Unmasking The True Villain: Why Are Major Studios Like Disney And Marvel Doing Away With 'Bad Guys?'
Are there really any villains anymore?
That's the question that cinema these days seems to be asking. More and more over the past twenty to thirty years, new films that come out have been trending towards narratives that present us either with complex and sympathetic villains, anti-heroes, or narratives where there's no clear 'bad guy' at all. Movies like The Dark Knight Trilogy, Joker, Suicide Squad, and even Deadpool and Twilight, all attempt to parse out what it means to be a monster versus a man - heck, even Thanos had some sympathizers. (And that is to say nothing for all of the psychological thrillers depicting the horrors of mental illness.)
Why?
To answer that question, we turn to the most popular and talked-about film of last year: Spider-man: No Way Home.
(If you are one of the few people who cares about spoilers for No Way Home but still hasn't seen it, turn back now. There are also spoilers for Encanto; we'll warn you about those when we get there.)
No Way Home wasn't just a film on its own: it also served as a sort of epilogue for the two iterations of Spider-man movies that came before it - especially The Amazing Spider-man with Andrew Garfield, which never even got the trilogy treatment the other two did. And it was necessary because in the past decade, our attitude towards the mentally ill has drastically changed.
Each of the villains that was brought into the MCU from other franchises was mentally ill or impaired in some way. Dock Ock had an electrical chip that was supposed to be keeping him alive fry part of his brain; Electro reads very much like an autistic man who has had his emotional needs neglected; Sandman is a victim of long-term poverty and the inevitable PTSD that comes along with it; and the Green Goblin has something that is a clear analogue for dissociative identity disorder.
Each of these characters had a past that, had they not committed various atrocities, would have won the sympathy of any onlooker - but the power that they held turned their very real pain into a danger for those around them, and as a result, they were killed.
The death of the bad guy is almost a foregone conclusion in most of these superhero films, and generally is not given too much thought other than, 'oh, good, now the conflict is over.' But not in Spider-man: No Way Home - a movie that questions the very premise that trope is founded on.
Do people who are severely mentally ill deserve to die or be locked away and forgotten simply because they pose a danger to others? Is there not more we can do?
We have always known that our treatment system for mental illness is lacking - as early as Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), people have been aware that treating the mentally ill as criminals or especially problematic children is an inadequate alternative to kindness and mercy. Blanche DuBois didn't need to be sent to a mental institution - she just needed to be taken out of the home of her awful brother-in-law.
It has taken a long time, however, to gain the knowledge necessary to figure out what form that kindness and mercy should take.
You can see the echoes of that multi-generational struggle in No Way Home on multiple occasions; it's in the Tom Holland Peter Parker's desperate desire to save everyone; it's in Aunt May's careful attentions to Willem Dafoe's Norman Osborne, and in her final message of caring for everyone, no matter how hard; it's there when Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire's Spider-men encourage Peter not to go down the same path they did - to choose mercy and sympathy, and not be consumed by the desire for revenge.
Most importantly, it's there when the Peters actually manage to save nearly all their villains from certain death - including, most importantly, Dock Ock, who they are actually able to successfully rehabilitate.
The movie symbolically goes back over those former endings and says to audiences, "Actually, we got that wrong, and we wish we could fix it." You can't heal those wounds in real life - the ones that helped create the powder keg era we're living in - but the emergence of this theme feels like an apology for the wrong-minded views of the past.
The MCU isn't the only studio playing around with the no-villain concept, either; Walt Disney Studios has been leaning away from the traditional villain since 2014.
When they tried to make Elsa a villain in Frozen, they were literally stopped in their tracks by the emotional power of the song "Let It Go," so compelling were her reasons for finally unleashing her power. The truth of her situation could not be denied once those lyrics were written - she was hurt, traumatized, and suppressed her whole childhood, never getting the emotional support she needed and never feeling like she was allowed to ask for it. The rest of the movie - one of Disney's greatest hits of all time - bloomed from there.
In Moana, they took it a step further: The villain Te Ka, an angry volcano god, is obsessed with getting the heart of Te Fiti back, nearly killing Moana and Maui in the process. But Moana realizes Te Ka is justified in this, when she discovers that the heart was hers in the first place: Te Ka is the form Te Fiti takes when you take away her heart. (If you know enough about the symptoms of depression, this one hits pretty hard.) In the end, it's actually Maui who has to apologize to her - and nobody dies or is thrown in a brig.
In Frozen 2, the true villain was the misunderstanding between the Northuldra and the Arendellians; if you had to pick out a real bad guy, it would be Elsa and Anna's grandfather, who murdered the Northuldra chief in cold blood simply because he felt threatened by their magic. But he is long dead before the beginning of the film; it's only the division he left behind that Anna and Elsa must set right.
(And here are those Encanto spoilers we warned you about:)
Now, in the new film Encanto, they've taken the theme to the extreme: There is no villain at all in the latest offering from Disney. The magical house of the Madrigals may be cracking, but it's not because of any one person or character: Rather, the cracks are being formed by the mounting pressure that each family member feels from Abuela Alma, who only pushes her family to such extremes because she is afraid of losing them the same way she lost her husband. And therein lies the rub.
The true villain in Encanto is basically the true villain everywhere, and it's probably the worst one of all: Unresolved emotional trauma.
Most tragic villain backstories result from unresolved psychological trauma, and we as a society seem to finally be recognizing that doing bad things when you're hurt doesn't make you a villain; it makes you a human being.
We know - now, after nearly two years of a pandemic and the associated quarantines, more than ever - that isolation does awful things to the human spirit. We've seen murders, riots, and overly-heated ideological fights (argument is no longer a strong enough word to describe them) take place across the U.S. and around the globe. We've even begun to question the very concept of having a prison system in the first place, with many political groups pushing instead to divert more money towards proactive mental health treatment and research.
This trend in our popular films didn't come from nowhere; it's a question we've been asking for a while.
"What do we do," we wondered during films like The Rise of Skywalker, Skyfall, and even Birds of Prey, "with people who hurt others because they desperately need help themselves?"
It's a question we're still asking - but hopefully the lessons being taught to the next generation in these new films, especially the Disney films, will take root and help us as we try to answer it. More compassion and listening, less punishment and shunning.
Hopefully all of this difficult grappling with the truth will lead us towards a brighter future - one where the Doc Ocks of the world always get the help they need, and the Abuela Almas, Isabelas, Louisas, and Elsas get the support they don't know how to ask for.
