ometime between the day I write this and you read it, former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein will be perp-walked from the hands of the U.S. Army to those of Iraqi security forces. The man most responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands—and a dozen of his key associates—will finally face justice. Saddam is the best, most obvious example of a villain currently walking the world stage, matched only by the mysterious Bin Laden type of terrorist.
I've been thinking about both Hussein and Bin Laden lately—not just as a concerned citizen or student of world affairs, but as a writer struggling to create a villain.
I keep asking myself questions like, what is true evil? What makes a person a villain?
Where do bad guys come from?
In real life, we feel angered and threatened by everything from controlling parents, abusive supervisors and cell-phone-distracted drivers to drug cartels, faceless insurance companies and soulless bureaucracies.
But are these villains? Are these people who seem capable of genuine evil? Can we compare being cut off on the freeway to having our entire family or tribe gassed to death? Of course not.
Real evil is ... inexplicable. It is a knock on the door in the middle of the night that takes a loved one to jail, to a mock trial, to certain death. It's a video from kidnappers who brandish a sword over their captive's neck.
It is death or disfigurement or imprisonment by design, by some entity you can't escape.
Defining the face of evil
Portraying evil—personifying it—is one of the greatest challenges facing a writer. Mainstream action stories seem to be avoiding the subject as much as possible: villains in thrillers can only be male English actors between the ages of 30 and 50. Even when a storyteller is daring enough to propose something as radical as a villainous North Korean warlord (see Die Another Day), the bad guy, thanks to plastic surgery, is still an English actor.
Part of the fear is, alas, due to political correctness. (I say "alas," because the term itself, or its use, irritates me. Ideally, it refers to the fear of giving offense to a minority group, and is said to be used by those who are overly concerned about such matters.)
(The unspoken reality is that it is fear of giving offense to a minority group, who will fail to buy your project. Yes, being P.C. is not only a touchy-feely liberal crutch, it's also a naked business tool. But I digress.)
Whatever the reason, it is highly unlikely that you will find a movie or television villain that is a child, a mother or a person of color.
Ah, but we are sci-fi writers. We are above all that, right?
You want a human child as a villain? Remember the terrifying godlike powers of Anthony in "It's A Good Life," the Jerome Bixby story that was adapted for Twilight Zone, both series and feature film?
You want a maternal villain? How about Big Momma, the Alien Queen from James Cameron's Aliens?
You want villains of color? What about those dark-skinned invaders in Independence Day? Or the Klingons? Or the badass aliens of varying degrees of gray in X-Files?
Heavens, for years it was said that Gene Roddenberry's favorite villain was God Himself.
This wasn't just Roddenberry's crotchet—one of the great themes of sci-fi is Man vs. the Universe, which would have to include God, right? Arthur C. Clarke used God as the bad guy in "The Star."
Oh, we've got great bad guys, starting with Frankenstein, and H.G. Wells' Martians, and Ming the Merciless, and Blackie Duquesne, and the Harkonnens and the Goa'uld.
We've even got bad-guy machines, from Colossus to Kronos to the Borg to a whole raft of killer robots.
We've got Mr. Smith from The Matrix—whatever he is.
Which isn't to say that sci-fi can't succumb to—there's that term again—political correctness. Consider Shinzon, the villain in Star Trek Nemesis. Yes, he has an "alien"-sounding name (which looks suspiciously Korean to my eyes) but in appearance was yet another bad boy with an English accent.
It isn't necessary to have villains to tell a great sci-fi story, of course. Both Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein wrote fine stories without out-and-out bad guys, even if you count the "Black Hat" in Heinlein's The Number of the Beast—and I don't.
But Saddam and Bin Laden, and Hitler and Stalin prove that there is genuine evil in our world.
If you're going to create a future world, you ought to acknowledge evil—unless lack of evil is your whole point.
Running toward redemption
Thinking about those four historical or contemporary villains doesn't seem to help me, however. I can't find enough empathy in these mass murderers to want to spend any time writing about them.
But if it's empathy I need, I could turn to the replicant Roy Batty from Blade Runner, adapted by writers Hampton Fancher and David Peoples and director Ridley Scott from Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Batty seems to have the potential to be a classic bad guy: He's stronger and smarter than an ordinary human being, and he has a great reason to want us extinct. It's replicants versus humans.
(OK, he's another Anglo type, but he's not actually English—)
Batty is ruthless, and powerful, and seems to be playing by rules we do understand. But we can also empathize with him—he's redeemed at the end of the movie.
Not so with real-life villains. Saddam is troubling because, at one time or another, we supported him against his enemies. I can be ashamed of that. But I still can't empathize with it—nor do I expect to see Saddam, or Bin Laden, redeemed.
I can't even imagine the barest details of it.
Maybe that's what makes real evil evil: There's no possible redemption.
No wonder I don't want to write a real villain.
Michael Cassutt is executive consultant for the third season of The Dead Zone (USA Network), and wrote this week's episode, "Total Awareness." He is currently developing a project for Fox Studios.
