Pop psychology has killed the villain
unherd.com
Pop psychology has killed the villain
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Re: Pop psychology has killed the villain
#2The author's hypothesis is undermined at two points: by their insistence on making it as oblique as possible (thanks, I suppose, to UnHerd's editorial predilection towards dressing up conservative culture war talking points) and by the fact that none of their "villains" are actually villains. At best, they're morally flawed or challenging characters, producing narrative complexities that Disney (or whoever) lazily expounds on. That, not the darn liberals, is why we get therapy-Joker.
Commercial media is doing what it's always done: identified lucrative properties and milked them until the audience either becomes tired or cynical. They've been doing it to Roald Dahl for half a century now! But to (again, obliquely) identify the BFG as a villain reeks of argumentative desperation. Come back when they try to rehabilitate Miss Trunchbull[1].
Re: Pop psychology has killed the villain
#3> Some of these are successful entertainments but, nonetheless, ones that nobody asked for. I doubt that any child has ever watched the Wicked Witch of the West and thought, “Huh, what’s her story?”
Wicked wasn't aimed at children.
Nor is it even remotely intended as a friendly to the original explanation of backstory, it is a deliberate inversion that is based as much as anything on the insufficient demonstration that the “good” labelled characters in the original are good as anything else.
This whole piece reads as a messy collection of sloppy arguments directed at tendentious misreadings of art that are undergirded by boiling resentment that people dare explore alternatives to established cartoonishly simple good vs evil narratives.
Re: Pop psychology has killed the villain
#4>Authors such as Gitta Sereny (who wrote about the Nazis Albert Speer and Franz Stangl ...
This jumped out at me because I had just read an interview with one of Franz Stangl's lieutenants [0].
Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka death camp, has to be one of the most evil humans in history, and most people have never heard of him.
[0] https://collections.ushmm.org/film_findingaids/RG-60.5046_01...
Re: Pop psychology has killed the villain
#5> Why is Cruella a canicidal fashionista? Because otherwise Dodie Smith’s story would have been just a bunch of dogs running about.
I actually think that prequel did a pretty nice job of crafting Cruella's character. It's a lot closer to the common real-world theme of "the banality of evil" than some sort of fuzzy pop-psych story about deep trauma as seen wrt. The Joker. I'm not sure why OP felt like they needed to complain.
Re: Pop psychology has killed the villain
#6I hadn't heard about the site, so I looked it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnHerd
It's paid for out of the pockets of a hedge fund billionaire who used to support the Liberal Democrat party in the UK, but who has since become a major Conservative donor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Marshall_(investor)
He's also a major funder of the recently launched UK News, whose biggest draw appears to be far-right politician Nigel Farage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB_News
Re: Pop psychology has killed the villain
#7> Some of these are successful entertainments but, nonetheless, ones that nobody asked for. I doubt that any child has ever watched the Wicked Witch of the West and thought, “Huh, what’s her story?” Wicked wasn't aimed at children. Nor is it even remotely intended as a friendly to the original explanation of backstory, it is a deliberate inversion that is based as much as anything on the insufficient demonstration th…
Yes, it’s almost as if the author suddenly noticed that grownups have learned that one-dimensional villains aren’t very interesting or realistic. Why this needs to be “blamed” on anything is beyond me. We might as well try to assign blame to the person who decided stories should be more interesting than watching the nth iteration of a good guy just barely saving a damsel that’s tied to the railroad track.
Re: Pop psychology has killed the villain
#8The “rubber ducky” explanation isn’t bad because it tries to explain a character, but because it’s a bad explanation.
Re: Pop psychology has killed the villain
#9> Why is Cruella a canicidal fashionista? Because otherwise Dodie Smith’s story would have been just a bunch of dogs running about. I actually think that prequel did a pretty nice job of crafting Cruella's character. It's a lot closer to the common real-world theme of "the banality of evil" than some sort of fuzzy pop-psych story about deep trauma as seen wrt. The Joker. I'm not sure why OP felt like they needed to c…
Yeah but it also makes her not a dog-killer. I guess the writers didn't feel up to the task of making that seem banal. It crafted a different character.
Re: Pop psychology has killed the villain
#10Weird article
> How much do we need to know about a TV detective to be invested in a whodunnit?
There are tons of shows that do exactly that. Turn on a random CBS procedural and you will get exactly that- 40 mins of by the numbers crime solving with a smartass quip thrown in every once in while.
On the other hand there are options for those who are bored by the repetitiveness of crime solving in these shows and get more invested when the characters in the show are full blown people not just vehicles for crimes to happen or be solved (say True Detective (Season 1) or Broadchurch).
I am sure there is a market for both these things and options for viewers that are interested in either option (or even both depending on their mood). Let the free market sort it all out. Not sure why the author of this article is so outraged.
> As one of the showrunners of Lost, Damon Lindelof was as responsible as anybody for the backstory epidemic, creating a time-hopping narrative tangle that concluded with a crushing disappointment.
> On his next show, The Leftovers, he learned his lesson and leaned into his characters’ reactions to the mysterious disappearance of 2% of humanity rather than the reasons for the event. Trauma was the cake rather than the icing, and therefore taken seriously. In becoming so comfortable with complexity and ambiguity, Lindelof made one of the finest shows of the decade.
Another strange argument, even if some people were disappointed by the LOST ending it was still one of the most popular shows of its era and is to this day considered to be one of the best shows ever made both in the critic and regular person circles.
On the other hand The Leftovers was widely panned in its first Season and was never a popular success. While it has its ardent fans, it's never going to come close to having the popular success or impact on tv as LOST did.
I like both shows. Like everything else it is not one or the other, you can have both and let people choose.
This entire article comes across as: "these are the things I like and anyone who likes what I don't like is wrong and everyone should only make art that fits my personal sensibilities" eventhough nothing is stopping the author to keep liking the things he likes and let others enjoy things they like. There is no shortage of content out there.