Am I The Only One Who Keeps Rooting For The Bad Guys

Cafe Society
1

I’ve been reading a lot of novels and well frankly, I have to admit, I keep rooting for the bad guys. Of course they lose but still one can hope.

I keep thinking that it’s easier to write for bad guys, because they are able to do things humans normall can’t or won’t do, so they are written better.

Oh sure on some level everyone wants Bluto to beat up Popeye every once in awhile, but this Christmas I re-read A Christmas Carol and thought, “Geez Scrooge wasn’t that bad.” Or even at worst, I re-read Sybil and was like “OK so Sybil’s mum was bitch, but Sybil never did anything to try to minimize her suffering.”

I was watching some old silent flick, the kind where the little girl can’t pay the mortgage and then he says “OK Marry me and I’ll rip up the mortgage.” She refuses so the guy ties her to a train track (did anyone actually DO THIS in real life?) and at the end the hero comes and pays the mortage and she marries him.

I was like "At least the villian loves the girl, when she was in trouble the hero was out on, at best a lark, at worst a two day drunk, when the girl needed him.

Anyone else root for the bad guy in a movie or book or play or TV show? If so why do you think people do it?

2

Remember that the Bad Guy has independence of motion. The Good Guy can only react to him. Good Guys are twerps. Bad Guys drive the story.

3

No, I always do that, too. Except Livia in I, Claudius. I just wanted her to hurry up and die. But Bond villains, bank robbers, even the Nazis in The Man with the Iron Heart…

Valete,
Vox Imperatoris

ETA: And especially the Empire in Star Wars. They were just too cool to lose.

4

Watching The Blair Witch Project, I was cheering for the witch. To me it wasn’t a horror movie, it was watching a group of morons getting served the price of their stupidity. That said, I’m still not in the habit of watching something bad happen to people who deserve it, so it’s not a favorite film. But I certainly didn’t mind.

And the main characters in:

  1. The book, Slaughterhouse Five
  2. The movie, The Shawshank Redemption
  3. The anime, Evangelion

All annoy me for starring dudes who need to be slapped upside the head to get with the picture. I wasn’t particularly cheering for the bad guys, but I definitely didn’t mind when any of these characters got beat up some.

5

(sigh) And this is what happens when we allow people who were NOT English majors to post. ')

6

I remember my mother took me and my best friend Jeff to see a movie one time. After, Jeff and I were playing video games in the lobby. Mom wanted to see Rocky III. Jeff and I outvoted her and she gave in because she was nice like that. We saw the first movie. Later, she snuck us into her movie. No dodging of the usher, no mad dash through the door - She gave us a five minute warning. We were ready. On her signal, she stormed across the lobby and grabbed us both by the collar and started yelling ‘where the f**k were you? I thought you got kidnapped! Do NOT EVER leave without telling me where you are going’ and all that. Dragged me and Jeff right past the usher (who didn’t even open the door to the theatre; he just found the lightswitch on the wall VERY interesting at that moment.

Back to the OP: Near the end (no spoiler intended), Rocky was introduced as the challenger. The theatre crowd clapped and hooted and hollered because they could see it coming. Mr. T (aka Clubber Lang) was introduced as the reigning champion. During the ‘boos’ from the peanut gallery, Jeffrey and I stood up and chanted ‘CLUBBER CLUBBER CLUBBER’.

Mom grabbed both of us and threw us in our seats. We heard about it on the way home for ‘creating a disturbance’ in the theatre. There was so self-defense about how ‘but the rest of the people did it.’

Lesson learned: Don’t f**k with Mom.

7

I was a literature major. More fundamentally stories are about a hero trying to solve an inadequacy in himself. The bad guy is a tool for which the good guy to shape himself on and need be no more interesting than to serve that purpose.

8

Well, there are some bad guys I root for way more than the putative heroes of their respective works…
**
Satan.** He performed the first act of rebellion, which means he had the first original idea of any created being…and his rebellion was against the Creator Of The freakin’ Universe, thus he performed the first, perhaps the only act of true bravery evefr. Plus, just about all the stories of the celestial uprising I’ve ever encountered, depict the Fallen One as acting from motives I can only regard as commendable.
**
The Wicked Witch of the West** – even before Mr Maguire’s elegant and heartfulreframing of the story, she has always struck me as A: having more solid motivations for her actions than anyone else in the (film) version of The Wizard Of Oz, and B: just being the most lively and interesting character in the story.

Leaping to another Oz altogether, when I used to watch the HBO men-in-the-pen nighttime soap opera of the same name, I had warm spots in my heart for two of the most villainous and dangerous guys in the joint --** Schillinger**, the sadistic White-Power elder, and Atabezi, the big frightening African guy – because they were so thoroughly themselves. The fact that I found them both really attractive doesn’t have that much influence, I don’t think, because I would’ve done at least half the inmates on that show in a red-hot minute if I got the chance.

When I saw Fatal Attraction, I cheered for **Glenn Close’s character **all the way, because, well, Michael Douglas really was a hypocritical sneak who used her and then tossed her aside to go back to his chickenshit conformist scene with the wife and brat, and thought that was so superior to her way…once he’d busted his sneaky illicit nut.

Of course, you’re supposed to root for Kong and the unhappy product of Dr. Frankenstein’s experiment, or at least have somew sympathy for them, so I won’t mention them. I will say that I always sympathized with, and rooted for, **Trog **in the movie named after him – poor ugly mofo didn’t ask for what happened to him at all, basically only attacked people in self defense, and was abused and terrified by his so-called superiors, then betrayed by the one person he trusted and killed off with B-horror bombast.

And finally (there are more, oh yeah, but this assortment is quite enough to get me in considerable trouble here already), **the crazy wheelchair-Nazi scientist **in the Turu The Terrible episode of the original *Jonny Quest *cartoon – that’s the one with the pterodactyl. Yeah, him, and the pterodactyl too! It’s his pet, you see, and he really loves the big awful monstrosity, and when good ol’ Race Bannon oh-so-righteously blasts poor Turu out of the sky with his bazooka, the old loon screams out “Stop! You’re hurting him!” and then, when Turu gets blasted into the tar pit and is screeching pitifully, dives in to try to save him. Only episode of that show that had me hating Dr. Q and ace at the end…

9

Indeed…good guys, all too often, come across as overly moralistic and stupid (or a bad mix). A villain can be more interesting—they take the initiative; the creative approach; they don’t kneel to their own obligations, to their society, or the cultural and structural conventions of their medium, unlike a hero. And as Shaw said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Plus they usually have better threads. And they put out, too. :slight_smile:

10

Destro & the Baroness from GI Joe were a hellava lot more interesting than the whole Joe Team put together.
She’s drop-dead gorgeous, **he’s **buff, brilliant & strapping (and honorable), and they love each other. Enough to marry & spawn a baby, hight Eugen.

I nominate them for the title of Perfect Evil Couple.

11

I always root for Deniro’s crew in Heat. They always lose. Dammit!

12

I liked the Mafia guys in the Sopranos and Goodfellas. Tony Soprano was very likable to me even if he was a stone cold killer. I also like Dexter , I guess he’s a mix of good and bad.

13

I really was for the bad guys in this one also. They were pretty cool, great dressers, balls, and brains. I think Al Pacino was a real jerk in it, on top of being the hero, even though I liked him. His cop characters were too ready to slam Charlene and kid into institution for just being Val Kilmer’s girl; too ready to get bad with a flash of the badge.

Also, I really didn’t think that Scrooge was that bad. He was a good business man, and, as he points out, that it being Christmas was a poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket. When he saw suffering, he was really moved to pity, so it wasn’t that he was heartless, he was just a businessman that understood that there were people that would suck the life out of him as long as he let them. He cut himself off, rather than oppressed the poor. Unlike the manipulative creeps that came to his office, trying to get money, all in the name of their organized charity.

There are a lot more, but I just can’t remember them, right now.

14

Rooting for the bad guy is equivalent to rooting for the underdog, and is ancient. (Who would deny rooting for Wile E. Coyote and Sylvester the Cat?). The contrarian instinct is strong.

15

But the Coyote IS the good guy, it’s just so subtle you don’t notice.

Sylvester is the good guy in most of his films too. Just because Tweety is little doesn’t make him the good guy.

16

I detect a faint whooshing sound.

17

I often root for the villains in books and films, particularly as they are (mostly) more interesting characters than the boring lantern jawed hero.

I echo the earlier comments about rooting for Satan in books, some of the best fiction I’ve read recently has had Satan/Lucifer as the main character for example the excellent grpahic novel series by Mike Carey.

One of the things I’ve noticed as well is that “heroes” in fiction and fairy tales in particular do not always play it honourably. I felt sorry for Rumplestiltskin as he was effectively lied to and conned by the “good” guys. He made an honest bargain and when they failed to live up to their half was conned.

18

The crew of the U-96 in Das Boot, I have to keep reminding myself that they worked for Hitler and deserved to be sunk.

19

That’s an interesting one. Perhaps one of the great things about literature and film is that they can encourage some empathy to all kinds of characters, regardless of fundamental differences with regard to politics, nationality and ‘what side you’re on’.

Similarly, even when watching documentaries on WWII for instance, don’t you sometimes think that many of the combatants, regardless of their affiliation, didn’t deserve what happened to them?

20

I gues this is GD material. But they didn’t choose to be born in Germany, and to be conscripted for the German army. Also, they possibly didn’t know about the killing of Jews and such.