutually exclusive. Lenin thought both 1) that capitalists are often shortsighted (though this belief was inconsistent with his other belief that they had a clever, longterm plan to dominate the world), and 2) that it was permissible for Communists to make deals with capitalists when it was in their interests to do so.
Your statements about the pension fund are very telling. One of the great crimes committed by corporations over the last twenty years or so is underfunding their pension funds. Why should they be allowed to renege on contracts made with employees simply to improve their balance sheets? How is this even legal or ethical?
If underfunding a pension fund violates a contract, then by all means let the workers sue and win. I have no problem with that. In the movie, Gekko's use of the pension fund money apparently did not violate a contract (otherwise it would have been listed among his alleged crimes in the scenes at the end).
This is so juicy a target that I hardly know where to begin:
1. Gekko wanted to destroy the union not because he cared about class conflict, but because he wanted to eliminate any obstacle to his own profit - including when it came from other capitalists like Wildman. He didn't care about class conflict as such.
2. I care about "class conflict" even less than Gekko. I don't hate unions per se, but I certainly do oppose their having legal rights beyond those of other private organizations. As for workers, I believe that they are usually best off under a free market system rather than under socialism, government regulation, OR mandatory unionization. How that can be interpreted as "hating" their "rights" is beyond me.
If anyone is the villain in the show, I'd have to say it's Uncle Jun'. Or Livia. Or both.
And there are times when I seriously want to kick Meadow.
The jury is very much out as to the death of his nephews. However it is incontestably true that he did usurp the throne out from under the older boy and locked him and his brother up in the Tower.
For me, the horror of watching Vidal's vicious methods was compounded, not mitigated, by the thought that his enemies, had they won, would very likely have used equally vicious methods (compare East Germany before and after 1945).
My litmus is not "who accepts help from whom?" - because (as JF Thomas sensibly notes), that would make Churchill or FDR a Stalinist - but "what sort of society would they put in place if they win?" In Spain, by 1942, the liberal democracy option had been swept off the table.