Villainy

No big secret here, but I’m attracted by dark characters.  I’ve created characters like Sarah, Black Shadow, Caroline Sula, and Loren Hawn.  I’m interested in shining light into the darker corners of their consciousness, interested in prowling along with them as they ghost about their desperate midnight errands.

I regularly write about people that I wouldn’t invite to dinner.   (And what would I talk to Loren about, anyway?  Sports?)

But my point is that I often use as protagonists the characters that other writers would see as villains, or at least hopelessly depraved.  (Orson Scott Card, for example, has said that only admirable people are worth writing about.)

I see that popular culture is beginning to share my interest.  We have TV series like Leverage, Dexter, Hustle, Weeds, the Sopranos, the Wire, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, all of which feature protagonists who earn their living through criminal enterprise.  And these series have, though quality writing and excellent casting, achieved quite a substantial audience.

But you can’t just plunk your average violent sociopath into a story and expect your audience to care whether he lives or dies.  There are ways and means of making such a character sympathetic— or, if not sympathetic, understandable, and with luck fascinating.

One obvious method of turning your bad guys into protagonists is to have them reform.   We see this in programs like Leverage and Hustle, where reformed criminals use their bad-guy skills to take down other bad guys, often leaving them in the hands of the police.   This is an old strategy for making us cheer for villains and goes back at least as far as Boston Blackie and the Saint, who in their original fictional incarnations were criminals who preyed on criminals.   Sometimes this sort of thing happens in reality— consider Vidocq, the criminal who reformed (mostly) and became the head of the French plainclothes police.  And Omar Little in The Wire was supposedly based on a number of real-life stick-up artists who preyed on drug dealers— though you have to wonder whether they shared Omar’s stern moral code, or whether they just chose to steal from criminals because the criminals had large sums of cash lying around and couldn’t call the cops when it got stolen.

The audience likes criminals who live by codes, sort of like Boy Scouts for Bad.  Viewers don’t want to think criminality is as anarchic and treacherous as it really is.  I mean, the very first rule of the criminal code is Don’t snitch. But criminals rat each other out all the time.  More or less constantly.  Almost by reflex.   The Prisoner’s Dilemma just isn’t a dilemma to most prisoners.

An extreme example of the criminal with a code would be Dexter Morgan, the serial killer whose code permits him to kill only bad people.   We’re completely on Dexter’s side as he dismembers thugs, killers, rapists, and the surprising number of other serial murderers who happen to cross his path.  But in order to make Dexter acceptable to a mass audience, the creators had to delete one crucial aspect of the serial killer’s personality.

A serial killer is a sex criminal.  A serial killer gets off when he tortures and kills someone.

Showing Dexter raping his victims, or getting off in some other way, would raise Dexter’s squick factor to a highly unacceptable degree, and so that aspect of the serial killer’s personality is simply not dealt with on the show.  And not simply with Dexter, but with the other serial killers on the program.

I have to call this cheating.  It bothers me that serial murder is shown as a kind of career choice, like teaching or gardening, rather than as a deep-seated psychosexual compulsion.

And though I admire the clever plotting and intricate timing of caper shows like Leverage and Hustle, I have to question the assumption that their grifter heroes are somehow less nefarious than the violent criminals they pursue on these programs.   A professional hit man might kill a few dozen people in his lifetime.  A successful con man can wipe out an industry, bring down an economy, throw millions out of work.  A hit man makes widows and orphans; a con man throws the widows and orphans into the street to starve.  These people are not among my heroes.  Sorry.

An inferior method of making us cheer for the criminals is to make their enemies worse, which often involves making the cops worse.  We see this on Sons of Anarchy, where our gun-dealing biker protagonists encounter, in the first season, a ATF agent who is also a creepy stalker/rapist, who is followed by a sexually voracious female ATF agent who seems simply crazy.  In the second season, they’re up against Nazis!  Rapist Nazis!  I mean, who do you want running your town, Hell’s Angels or . . . Hitler! It forces a moral choice on the audience that doesn’t seem legitimate to me.

Plus, the bikers are rather de-fanged in this presentation, and are shown making their living running guns to black gangs in the ghetto, guns which are presumably used to shoot other gangsters of color . . . in any case  the audience need not concern itself with any resulting massacres.  They might as well be happening in another country far away.

While real-life outlaw biker gangs do in fact run guns, they make most of their money by selling drugs, by stealing, and by running extortion rackets.  Because the show’s audience might not care to see their protagonists selling crank down at the high school, or demanding a payoff for not breaking the candy shop’s windows, we are spared the sight of this, and spared as well any moral outrage this might induce in us.  Instead, we feel for the bikers in their struggle against the storm troopers of the world.

Probably the best excuse for bad behavior on the part of your protagonists is one of the most dreadful truisms of all: “Society made me do it!”  It’s a dreadful hoary cliche, and it’s been made the reason for any number of lame social programs; but as a writer, you can get away with practically anything if your characters’ situation begins badly enough.   If there’s no social mobility, and you’re a minority, and the authorities are uncaring and corrupt, and you get the crap kicked out of you as a kid, and there’s absolutely no hope of fairness or justice unless you create it yourself, then your character can in the most literal way get away with murder, or practically anything else.

If life hands you slavery, become Nat Turner.  Or Spartacus.

If the people in charge won’t respect you, you can make them fear you.  And if you can’t make them fear you, maybe at least you can make a buck selling drugs to their kids.

See?  You’re on their side already, aren’t you?

Though the best way to handle your shady protagonists is just to let what would happen, happen.   To which I recommend The Sopranos, The Wire, and— oddly enough— Weeds.

The Wire— to date the best dramatic television program ever— shows drug crime from every aspect, from the criminals to the cops to the lawyers to the politicians.  Even to the schools and churches and longshoremen.   The program was deeply humane in its attitude towards all its characters, and deeply cynical about the institutions they represented.  And though you feel a certain sympathy for criminals like Bodie and Stringer Bell and Frank Slobotka, the program is frank about the devastation they caused.

The Sopranos shows you why someone would want to be in the Mafia.  For one thing, impulse control is just for other people.  So is collateral damage.  You want something, you take it.  You want money, you find yourself some.  You want someone hurt, you hurt them.   You want a woman, you seduce her, or you buy her, or you just take her.

You’re causing harm, not least to your own family, but none of that matters, because you get what you want.  And what more do you want than what you want?

Good writing plus James Gandolfini make this character fascinating.  You see him scheme, you see him charm, you see him double-dealing, you see him coping with his family and with his tyrannical mother and with turning 40.  The series doesn’t cheat.  It doesn’t turn the FBI into the Gestapo in order to make you sympathize with the Mafia.  The other Syndicate guys who give Soprano trouble are usually worse than he is, but that doesn’t make Tony Soprano a hero, it just makes him a Mafioso with brains.  You always see the price that other people pay for Tony’s success.

I thought the quality of the series fell off after the second season.  Nancy Marchand died, and her character of Livia provided a necessary balance to Tony.  And, when all’s said and done, there are only so many stories you can tell about the Mafia.  After the show started repeating itself, I lost interest, though I continued to rent the DVDs right until the (horrible, bewildering, incredibly frustrating) end.

Another series that’s getting it right is Weeds.  I enjoyed this half-hour comedy about a widowed, pot-dealing housewife from the start, but also from the start I also appreciated that there was a seriously dark subtext to the program.  It was clear to me that Nancy Botwin’s adoption of a criminal lifestyle in order to keep her family in a big house in a toney suburb would— if played honestly— result in the total destruction of her family.  But I figured that the series would chicken out.  It was, after all, a comedy.  And during the third season, I figured it had chickened out.

But I’m now partway into Season Five, and I’m here to tell you that the destruction has happened!  Things have gone horribly wrong for Nancy’s family and friends, and they’re all suffering in a terrible way, and it’s still funny! There’s some kind of miracle happening here.

Plus, Nancy’s done extremely well for herself.  At the cost of her family’s security and happiness, she’s got herself a new baby and a rich Mexican drug-dealing politician for a husband.   And she’s taken out a hit on a rival.  She’s turning into Tony Soprano, a woman who gets what she wants by using and manipulating the people nearest to her  . . . and it’s great!

So if you’re writing about a dark protagonist, show the price.  Show what it costs in the character’s own humanity, show what it costs the people around him.  Show the collateral damage.

Anything else would be cheating.  And cheating, we are told, is Bad.