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

New top story from Time: Latest Tests Bring Israel a Step Closer to Commercial Drones

https://ift.tt/3lyZxGe TEL AVIV, Israel — Dozens of drones floated through the skies of Tel Aviv on Monday, ferrying cartons of ice cream and sushi across the city in an experiment that officials hope provided a glimpse of the not-too-distant future. Israel’s National Drone Initiative, a government program, carried out the drill to prepare for a world in which large quantities of commercial deliveries will be made by drones to take pressure off highly congested urban roads. The two-year program aims to apply the capabilities of Israeli drone companies to establish a nationwide network where customers can order goods and have them delivered to pick up spots. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The project, now in the third of eight stages, is still in its infancy and faces many questions about security and logistics. “We had 700 test flights at the start of this year and now we are close to 9,000 flights,” said Daniella Partem, from Israel Innovation Authority, a partner in th

New top story from Time: Pfizer-BioNTech Have Started Testing Their COVID-19 Vaccine in Children Under 12

https://ift.tt/3vWOQjL Alejandra and Marisol Gerardo are nine years old but already making a little bit of history. The twin sisters are among the first young children to get vaccinated with a COVID-19 shot in Pfizer-BioNTech’s study of its vaccine in kids under age 12. Alejandra and Marisol had their blood drawn in the morning on March 24, then got their first dose of the two-dose vaccine later that afternoon. “Their primary concern was, ‘is it going to hurt,’” says their father, Dr. Charles Gerardo, chief of emergency medicine at Duke University School of Medicine. “They’re not too worried about the long term side effects; they’re looking at the moment, not the future.” Testing the vaccine in younger children will answer critical questions about how much immunity the shots can provide, and potentially give parents and education officials more confidence in re-opening schools. While it appears that younger children don’t get as sick with COVID-19 as older teens and adult

New top story from Time: Little Recognition and Less Pay: These Female Healthcare Workers Are Rural India’s First Defense Against COVID-19

https://ift.tt/3mrDgrm Archana Ghugare’s ringtone, a Hindu devotional song, has been the background score of her life since March. By 7 a.m. on a mid-October day, the 41-year-old has already received two calls about suspected COVID-19 cases in Pavnar, her village in the Indian state of Maharashtra. As she gets ready and rushes out the door an hour later, she receives at least four more. “My family jokes that not even Prime Minister Modi gets as many calls as I do,” she says. Ghugare, and nearly a million other Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) assigned to rural villages and small towns across India, are on the front lines of the country’s fight against the coronavirus . Every day, Ghugare goes door to door in search of potential COVID-19 cases, working to get patients tested or to help them find treatment. With 8 million confirmed COVID-19 cases, India has the second-highest tally in the world after the United States and its health infrastructure struggled to co

FOX NEWS: Top baby names list for 2021 reveals familiar trends For the second year in a row, these two names are the most popular for girls and boys – leading BabyCenter's Top 100 Baby Names list.

Top baby names list for 2021 reveals familiar trends For the second year in a row, these two names are the most popular for girls and boys – leading BabyCenter's Top 100 Baby Names list. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/2ZZEl3u

New top story from Time: Google’s Employee Vaccine Mandate Could Influence Other Companies to Do the Same

https://ift.tt/3BQnXRv (SAN RAMON, Calif.) — Google is postponing a return to the office for most workers until mid-October and rolling out a policy that will eventually require everyone to be vaccinated once its sprawling campuses are fully reopened in an attempt to fight the spreading Delta variant. In a Wednesday email sent to Google’s more than 130,000 employees, CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is now aiming to have most of its workforce back to its offices beginning Oct. 18 instead of its previous target date of Sept. 1. The decision also affects tens of thousands of contractors who Google intends to continue to pay while access to its campuses remains limited. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “This extension will allow us time to ramp back into work while providing flexibility for those who need it,” Pichai wrote. And Pichai disclosed that once offices are fully reopened, everyone working there will have be vaccinated. The requirement will be first imposed at Goog

New top story from Time: Corky Lee, Photographer Who Spent His Career Spotlighting Asian and Pacific Islander-Americans, Dies at 73

https://ift.tt/2Ymu9yf Corky Lee, a photojournalist who spent five decades spotlighting the often ignored Asian and Pacific Islander American communities, has died. He was 73. Lee died Wednesday in New York City’s Queens borough of complications from COVID-19, his family said in a statement. “His passion was to rediscover, document and champion through his images the plight of all Americans but most especially that of Asian and Pacific Islanders,” his family said. The self-described “undisputed unofficial Asian American Photographer Laureate,” Lee used his eye to pursue what he saw as “photographic justice.” Almost always sporting a camera around his neck, he was present at many seminal moments impacting Asian America over a 50-year career. He was born Young Kwok Lee in New York City to Chinese immigrant parents. He was the first child in his family to go to college, graduating from City University of New York’s Queens College. A self-taught freelance photographer, Lee

New top story from Time: I Interviewed Hundreds of New Yorkers. Here’s What They Taught Me

https://ift.tt/3cgW6zl In 2014 I was given a unique assignment: move to New York and talk to people, hundreds of them, and then somehow create a book using their words to describe the experience of living in New York right now. I spoke to New Yorkers in all five boroughs, in coffee shops, in pizzerias, in elevator shafts, on job sites. At one point, when the book was nearly finished, I began to recognize a by-product of the interviewing process. Something happens when you ingest so many stories from so many New Yorkers. I learned a few things. I learned about express trains and egg creams, the route of the New York marathon and the strange naming protocols of the streets of Queens. I was taught how to steal a car in Manhattan, how to move properly on a sidewalk. Next came a list of specifics: best bagels, best pupusas, best baked clams (Donovan’s in Woodside). But I had no idea that speaking to New Yorkers would mean more important, subtle lessons would be shared from some of

New top story from Time: Australian ‘a Bit Sore’ After Getting His Arm Caught in a Crocodile’s Jaws

https://ift.tt/39Khfj1 CANBERRA, Australia — An Australian wildlife tour operator said he was lucky to escape more serious injury or even death when a crocodile lunged from a river and clamped his hand in its jaws. Sean Dearly was attacked on Monday on the Adelaide River which is renowned for its “jumping crocodiles” — large crocodiles that rise vertically from the water to snatch chicken carcasses dangled from long poles extended from tourist cruise boats. The 60-year-old Dearly spoke Wednesday about his encounter with a young 2.2-meter (7-foot) crocodile. “I’m feeling all right. I’m a bit sore in the arm, of course, but, yeah, I survived it,” he told Nine Network television. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Dearly had his right hand and forearm in a cast, but did not detail his injuries. He had undergone surgery to repair a severed tendon in his hand, the Northern Territory News reported. Dearly said he told the 18 tourists on his cruise on Monday to keep their entire

New top story from Time: Patrisse Cullors Steps Down as Head of Black Lives Matter Foundation

https://ift.tt/3utmDPE A co-founder of Black Lives Matter announced Thursday that she is stepping down as executive director of the movement’s foundation. She decried what she called a smear campaign from a far-right group, but said neither that nor recent criticism from other Black organizers influenced her departure. Patrisse Cullors, who has been at the helm of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation for nearly six years, said she is leaving to focus on other projects, including the upcoming release of her second book and a multi-year TV development deal with Warner Bros. Her last day with the foundation is Friday. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “I’ve created the infrastructure and the support, and the necessary bones and foundation, so that I can leave,” Cullors told The Associated Press. “It feels like the time is right.” Cullors’ departure follows a massive surge in support and political influence in the U.S. and around the world for the BLM movement, whi

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J कहने को हमसफर हैं 3 में दिलचस्प मोड़, क्या होगी अब रोहित और अमायरा की शादी?

ऑल्ट बालाजी और ज़ी5 का लोकप्रिय शो 'कहने को हमसफ़र हैं' का तीसरा सीज़न 6 जून को दोनों लोकप्रिय स्ट्रीमिंग ऐप पर लॉन्च किया गया था। जबकि शो के निर्माता अब तक 10 एपिसोड लॉन्च कर चुके है, वही दर्शक विशेष from टेलीविजन की खबरें | Television News in Hindi | TV Serials Update in Hindi – FilmiBeat Hindi http:/hindi.filmibeat.com/television/kehne-ko-humsafar-hai-season-3-rohit-and-amayra-marriage-090630.html?utm_source=/rss/filmibeat-hindi-television-fb.xml&utm_medium=23.195.73.4&utm_campaign=client-rss