#8 – FOILED AGAIN!

File under: Bring on the bad guys!

Reflected back by the light of:
NOFX – “Thank God It’s Monday”
Ursula 1000 – “Boop”
Ursula 1000 – “Smokebomb”
Edna’s Goldfish – “I’m Your Density”
Edna’s Goldfish – “Eventually, Anyway"

I'm proudly geeky about superheroes right now, but I'll try to spin it with a broader value to writing fiction of all stripes.

Spider-Man 3 comes out next week, and I am enthused, hopping like a one-legged sprinter with a small bladder.  It was impressive enough that the first flick captured everything right about Spider-Man on film, moreso when the sequel was that oh-so rare improvement on the original. So even if this is the worst of the three, it's got high standards, and neither of those had my favorite Spidey villain: Venom.

Writing classes like to teach that the hero and villain should be a reflection of each other, because then we get to see the Right Way and the Wrong Way. Foils are inherently dramatic, because they’re innately opposed.

Really, though, it starts with, and thus boils down to, this:

“Wouldn’t it be AWESOME if Spider-Man had to fight a guy with all his powers, but stronger, meaner, and completely insane? Someone for whom great power meant a great personal vendetta? Ooh, that’s pretty.”

Enter Venom. (If you hate Venom, substitute your personal Evil Twin preference to best illustrate this story). Venom, with his sticky black suit, so perfectly captured in the movie as a tar-like substance, yet fibrous like tarantula legs.

Whereas the wrong done to Spider-Man (his uncle’s murder) challenged him to become someone better, Venom’s slights were largely self-perceived -- wisely, by his human side. We’re given room to sympathize with the mysterious, alien symbiote, humanizing the alien while distancing the familiar human being. 

Rather than growing from his faults and wounds, Venom lets them empower him to exact revenge and feed his delusions; lurking and plotting, waiting to pounce and eat Spidey's brains.  Spider-Man’s origin made him more human, whereas Venom’s turned him into a spider.  Spider-Man was forced to confront the world as it really was, Venom was given a means to retreat from it into his righteous fantasy.

All the best villains are evil twins: Sinestro, Zoom, General Zod, Black Adam, Abomination, and a million others are so awesome you could cry.  They’re a perfect match for the hero, so you know when they fight, there will be some high splodey.  Better still, they represent the biggest threat to the hero, because they’re what he/she could have (and still may) become.  With the evil twin, it’s always personal.  Venom blames Spider-Man for ruining his life.  Sinestro hates the Green Lantern Corps for making him its scapegoat (though he’s actually projecting his own behavior onto it).  Zoom is jealous of The Flash for being the real-deal hero.   Black Adam’s old-world justice  differs from Captain Marvel’s lauded wisdom, and they clash over whether one sits complacently or the other goes too far. 

A polymath like Batman has a number of foils.  Trying to heroically redeem his tragedy, he’s contrasted by the Joker’s villainous comedy (Bill Griffith once wisely observed that Batman’s tragedy is he can’t laugh at himself).  A detective, he chases the Riddler.   A man dedicating his talents to saving others from the loss that befell him, he’s the stark opposite of Prometheus, Hush and Zsasz, who use their parents’ deaths as self-justification to beat on the world, and all of whom at some point tell Batman, “We’re no different, you and I…”.  Man-Bat, Killer Croc, Mr. Freeze, and Ra’s al-Ghul all share Batman’s isolation, separated from humanity by random fate or pursuant destiny.

This isn’t just the stuff of capes and codpieces.  Shakespeare's Hamlet is contrasted against two avenging sons, and he outstrips rash Laertes while proving too cool in the blood to measure up to the healthy avenger Fortinbras (though I think Fortinbras was being a jerk to make war on the Danes over his pop’s loss in a just battle, he has to take revenge because that’s what loving sons do.  If he didn’t, he’d be the tragic Hamlet).

But it does work very well for the superheroes, whose costumes and powers are all external manifestations of their personalities and agendas. When you’re a living symbol like Superman, everything you do has broader meaning, so a battle against your counterpart is going to be a clash of primal ethos.  Superman is Apollo, an idealization of the golden boy, the alpha male, the mesomorph, and the born leader -- his antithesis is a bully.  The blue-and-red hero's purpose is to help humanity achieve its potential by knocking away all the obstacles that shouldn’t be there, that want to see us backslide.  He’s not going to solve cold fusion for us, but he will fetch the materials we need to do so ourselves, or thwart the villain who wants to erase the memories of Earth’s scientists.  He treats others the way they want to be treated.  And his greatest threat?

General Zod, that criminal Kryptonian, who wants to rule Earth, not realize its potential.  He wants to grind humans down, because a strong humanity is anathema to his plans.  Even though he considers the planet beneath him and his ultimate dream is to rule Krypton, helping Earth become a new Krypton (read: paradise) doesn’t suit his plans.  Zod is a coward, for all his invulnerable brutality, because he fears others might treat him as he would treat them, and so he cannot trust anyone to have the power he does.  And so, because he’s ruled by fear, he rules by fear.

That’s the real truth about evil twins.  They show, by negative example, why our hero is so great in the first place.  (Unless you’re Hamlet.  That’s more of a triangulation thing.)  When you write a story about these characters, make sure the story’s values and the stock’s values are in harmony.  A Superman story is about the power of one man’s strength to change the world.  Think of some oppositions based on that single sentence.  What if the antagonist were weakness, vulnerability of some type?  You might come up with a Parasite story.  What if it were the horde vs one man?  Superman can’t do a thing to hurt an innocent population under Braniac’s mind-control -- or even scarier, opposing Superman of their own free will.  Zod’s perfection as a nemesis shows in the fact that he has almost the exact same description: a single threat with the power to ruin everything. 

The difference between them is that Superman is a leader, and Zod is a ruler. Zod says “What will you do for me that I should let you live?”  Superman says “I’m Superman. How can I help?”  

Personally, I always go for trickster characters; that’s why Spider-Man appealed to me.  An ectomorph, he frequently has to use his powers to some special effect to thwart a villain who had him outclassed, all while distracting them with his words.  These are the cool kids (ok, excluding the Vulture), the brutal types that surround puny Peter Parker at high school and make fun of him within earshot.  Though it would be wrong for Peter to thump Flash Thompson’s head in, Spider-Man has license to drop a jerk like Kraven cold, while using that intellect, normally kept shy and silent, to deride him while he falls. Spider-Man's villains are stronger than he is, just as the kids in school used to be.  Therefore, he has to be smarter, wilier, and perhaps most importantly, sass-tongued.  When he mouths off to a villain, he's unleashing everything Peter Parker couldn't say at the lockers for fear of getting into a fight and hurting someone weaker (as he was once afraid of being hurt). 

I’ve noticed, in my own stories, that I apparently dig the sly achievement of power.  I like it when protagonists pose as people they’re not, or better yet, become people they’re not, wearing identities like clothing.  Versatility.  Flexibility.  An ability to reverse perspective and assume a different point of view.  Superman’s strength is intractable and immutable; for all his posing as Clark Kent, he’s at his best when he releases himself from the bonds of a secret identity to smash through obstacles.  Spider-Man’s at his best twisting and dodging around them.  Superman needs Clark Kent to be a better hero; it’s an exercise in control and restraint to stay in touch with what he’s fighting for. 

Peter Parker, by contrast, needs Spider-Man to be a better person, an active participant rather than a weakling unwilling to risk what he has to achieve something greater.  His transformation isn’t complete when he gets his powers, because then he becomes active, but only on self-interested terms.  His passive sin, standing by and letting a robber escape even though he’s now able to stop him, comes back to haunt him.  He learns he not only can act, he must act, and often at personal sacrifice.  If he doesn’t do it, he’ll lose far more in the long run.

Venom, like Pete, a newspaper photographer who make his name by snapping pics of Spider-Man, never learns that lesson, and so he never grows capable of anything besides the egocentric concerns that almost trapped our hero.  He was wronged, he was wronged!  And this is true.  It sucks what happens to him, even if he weren’t partially culpable, but he is.  A hero shuts up, sucks it up, and keeps moving, which is why Spidey is a hero despite his mistakes.  He accepts his error and pays for it. 

Still, the best villains…you can see their point.  Don’t get me wrong, they can still be pure evil and need to be destroyed, but at the very least, they have a reason for doing what they do.  Some seed exists on which they can base their moral imperative.  Everyone thinks they’re doing the right thing.  Even when their conscience tells them otherwise, they have some reason that they convince themselves, in that moment, supercedes their preferred model of behavior.  

Blinders are why Sinestro is one of the greatest villains in comics.  Here’s a guy who looks like Snidely Whiplash or some cartoon devil, and has a straight up Luciferian origin.  But look at his complaint: he did his job too well!  He was the greatest of the Green Lanterns!  He gave the Guardians the most orderly sector in the universe, just as they asked for.  The problem is he had to become a tyrant to do so, and so throttled the principles that the Green Lantern rules existed to protect.  Order, yes, but order in preservation of life, liberty and the pursuit of free will.  They stripped him of his title and banished that obsessive-compulsive mind of his to a universe made of chaotic evil.  No wonder he snapped!

And can’t you see his point?  His flaw was that he was too orderly, too cold, too perfect a realization of their model.  He’s unable to perceive his own mistakes.  Imagine his shock when other Lanterns come to arrest him – since they’re demonstrably inferior in preserving neatness and order, they must take issue to his success.  They must be infected by chaos, madness, but it’s alright because Sinestro is second only to the Guardians of the Universe, those avatars of law and light, every ideal he holds up.  He chafes under their bit, but he accepts their decisions…Sinestro is a good Green Lantern.

He’s just a terrible person.  He suppresses his own people, stifling them.  He treats them like children, denying them the chance to pursue their own lives because he has decided the way things must be.  Everyone must fall in line with his vision, because he can’t find and accept a line where the value of order is outweighed by the value of liberty. 

In other words, there’s a reason dictators always say, “What I did, I did for the country’s well-being,” just as there’s a reason Iraq has been “liberated” every century or so, just as conquistadors and colonists told themselves it was their sacred duty to civilize the Native American “savages,” and that the real crime would be to leave them to their way of life.  For every sin, a self-justification.

Sinestro, like so many other dangerous personages in literature and history, is an idealist, convinced of the righteousness and prevalence of his cause.For all he serves the letter of the law, he misses the spirit of the body he serves. Of course he's a villain...Sinestro is a bad Green Lantern.

And that's a great villain. One that's bad and good both.

Can you imagine what a surprise kick in the throat it must have been when the Guardians found him guilty of deserting his duties and violating his oath?  Through the entire trial in Green Lantern: Emerald Dawn II, he acts like it’s for show, a necessary formality to giving his inferiors their due feeling of justice and having tried to snipe his unimpeachable character.  His one moment to worry, his one moment of self-doubt in the trial, is when he questions his pupil Katma Tui. He appears to have a carnal interest, if not a romantic one, in Katma, and he trusts her if he trusts anyone at all.  She was his hope for the future, and when she leads the rebellion against him, and rails against his tyranny on the stand, he is stunned for the first time.  He almost doubts himself.

No -- he does doubt himself. 

It’s the only time in the story, and only for a moment, that his ego is deflated.  He abandons his inquiry and his defense altogether.  He tells her, softly, because he’s actually telling himself, “Katma…you were my best hope. My best…” And it dawns on him what’s actually happened. “Hope…” he mumbles. “No more questions…I am all…out of questions.”  He retires the witness and his ego, both.

If they’d offered him a second chance right there, he might have taken it.  He might have admitted his sin.  It’s the only time in the book he doesn’t expect to be vindicated by the Guardians.  He understands.

The Guardians don’t.  They find him guilty rather quickly, and banish him not only from the Corps, from his home, and anything else that mattered to him.  They boot him out of the universe for tainting their sacred trust.  At that point, he’s the only Green Lantern to ever betray the Corps.  From ace to disgrace in one day.

That’s when Sinestro loses his mind right there.  Not all the tyranny and oppression, which earned him his fate.  Those were unforgivable, but perhaps not irredeemable.  That’s the point at which he loses hope.

Cripes, who wouldn’t see his point of view?  If you can’t be sympathetic to someone without hope, even if you want to see them get what’s coming to them, get yourself checked out.

Geoff Johns and Ethan van Sciver, amid all their other phenomenal recreation of the Green Lantern Corps, have really crafted a frightening Sinestro, without losing sight of their basis.  Given over to the arrogance and egotism, given over to the chaos he once battled, he’s truly the Satanic figure he was conceived to be, back to tear down his master’s creation through force and flexibility.  That’s what makes a great villain.  Someone you can understand and oppose in the same breath.

Now granted, there are sociopaths like Othello's Iago, who don’t really need a reason even to themselves. It’s fine to do some of those, as they occur in reality. But they have their own logic, even the sadistic ones. They’re not going to cackle and sneer, “I’m Tom Dastardly, and I enjoy being MEAN! I hate all things good!”

And hey, even then, there’s probably some goth kid out there who thinks he’s invented that particular brand of cynicism.

But Othello is just depressing in a way the other plays, even MacBeth, aren’t, because it’s such a random, violent, malevolent, homicidal bullet hole in the head of a happy marriage.  For really enjoyable truculence, go with a foil.

Everyone has it in them to be their own worst enemy.  Your hero's only as good as the threat he overcomes, so your antagonist had better be the real star of the show.  Hopefully they’ll get that right with Venom in Spider-Man 3.  Till then, I’m going to be re-reading Emerald Dawn II.