The Villain

That life has problems is no secret to anyone. In film, if a story is to be interesting and ring true to viewers, there must be a problem for the hero or heroine to overcome. The traditional term for this in film is Disturbance and Adjustment. The film starts with the protagonist happy, balanced, and at peace. Then a problem hits; a family member dies and the heroine has to come to grips with that lost, a little alien gets stranded on earth and must find a way to get home. Whatever form it takes, the problem is the catalyst that gets a film started and gives it direction toward the final goal of the heroine, regaining balance. The form the problem facing the heroine most often takes in film is the bad guy or villain.

The form the bad guy has taken hasn't changed much from the mustache twirling villain of the silent film era to a dark helmeted Darth Vader of Star Wars. Of course the form an opposing force takes can vary from floods to drug addiction as long as it threatens the heroines' well being in some way. The fact most bad guys wear black hats in the movies reflects the need to make plain from the start of a movie who we get to boo and hiss. More complicated villains, such as the shark in Jaws who go unseen for the early part of the movie, are often announced with music or a particular sound that puts us on our guard.

The villain of the silent movie era who tied the heroine to railroad tracks was born out of the need to motivate not the actor on screen but the audience who in life had to suffer with many injustices in life and found release when the bad guy on screen getting his comeuppance. Modern attempts in some films to do away with the bad guy didn't work because when it comes to film and life most of us aren't self starters. We need the sight of peril to get us involved in a movie. The story is told of a stage play that was being put on in the old west. The villain had the heroine in his arms and was menacing her something fierce when a member of the audience got up and took a shot at him. That's the kind of gut involvement that filmmakers would do anything to evoke.

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