Anyone
who’s played an RPG (or who, like me, never have but are familiar with the
concept) knows about Character Alignment. Alignment is basically whether your
character is supposed to be a good guy, a bad guy, or somewhere in between.
This is supposed to guide your decisions as you proceed through the campaign
(i.e. if you have a Lawful Good Wizard, you shouldn’t be researching an
“Omnicide” spell).
Meanwhile,
anyone who has been to the cinema lately knows that movies centered around “bad
guys” are all the rage (Despicable Me,
Megamind, Wreck-It Ralph, etc. not to mention things like the
internet-original Dr. Horrible’s
Sing-Along Blog or the book/show Wicked.
These are just off the top of my head; you could find dozens more). Now, to a
greater or lesser extent, I like all the works I listed above (well, Wicked sucks as a story, but the music’s
good). But the thing is that, by and large, they don’t actually center around
real bad guys. Wreck-It Ralph isn’t a bad guy; he just plays one in a
video-game. Dr. Horrible may steal things, but he balks at the idea of actually
hurting anyone. And of course,
‘Elphaba’s only crime is being born with green skin (one of the reasons I think
the story doesn’t work; what’s the point of writing about the flippin’ Wicked
Witch of the West if you can’t even make her mildly amoral?). About the only genuinely bad guy on that list is Gru
from Despicable Me, who at least
starts out as selfish and uncaring.
Remind me why he's a bad guy again? |
It’s
obvious to see why this is; a story about an honest-to-goodness bad guy would be intolerable (note that
the Nightmare on Elm Street series
tanked the moment it became centered on Freddy himself). Instead, these kinds
of stories could be said to have characters with an ‘evil’ (or at least
‘neutral’) alignment; being ‘bad’ is simply part of their make-up, like their
race or appearance. Wreck-It Ralph and his friends at ‘Bad-Anon’ are only bad
guys in the sense that that’s their particular niche in the video-game society,
not because of anything they actually do.
The
trouble is that this sort of thing can, and I’m afraid often does, lead us to forget
that the real world doesn’t have an alignment system. ‘Evil’ people aren’t
cuddly, oppressed types who can’t help their alignment and suffer for it.
They’re people who consciously choose to do evil things. ‘Good’ people aren’t
the privileged few whom the world has blessed to go out and fight evilness,
they’re the people who have done the right thing time and time again until it
has become a habit, and this doesn’t usually translate to social prestige. ‘Good’
and ‘evil’ people are not different species; they’re people who have made
different choices and who may make still different ones in the future.
In
other words, these kinds of stories can make us think that, when we hear
someone call a certain act ‘good’ or another ‘evil,’ that just means “Oh, he’s
just being a self-righteous bully, like Captain Hammer; appointing himself good
and lording it over the poor ‘bad guy.’” No, it doesn’t. It means “this is an honestly
wrong and disordered action which no one should ever commit.” In the real
world, unless someone is very silly, ‘evil’ means just, simply, evil. Not
‘unwanted,’ ‘inconvenient,’ or ‘socially-excluded,’ but evil. Wrong. Unnatural.
Bad.
It’s
true, of course, that in the real world people often get ostracized for
superficial reasons (skin color, height, attractiveness, etc.). But this is not
the same thing as making a moral judgment. The latter is a matter of
philosophy; the former is just bad manners (of course, the rude person may subsequently try to excuse his behavior by making it out to be a matter of philosophy). In these stories, the common
thread, it seems to me, is that the ‘bad guys’ lash out because the ‘good guys’
are rude to them, and being a ‘good guy’ is associated with being rude to the
bad guys. Thus the takeaway is that a ‘bad guy’ is simply someone the ‘good
guys’ feel justified in being rude to. But again, that’s not how the real world works.
And
the thing is; no one believes it does. For one thing, all of these stories
include a genuinely evil character for the ‘hero’ to fight. But none of them,
as far as I can remember, bother to stop and make the distinction between the
‘evil alignment’ protagonist and the genuinely evil antagonist (the closest I
can think of is Megamind’s boast that
his opponent is “a villain…but not a super-villain”).
Obviously, though, the protagonists are ‘good’ in a way that the antagonists
aren’t, even if the antagonist is the ostensible ‘good guy.’ Thus, even when
they purport to be revealing the ‘superficiality of our distinctions of good
and evil,’ they aren’t. They’re just arbitrarily slapping the labels ‘good’ and
‘evil’ on the wrong characters while maintaining the same moral standards of a
more ‘traditional’ story.
The
truth is, of course, that moral standards are axiomatic and unchanging. If you
don’t believe me, just try to imagine what a story where the real Wicked Witch of the West was the
protagonist and you were expected to root for her as she tries to murder
Dorothy and take over Oz. Or imagine you were expected to root for Captain
Hammer in Dr. Horrible, or the Joker
in The Dark Knight. Not only can you
not imagine doing so, but you would hate any story that expected you to. The
easiest way to kill an audience’s interest in a story is to have an unlikeable
protagonist (see The Lost World: Jurassic
Park for an example).
He's just misunderstood... |
And
don’t think you can escape this by pointing out popular, morally ambivalent
characters like James Bond, Wolverine, Sam Spade, or Mal Reynolds. Yes, these
guys are rough around the edges and no one’s idea of a nice guy, but we don’t root for them because
of their immorality, but for what morality they have, and because their opponents are obviously much worse. Again,
imagine that we were expected to cheer for Blofeld, or Sabertooth, or Guttman,
or the Operative. You can’t, and you’d resent anyone who expected you to.
Good
and evil are not just arbitrary labels, and even attempts to show that they are
only re-confirm the fact that they aren’t. We can’t imagine a world in which
they would be other than they are, even when we deliberately set out to do so,
because our whole being revolts against the concept. A world in which cruelty,
cowardice, dishonesty, and selfishness are good is unimaginable, and if by some
demonic effort we could, we would want to leave it as soon as possible.
Vive Christus Rex!