What Makes a Great Villain?

When it comes to creating and designing a popular villain, Disney easily takes the cake with their masterful compositions of wickedly wonderful personalities, outlandish outfits, hilarious henchmen, and dastardly deeds. When I think of a villain, my mind immediately takes me to Jafar, from Aladdin, with his glowing golden snake staff and minion, Iago, yapping away at how much he hates crackers. Others may think of Ursula, the black inky sea witch who steals our favorite mermaid’s voice, or Cruella de Vil, a mentally unstable woman who plots to do the unspeakable, hurt puppies (and in my opinion, the most evil villain of all, because who in their right mind would want to hurt a puppy, let alone, puppies?!). With their iconic outfits and hackles, villains play a very important role in Disney movies. As expressed earlier in my introduction blog, villains are a vital piece in each Disney movie because they are the ones who not only create the problems for the hero/heroine to solve, but inadvertently create the heroes themselves by creating situations where a hero is needed.

            Yet this also presents the question, what makes for a great villain? Is it their garb, their accomplice, their motives? If it is their motives, then what makes them evil, or better, what is evil?  Daniel A. Forbes addresses each of these ideas in his writing “The Aesthetic of Evil”, where he breaks down the meaning of what it is to be evil, and even attempts to define it through theological and existential lenses. Forbes asks the question, “… if there exists a God (or other supreme being) who is unlimitedly good and powerful, then such a being would eliminate evil wherever it might appear – or even make it impossible for evil to arise in the first place.” I then respond with this question: if we do not have something evil to compare our actions to, then how would we know what is good and what is bad when we don’t have a concept of the bad? Would the good even exist anymore? St. Augustine, one of the world’s most famous philosophers, responds to this by arguing that evil does not exist, but instead takes on that of a parasitic nature, feeding off the good. “Nothing evil exists in itself, but only as an evil aspect of some actual entity.” Evil depends upon the good to be its “host”, whereas the good is capable of existing without evil, it is in itself existence. If evil is able to consume something, it would diminish and vanish, leaving nothing because the good, or existence, was destroyed. “Wherefore corruption cannot consume the good without also consuming the thing itself.”  The Bible also addresses this concept of good versus evil in Isaiah 5:20, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil: who call darkness light and light darkness; who call bitter sweet and the sweet bitter.”

            Through an existential lens, Forbes quotes Susan Neiman, a fellow philosopher, and says, “Why do we have the sense that things ought to be otherwise than they are?” In this quote, Neiman is condemning man into judging things that we cannot explain, and because we cannot understand them, we automatically assume they are evil, or not good. Why do we feel the need to have villains, or even, what makes them so appealing in movies when we know that they are not good? I think that Disney’s villains are appealing to people not only through their amusing personas or outfits, but because we see a little of ourselves in each of them (well maybe not all of them… I’m looking at you Cruella). The only difference is that they nefariously acted in response to their frustrations and added a couple of comical sidekicks and some fancy robes in the process.