When you think of a villain, who comes to mind? Darth Vader? The Wicked Witch of the West or one of the evil queens from Snow White or Sleeping Beauty? While all are good candidates, a strong case can be made that Mr. Potter from “It’s a Wonderful Life” is the quintessential villain. When we think of a villain, there are a couple of traits that come to mind. Donald Miller notes that villains make other people feel small or less than, and they are not connected with other people. “Villains do not have friends, they have minions. Villains surround themselves with people who do their bidding out of fear. To the villain, people are expendable.” You see, as readers or viewers, we are influenced to see characters as good or bad, likeable or unlikeable often by how they treat other people around them. Remember, heroes are far from perfect, they have a mixed past, they can be estranged from family or friends, they can be scared or weak, they can have a drinking problem, but we simply will not root for somebody who treats other people like garbage. Even for characters with a rocky past, perhaps they’ve been divorced for being a bad wife or husband, when the story picks up or at least by the end of the story, they had better be treating those they love with respect and care.
So why does Mr. Potter get my vote for the quintessential villain? He holds everyone around him in contempt, the Bailey family are not good people trying to help others, they are a thorn in his side, a roadblock to developing Portersville. You see he has desires too, he wants something just like the hero does, but what he wants is born from selfish ambition. He makes George Bailey, a decent upstanding man trying to do what is right and sacrifice for his family and community to feel so insignificant that George really believes he’d be better off dead. Mr. Potter is a “warped, frustrated, old man” according to George Bailey, and his past whatever it was, has taken the use of his legs from him. His infirmity may in fact be part of the reason he is selfish, greedy, and treats others poorly. Perhaps he himself suffered in his past from an illness or injury, but what differentiates the villain from the hero is the response to challenges in their lives’. It is a tragic thing to see how this plays out in our world today, particularly online where people can make anonymous comments about other people to make them feel small in order to make the commenter feel better about themselves. This is villain 101 stuff. If they played a montage of a modern villain and how they became the way that they are now, I’m sure it would involve trolling comments online as a teenager and hurting baby animals. Villains feel good tearing down and destroying things around them. Whatever the reason, they are often wounded or hurt and want others to feel their pain too.
Just as both the hero and the victim have similarities, the hero and villain likewise can have similar backgrounds. Villains often have an infirmity or scar showing their wounded past. But the hero who loses his parents to criminals chooses to fight crime and protect others, the villain who loses his parents, or use of his hand or whatever, chooses to take out his pain on the world. Because he suffered, he will make everyone else suffer in the process. This is the fundamental psychology behind the villain, a lack of imagination that something bad that happened to them can be redeemed for others’ good, because often they are not thinking about other people only themselves. Now to be sympathetic for a moment to villains, when we are wounded it can be extremely disorienting, being betrayed by someone we are close to, having a random act of violence perpetrated can be life altering, and so in an effort to protect the shards of what’s left we turn inward, we become guarded, and often angry, because at least angry feels powerful. When I’m full of anger and rage I feel like I can defend myself and stop something like that from happening to me again. They don’t heal from that initial wounding though, they continue to carry it will them, unprocessed, unredeemed, and so rather than using that pain as a path to healing and helping others, it is a constant reminder of their vulnerability that has to be compensated for. They work hard to amass wealth and strength and influence to protect themselves and inflict harm on others, they don’t actually ever experience healing.
A commonality between villains and victims interestingly enough is that neither one is grateful. Villains feel they owe no, and victims are waiting to be rescued in order to be able to be grateful. The moment they express a form of gratitude the begin to shift out of the villain role. Think about how quickly we go from fearing and hating Darth Vader, to him coming to the aid of his son. When he turns to attack the emperor and protect Luke, we as an audience feel sorry for and appreciate him despite all the terrible things and people he’s killed in the last few movies. You can’t be villain while displaying genuine gratitude for others and optimism because gratitude connects us to others, puts us in relationship with others in a way that a villain can’t or refuses to enter into. When you think back on your own life, your current state, I’m sure you can recall ways you’ve been mistreated in the past. You may be acutely aware of your past wounds and who inflicted them. But the work that we all need to do is consider, how do I want to respond because of this? Do I want others to taste my pain, to regret having wronged me by going scorched earth over everyone? Do I want to make others feel less than or small to make myself feel better? Where do I behave this way in my own life? We will ultimately want to change this, because even though it can be en vogue to root for anti-hero, bad guys like the Joker, villains are never happy, they’re never satisfied with life, they operate from a lack, a need, whether that is for more money, power, influence, or status. Mr. Potter might have more money after all, but George Bailey is “the richest man in town.”