Villains in Storytelling, WAS Snape Survey

[Sydney]

No: HPFGUIDX 149090



Sigh. Well, here goes another hour of my life I really ought to spend
doing something productive...  

In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "lupinlore" <rdoliver30 at ...> wrote:

>Ask twelve people for 
> the definition of a villain, and you'll get at least 48 answers, and 
> maybe 96 depending on the phase of the moon.    
Yes, you may well.  You may also get that many answers for the
definition of 'lasagna'.  However, we were speaking of something 
very specific, which is villains in stories, specifically children's
stories, which happens to be not an idle question for me.  
In fact, there are years on end when villains in children's stories
are my bread and butter.  I'm in animation, see, and many's the day I
have to ask myself, what do we talk about when we talk about villains?

A villain is an antagonist that the structure of the story demands the
hero destroy, neutralize, or otherwise exile from the community in
order for the story to finish.  By definition, that's a character that
can't be reconciled with the hero, or allowed to continue to have any
power at all, because the story cannot come to a rest until he is
stopped, period.  By no means all stories have villains.  What all
stories DO have is antagonists-- which, to also get technical, are
characters that provide an opposing force to hero and so cause him or
her to generate action back.  Different kinds of antagonists create
different story dynamics, obviously, which have different sorts of
effects on their hero.

To go back a bit:  a story is a series of forces, which are generally
emotions expressed as actions, that follow one upon the other until
they result in a satisfactory state of rest.  Creating a composition
of these forces that is dynamic, clear, powerful, and satisfying, is
needless to say so unbelievably difficult that the film industry
manages to produce one good story aproximately every ten years.  This
is why usually we just steal them from other people. 

Now any story (classically speaking) is about Our Hero, the
protagonist, who, for the sake of telling this story for a reason,
begins in a state which is stable but incomplete.  We wish to make him
UNstable, so that he will do something.  Naturally when you want to
make life unpleasant for somebody, the very first thing that comes to
mind is to create an unpleasant person whose sole goal in life will be
to push our hero around and make our story happen. Enter the Villain.
 And sure enough, if writers are lazy, stupid, or most likely,
sensibly just phoning it in while they check their stock options, they
just leave it at that.  The Villain will keep pushing the Hero, until
the Hero takes whatever action results in a very cool explosion at
some point, and then we have to drop the Villain off a cliff or
something because seeing as his basic and only purpose in life is to
make the hero miserable, otherwise he's just going to keep going like
a tin toy with energizer batteries and the story can't end.

Now if we go so far as to call a meeting about this guy, we'll
probably try to artfully arrange some fig leaves around so as to
create an illusion that he has motivations of his own.  Often this can
actually work really well, at least in so far as making a very
entertaining story.  One of the characteristics of a villain, after
all, is that they are not restrained by social conventions, otherwise
they'd leave our poor hero alone out of sheer embarassment.  So you
can go crazy and create big personalities, like Cruella de Vil, and
who would want to live in a world without her?  To me that's a perfect
villain-- she's crazy fun, she creates great situations, and she's got
this bizzare yet utterly simple and logical motivation of really,
really wanting a puppy-skin coat.  Which is problematic if you're a
puppy.  That story tells itself!

There's a problem with villains though, and that's that they can be a
waste of a really good antagonist. 

Did you know that when "Toy Story" was in early development, it was
about this heroic space toy Bud Lightyear, whose life in Andy's room
was made miserable by a villainous cowboy toy who was jealous of him?
 No, really.  But the more the story guys worked on claryifing Woody's
motivations, the more they started to see where he was coming from,
the more they identified with his anxieties about being replaced by
someone younger and cooler-- a constant keep-up-at-nighter for people
in animation, let me tell you.  Suddenly he stopped feeling like a
villain.  He became--gasp!-- an actual character!  They took it so far
as to actually change protagonists, but anyways they wound up with
what to me makes a real story that you can sink your teeth into, where
protagonist and antagonist push and pull on each other, creating rich
and ambiguous situations.  You can take a protagonist in far more
interesting directions when you open up the possiblity of
RECONCILIATION, rather than DEFEAT of the antagonist, because it pulls
a great deal more out of the hero internally.  The forces of the story
have to reach a balance, rather than one just plain pushing the other
one out of the picture.  "Toy Story" was the first animation
screenplay to be nominatated for an Oscar, and altough I enjoyed
"Usual Suspects", as far as I'm concerned, "Toy Story" was robbed of
the prize. 

What were we talking about?  Oh, yeah!  Harry Potter!

I actually read "Philosopher's Stone" for work-- at Warner's, as a
matter of fact, when it was distributed to our departement as The Next
Big Thing and More of This Please.  I thought it was okay-- certainly
very imaginative, but I'd read many a better children's fantasy.  And
then I hit the bit where the villain WASN'T Snape.  And boy did that
get my attention, because it wasn't just a way of delivering a random
shock ending-- it was saying, 'this story isn't villain-driven.  It's
antagonist-driven'.  Going back to the beginning and reading it that
way, it woke me up to all the different levels that were going on, and
it totally hooked me.  Five books later, it's not
jusantagonist-driven, it's one of the unique and original
antagonist-protagonist relationships I've ever seen, which may perhaps
explain all the suspiciously Snape-like antagonists that are going to
start popping up the movies as stuff that got develped round about
when PoA came out starts hitting the screens. 

To make this post REALLY long.. when I first complained about
villain-driven stories on this board a few weeks ago, several people
sensibly asked, what about Voldemort?  I started and stopped several
posts, but I couln't find a good place to start, but this is actually
a pretty good place, so I'll just go on...

Basically, I don't think Voldemort is a villain at all, at least what
I define as a Villain.

There's another type of antagonist who is something beyond a Villain,
and that is the Monster.  Monster stories are very, very ancient and
far predate even the classical Greek story structure, which is the one
we still essentially follow today.  You can tell a story with a
monster in it because, while a lot or even most of the scenes are
perfectly normal, when the monster appears a nightmarish sense of
inevitabilty and helplessness seems to sink into everything.  The
monster always, ALWAYS has supernatural powers, even if this is
unacknowledged in the story itself.  There was a very gritty,
verite-style serial-killer show I saw in London, for example, that
while priding itself in it's psychological realism, nevertheless had a
killer who committed crimes which really were simply impossible
provided the victims even tried to defend themselves.  If you've seen
'7' you probably know what I mean-- the killer is amazingly
intelligent, comes and goes everywhere without being seen, never
leaves a clue except those he intends, etc., etc..  Teen slasher
movies are more honest about what they're talking about, I think--
essentially, the monster is certainly not a human being, but an
embodiment of some primoridal, eternal, unkillable evil-- an evil we
all know intimately if we can remember our nightmares.  Monsters
always live in caves (or at least, basements with Oscar-nominated Art
Direction), and can be defeated only by a hero Pure of Heart, and not
in a conventional fight but in a strange dreamlike moment of catharsis
using spiritual tools.  Even then, we know that the evil has not been
permanently vanquished;  it still waits, in some regenerated form,
down in it's cave, for the next cycle to begin.   

Jung and Freud and everybody and his kid brother had a theory about
what the Monster represents, and I do think to some extent the monster
fills the role some sort of psychological darkness in the audience
themselves.  I also think people deal with primordial evil in the real
world, in the shape of diseases and natural disasters and man's
inexplicable inhumanity to man and death itself.  Raising and
defeating the monster in any case fills some primitive need;  and true
monster stories exist somewhat outside the classical storytelling
tradition, like horror movies exist outside the classical movie
tradition.  Voldemort IMO is plainly a monster, not a villain, which
is why his scenes seem to enter into a dreamlike state that stand
outside of the main narrative. The horcruxes are a great extension of
this, in that they allow Harry to confront bits of this monstrous soul
(like a traditional monster, Voldemort keeps his heart outside of his
body), without having to make Voldemort come out so often as to become
too solid.  

HP has a LOT of characters.  Some of them are clearly Cruela de
Vil-style villains, like Lockhart or Umbrige.  Some are more
sophisticated villains like Pettigrew, who is a marvellous, very-well
motivated character that I'm not sure where Rowling is taking! 
Voldemort is a monster whose principal role is in the symbolic
psychodrama, and I expect his eventual defeat will have the same sort
of un-reality to it as the freakiness with the wands in GoF.

But the most interesting stuff to me are the reconcilable antagonists,
Slytherin and Snape and Draco.  Because they take Harry in the most
interesting direction!  

-- Sydney, wrapping this up before she winds up writing a book