I've been pondering something ever since I saw Superman Returns.
Last year, I wrote a conference paper on Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, a wonderful little mini-series that basically tells the old Superman vs. Luthor story, but from Luthor's point of view and in such a way that you can't help but agree with Luthor for most of the story.
But that's just it. In the last issue, predictably, Luthor's arguments, which were extremely convincing for most of the series, are dismissed with a whim. Luthor explains himself to Superman, who simply says "You're wrong," and then flies away. Luthor's whole, meticulous explanation falls away in the face of Our Hero's bald assertion. To make a long essay short, I argued that villainous justifications are presented in heroic narratives as case studies in 'bad' reasoning. We, as readers, know this inherently, as a matter of genre expectation. Therefore, whatever the villain says, we are to believe the opposite.
Also, in terms of form rather than content, villains employ complex, academic rhetoric to make their points and heroes employ bald assertions of essential 'truth.' Therefore, such stories are a symbolic denouncement of complex rhetoric and a valorisation of simplistic deference to status quo ethics. In the Superman dynamic, brawn and 'family values' trump brains and complex thinking, so complex thinking must be inherently evil.
However, something happened in Superman Returns that took me a second or third viewing to acknowledge. In the yacht library, Luthor rambles on about technology's relationship to Empires. I'm paraphrasing from memory, so I might be wrong on the details, but he says something like "The Roman has roads. The British had ships. America had the atomic bomb..."
What was that? Did someone just lump America in with the two most famous empires in Western history? Did an American movie just tacitly state that the U.S. is an imperial regime? As someone who reads Chomsky on a regular basis, this is not a new thought to me, so I didn't realise the significance of it until the second time I saw it (that scene was in an on-line preview; I can't find it, but I'm sure I saw it more than once).
So that got me thinking. Are villains afforded a capacity for truth telling, for social and political criticism, that is much wider than heroes because it's always assumed that they're 'wrong'? Is that where popular writers and film-makers vent their feelings about the social order?
Perhaps I'm a little slow on the uptake, but I find this notion exhilarating. It does bring up a whole host of questions, though. We can't just assume that all villains are the covert voice of social commentary, of course, but we also can't assume that they're merely pure evil given voice, either.
So what are the tell-tale indicators of truth in the mouth of villainy in action/adventure storytelling? Lex Luthor is supposed to be an unparalleled genius, which might make us more apt to take his statements more seriously than, say, the mad ramblings of Green Goblin or the Joker (leaving aside the possibility that in lunacy veritas). Would we take more seriously the words of villains who belong to marginalised social groups, like people of colour, women, gay people, the poor, etc.?
I've noticed that villains in action/adventure stories are rarely allowed to be anything other than white males, though some racialising is permitted, most commonly English or German. The Galactic Empire is clearly raced English, for example, while the Rebels are very American. It seems clear that movie studios avoid 'minority' villains for fear of offending the groups to which they might belong (anyone remember the protests against Basic Instinct for its depiction of bisexual people?). Is there a side benefit, though, that a white, straight, male villain also doesn't have the same capacity for truth telling?
Posted by orion at July 22, 2006 8:12 PM