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Villains We Love
254 Plays1 year ago
Bad guys or misunderstood? In this week's episode, Brook and Sarah discuss all things villainous, including anti-heroes and what makes a good villain.
Discussed in order
"The Final Problem" (1893) Arthur Conan Doyle
The Valley of Fear (1914) Arthur Conan Doyle
Moriarity (2014) Anthony Horowitz
"The Ides of March (1898) E.W. Hornung
"The Arrest of Arsène Lupin" (1905) Maurice Leblanc
Lupin (2021) Netflix
Catch Me if You Can (2022) Steven Spielberg
Toy Story
Darth Vader
Hannibal Lector
The Grinch
Breaking Bad (2008-2013) AMC
Tom Ripley
Tony Soprano
Dexter
Ocean's Eleven (2001) Warner Bros.
Hustle (2004-2012) BBC
Gone Girl (2012) Gillian Flynn
Counterfeit (2022) Kristin Chen
For more information
Instagram: @cluedinmystery
Contact us: hello@cluedinmystery.com
Music: Signs To Nowhere by Shane Ivers – www.silvermansound.com
Transcript
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Transcript
Introduction to Villains in Mystery Stories
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I'm Sarah. And I'm Brooke, and we both love mystery. Hi Brooke. Hi Sarah, how are you doing today? I'm doing really well. How about you? I'm really excited because I can't wait to talk about villains with you.
00:00:33
Speaker
Yes. Criminals and villains have long held a special appeal for audiences. And in this brief overview, I'm going to mention a few that have proven popular for years, starting with Robin Hood. Historical references to the thief date back to the 13th century and literary references to the 14th and 15th century poems and ballads. And there are many television and film adaptations of the character. So he remains someone who is certainly popular with audiences today.
Classic Villains in Literature: Moriarty and Raffles
00:01:03
Speaker
Fans of Sherlock Holmes will know Professor James Moriarty as the famous detective spoil, though he actually only appears in two stories, The Final Problem and The Valley of Fear, and he is mentioned in Five Others. I really loved how Anthony Horowitz handled him in his book Moriarty.
00:01:23
Speaker
Fans of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson will see parallels with A.J. Raffles and his sidekick, Harold Bunny Manders. Raffles is a cricketer by day and amateur cracksman or burglar by night, and the stories that I read were largely about how he committed his thefts and evaded capture, with Bunny recording the exploits. The first story featuring Raffles was published in 1898 and written by E.W. Hornig.
00:01:47
Speaker
The character was first inspired by Sherlock Holmes and Horning had a bit of an advantage in that respect since he was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's brother-in-law and so no doubt the two of them had plenty of opportunity to compare notes.
00:02:00
Speaker
Raffles is not the only popular gentleman thief. In 1905, Maurice LeBlanc introduced his character, Arsen Lupin, to audiences, and he features in a total of 17 novels and 39 novellas. The character serves as inspiration for a modern Netflix series, Lupin. And interestingly, in several stories, Lupin actually meets a character who is not so loosely based on Sherlock Holmes.
00:02:23
Speaker
Initially, he did call the character Sherlock Holmes until Doyle complained and then renamed him Herlac Chomes. And they meet in several stories.
The Complexity and Appeal of Villains
00:02:37
Speaker
And Holmes, Lupin and Raffles share a lot of qualities, including sharp wit and an affinity for disguise. As a reader or a viewer, it can create conflicting feelings if we're rooting for the bad guy. But when it's done well, it can be really satisfying.
00:02:53
Speaker
Brooke, what do you think about this?
00:02:57
Speaker
I think that that was a fantastic introduction, first of all, Sarah, and so good. And yeah, absolutely. I was reminded of a quote by Alfred Hitchcock, who of course is the master of suspense. And he says, the more successful the villain, the more successful the picture. And I think that that's exactly right. And that does bring up what you said that sometimes they are the most compelling
00:03:23
Speaker
figure in the story, we find ourselves rooting for them. One of the stories that you mentioned in the intro reminded me of a more modern take on that, which is Catch Me If You Can. I believe that it's also a book, but I've seen the film with Leonardo DiCaprio. And you're very much rooting for the quote unquote villain.
00:03:48
Speaker
to evade capture. I mean, he's doing these amazing, smart, creative feats. And we watch to see if he's going to be able to evade capture from the bumbling detective, which doesn't hurt. I mean, that's just always a fun addition to
Villains vs. Anti-Heroes: A Deep Dive
00:04:04
Speaker
a story too.
00:04:04
Speaker
what you're talking about, about the bumbling detective, it sort of throws the hero detective trope on its ear, right? So if we're going to be rooting for the criminal or the villain, I think the detective almost needs to be someone who's not as clever as our hero, who's actually the villain.
00:04:29
Speaker
Yeah. And that brings up a really good thing when you, you know, we put quotes around hero and I've always been a little confused in my head. Okay. We have the villain and then we have the anti hero. I poked around in that to clarify for myself what the difference is between those two characters in a story.
00:04:47
Speaker
And so villains are the characters who are motivated by evil or darkness. Their ultimate motivations are not sympathetic. It's pretty hard to get behind these guys. And they are wanting the protagonist's demise or the opposite of what the protagonist wants.
00:05:05
Speaker
But in anti-heroes motivations, we can get behind them. They're sympathetic to a reader or a viewer. And often because they're working for the greater good, and it's what you reference, Sarah, it's the Robin Hood scenario. He does some bad things, but it's to help others.
00:05:23
Speaker
Um, so some examples of villains are, um, so the truly dark guys, we've got Sid from Toy Story. He doesn't have very many redeeming quality qualities. Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter, the Grinch. So these guys are just kind of rotten to be rotten. And then anti-heroes, we've got Dexter.
00:05:46
Speaker
Walter White from Breaking Bad, Tom Ripley. Tom Ripley is a bit of a question mark for me so maybe we can talk about him. But, you know, Walter White is a great example of an anti-hero because he does all sorts of really horrible things. You name it on the list of crimes and he and Jesse probably carry them out. However, from the first episode we learned that he believes he's dying
00:06:13
Speaker
and he's got all these intellectual skills and so he's going to start dealing drugs to hopefully care for his family after he passes away. So you can get behind that as a viewer. You can understand on some level the dire need that he found himself in. So I think that that's the kind of character that is the most fun to root for in a film or in a book or probably more on the spectrum of the anti-hero.
00:06:42
Speaker
That's a really great distinction, Brooke. And I think I'm with you. I don't think I would put Tom Ripley in the anti-hero. I think he was much more of a villain than that. But if I think about anti-heroes, it's maybe Tony Soprano?
00:07:05
Speaker
Maybe Danny Ocean and, you know, Ocean's Eleven because, you know, you're watching that film and you're really hoping that they get away with robbing this casino. And obviously audiences have enjoyed that franchise because there's, I think there's even another one that was recently announced that they're looking at doing. So,
00:07:31
Speaker
You know, I think, I think if as a reader or a viewer, you're cheering for someone who in the, you know, in the real world would be considered a criminal, then that's a, that's a really effective anti-hero. But then there's some like, yeah, like Tom Ripley is, it makes you really uncomfortable. Maybe that's, that's how you know that that's a villain.
00:07:55
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I agree. I'm not sure about Tom Ripley on that list. To me, he feels like straight up villain. But another way to make the distinction is to ask yourself, if this character won, if they got what they wanted at the end of this story, what would the outcome be? And many times if the anti-hero wins,
00:08:20
Speaker
it's still the greater good, even if they had to do some pretty bad things to get there. So yeah, exactly, Sarah. Well, and that's the thing with Dexter, right? Like he has a moral code in terms of who his victims are. But if you look at it, he's a serial killer.
00:08:39
Speaker
Yeah, that was such an interesting, um, and groundbreaking series, right? To have us all rooting for the serial killer. And I think when a villain, and we'll just say villain, because overall we know what we mean, the, the bad guy in the, in the story, when a villain is done well,
00:09:00
Speaker
It really can cause us to ask some of those bigger questions. It really can show us that good and evil and right and wrong aren't black and white. It's shades of gray because can you say what Dexter was doing was right?
00:09:17
Speaker
or wrong. I mean this these are these deep dinnertime conversations you get into with people and you could argue it forever because there isn't a right answer to that. And so I think it's really cool what a villainous character can bring out in a story.
00:09:34
Speaker
Absolutely.
The Allure of Heist Stories
00:09:35
Speaker
You know, I think about a lot of the examples, perhaps with the exception of Dexter, are nonviolent, right? I think there's this kind of universal appeal of someone who is getting away with
00:09:51
Speaker
either pulling one over on the authorities, or on the wealthy, like Robin Hood, or the Ocean's Gang, right? Where are they really harming someone by stealing that money?
00:10:05
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And those are definitely my favorite. I love a good heist story. I think they're so much fun. And yeah, there's a feeling that there really isn't a victim here because it's the big rich casino or it's the wealthy billionaire who can do without that $100,000 or something that really no one's getting hurt, but you get to see the tricky behind the scenes
00:10:33
Speaker
attempt for them to steal this. And I think that another reason that we really like this is sort of the same thing we talked about in the true crime episode where you get a little hit of adrenaline by watching these people commit crimes and yet we're rooting for them and we're still at that safe distance. It's fiction. It's just for fun.
00:10:56
Speaker
The other thing that I thought about is the fact that many times in a story, a villain is actually the underdog, even though they may appear at the beginning to be the strongest and most equipped in the story. We know that in the end, they're probably going to lose. The hero is going to prevail. And so it's always fun to root for an underdog.
00:11:19
Speaker
I agree. And just picking up on one of the comments that you made earlier about kind of getting that view into how they commit the crime. So it's a little bit different than in detective fiction where the detective is trying to figure out kind of what happened in a lot of these, particularly the
00:11:38
Speaker
the ones that we see on screen, you get to see either the planning that goes into the caper or there's that kind of scene at the end where they show how the painting actually hadn't been stolen until they came in later and they grabbed it. I'm thinking there was a series by BBC called Hustle.
00:12:01
Speaker
And it was a group of con artists slash thieves who would plan these thefts where they would go into a museum and take an expensive painting and you would see the different characters that they would take on, the different personas.
00:12:17
Speaker
so that they could do that. And you see the same thing in the Netflix version of Lupin. And as well as you get that in the stories about Raffles or Lupin, the original stories, you kind of get that insight into how did they very cleverly come up with ways to commit those crimes.
00:12:38
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. It's the inverse almost of the detection novel, but to me, it's the same type of satisfaction that you get rather than unraveling the crime, setting up the crime. Yeah, they're great. It's great fun.
Unreliable Narrators and Surprising Villains
00:12:58
Speaker
When I was thinking about some of this, Brooke, I was thinking about unreliable narrators and how they, I mean, they're often the bad guys, right? And, you know, we as an audience don't often realize that they're unreliable until that big reveal that happens later in the book, like we talked about in the episode that we did about unreliable narrators.
00:13:21
Speaker
And some of them are, I think, these anti-heroes that we've been talking about. And that kind of adrenaline rush that you were talking about that you get as a reader or viewer when you realize, they've been bad all along.
00:13:40
Speaker
Mm hmm. Yeah. And you're one of their victims because you've bought in to their lies. Yeah, totally. Yeah. I listed both Moriarty and Gone Girl on my list of like kind of some of my favorite villain based reads and noted the same thing you did that for a long time.
00:14:00
Speaker
Into the story you don't realize that they're the villain and that is exactly like you said because of the unreliable narrator component that's laid over so yeah when you look at it the way that Flynn and Horowitz constructed these stories it's extremely clever as we would expect from both of those authors.
00:14:21
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I read one recently called Counterfeit by Kristin Chen, where I still think about this book because I think about like, okay, whose story was the true story? It was done really, really well and it's about counterfeit kids and it was quite good.
00:14:40
Speaker
I'm writing it down right now because that's a litmus test for me. If you are continuing to think about a book days, weeks, probably even months later, that's, that's one I want to have on my TBR Sarah.
Misunderstood Villains and Redemption Arcs
00:14:54
Speaker
I think one of the things that happens with the anti-hero is the way that they're portrayed as being misunderstood, right? And there's an element of that in some children's books that I've encountered where the character that we traditionally think of as being a bad guy is portrayed as just being misunderstood. I mean, there's a whole series called The Bad Guys where this is the
00:15:22
Speaker
Part of the original premise of the books is that these characters that are traditionally considered bad are actually out to do good things. And I think that's really interesting, the kind of playing with that, even at an early reader level.
00:15:40
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Um, and that takes us back to that anti-hero, right? Um, but it also, I think is a very important part of creating any villain because they need a backstory. And many times when we.
00:15:58
Speaker
find out what the rest of the story is for them. There is a little part of us that sympathizes and realizes that, oh, well, if people really understood, then they would get this person better. I mean, I think even though we put the Grinch in the villain category, straight up villain,
00:16:17
Speaker
there is some good in the Grinch. And we also know that there is a twist at the end and he becomes good. I think that that's also a trend that we see in many of these, the catch me if you can story ends that way. Abagnale becomes an FBI, I believe, officer. So, you know, there are redeeming qualities, maybe they're just misunderstood.
00:16:40
Speaker
Yeah. And there's, you know, I think maybe that's one of the things that as audiences we like is that redemption that happens at the end. Right. And, you know, thinking about a backstory and, you know, understanding that maybe this character only had bad choices available to them. Or, you know, when we think about our what would you do episodes where this is the only choice that the character could make.
00:17:07
Speaker
that led them to being a villain or being an anti-hero. So Sarah, that gives me an idea. Maybe one of our upcoming What Would You Do episodes will be one of these stories that are villain-based and we can put ourselves in the shoes of the villain character rather than the hero. Yeah, I love that idea, Brooke.
Listener Feedback and Episode Conclusion
00:17:30
Speaker
Brooke, I think this has been a really great conversation. Yes, this has been so much fun, and we've talked about some of our favorite types of stories today as usual. But before we say goodbye, I would like to share two great reviews that we recently received on Apple Podcasts. The first is from Stella Bixby, and Stella gives the show five stars. She says, great podcast, easy to listen to voices, great content, and good resources.
00:17:59
Speaker
The second one is from Ross Girl who also gives the show five stars and says, don't let the chill vibe of Clued in Mystery fool you. These ladies know their stuff. I've learned so much. I've added to my want to read list and discovered TV shows that are fantastic. If you're a mystery lover, this is a must listen podcast.
00:18:21
Speaker
We want to thank both of you for taking the time to rate and review the podcast. It truly means the world to us to hear listener feedback. Reviews definitely help new people find our show, so if you would be willing to leave a review on the platform you listen from, we would be so thankful. Until next time, thank you for listening to Clued in Mystery. I'm Brooke. And I'm Sarah. And we both love mystery.
00:18:46
Speaker
Clued In Mystery is produced by Brooke Peterson and Sarah M. Stephen. Music is by Shane Ivers at Silvermansound.com. Visit us online at CluedInMystery.com or social media at CluedInMystery. If you liked what you heard, please consider subscribing, leaving a review, or telling your friends.