Why Can’t Monsters Get Along with Other Monsters?

Trying to figure out who the villains are when they're everywhere.

This past weekend I was stuck in Vermont pretending to write, which mostly consisted of taking two hours to set up my office just the way I like it before refocusing my energies on nacho construction and NFL Wild Card Weekend. I was desperately missing my wife, who was at her studio in Brooklyn. I spent a good hour scanning JustWatch for some TV series I may have missed in the past five years that I could use as a vessel to binge away my Saturday. This often proves difficult as in a former life, I was a part-time cultural critic and watching TV and movies was my job. I don’t write about culture much anymore, (something I’m trying to change with this Substack) but I can’t give up the sweet, sweet opium of television. I tell myself it’s research about narrative construction for all ten of my forthcoming as-yet-unwritten novels, but really, it’s more about breaking in a new couch and waiting out the inevitable apocalypse that’s coming later this year.

Anyway, I found Paris Has Fallen, a French-British series on Hulu that exists (very loosely) in the Gerard Butler Has Fallen universe, of which I am a fan. I even own them on iTunes. I watch them when no one’s looking, wrist-deep Ben & Jerry’s and shame. Gerry’s (those in the know, fans of Plane and Den of Thieves but not 300 or the Katherine Heigl thing, call him Gerry) films—Olympus Has Fallen, London Has Fallen, and Angel Has Fallen—are rife with nearly cartoonish levels of violence and witty banter like, “Why don't you and I play a game of fuck off. You go first.” Each features an archetypal protagonist (North Korean terrorists, Pakistani terrorists, and Danny Huston) that leaves no room for nuance. The baddies are the baddies and in the third act they die and order is restored, though with a massive kill count and unimaginable destruction to infrastructure and faith in global security and civil servants. The films are undoubtedly problematic (Islamaphobia, Asiaphobia, Danny Huston), but they remind me of 90s action flicks and don’t judge me in a world where The Real Wives of Tuscaloosa passes for culture.

But in Paris Has Fallen, I found that identifying the “enemy” a lot more difficult, and not because the series is more nuanced or cryptic than its film fathers. At least not intentionally. The series stars Tewfik Jallab and Ritu Arya as a French Secret Service and MI6 agent, respectively, who are attempting to thwart the terroristic efforts of Sean Harris, who plays a former Captain in the French Foreign Legion who served in Afghanistan, betrayed by his government who witnesses the murder of his family and men, and is tortured mercilessly by the Taliban during a six-year prison term. fairly stock motivation for contemporary action narratives—love, death, war. But the more I watched, the more I empathized and identified with Harris’ character and his motivations, wondering: If the state were to slaughter my family and friends, would I not reap vengeance upon the state?

Luckily, this hasn’t come up yet. But it did get me thinking about how film and television portray the villain and how I have found—in an increasingly complicated world, where evil tends to hide in plain sight—villains past and present have gained my sympathies and, in some cases, support.

Now, understand: I am not a proponent of murder. I’m totally anti-murder. I’m the opposite of the Texas government and Lougheed Martin in that regard. I’m essentially a pacifist unless someone harms my wife, friends, family, or cat, Dave. Then I rain hellfire.

But when I consider villainy in the media I’ve consumed, I’m hard-pressed to find the simplicity of the black hat /white hat binary that the culture presupposes. Consider Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He just wanted to solve overpopulation and resource scarcity, and the Avengers offered no solutions other than an anti-genocide “Thanos Bad,” like there’s not a universe in which SHIELD is deployed on loan to Bibi Netanyahu. In fact, The Avengers are essentially a conservative or neolib think tank cum Blackstone agency enforcing evangelism and populism while wasting their resources for celebrity. They’re the Jenners with guns. You never see Dr. Bruce Banner working on the problem of global warming, just Hulking out and murdering. Dude has seven PhDs in various fields, including nuclear physics, biochemistry, engineering, and other advanced sciences. Tony Stark? He’s a military industrialist, privileged daddy’s boy, MIT grad, philanthropist fratboy neobaby at the top of the complex. Captain America? A drug-induced jingoist. Thor? An illegal migrant taking American jobs and screen time. Natasha Romanoff? Assassin. Spider-Man? A teenage boy and as a former teenage boy, I can tell you there’s few things more evil in our universe.

Even expanding beyond the MCU, I can find good in most cultural monsters. Agent Smith just wanted everyone obliviously happy in our Matrix bubble. What’s wrong with that, Neo? The Joker simply longs for a billionaire fascist obsessed with latex. He has no interest in wealth or power, evident when he burns a massive pile of money and tells mob bosses, “It’s not about money; it's about sending a message.” Even in Star Wars, Darth Vader destroys Alderaan, a planet that seems to run on incest, misinformation, underqualified civil servants, and rampant robotism (the way they speak to C-P30 is fairly toxic) in a monarchical caste system and eventually (as Kevin Smith famously pointed out), the rebels kill a whole lot of day laborers when they blow up the Death Star, and for what? Because an estranged father found God and doesn’t want his kids to fuck?

My sympathies for the villain should not be confused with the popularity of the anti-hero in contemporary film and television. Barry, Don Draper, Tony Soprano, Walter White, Elmo et al. are characters the audience can identify with, and even like, but we understand they’re inherently evil, and tend to receive their comeuppance at story’s end. At last count, 14211 films or TV series have been made since 2005, in which the protagonist is a hitman. (Barry, Killing Eve, and Mr. Inbetween are great; the rest are lazy.) There’s even a show on Peacock right now called Laid where a vagina is a serial killer, and its (show and vagina owner) protagonist is an unlikeable, vapid millennial who feels like the fifth wheel cut from Girls (Zosia Mamet even co-stars.) I found myself cheering for the vagina.

I’m positing that some contemporary villains—who don’t know they’re villains, by the way—are actually on the right side of morality. Our idea of right and wrong in cultural representations has been upset by a judeo-christain and inherently Westernized/Americanized idea of good and bad. Copaganda has perverted that binary for as long as networks have been pumping Blue Lives Matter into our living rooms. But in a world where the police are, arguably, the bad guys, where the government is arguably evil, where leaders are inherently and boldly corrupt, where churches and Oval Offices are filled with rapists and prisoners fight fires and Marcellus Williams is murdered by the state, where we celebrate the violently wealthy our of some sad affection for the lie of the American Dream that, perhaps, one day we can be evil, too, is it that much of a stretch to argue that the villains have been right and we’ve been wrong all along?

We saw the real-life manifestation recently when Luigi Mangione assassinated healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and quickly became a folk hero. Thompson, some reasoned, had killed innumerable people and financially destroyed families through his company's malpractice in denying treatments and predatory business model. Mangione, who suffered from pain due to a medical procedure in his back, was avenging those wrongs. He was a real-world Punisher to many, which again underscores our propensity to value villainy. Consider the heel in wrestling, or Andrew Tate, or Elon Musk fandom. Or Trump. All, through a simple binary lens, are easily classified as villains, and certain villainous. And yet, they are revered and rewarded for their villainy because they are transparent about it. It’s the reverse of the same coin that has me sympathizing with Baker’s terrorists in Paris Has Fallen and questioning the virtue of The Avengers.

This week, a fascist regime will take over control of the United States. What happens next is anyone’s guess, but what I fear the most of our tomorrows are how we’ve become polarized monster apologists. Whether you fall left or right on the political spectrum, our leaders and institutions are, often, unquestionably villainous. HMOs, Trump, MTG, Starbucks, the Koch Brothers, McDonald’s, the Kardashians, Morgan Wallen, the inventors of Monster Energy Drinks, Justin Trudeau, Pierre Poillievre, the US Armed Forces, Biden, the Clintons, the Obamas, Monsanto, fire, techbros—the list is endless—are all, on some level, villains when in the past they would’ve been innocuous or at the very worst annoying. I mean, we can’t even agree that Matt Gaetz is fucking evil? And if you can’t agree who the monsters are, how do you defeat them?

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