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The easiest villain to write is the external villain. The Alien. The shark in Jaws. The Terminator. Doc Ock, Bane, Immortan Joe. Or force-of-nature villains—the volcano in Volcano, the oncoming Ice Age in The Day After Tomorrow, the Mayan-prophecy-end-of-the-world in 2012.

The villain in “ALIEN: Covenant.” Can we do better?

External villains present existential threats to our physical existence. These sonsofbitches will kill you, eat you, freeze you, boil you.

The problem with external villains, though they may occasionally deliver bestseller sales and boffo box office, is they don’t often bring out the best in the stars who must confront them.

Why? Because the stars only have to duel these villains on one level (and the most superficial level, at that): the physical.

Much higher on the Villain Food Chain are

Societal villains.
Interior villains.

The villain in Huckleberry Finn, To Kill A Mockingbird, In the Heat of the Night and many, many others down to The Hurricane, Precious, and The Help, is racism.

Racism is a societal villain.

An individual character or characters may personify this antagonist in our narrative, as the jury or the mob or Bob Ewell did in Mockingbird. But the real villain is all-pervasive. It’s that cruel, ignorant, evil belief—”I have a right to dominate you because my skin is a different color than yours”—that exists only in men’s minds and hearts.

Societal villains are great villains, and they have produced great stars/heroes to confront them.

Do you remember The Way We Were? The Way We Were was a vehicle for two superstars in their prime, Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand, and it provided both of them with roles worthy of their peak power.

Who was the villain?

The villain, again, was societal. It was the ethno-racist belief that “Park Avenue” was different from “Brooklyn” and that people whose characters were formed in such environments—WASPy, athletic, born-golden Hubbell Gardiner and Jewish, striving, up-from-the-streets Katie Morosky—could never truly come together.

Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford in “The Way We Were”

The chasm between them because of their ethnicities and the different worlds they grew up in was so vast that it could not be bridged even by a great love.

The villain wins in the end of The Way We Were.

But the battle against this antagonist—the passionate, complex, tragic struggle by Katie and Hubbell to maintain their love—is an epic, world-class throwdown, with layer upon layer of emotional and psychological depth. The clash with this villain was worthy of two superstars.

The stars made the roles, but the villain made the stars.

The third type of villain, and the most satisfying dramatically, is the interior villain.

The interior villain is inside the star herself.

Karen Blixen’s need to “possess” the things she loves.

Hamlet’s inability to make up his mind and act.

Gatsby’s dream of recapturing a past that never really existed.

External villains exist as metaphors. The Alien represents … what? Pure evil? Death? Pitiless fate?

But interior villains show us the demons you and I really deal with in our real lives—the crazy shit inside our skulls.

Silver Linings Playbook made stars out of Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence.

One reason: a great villain.

“So think about that dance thing.” Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence in “Silver Linings Playbook.”

The villain in Silver Linings Playbook is interior. It exists inside Bradley Cooper’s head. The villain is his obsession, fueled by his bipolar disorder, with winning back his wife Nikki, whom he has alienated by his extravagant behavior in the past.

This villain is in every scene of the movie, from first to last.

PAT (BRADLEY COOPER)

[Nikki and I] have a very unconventional chemistry. It

makes people feel awkward, but not me. Alright? She’s the

most beautiful woman I’ve ever been with. It’s electric between

us! Okay, yeah, we wanna change each other, but that’s normal,

couples wanna do that. I want her to stop dressing like she

dresses, I want her to stop acting so superior to me, okay?

And she wanted me to lose weight and stop my mood swings,

which both I’ve done. I mean, people fight. Couples fight. We

would fight, we wouldn’t talk for a couple of weeks. That’s

normal. She always wanted the best for me.

TIFFANY (JENNIFER LAWRENCE)

Wow.

PAT

She wanted me to be passionate and compassionate.

And that’s a good thing. You know? I just, look, I’m my

best self today and I think she’s her best self today, and

our love’s gonna be fucking amazing.

TIFFANY

It’s gonna be amazing, and you’re gonna be amazing,

and she’s gonna be amazing, and you’re not gonna be that

guy that’s gonna take advantage of a situation without

offering to do something back. So think about that

dance thing.

See the villain in there? It’s in every word and it’s more terrifying than the Alien and the Predator and the Monsters of the Id from Forbidden Planet. This demon will devour not just Bradley’s soul but Jennifer’s too if it can, and it’s in every cell in Bradley’s body, as invisible to him as water is to a fish swimming in it.

What a hero Bradley will be if he can somehow, either alone or aided by Jennifer, see the real love that’s staring him in the face and recognize this Nikki-self-delusion for the monster it is—and change himself.

Spoiler alert: he does.

That’s a hero.

That’s a star.

(And count Jennifer too, because she’s fighting the same villain.)

What made that star was the scale and depth of the villain he (and she) had to fight.

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Posted in Writing Wednesdays
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In January of 1966, when I was on the bus leaving Parris Island as a freshly-minted Marine, I looked back and thought there was at least one good thing about this departure. "No matter what happens to me for the rest of my life, no one can ever send me back to this freakin' place again."

Over forty years later, to my surprise and gratification, I'm far more closely bound to the young men of the Marine Corps and to all other dirt-eating, ground-pounding outfits than I could ever have imagined as I left Parris Island that first time. Gates of Fire is one reason. Dog-eared paperbacks of this tale of the ancient Spartans have circulated throughout platoons of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan since the first days of the invasions. E-mails come in by hundreds. Gates of Fire is on the Commandant of the Marine Corps' Reading list. It is taught at West Point and Annapolis and at the Marine Corps Basic School at Quantico; and Tides of War is on the curriculum of the Naval War College. In 2009, I launched the blog "It's the Tribes, Stupid" (which evolved into "Agora"), to help gain awareness of issues related to tribalism and the tribal mind-set in Afghanistan—with the goal of helping the Marines and soldiers on the ground better understand the different people they were facing in Afghanistan.

My father was in the Navy, and I was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1943. I graduated from Duke University in 1965. Since then, I've worked as an advertising copywriter, schoolteacher, tractor-trailer driver, bartender, oilfield roustabout and attendant in a mental hospital. I've picked fruit in Washington state, written screenplays in Tinseltown, and was homeless, living out of the back of my car with my typewriter. My struggles to earn a living as a writer (it took seventeen years to get the first paycheck) are detailed in The War of Art.

With the publication of The Legend of Bagger Vance in 1995, I became a writer of books once and for all. From there followed the historical novels Gates of Fire, Tides of War, Virtues of War, The Afghan Campaign and Killing Rommel.

My writing philosophy is a kind of warrior code—internal rather than external—in which the enemy is identified as those forms of self-sabotage that I call "Resistance" with a capital R (in The War of Art). The technique for combating these foes can be described as "turning pro."

I believe in previous lives and the Muse—and that books and music exist before they are written and that they are propelled into material being by their own imperative to be born, via the offices of those willing servants of discipline, imagination and inspiration, whom we call artists. My conception of the artist's role is a combination of reverence for the unknowable nature of "where it all comes from" and a no-nonsense, blue-collar demystification of the process by which this mystery is approached. In other words, a paradox.

There's a recurring character in my books, named Telamon, a mercenary of ancient days. Telamon doesn't say much. He rarely gets hurt or wounded. And he never seems to age. His view of the profession of arms is a lot like my conception of art and the artist:

"It is one thing to study war, and another to live the warrior's life."