Skip to main content

New top story from Time: From Cruella to Maleficent to the Joker: Is It Time to Retire the Villain Origin Story?

https://ift.tt/2RQX0ed

Even if the slogan “fair and balanced” has been retired by the conservative news network that used it for years, the damage caused by its shifty logic endures: There are two equally valid sides to every story. Every warped viewpoint must be weighed seriously for any grain of truth it might contain. If you shout loudly enough, down is actually up. We’re now stuck with this legacy, and it’s so ingrained that it shows up even in the most unlikely places. In particular, you’ll find it in the villain origin story, a long-simmering trend that exploded with Todd Phillips’ 2019 Batman-nemesis apologia Joker. This month, Craig Gillespie’s Cruella hops on the backstory bandwagon.

Cruella devises a biography for the 101 Dalmatians villainess Cruella de Vil, she of the spotted fur coat and duotone hairdo (who, though she’s now most famous as a Disney creation, was the invention of English writer Dodie Smith, who described her vividly in the delightful 1956 novel that spawned the Disney properties in the first place). This Cruella—played by Emma Stone—is an aspiring fashion designer in 1970s London, who’s set on the bad-gal rail when, aflame with her own ambitions, she goes to work for a ruthless baroness (Emma Thompson) who heads her own fashion house. Like another Disney villain, Maleficent, who already has two films of her own, she’s a misunderstood woman who’s just trying to make her way. According to villain-backstory logic, evil behavior doesn’t just happen; it’s caused, often because a sensitive individual is unable to adjust to an unfair, sometimes cruel, world.

The word misunderstood is key to all villain backstories, whether we’re talking about TV’s Ratched, which details the origins of the most infamous psychiatric nurse in literature and movies, or Broadway’s Wicked, which unmelts the legend of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West. These works are sometimes fun, excuses for whacked-out makeup and hairdos and cartoonishly exaggerated performances. But they’re also convenient vehicles for big entertainment franchises to expand their empires. At what point do we ask for more?

Cruella
Courtesy of DisneyEmma Stone as Estella a.k.a. Cruella de Vil

In the early days of comic strips, comic books and adventure serials, the role of villains was relatively simple: they were foils, figures whose badness was a delectable given, designed to contrast as boldly as possible with the selflessness of heroes. At the same time, they were free in a way heroes are not. Their job was to behave badly, often with irresistible glamour on their side. (Hello there, Catwoman.) They could be just as compelling as heroes, often more so. And because most of us strive to be good most of the time, it’s cathartic to give in now and then to the allure of being bad. We don’t need to work that hard to identify with most villains. Certain aspects of their characters—like the desire to break stuff, for no good reason—are also alive in us. We just know better than to give those urges free rein.

But somewhere along the way—a development nurtured, if not born, in the comic-book world with Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s dazzling 1988 graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke—villains began to push their way to the foreground. No longer just breaking stuff for no good reason, they were now pleading for our understanding—sometimes, as in Phillips’ Joker, with the cloying neediness of a thrift-store clown painting. Now we’re stuck with villain backstories that are little more than rote exercises in psychological depth, stories that sap our imagination rather than igniting it. It’s no longer enough to just accept, and revel in, a character’s badness, allowing their miscreant behavior its own aroma of mystery. Now we get elaborate explanations of why and how, in stories that build an illusion of moral complexity even when, in reality, they risk nothing at all. To borrow a line from Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, “In this world, there is one awful thing, and that is
that everyone has his reasons.” Among our fictional bad guys, reasons have taken the place of the glorious, naked id. Villains are no longer enigmatic, exciting cautionary figures; they’re homework.

Read more: The Problem With Joker Isn’t Its Brutal Violence. It’s the Muddled Message It Sends About Our Times

Joaquin Phoenix
Niko Tavernise—Warner Bros. Pictures/APJoaquin Phoenix in a scene from ‘Joker.’

The Joker suffers from untreated mental illness and lives in a world where people just don’t care enough. Maleficent is jilted by a swain who prefers power to love. Cruella, before she becomes a psychotic fashion plate, is simply Estella, a troublemaking schoolgirl who suffers a devastating personal loss that she believes is her fault. These stories, sometimes entertaining but often wearing their earnestness on their sleeves even so, don’t illuminate the mystery of human behavior. They merely stitch a diagnosis to it, the equivalent of the psychiatrist’s intentionally drab monologue at the end of Psycho, but without Hitchcock’s final, chilly kicker—the acknowledgment that in the end, there’s evil in the world that just can’t be rationally explained.

How did we reach this point? For the past 30 years or so, people who grew up reading comic books—people who, as kids, felt they were outsiders, misunderstood by the world at large or even just by their parents—have become increasingly invested in their identity as a downtrodden minority, a leftover rationalization from the days, in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, when comics really were treated as the end of civilization as we know it. But now this alleged minority of underappreciated iconoclasts is the driving force behind several multibillion-dollar entertainment franchises. They can no longer differentiate themselves from the mass audience because they are the mass audience. Idolizing superheroes is no longer anything special, which may be why it now seems more sophisticated to sympathize with the villains—even if that means reading depth into these backstories that isn’t really there.

There’s something else. Bothsidesism and whataboutism are thriving in our era like spiky, poisonous weeds, and if villain backstories aren’t a cause of that problem, they’re surely a symptom. Villains are bad—but they have good reasons for being bad. They’re capable of terrible things—but only because we have failed to understand them. We live in a world of people demanding to be heard—not just those who have been genuinely disenfranchised for decades and centuries, but also those who merely feel they’re under attack.

The Black Lives Matter protests of last summer ignited the self-righteous anger of white people who needed to tell the world that their lives mattered too. According to some, the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were really just tourists showing up to have a look around, decent people whose actions have been grossly misread. And even as we crawl, slowly, out of a pandemic that has killed millions and slowed down the world, we’re still dealing with noisy know-it-alls who claim the virus isn’t real, or who refuse vaccination for nebulous, if not delusional, reasons. Respecting every viewpoint, including those of villains, only results in a murky gray mass where none are respected at all. When bullying and bleeding hearts unite, understanding and forgiveness are turned into a performative rite that means nothing at all.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

L Taraval Improvement Project Update

L Taraval Improvement Project Update By Sevilla Mann Roundtable at the Community Parklet Shares Project Updates  This past week, the SFMTA hosted a media roundtable discussing updates about the L Taraval Improvement Project at the community parklet located in front of the The Rolling Out Café  on Taraval St.   Segment B construction began in February 2022 and is scheduled to be completed Fall 2024. Sewer and water infrastructure work is currently taking place. Future work includes track work, overhead line work, the construction of new boarding islands and streetscape improvements.    On hand to answer questions and provide updates was District Four Supervisor Gordon Mar, SFMTA Board Director Sharon Lai and Director of Transportation Jefferey Tumlin.   The Roundtable  Supervisor Mar opened the discussion by highlighting the many benefits that the local community will receive with the planned infrastructure upgrades along the corridor. These benefits include:   Replacing sew

FOX NEWS: Cincinnati zoo renames sloth habitat after late 1-year-old who loved sloths The sloth habitat at Ohio's Cincinnati Zoo will be named after a toddler who recently passed away.

Cincinnati zoo renames sloth habitat after late 1-year-old who loved sloths The sloth habitat at Ohio's Cincinnati Zoo will be named after a toddler who recently passed away. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/3DLAshi

IPL 2020 | KKR, SRH search for first win to get off the mark https://ift.tt/333a9nc

Having suffered defeats in their opening games, the Kolkata Knight Riders and Sunrisers Hyderabad will lock horns on Saturday at the Sheikh Zayed Stadium in Abu Dhabi. While Kolkata faced a tough 49-run loss to defending champions Mumbai Indians, the Sunrisers suffered a monumental batting collapse against Royal Challengers Bangalore, losing the game by 10 runs.

FOX NEWS: Decadent double chocolate mint cookies for National Chocolate Day National Chocolate Day on Oct. 28th calls for a serious dose of chocolate.

Decadent double chocolate mint cookies for National Chocolate Day National Chocolate Day on Oct. 28th calls for a serious dose of chocolate. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/3nEJxSB

Muni’s Equity Toolkit Helps Essential Employees Get to Work

Muni’s Equity Toolkit Helps Essential Employees Get to Work By Mariana Maguire The latest data from SFMTA’s new  Equity Toolkit  shows that Muni service changes are helping people in neighborhoods identified by our  Muni Service Equity Strategy  access more jobs and support the city’s recovery.   In winter 2020, we launched the  SFMTA Equity Toolkit  to understand how service decisions are affecting neighborhoods where there is likely a high prevalence of essential workers who rely predominantly on Muni to get to their essential jobs. Our goal is to make better service decisions based on the trends and impacts we see in the Equity Toolkit.   Recently, the greatest increases in access to jobs via Muni have been in Hunters Point and Western Addition. The Hunters Point neighborhood saw the largest gains from the addition of the  15 Bayview-Hunters Point Express , as demonstrated in the table below. Thanks to the return of key Muni lines and increased frequencies on connector routes, I

Powered Scooters Charge City’s Transportation Recovery

Powered Scooters Charge City’s Transportation Recovery By Jason Hyde The SFMTA is releasing its next round of Powered Scooter Share permits on July 1. Scooters remain a sustainable mode of travel and a complement to Muni and public transit service as the city recovers from the pandemic and San Franciscans begin to travel more. The SFMTA’s Powered Scooter Share Program is essential in ensuring that shared scooter operations support the city’s economic recovery in a safe, sustainable, and equitable way.  The SFMTA received four submittals for the permit program and will issue permits to two operators : Spin and Lime. Permits will be in effect for a one-year term, with the option to extend for another year at the discretion of the SFMTA based on compliance with various program metrics. While the new permit program does not set a limit on the number of scooters each operator may deploy, it does limit the overall citywide fleet size at 10,000. Starting at a base of 2,000 scooters per

New top story from Time: 3 Killed in Northern California as Wildfires Force Thousands to Evacuate

https://ift.tt/34at2Uy (SAN FRANCISCO) — Northern California’s wine country was on fire again Monday as strong winds fanned flames in the already scorched region, destroying homes and prompting orders for nearly 70,000 people to evacuated. Meanwhile, three people died in a separate fire further north in the state. In Sonoma County, residents of the Oakmont Gardens senior living facility in Santa Rosa boarded brightly lit city buses in the darkness overnight, some wearing bathrobes and using walkers. They wore masks to protect against the coronavirus as orange flames marked the dark sky. The fire threat forced Adventist Health St. Helena hospital to suspend care and transfer all patients elsewhere. The fires that began Sunday in the famed Napa-Sonoma wine country about 45 miles (72 kilometers) north of San Francisco came as the region nears the third anniversary of deadly wildfires that erupted in 2017, including one that killed 22 people. Just a month ago, many of those

Traffic Collisions have Decreased on San Francisco’s Slow Streets

Traffic Collisions have Decreased on San Francisco’s Slow Streets By Julia Malmo   As a whole, Slow Streets are safer than they were before being designated Slow Streets  Streets that are part of the SFMTA’s  Slow Streets Program have become measurably safer since the program began in 2020, with the number of traffic crashes falling by almost half. On average, these corridors have seen a 48% drop in collisions following their designation as Slow Streets, compared with a 14% drop in collisions citywide over the same period. Slow Streets also are more welcoming for people who walk, bike and roll. Fewer than 1,000 vehicles per day use all but four of the current Slow Streets (20th Street, Minnesota Street, Noe Street, and Page Street).  The goal of the program is to create safe, shared streets that are comfortable and enjoyable for people of all ages and abilities, using any mode of transportation. We now can see how it’s doing in a new evaluation report . When the SFMTA Board appr

New top story from Time: How History Is Repeating Itself for Haitian Migrants Trying to Enter the U.S.

https://ift.tt/3upRk9U In the past 11 years alone, Haitians have suffered natural disasters, rising gang violence, outbreaks of cholera and COVID-19, and political instability, including the recent assassination of President Jovenel Moïse . The crises left many in the hemisphere’s poorest nation feeling they had no option but to leave—despite the difficulties they face in fleeing to other countries. In late September, Americans were confronted with the reality of those difficulties too. An estimated 15,000 people arrived in Del Rio, Texas, during the month, below a bridge connecting the city to Mexico’s Ciudad Acuña. A majority were Haitian nationals, migrants and asylum seekers who ended up living in tents or under tarps, in conditions similar to those in other camps that have formed along the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Read more: Caught Between U.S. Policies and Instability at Home, Haitian Migrants in Tijuana Are in a State of L

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J कोरोना सकंट में TV सीरियल की शूटिंग शूरू, मास्क लगाकर पहुंचे स्टार्स- निया, पार्थ से लेकर रश्मि-PICS

कोरोना वायरस के चलते जारी लॉकडाउन में टीवी व फिल्मों की शूटिंग बंद थी। कोरोना के खतरे को देखते हुए तमाम सीरियल की शूटिंग रोक दी गई तो वहीं फिल्मों को रिलीज अटक गई। एंटरटेंमेंट इंडस्ट्री को कोरोना के चलते करोड़ों from टेलीविजन की खबरें | Television News in Hindi | TV Serials Update in Hindi – FilmiBeat Hindi http:/hindi.filmibeat.com/television/tv-shooting-starts-kasauti-zindagi-kay-naagin-nia-sharma-parth-samthaan-rashmi-desai-pics-090604.html?utm_source=/rss/filmibeat-hindi-television-fb.xml&utm_medium=23.11.231.156&utm_campaign=client-rss