Simple Bad Guys

                Someone asked me on my Wicked post why I thought the Witch was such an interesting character. Of course, I couldn’t simply give a quick rundown; this had to turn into another blog post about villains in general (the fact that the next day I ripped apart a terribly done villain also factors in).

                These days we like complexity in everything, including our bad guys: “he’s not just a simple villain” or something like it is becoming such a common source of praise that one wonders whether it’s approaching its expiration date (the way “spectacular special effects” has done). Now, I’m not going to object to this habit; I like complex, humanized antagonists as much as the next man. But I notice that the villains we really gravitate to, the ones that stick in our minds are, for the most part, the ‘simple bad guys.’

                If you were to list the most memorable and iconic villains in cinematic history, your list would probably look something like this: Dracula, the Wicked Witch of the West, Darth Vader, Blofeld, Hannibal Lecter, Mr. Potter, and Freddy Krueger. These are the villains who capture our imagination, whose image we keep coming back to, who become bywords or cultural touchstones, so that even people who haven’t seen the movies know at once who they are. And with the possible exceptions of Hannibal and (arguably) Vader, they’re all extremely simple characters. They’re two-dimensional, flat, ‘just villains.’ Yet they are the ones who fascinate us (this notion is further supported by the fact that the most celebrated movie villain of recent years is The Dark Knight’s emphatically non-humanized Joker).

                This to me suggests that maybe complexity and what we might call ‘humanity’ isn’t necessarily what we look for in our bad guys. Or, to put it another way, that when we compare complicated, distinctly human villains with simply evil bad guys, we’re actually comparing two very different things.

                When we view a story featuring a humanized villain, we’re seeing a conflict between two men; Mal and the Operative are both just men with competing philosophies and characters. Mr. Smith and Sen. Paine likewise are just men who, finding themselves at the same moral crossroads, took divergent paths.

                On the other hand, you can’t really call, say, Mr. Potter a ‘man’ at all. He’s a caricature, a bogey; the embodiment of greed, corruption, and self-interest. The Wicked Witch likewise is a bogey; a living expression of ‘wickedness,’ with all its implications of cunning, cruelty, spite, and covetousness.

                The distinction, then, is between what we may, for present purposes, call an ‘antagonist’ and a ‘bogey.’ An antagonist is a human bad guy; someone who opposes the hero for clear and understandable reasons because they either both want the same thing or want two mutually exclusive things. A bogey is a mythic bad guy; less an actual person than an imaginative representative of some idea or quality. To put it simply, an antagonist possesses certain qualities; a bogey embodies them.

                Let’s take an example: contrast Mr. Kirby in You Can’t Take it With You with Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life. Both characters are greedy, unscrupulous, self-centered businessmen of a well-known type: the uncaring rich man who gobbles up everything he possibly can by hook or crook, who relentlessly seeks more and more even when he already has more than he could ever use or enjoy.

                But Mr. Kirby is an antagonist: he’s greedy, snobbish, and heartless when it comes to his business, but he loves his son dearly, has a sense of humor, and is capable of acts of kindness and self-reflection. Mr. Potter, on the other hand, is a bogey: he has no family, no apparent interests apart from being a heartless miser, and he only ever laughs when he’s getting one over on someone else.

                A key difference is that Mr. Kirby has a past: he and other characters make references to things he had done or characteristics he had had before he became so obsessed with business. There’s a sense of Mr. Kirby being fallen from what he once was. Mr. Potter has no past; as far as we know, he entered life old, rich, and evil. As Hannibal Lecter said in a cut line from Silence of the Lambs, “nothing happened to me. I happened.”

                Bogeys don’t have pasts. Of the villains I listed above, I believe only one – Darth Vader – is given any kind of back story, and that very little: he was a Jedi Knight, he was seduced by the Dark Side, he betrayed the Jedi, his wife and infant children went into hiding to escape him (note that I’m not counting later attempts to give these characters histories, both because these efforts come after they have already become seared into the public mind and because they almost all fail spectacularly). Having a past humanizes the villain, and some villains don’t want to be humanized.

                In Batman Begins, there are several scenes where characters discuss the idea of symbols: a mere man can be destroyed, or ignored, or locked up, but a symbol is something more, something eternal and incorruptible. Bruce consciously sets out to achieve that kind of mythic status through a combination of solitude, anonymity, and primal imagery. That is what a ‘bogey’ villain is meant to do; to encompass in a single figure some archetypal evil. When they succeed, some vast, formless shadow in the viewer’s mind is given a definite shape or symbol, almost in the way a sound is associated with a letter. That vague idea of seductive, yet life-sucking evil finds its expression in the form of Dracula. The chaotic, violent subconscious that so terrifies us in our sleep is given the name and face of Freddy Krueger. The half-suspected cruel intellect manipulating world events from behind the scenes becomes a soft-spoken man stroking a Persian cat. Thus our formless notions of evil are given shape and character in these mythic villains.

                Though let me be clear that these are not mere ‘symbols,’ so that you can say that Mr. Potter is the evils of unbridled capitalism, or Hannibal Lecter is psychopathic tendencies. Rather, they embody these things in the way that Apollo embodies music or Diana embodies the woods: it is a deeper kind of symbolism, one that doesn’t allow for a one-to-one comparison (i.e. Potter’s confinement to a wheelchair represents to actual impotency of capital, etc.), but which tries to capture the feel or beats of the thing itself in one archetypal figure. In describing the effect, it often seems like mere symbolism, but it actually goes much deeper than that; the thing being expressed is caught in elements you could never really put down in a list of matching qualities. It’s found in the witch’s cackling voice that has an undercurrent of a snarl. It’s found in the goddess’s bare arms and deer-like strides as she runs under the moon, a bow on her shoulder and dogs baying at her feet. It’s in the old man tossing off muttered sneers as he recommends ruining another man’s livelihood. In short, the whole ‘feel’ of the character captures the feeling of the thing itself in our minds. Like in music, it’s the piece taken as a whole that creates the effect.

                 Now, obviously there is a lot of grey area here, where a bad guy fails to either be humanized or achieve any kind of mythic grandeur. It might be said that a ‘bogey’ is the easiest kind of villain to write and the hardest kind to do well. The ones listed above are a mere handful of the innumerable blunt, simplistic, one-dimensional bad guys that flood cinema screens. Most, frankly, just feel lazy or boring. Some rise to a mild level of archetypal power, but not enough to really capture the viewer.

That, I think, is why we often sneer at bad guys who are ‘simply villains;’ not because it’s bad writing in itself, but because it fails so often. This sort of thing is very advanced storytelling, so advanced that most examples of it happen, as it were, by accident; the right combination of design, script, and performer come together to capture the intended effect, often as much to the writer’s surprise as the viewers’. If Dracula had been played by anyone other than Bela Lugosi – even great actors like Conrad Veidt or Lon Chaney Sr., both of whom were considered for the part – I’m willing to bet that he wouldn’t have made half the impact he did (the fact that none of the many, many actors who had assailed the part since have come close to eclipsing Lugosi supports this view). The same thing with Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter (an earlier Lecter film featuring Brian Cox is now barely remembered except as a trivia question), or Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch. The best most filmmakers who attempt this sort of character can reasonably hope for is generally something like Red Skull from Captain America or Jack Wilson from Shane: a villain who captures the right feel of the thing, but not spectacularly so, and only, as it were, for the time of the film. They serve their purpose in the story, but don’t take a place in the ‘pantheon’ of the culture.

                Regarding complex villains, these, I think, generally fill out the middle or upper-middle of the storytelling spectrum; they fascinate and intrigue and trouble us, but I find they almost never rise to the artistic heights of ‘bogeys.’ Much as we enjoy them and admire the craftsmanship that went into them, I think it’s clear they don’t grab us in the same way the others do. Sheriff Hank Quinlan from Touch of Evil is an intriguing character and a great villain, but who remembers him? In fact, the only indisputably ‘complex, three-dimensional bad guy’ I think of off the top of my head who reaches iconic status is Norman Bates (I’m not counting characters like King Kong or the Frankenstein Monster, whose ‘villain’ status is debatable). These ‘antagonists’ as I have called them have our cheers and our critical approval, and rightly so, but they don’t fascinate us like the bogeys.

                And that, to finally answer the question that prompted this post, is why I think the Wicked Witch of the West is an ‘interesting’ character (at least in the movie: I haven’t read the books); she’s one of those great mythic figures that capture an idea so perfectly that she becomes the means of conveying that idea. She’s interesting in the same way that Hecate is interesting; because she taps some primal well of imagery in our minds and becomes more than just a character in a children’s story. You could, if you really wanted to, break her down into Freudian or feminist or religious or Marxist interpretations, but you’d spoil the effect, just like you’d spoil a joke if you tried to explain it, or kill an animal by dissecting it. She’s interesting not because you can dissect or examine her, not because she raises interesting questions or poses moral quandaries, but simply because she is what she is: the Wicked Witch of the West.

Vivat Christus Rex!

The Mandarin or ‘Davy Jones Syndrome’

                  It’s a little late, but it’s time to get this off my chest: the handling of the Mandarin in Iron Man 3.

                  (FAIR WARNING: I'm writing this piece assuming that you've seen the movie, or at least don't care enough about it to bother about major spoilers).

                  Some people think the twist a brilliant piece of satire. Others think it unutterably stupid.

                  Me? I think it was the single worst decision in any superhero film since someone decided Arnold Schwarzenegger would be the ideal Mr. Freeze (and no, I am not forgetting the death of Cyclops or evil Tobey Maguire thrusting his pelvis at the camera).

                  Imagine if, midway through The Dark Knight, Batman had tracked down the Joker only to learn that he was an innocent clown hired by for a birthday gig that got out of hand and that Eric Roberts’ Mafioso character was the real villain. Or if the original Star Wars had killed off Darth Vader and kept Grand Moff Tarkin as the main bad guy. I call this the “Davy Jones Syndrome:” wherein a work introduces an awe-inspiring or iconic villain, only to sideline him in favor of a more generic bad guy who gores whatever ox the writer happens to be obsessed with (usually capitalism or patriotism or some other institution liberals don’t like). It’s named, of course, after the disastrous Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, which – in addition to their many other sins – inexplicably decided that an utterly generic evil capitalist would make a better chief bad-guy than a super-powered demonic cross between Captain Nemo and Cthulhu as played by one of the best character actors in modern Hollywood.

                  Iron Man 3 makes almost the exact same mistake: a diabolically evil villain played by a master bad-guy is unceremoniously tossed aside to make room for a nondescript corrupt corporate executive. The only saving grace of this debacle is that Guy Pearce is an excellent actor in his own right and can make a perfectly serviceable villain, unlike…whatever the hell his name was in Pirates. The trouble, though, is that Pearce is best at playing rather ordinary or at least human bad-guys (see his deliciously heartless turn in The Count of Monte Cristo). As a comic-book super-villain, ‘Guy Pearce as evil businessman’ is no match for ‘Ben Kingsley as all-knowing terrorist mastermind.’

                  This is so stupid, so anticlimactic, and so indescribably lame that I find it single-handedly derails the film (in my review, written shortly after I had seen it, I thought that it didn’t quite, but upon reflection I realized that the film’s contrary virtues are all ones that only really come on the first viewing, and the black hole of badness created by the Mandarin and the many other flaws grows ever larger the more you think about it).

                  I’ll try to explain why and how this was such a terrible, terrible idea (because I think it's instructive). To do that, I’ll have to recount the basic set up of the first half or so of the film and read it as though they were not going to pull their disastrous twist.

                  The Mandarin (played with chilling coldness by the great Ben Kingsley) is established as a master terrorist; Osama Bin Laden by way of Fu Manchu. He has a deep, abiding hatred for America and all it represents, a hatred he expresses through precise and symbolic bombings across the globe, accompanied by stylistic propaganda videos explaining his reasoning. He often announces his targets ahead of time, but the authorities prove helpless to do anything to stop him. At one point he openly challenges the President of the United States by threatening to execute a hostage if the President doesn’t call him in time. Then when the President does, he kills the man anyway. He’s made his point: he is in charge.

                  The Mandarin gives off an air of chilling omnipotence; he is so cunning and subtle that he can make a phone number appear in the President’s personal cell-phone while effortlessly eluding all attempts to bring him to justice. Combined with his theatrical manners and trappings, he seems almost more than a man.

                  Then, one day, Tony Stark’s friend is injured in one of the Mandarin’s attacks. Tony, enraged, offers a public challenge to the terrorist. The Mandarin accepts by bombing Stark’s house into rubble.

                  The impression is that, for once, Tony has really bitten off more than he can chew. The Mandarin is the kind of bad-guy, like Bane or the Joker in the Dark Knight films, who cuts right to the point with a speed and ferocity that the hero is unprepared for; an intricately planned blitzkrieg that overwhelms and crushes him right where he thought he was most powerful.

                  In the midst of this is Guy Pearce as a character named Aldrich Killian; a business rival with a serious grudge against Tony Stark for snubbing him years earlier. Killian possesses an unstable performance-enhancing technology called ‘Extremis’ which is tied up in the Mandarin’s schemes, and appears to be working with – or for – the terrorist, who headquarters in Killian’s Florida mansion.

                  Now, what happens in the film is that it turns out Killian is the one in charge and the Mandarin is actually a funny little British actor who has no idea of the crimes he’s involved in. Killian is in league with the Vice President and has a deal in which he’ll kill the President in exchange for the Vice President supporting his war profiteering (in a desperate attempt to save face, the writers have Killian inexplicably screaming “I was the real Mandarin!” right before he dies).

                  First of all, lame, lame, lame, Lame, LAME! Political corruption, a personal vendetta, and war profiteering? Boring! Seen it a thousand times. Hell, the last two Iron Man movies did all that, and did it better! Killian is basically just a mix of Iron Monger (the war profiteer), Vanko (the personal grudge against Stark), and Justin Hammer (the corrupt business rival), all of whom were a heck of a lot more interesting and fun.

                  Even if we hadn’t seen it all before, a corrupt corporate executive with an old grudge is a petty, rather pathetic figure. There’s no power or grandeur to him. He’s a perfectly serviceable villain, but he’s a mid-level bad-guy, not the ultimate threat of the climactic film of a trilogy. On one side we have the Master Terrorist who hates the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave and all it stands for, and on the other we have a shallow, soulless man who can’t forget a personal slight. All the laws of drama scream in protest when you take the latter over the former.

                  What should have happened is that Killian, out of his hatred of Stark, would join forces with the Mandarin, thinking, in his arrogance, that he could control the terrorist. This would lead to the crucial moment where he realizes that he has been toying with a force far more powerful and dangerous than he bargained for and would presumably pay the price. The dynamic would be rather like Dagget and Bane in The Dark Knight Rises: the greedy businessman who, looking for an edge over his rival, turns to someone who really believes in something greater than mere Mammon and finds, to his horror, that the ideologue is something far beyond the control of a petty creature like himself. Killian, like Dagget, is a small man; a man of spite and greed and envy, whose overwhelming arrogance is the only thing that prevents him from realizing how dangerous someone like Bane or the Mandarin really is (or ought to be).

                  Which brings me to one of the crucial points: the Mandarin, as established in the first half of the film, hits Tony at a point he’s never been hit before. He strikes right at the roots of who he is and what he does. He forces Stark to face the question “what, exactly, are you fighting for?” Stark has always supported and ‘fought for’ America: both when he made weapons for the military and when he took the fight directly to the Afghan terrorists. But really, Tony has always had his own interests at the forefront. Even after he became a hero, it’s always about either cleaning up his own mess or protecting his own friends and loved ones.

The Mandarin forces him to question all that. He forces Tony to look for the ideal beyond any personal interest; it’s not about him, his past, or even his friends, it’s about the bigger issues of Freedom, Justice, and so on that Tony is supposedly fighting for. Do those matter to him at all? If so, is he really certain he’s on the right side? When push comes to shove, can Tony fight for something higher and nobler than himself?

                  See, the Mandarin, had they but allowed him, would have forced Tony to do some serious self-examination and answer some hard and interesting questions. He wouldn’t have just been a physical or intellectual challenge, but a spiritual one.

                  But perhaps I’m asking too much. Modern Hollywood seems almost incapable of imagining a man fighting for a higher cause like Justice or Honor; even Captain America wasn’t allowed to have any more profound a motivation than “I don’t like bullies.” Hollywood morality is, as a rule, entirely self-centered: personal exploration, personal empowerment, supporting one’s friends and families (if we’re lucky), and so on. The idea of fighting for a flag or an idea, for the “ashes of your fathers and the temples of your gods,” seems entirely alien to them. If so, then I can only say that if they can’t comprehend the ideas that make stories worth telling, they should stop telling them.

                  Still, even if they were never going to make the most of the Mandarin, what they actually decided to do simply hideous. On the most basic dramatic level, setting up an omnipotent, deadly mastermind able to run circles around the most powerful nation on Earth only to throw aside the curtain and show him to be nothing but smoke and mirrors is a stunning misstep, on the level of having the characters wake up and realize that it was all a dream. Having it done as a cheap joke (complete with toilet humor) only adds to the insult.

                  There is a time to be subversive and a time to be conventional. In both cases, that time ceases the moment it begins to hurt the story. In this case, it doesn’t just hurt the story; it maims and kills it. “We know you came for an elemental confrontation between Iron Man and his greatest foe, but that’d be too obvious, so we thought you’d enjoy more of the exact same kind of stuff you got in the first two movies, only stupider.” Or, alternatively “yes, I did just spend an hour setting up an utterly terrifying villain only to turn him into a cheap gag at the last minute. Ain’t I a stinker?” For goodness sakes, that’s the kind of joke you get on a Simpsons episode; it doesn’t work in an actual movie!

                  I’ve heard some people say they support the twist on the grounds that the Mandarin is a ‘racist’ character. Personally, I don’t know what racist stereotype is forwarded by a man who can outsmart the whole United States Military and go toe-to-toe with Iron Man. I’m not sure what negative statement this makes about Orientals or Anglo-Indians. Moreover, if we’re going to play the ‘racism game,’ isn’t the twist a lot more racist than the alternative would have been? Isn’t the implication (if you insist on drawing one) “oh, of course an Oriental couldn’t be the real bad guy: they’re just a funny little people. For a real mastermind, you need a white man”?

                  Besides that, what about the Mandarin is at all racist? A ‘mandarin’ is just an aristocratic class of civil servants from Imperial China who served as advisors, barristers, treasurers, and that sort of thing. An equivalent Western bad guy would call himself something like “the Bureaucrat” or, less amusingly, “the Judge.” This, of course, makes perfect sense for the Mandarin as presented in the first half of the film; a master strategist who appoints himself to stand in ‘judgment’ over the United States, and does so from the heritage of his own (ostensible) culture.

                  The only other grounds for calling the Mandarin a ‘racist’ character is the mere fact that he isn’t European, in which case good God! Do you realize how idiotic that position is? In the first place, it actually is racist to assume that people of one race do not suffer the same temptations and passions that any other race does and hence cannot be villains. In the second, pick up a newspaper sometime and see how much relation that notion has to the real world.

                  I can think of two, maybe three reasons for the decision the filmmakers made. The first is a simple desire to do something different, in which case they ought to be reminded that their job is to tell a story, not to win a Calvinball tournament. Originality is a tool, not an end, and the moment you start worrying about being original rather than simply telling a good story, you have lost your way and should put down your pen until you find it again.

                  The second reason is a fear of overseas markets. I suppose I can’t really fault them for that; filmmaking is a business, after all, but we’ve reached a very low point of culture indeed if we’re so desperate for the wealth of the tyrannies and dictatorships of the world that we dare not say a word against them. That’s even assuming that the Mandarin was explicitly connected to the Chinese government in any way, which would be an easy thing to avoid. Indeed, if they were really so worried about that, it seems to me the obvious solution would be to introduce a sympathetic Chinese character or a flattering depiction of the Chinese government to balance the portrayal (though the latter would be morally questionable in its own right).

                  The third and most troubling reason is that they really believe this is closer to how the world works: that the director or screenwriters subscribe to a kind of ‘9/11 Truther’ view of politics in which nations like America really fabricate terrorist threats to gun up the military-industrial complex that pumps wealth into the pockets of the right people. If so, then they’re despicably ignorant and callous people who need to learn to face the real world and their film is not only bad, but actively offensive (the fact that it came out mere weeks after the Boston Marathon Bombings only emphasizes this).

                  Unfortunately, I suspect the last is the true, or at least primary, motivation. Something I read quoted from an interview with the director indicates that he subscribes to this kind of insanity (I can’t find the interview at the moment).

                  So, in summary, the treatment of the Mandarin in Iron Man 3 squanders great dramatic potential, is hideously anticlimactic and stupid in itself, and seems to stem from motives that range from silly to despicable. It’s a real winner. Storytellers, we’re going to file this under the ‘don’t’ category.

Vivat Christus Rex! 

The Loves of Harry Potter (SPOILER ALERT)

I learned an important lesson about being an author this week; once your book is complete and published, you should really KEEP ANY SECOND THOUGHTS YOU HAVE TO YOURSELF!! 

I’m referring, of course, to J.K. Rowling’s infamous announcement that she regrets pairing Ron and Hermione. Really, what possible purpose could such an announcement serve? It’s not like she can go back and ‘fix’ the books so that Harry and Hermione get together instead. All it does is introduce a disconnect in the minds of the readers, who now will have a harder time getting caught up in the romance because they’ll be thinking “but the authoress thinks it should have been different…maybe I shouldn’t enjoy it so much…” Likewise, if you shipped Harry-Hermione, you’ll be even more focused on how much better that would have been, and so you will also have a harder time enjoying the story, because the criticism you already had will have been sharpened. A little of the readers' enjoyment of the books has been taken away.  

Besides which, I think she’s wrong. I love the Ron-Hermione romance, and I can’t imagine the story without it. Ron in particular would have virtually no character arc at all.

See, Ron’s deal is that he’s always gotten the short end of the stick in pretty much everything; poor, second-youngest while the youngest is the girl his mother always wanted, picked on by his elder brothers, obliged to use second-hand-everything, not especially smart or talented or popular, and so on. He’s always the runner-up: second-best in everything, eternally overshadowed, and it’s a source of constant torment and shame for him, which ironically stops him from making good use of what talents he has. He’s come to expect to fail and be overlooked, and so at the slightest hint that he might be, he panics and becomes defensive or angry, thinking ‘Of course: here we go again.’ In short, he’s nearly lost his capacity to hope.

Then he makes friends with Hermione, and they grow up together, and Hermione, of course, excels and surpasses him, just like almost everyone else he knows. But Ron doesn’t feel overshadowed by Hermione (as he does by Harry) because she’s good at things that he admires, but isn't really interested in. He can tease her about spending so much time on homework or reading or being a ‘know-it-all’ because has no ambitions in that direction himself (he never teases Harry about being good at Quidditch, for instance, and note that when he fights with Harry, it’s out of resentment, but when he fights with Hermione it’s over some specific felt injury). He’s able to enjoy her talents without jealousy, which is something he’s probably never experienced before. Then, as they grow older, Ron slowly realizes that Hermione is becoming a beautiful young woman and that he is falling in love with her.

Now faced with the one thing – or rather one person – that he wants more than anything else in the world, he panics. So he does stupid things and makes rash choices because he is so terrified by the idea that he can’t actually succeed in winning her, which of course makes it all the less likely that he will.

For her part, Hermione is sensitive to criticism and afraid of failure. She takes refuge in her studies and overcompensates on them due to a lack of confidence mixed with a deep desire to succeed. She has a tendency to be overly serious or driven or wrapped up in her own head. Ron helps her counterbalance this tendency by both interjecting a voice of calm and good-humor into her life and, equally importantly, by being a constant source of reassurance to her. He’s always reminding her of how brilliant she is and how hard she works. True, he usually does it in a teasing or mocking manner, but he means it and she knows it (note the scene in the sixth book where Ron launches into a boastful description of how brilliant Hermione was at their apparition lesson). Besides, his treating it humorously helps control her fears and self-doubts. He laughs at her at the same time he compliments her, which is just the combination Hermione needs.

This sort of thing is a sign of something Ron doesn’t show much; he has deep wells of kindness and compassion. They’re often lost in the storm of his darker emotions, but he loves and cares for other people very deeply. This is shown in scenes as disparate as his losing his temper whenever Malfoy taunts his family or friends, his grief when he thinks his pet Scabbers has died, and even his regret over the state his backfiring wand has reduced Gilderoy Lockhart to. Hermione, being sensitive to that sort of thing, recognizes this and loves him for it. It isn’t his sudden, brilliant idea of breaking into the Chamber of Secrets that finally breaks her resistance; it’s his concern for the safety of the House Elves.

As I said, by the time he realizes he’s in love with her, Ron has almost become afraid to hope for anything that he really wants. The fact that Hermione already has two ostensibly superior possible beaus – Viktor Krum and Harry himself – only exacerbates the situation. It confirms the suspicion in his mind that he really doesn’t have a chance with her (note he always becomes grumpier when Krum is mentioned, and learning that Krum probably kissed her sends him into his worst temper yet: it makes him think again about how much his supposed rivals apparently outclass him).

Basically, Ron needs to learn to hope; to make the effort even though he doesn’t see much chance of succeeding. The key point in his transformation is when he saves Harry’s life in the seventh book and fully understands what Harry has been trying to tell him all these years about that sort of thing being less impressive from the point of view of the person actually doing it. That’s when he realizes that, even though he doesn’t think of himself as being as good a catch as Krum or Harry, Hermione might not see it that way. That’s when he starts to hope again, and he pursues her quietly, but steadily for the rest of the book (in contrast to the fits and starts that characterized his pursuit of her in prior books). It’s this learning to hope that forms the backbone of his character arch. Ron without Hermione, it seems to me, would be a fairly pointless character.

Hermione without Ron, on the other hand, is, well, boring. She needs him to take her down a peg, to needle and tease and hold a light to her flaws. Without him, she’s simply ‘the smart one:’ there to provide exposition and teach Harry what he needs to know. Consider the films, where Ron is constantly sidelined and Hermione emphasized. The result is that Hermione, in the absence of Ron’s affectionate ribbing, becomes utterly insufferable: just a solemn, bossy know-it-all. Picture Mr. Darcy without Elizabeth and you have an image of what Hermione is like without Ron (the catastrophic mishandling of those two is the main reason I don’t like the films).

Besides which, I really can’t picture a romance between Harry and Hermione. They don’t complement one another at all, and their interactions aren’t nearly as fun as Ron and Hermione’s. Note that whenever they’re alone together, they find they really don’t have a whole lot to say to one another. In the two periods where Harry and Ron aren’t speaking, Harry finds life with Hermione as his best friend to be quiet and rather dull. They love each other, but like brother and sister: there’s no fire or spark or merry duel between them, and never could be (judging by the narration, Harry barely even registers that she’s attractive, requiring us to gather it from the reactions of other characters). There’s a level on which they simply don’t connect. It’s almost as though he’s a straight line and she’s a wavy one; there are contours and depressions in her soul that he doesn’t and can’t respond to.

Now, I can imagine the books rewritten so that Harry and Hermione could reasonably get together, or that Ron would have a character arc apart from his romance with Hermione, but that would require a very different story than the one we have. Mrs. Rowling might just as well have said “I wish I had written a different book series than the one I did.” It's her business if she feels that way, but she shouldn't have mentioned it. It has no effect on the stories themselves, and if it has any effect at all on the readers, it can only be an effect for the worse.

And in any case, I respectfully disagree with her.

Credit: maria-abagnale.livejournal.com

Vivat Christus Rex!

Happy Halloween!

I love Halloween.

Halloween is, to me, a celebration of a primal human need; the need to, for lack of a better term, play: to hold mock-battles, to imaginatively incarnate the evils and trials of the world into villains and monsters so that they can be slain. You can’t beat up lust or anger, but you can beat up vampires and werewolves. It’s tough, and they’re dangerous and all, but you can do it. If not, there’s always silver bullets, wooden stakes, big honkin’ shotguns and other monster-killing paraphernalia.

The point is, the impulse to create monsters and horror – to scare ourselves – is a good and healthy one (though, like all things, it can be perverted). It’s fun to be scared by a ghost story or a horror movie, just like it’s fun to jump out of an airplane with a parachute on. Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, Kharis the Mummy, and so on wouldn’t be any fun at all if they were chasing us for real of course. But in fiction we enjoy the shiver of dread as we watch the stiff, painfully-rehearsed way Dracula pours the “very old wine,” all the while keeping his eyes on his victim. We like being creeped out by Kharis’s glittering black eyes (or, for the more discerning tastes, the creaking menace of Imhotep). Monsters like that not only scare us, but they comfort us as well; they take up residence in our consciousnesses and serve as endless sources of jokes and knowing references.

It’s play and story-telling; two of the most ancient of mankinds weapons against evil. They help us to make sense of the senseless; to trap it in images and make it vulnerable, rather like how Nancy pulls Freddy from the dream-world into the real-world, forcing him to fight on her terms (man, I love Nancy!). Stories and games can make us braver, more resilient to the trials and temptations of life.

See, the trouble is that real evil is something that is both very like nothing (indeed, there is no such thing as pure evil, because evil is only a negation or corruption of something good) and, as such, it is very subtle and impossible to pin down. The devil can take any shape or persona he likes. Stories, and especially horror stories, are attempts to ‘pin him down:’ to force him into a specific shape for the duration of the story so he can be defeated. This helps us build ‘habits’ for defeating him in the real world. The more and better stories we ingest, the more monsters we vicariously defeat, the more horrors we imaginatively endure, the more ‘trained’ we become to face him.

That’s one part of it. The other is that a really good horror story will showcase something of the ‘bad news:’ the fallen nature of humanity. Take Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for instance, in which the good doctor discovered just what was lurking inside his own soul and lost himself to it. Or The Picture of Dorian Gray, about a depraved young man’s inability to escape his own conscience. Or Halloween, about the irrational evil lurking beneath the surface even in the most ordinary of places.

C.S. Lewis (who knew how to write horror very well) said that Christianity has nothing to say to people who don’t think they need to be saved. A good horror story helps show just how deadly and universal evil really is, and how foolish we are to think that we’re “okay just the way we are.”  No, the world has too much corruption, too many spiritual dangers and temptations for us to think of ourselves as ‘safe.’ Being confronted with zombies or ghosts or werewolves invites us to look at ourselves and the world we live in, to see the darkness lurking just out of sight, and so to realize just how scared we ought to be.

Of course, fear doesn’t have the last word; we don’t live in a world of Lovecraftian elder gods, but of the One God who became incarnate in Jesus Christ and died to save us from that very evil that so frightens us. We can enjoy imaginary fear and danger all the more because we know that, in the real world, we don’t have to be afraid.

Vivat Christus Rex!