Writing Wednesdays
Writing a Great Villain
By Steven Pressfield
Published: May 31, 2017
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.
Posted in Writing Wednesdays
13 Comments
Turning Pro
The follow-up to the bestseller The War of Art, Turning Pro navigates the passage from the amateur life to a professional practice.
You don’t need to take a course or buy a product. All you have to do is change your mind.
Turning Pro is the first official book released by Mr. Pressfield on his own publishing company, together with Shawn Coyne, Black Irish Books.
TURNING PRO IS FREE, BUT IT’S NOT EASY.
When we turn pro, we give up a life that we may have become extremely comfortable with. We give up a self that we have come to identify with and to call our own.
TURNING PRO IS FREE, BUT IT DEMANDS SACRIFICE.
The passage from amateur to professional is often achieved via an interior odyssey whose trials are survived only at great cost, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. We pass through a membrane when we turn pro. It’s messy and it’s scary. We tread in blood when we turn pro.
WHAT WE GET WHEN WE TURN PRO.
What we get when we turn pro is we find our power. We find our will and our voice and we find our self-respect. We become who we always were but had, until then, been afraid to embrace and live out.
[The following are the first two chapters of Turning Pro:]
TURNING PRO
BOOK ONE THE AMATEUR LIFE
1. THE HUMAN CONDITION
The Daily Show reported recently that scientists in Japan had invented a robot that is capable of recognizing its own reflection in a mirror.
“When the robot learns to hate what it sees,” said Jon Stewart, “it will have achieved full humanity.”
2. THREE MODELS OF SELF-TRANSFORMATION
When we hate our lives and ourselves, two models present themselves as modes of salvation.
The first is the therapeutic model. In the therapeutic model, we are told (or we tell ourselves) that we are “sick.” What ails us is a “condition” or a “disease.”
A condition or a disease may be remedied by “treatment.”
Right now we are “ill.” After treatment, we will be “well.” Then we will be happy and will be able to function productively in society and in the world.
That’s one way of looking at our troubles.
The second way is the moralistic model. The moralistic model is about good and evil. The reason we are unhappy, we are told (or tell ourselves) is that we have done something “wrong.” We have committed a “crime” or a “sin.”
In some versions of the moralistic model, we don’t even have to have done anything wrong. The human being, we are told, was born wrong.
The answer to the condition of wrongness is punishment and penance. When we have “served our sentence” and “atoned for our sins,” we will be “pardoned” and “released.” Then we will be happy and will be able to function productively in society and in the world.
This book proposes a third model.
The model this book proposes is the model of the amateur and the professional.
The thesis of this book is that what ails you and me has nothing to do with being sick or being wrong. What ails us is that we are living our lives as amateurs.
The solution, this book suggests, is that we turn pro.
Turning pro is free, but it’s not easy. You don’t need to take a course or buy a product. All you have to do is change your mind.
Turning pro is free, but it’s not without cost. When we turn pro, we give up a life with which we may have become extremely comfortable. We give up a self that we have come to identify with and to call our own. We may have to give up friends, lovers, even spouses.
Turning pro is free, but it demands sacrifice. The passage is often accompanied by an interior odyssey whose trials are survived only at great cost, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. We pass through a membrane when we turn pro. It hurts. It’s messy and it’s scary. We tread in blood when we turn pro.
Turning pro is not for everyone. We have to be a little crazy to do it, or even to want to. In many ways the passage chooses us; we don’t choose it. We simply have no alternative.
What we get when we turn pro is, we find our power. We find our will and our voice and we find our self-respect. We become who we always were but had, until then, been afraid to embrace and to live out.
Do you remember where you were on 9/11? You’ll remember where you were when you turn pro.
Enter your email to get free access to every new thing I do.
No spam, I promise!
