The REAL Banality of Evil

Cafe Society
1

I don’t mean it in Hannah Arendt’s sense*. I mean the depiction in popular media of criminals as people utterly lacking in taste and discerning insight.
It’s The Tackiness of Evil
The most striking example is in the original Robocop, where the criminals steal fortunes and often blow them on showy, tacky, gas-guzzling cars. Or reveling in really bad and tasteless TV.

I thought that was sort of an aberration, another attempt by Verhoeven and Neumeier to parody modern society, as with the ridiculous TV ads, and the hostage-taker demands for a car “that gets really shitty gas mileage”. But the trope exists elsewhere.

In ** Goodfellas**, for instance, where the gangster’s homes have absurd features like a fake rock wall hiding the entertainment center, which moves aside at a touch of the radio control. Or the Makeup Party.

I was surprised to see it in the classic film Little Caesar, where the hoodlums are explicitly shown to have abysmal taste.
It’s the polar opposite of another trope – the Cultured Villain, who might evebn let the Good Guys go rather than destroy art. James Bond movie villains are often of this sort – Dr. No Golfinger and Emilio Large (and Max Largo in the remake) and Blofeld in several incarnations showing excruciatingly good manners to Bond and other people they later intend to kill, serving them gourmet meals, drinks, and so on, and transparently behaving as good hosts.

Doctor Doom, in the Prisoner-like arc in FF 83-86 behaved like that, serving exquisite meals and the like (image at TV TRopes, here: No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine - TV Tropes ) Later he killed his own minion, who threatened to use a flamethrower on the Fantastic Four, so that the artworks in the room wouldn’t be destroyed.

So it goes beyond the dinner the TV TRopes page shows – The villain just is, or wants to appear, incredibly cultured.

I notice that the Tacky Villain seems to be more about gangsters and more rea;listic portrayals, with even the leaders being of low taste, while the cultivated villains tend to be more fantastic, with extremely powerful leaders (who are shown killing their own minions).
Any other examples? or counter-examples?

On Arendt’s coinage and definition, see here for instance: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/opinion/the-banality-of-evil-and-the-nazis-early-victims.html?_r=0 I don’t mean to minimize her powerful phrase, but when I see behavior like the goons in Robocop, “Banality of Evil” springs to mind.

2

I forget the name of the movie, but it was about a rich guy who used money from charitable donations to buy a huge portrait of himself. Ring a bell with anyone?

3

Yeah, a bell that goes DING-dong.

4

Is this the Cultured All-Powerful Villain or the Tacky Gangster?

5

[Moderating]

Since this is in Cafe Society, let’s keep all of our examples fictional, please. If you want to discuss the real world, Great Debates is over that way.

6

It was a social allegory, but The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover has what may be the ultimate - and very fantastical! - Tacky Villain (and a ton of Tacky Henchmen/Molls/Associates). Gambon’s villain is made even tackier because he is pretentious: he believes that his economic and physical power gives him access to the “high” culture he doesn’t bother to work to try to understand. (Given that it’s a satirical film, many of his lines come off as completely self-aware and taking the piss out of that high culture, but hey.)

7

I don’t know about their individual tastes, but as a group, the Nazis were really snappy dressers.

8

I would include portrayals of Wall Street excess as examples as well. Wall Street, Wolf of Wall Street, Boiler Room, American Psycho. The bankers, brokers and traders are typically presented as not particularly intelligent, but nevertheless possessing a certain “low cunning” an relentlessness in their avarice. Everything is about “MORE”. More money, more hookers, more blow, bigger house, faster car, more exclusive club or restaurant.

The reason mobsters and portrayed as tacky is because they are uneducated blue collar guys who came into money. They’re not educated in the fine arts or anything like that. It’s all about ostentatious displays of newfound wealth.

9

My favorite Cultured All-Powerful Villian is Casanova Frankenstein from Mystery Men (1999).

Combination of most excellent Supervillain Name, stylish threads, Geoff Rush’s acting, and his wielding of the dreadful Psycho-Frakulator.

10

He is awesome in that.

11

Hmm, maybe I’m misreading this, but it seems that you’re complaining that they don’t take over the world so they can live a nice, normal life without ostentation.

For most of these characters, the ostentation is the goal. They didn’t get good at dominating wall street or build an army of henchmen so they could be good at finance or be a leader of men, they did it because of all the unlimited stuff they could get. Some of them actually have some sort of taste, and are superficially good hosts – a really good host never even tries to kill their guest. But most of them are like most of us, and have questionable taste.

12

I think the OP’s referring to people who crave ostentation, but are lousy at it. Like, a villain wearing bespoke suits sitting in a stylishly-decorated office is normal, in movie terms; what the OP is interested is is in the bad guys with the ill-fitting leopard-print jackets who are obsessed with Elvis on black velvet.

13

Opulence, I has it.

14

He certainly does better in the Iconic Pet category.

15

You’ve missed the point. He’s not complaining about the ostentation, but describing the trope in which the villain tries to be ostentatious but has really bad taste.

Tony Soprano and company were notably both ostentatious and tacky. Christopher’s Hummer was a case in point.

On of my favorite bits in The In-Laws is when the Dictator General Garcia shows off his art collection, which is made up entirely of black-velvet paintings.

16

Yeah, I was misreading it. They were contrasting the second half to the first, not complaining about both.

But still, I think that’s more realistic than a trope. There’s no reason for people who are successful at one thing (criminal enterprise, in this case) to be good at appreciating art or food. To provide a nonfiction example, Michael Jackson was great at assembling piles of money, but bought tons of overpriced, tacky crap.

17

Tony Montana from Scarface was a classic example of this, with his pet tiger, “The World is Not Enough” Globe, leisure suits, and mansion, not to mention his potty mouth.

While it’s in danger of violating Chronos’ stipulation against real world examples, the movie The Devil’s Double, in which Dominic Cooper plays both Udsu Hussein and Uday’s body double is a great example. With his incessant clubbing, partying, fleet of ferraris, and so forth he makes Tony Montana look like one of the cast of Downton Abbey.

18

[Moderating]
While I was mostly looking to keep politics out of this discussion, it’d probably be best if we avoided all of the non-fiction examples. And yes, Michael Jackson is technically non-fiction.

19

Well I suppose everybody in the Grand Theft Auto series is a villain even if not antagonistic, being criminals, but Yusuf Amir of GTAIV is a decent enough guy. But he is the ultimate example of a tacky Emirati manchild who covers everything with gold

20

I just want to let you know that I haven’t abandoned this thread – I just wanted to see the other examples people pulled out