You don’t need a bloated degree in behavioral “sciences” to understand that one’s perceptions of, and identification with, pop culture’s archetypal villain is a strong reflection of one’s personality.
Are you a conformist? Were you alienated from others as a child? Are you “edgy” or are you a “normie?”
Perhaps you don’t care about average things that average people do.
I’m positive that if we were to plot frequency of behavioral traits versus favorable embrace of villainous figures from entertainment, we would see a strong correlation between asocial thought patterns and adulation of the Joker.
Open disclosure, and feel free to draw your own psychoanalytical conclusions: I have always been drawn to the villain, that fictional antagonist, the simmering misanthrope that people don’t root for. Even as a child, I found the formulaic movie hero boring. This character was inevitably portrayed as a one-dimensional cut-out in shining armor. Protagonists were the overly scripted popular kid who dressed right, acted right, thought right, and since I was everything but, I gravitated in the other direction.
Villains are immensely more interesting and easier for me to identify with.
When I use the word villain, I am not simply talking about the evil murderer or the psychopath with a sharpened axe waiting to murder innocents in the forest. My definition of the word is more nuanced; my villain is an antagonist, a naysaying outsider who doesn’t share the values and sensibilities that contribute to a cohesive society. My version of a villain is from a different mold. He grew up in an unfriendly world that never accepted him, which, in some instances is the recipe for an evil killer, of course. That is a boring, Hollywood vision of the “bad guy.” The villain, especially in literature, is the discarded man. Never fitting in, or caring to, he is excised from society like a splinter, and sometimes he lashes back, sometimes he retreats into inconsequentialness.
Such a villain is exemplified by one of my favorite fictional characters: Bartleby, from Herman Melville’s 19th Century short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” a mysterious man who inexplicably shows up for work at at a lawyer’s New York office. So astoundingly alien and unusual is this strange, silent man that he is hired against the lawyer’s (the narrator) better judgement. It is the 1850s and I suspect people were not attuned to stranger danger as they are now.
Bartleby is not a villain, per se. He is an antagonist, an oppositional interjection in the smooth flow of “normal” life. He is a contradiction, or worse, a complication, in society’s game plan for a predictable and orderly life.
Bartleby is quiet chaos, a surreal villain without a past.
He is described:
“I now recalled all the quiet mysteries which I had noted in the man. I remembered that he never spoke but to answer; that though at intervals he had considerable time to himself, yet I had never seen him reading—no, not even a newspaper; that for long periods he would stand looking out, at his pale window behind the screen, upon the dead brick wall; I was quite sure he never visited any refectory or eating house; while his pale face clearly indicated that he never drank beer like Turkey, or tea and coffee even, like other men; that he never went anywhere in particular that I could learn; never went out for a walk, unless indeed that was the case at present; that he had declined telling who he was, or whence he came, or whether he had any relatives in the world; that though so thin and pale, he never complained of ill health.”
That is my “villain,” an abstract Godly figure who materializes from thin air only to confound us with his unfamiliar nature and refusal to follow our playbook.
When I look at the stories I’ve written, most of them are narrated by villains, misunderstood people swimming upstream in a world content to lazily float downstream.
Not all villains want to hurt you.