Some expressions from a villain-lover's glossary

While waiting for the next villain crush to hit me (and to be perfectly honest, I'm not looking ultra-hard for a new one at the moment), I can while away the time by defining some expressions -  related to the theme of villains and villain-loving - which I will probably use in my blog posts sooner or later (some have already had an airing or two):

Villain in distress: formed on the template of "damsel in distress". Describes a villain at bay, showing a surprising vulnerability which goes to the heart of seasoned villain-lovers like myself. While it's annoying, in a way, that bad guys so often land in deep trouble, it is a win-win situation for them when it comes to impressing the fans. If they fight back until the last, like Uriah Heep, they come across as plucky. If, on the other hand, they break down completely, the supporter reaction is "Aaah, poor baby". Either way, the hero will end up not looking his best if he insists on gloating over his enemy's downfall. The villain in distress particularly might actually gain support from readers/audiences who would not normally root for him, so a canny hero treads carefully. The classic example of a villain in distress is Bulstrode in Middlemarch, and Eliot is wise enough not to pit her hero Lydgate against him but rather to tie their fates together. The novel's other hero Will Ladislaw is foolish enough to make Bulstrode cry at one point (unforgivable!), but he is noticeably absent from town when the banker's world really starts to fall apart.

Leader of the pack appeal: As in the line - full of profound truth - from the hit by the Shangri-Las: "They told me he was ba-ad, but I knew he-e was sa-ad, that's why I fell for - the leader of the pack". This expression is of course similar to the previous one, and a villain in distress always has leader of the pack appeal in droves. But there is a subtle difference: leader of the pack appeal is not dependent on a certain situation, it is a state of mind. There are bad guys, and plenty of them, who are unhappy all the time, even when they're apparently successful. Triumphs are enjoyed so feverishly there is little real happiness in it. The leader of the pack villains carry a secret sadness with them wherever they go. If only we, their trusted admirers, could be there and nurse their wounded souls! Then things would have been quite different - or not. Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Ralph Nickleby in Nicholas Nickleby are good examples of villains with leader of the pack appeal.

Beagle boy appeal: As in the quote from an Uncle Scrooge adventure by Don Rosa which goes roughly like this (always allowing for that it's been translated into Swedish and then back again into English): "It felt somehow honest to cross swords with those Beagle boys. They looked like villains, were villains and were proud of it." This well sums up the appeal of the unashamed, self-confessed bad guy. In comics, he'd be the one to chuckle "Thanks for the compliment" when someone exlaims "You scoundrel!" In more serious contexts, the brush strokes won't be quite as broad as that, but the idea is the same. A beagle boy villain revels in his villainy and invites us to revel with him. Daniel Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop is a beagle boy villain, and perhaps the only one of Dickens's main villainous characters who is practically without any hint of leader-of-the-packiness. I may be mistaken, because I only know them from reputation, but I wager that soap baddies like JR Ewing are beagle boys too.

You'd think that leader of the pack appeal and beagle boy appeal would be each other's opposites, but it's not as simple as that. Each type of villainy carries with it its own problems: leaders of the pack risk getting too soppy and sensitive - lethal for a villain - and beagle boys risk shallowness and vulgarity. And so as often as not, a successful villain blends leader of the pack appeal and beagle boy appeal. It's called having your cake and eating it, and it's something villains are very good at.

Villain surrogate: Surprisingly rare character considering his usefulness: someone who displays the same style and cynicism as a villain, but is eventually revealed to be on the side of common decency after all. See Jaggers in Great Expectations.

High-prestige/Middle-prestige/Low-prestige villains It would be hard to find someone who has never, ever rooted just a little bit for a villain. But there are differences as to how far the great multitude are prepared to go in this regard. I have already mentioned the problem with high-prestige villains on this blog: they are universally popular, and so are just that little bit unsatisfactory for us hard-liners. Without the ordinary, unimaginative punter condemning our dearest love with words like: "Ugh, he's a creep", where exactly would we come in? Anyhow, you know a character is a high-prestige villain when no-one is the least bit surprised at your confessing that he's your favourite character: the reactions will rather be "of course!" and "mine too!". Count Fosco is and remains the prime example.

If you admit to liking a middle-prestige villain, there will be a few raised eyebrows, but you won't be in a minority of one. There are others who think like you, but they are a select group, like a club. Take Uriah Heep: most people may think he's awful, but he did get a rock group named after him. Most villains - and in my view the best - are to be found in the middle-prestige category.

If you admit a weakness for a low-prestige villain, someone is likely to call the nearest lunatic asylum. These are the really hard cases, deficient not only in morals but in style as well. They are not glamorous enough to encourage fan clubs: they're lacking in both leader of the pack and beagle boy appeal, in fact in any sort of appeal. And yet: such a challenge! Monsieur Lheureux in Flaubert's Madame Bovary is a low-prestige villain, a consciously deglamourised version of the Greedy Businessman Scoundrel beloved by writers such as Balzac. All the same - just a hint of the balzacian lynx remains in his make-up. And if we villain-lovers don't take pity on the runt of the litter, who will?                

What's the appeal of the ranting rebel?

I think I know which of my own taboos I will break next. Next time I fall in love - or, to be precise, develop a weird villain crush - the object of my affection will probably be an idealist who likes to explain at length his plans to save the world. Because, hitherto, I have not been able to see the point of this kind of bloke at all. Clearly this is a barrier waiting to be broken down.

It is, by now, impossible to find any one common denominator among all my villain crushes, except that they have been villains. But there is one thing most of them share: supreme selfishness. If pushed, they may perform a selfless act for someone they love (think of Soames, for instance). But sacrificing themselves to a higher cause? Nope - never, and quite right too. This down-to-earthness is one of the reasons I like villains so much. They cut through the waffle - or sneer at it and parody it to great effect - and concentrate on essential things. Like looking after number one.

Of course, there have been exceptions to the rule. Javert and Bulstrode are both idealists, and Chauvelin's exertions to capture the Scarlet Pimpernel are, at least at first, powered by his wish to be of service to the Revolution. But in each of these cases, what I've admired has been the style and personality of these men rather than their beliefs. I don't believe as fanatically in law and order as Javert (though anarchy certainly holds no appeal for me, besides not having to work), and I don't think people should be strong-armed into a grim and unmerciful kind of faith even by a scrumptious banker like Bulstrode. As for the Reign of Terror, we-ell, I suppose it got of hand just the teeniest bit. But no one could fault the way these gentlemen go about their business, with cunning (Chauvelin), powerful efficiency (Bulstrode) or just bare-faced panache (Javert).

The normal template for an idealist heartthrob in the world of fiction is nothing like Javert and Co. anyway. One good example, which made me think of the subject, is a character in the book I'm reading at the moment. It's called Park Lane and should be right up my street, as it has as its central characters a maid and her young mistress in a rich London household in the 1910s. An upstairs-downstairs perspective; balls; hard-to-find eligible matches; handsome (if annoyingly blameless) footmen - I ought really to be wild about it. Somehow, though, I'm not finding it as easy going as I'd hoped, and this is largely because I can't really warm to the novel's two heroines. They seem each in their own way very silly girls, and I find it hard to care when they get into completely self-inflicted trouble. The upstairs girl, Beatrice, is especially idiotic, more like a fourteen-year-old than a twenty-one-year-old. Both girls are full of admiration for Michael Campbell, the maid Grace's brother whom Beatrice encounters when attending a suffragette rally.

Michael is a texbook idealistic revolutionary, and describes his ideas of a new world order to anyone who cares to listen. He is full of glowering resentment towards the upper classes, and far from being put off by this, upper-class Beatrice thinks his rants are top hole. She even offers to type his glittering opinions and to find a newspaper publisher who will print them.

What is wrong with these women? Show me a self-important numbskull droning on about the people's revolution (while not so much deigning to wash up his own tea-cup, in most cases) and I'll show you a flock of women sitting entranced at his feet. Whenever a surly rebel turns up in a novel - or film or TV production for that matter - you can be sure one of the female protagonists will be making a bee-line for him. And I don't get it. I simply do not.

All right, perhaps it's partly, or even mostly, to do with the fact that the grand ideas that these rebels tend to spout hold no appeal for me. Also, I am a woman of the 20th century - we were taught to be wary of Utopias which hinged on the mysterious disappearance of a considerable part of the populace. The century's hard lessons weren't available to Beatrice, of course, but still it's hard to sympathise with her starry-eyed acceptance of both Michael's railings against her own kind and the violent actions planned by the group of hard-line suffragettes she's joined.  There is no excuse for committing foul deeds in the name of creating a better world. If it demands such things of you, how good can it be?

And so I throw down my gauntlet to future villains. Make me care for a wild-eyed social reformer who commits his villanies for the good of humanity, and you will truly have achieved something new.

TV bits and pieces

Blimey. I've forgotten how tired work makes you, and how much time it takes out of your day. I certainly don't feel up for any in-depth discussion of anything, which means this will have to be one of those bitty blog posts about all kinds of things like:

Richard II - well done, BBC: I know I've been hard on the Beeb since... ooh, forever now. Since they axed Dombey, in fact. So it's only fair to mention that I was extremely impressed by the first part of The Hollow Crown which I watched during my vacation. I was no fan of Ben Whishaw's Sebastian Flyte in the mainly disastrous film version of Brideshead Revisited (don't get me started!), nor of his journalist Freddie Lyon in The Hour. They both shared a trait of whinyness, which was a pity, considering Whishaw's nervy good looks - I really wanted to like him. He was great as Richard, though - still not exactly a stoic, but able to skewer his usurping cousin Bolingbroke (Rory Kinnear, satisfyingly conscience-stricken from the first) with wry conviction. First-rate acting and verse-speaking all round: yep, if it has to be high-brow, it should be like this rather than like the soporific Parade's End.

"New grit"? No way! As if The Village wasn't bad enough. Now another gloom-and-doom-and-indignation-politics costume drama has aired in the UK, called - wait for it - The Mill. Well, at least it appears to do what it says on the tin. Apparently, the series starts off with a child worker getting his hand mangled and a woman worker being "sexually assaulted", as reviews primly put it. The events in the series are based on records from a real mill, so this, like, really happened. Well, yes, I'm sure it did. I wouldn't be surprised if similar things have happened at my workplace during its long history, but not, I believe, at the same time and as an everyday occurrence. I strongly suspect the series creators of foul-cherry-picking, milking their source material for grim details which they can serve up to their viewers, so that everyone can have a good boo and hiss over the nasty industrialists. This is the second costume drama in a short time which I have no desire whatsoever to watch even five minutes of. And this time - to be fair to the BBC again - they are not the culprits. The Mill was perpetrated by Channel Four - a commercial channel. What's worse, 2.8 million saw the first episode, which is more than the channel's usual audience at this time. It's still only half of the audience for the new Upstairs Downstairs - which was deemed a failure viewer-wise - but still there is talk of a trend of "new grit", away from cosy dramas.

Let's face it, no-one does costume drama quite as well as the Brits, which makes it so upsetting when they're side-tracked like this. They could spare a thought for their international viewers. Do they honestly think we're going to go wild about some smug, mill-owner-bashing, mud-drenched misery fest? Will we watch it in millions? Will we visit the sites, buy the calendar, like pictures of the cast - all the cast - on Facebook, and swooningly comment on what great personalities they are and how marvellously they are acted? Not bloody likely. We don't want the "new grit", thank you very much. We want the new Downton.

Three is a magic number: A far cry from ambitious Shakespeare-watching, I spent my two last-but-one vacation days glued in front of the airiest and least demanding TV viewing possible: Lace and Lace II. Then again, it might look simple to come up with light and frothy entertainment, but I bet it isn't. As I've mentioned before, formulas must be handled in the right way, or the soufflé sinks. For instance, Shirley Conran settled for exactly the right number of girls for her schoolgirl pact in Lace. Two would have been too few. Four, and the story would have lost focus. Three friends with different characters and backgrounds (though all with families able to afford a pricy finishing school in Switzerland): that works beautifully. Other sure touches include an underplaying of the abandoned daughter's revenge plans in favour of more light-hearted aspects of the plot, such as the heroines' school-girl antics. All this, and a creepy chauffeur too - no wonder I started work in a relatively good mood.                                 

“Anti”-characters – hard to like, but can work sometimes

I’m happy to say that Fingersmith proved riveting until the end, largely thanks to its cunning plot – so twisty it’s hard to comment on – and the resourcefulness of its anti-heroines. I would call them anti-heroines, though, rather than heroines. Both Susan aka Sue and Maud can behave like perfect cows. Their reluctant and, for them both, inconvenient love for each other is engaging, but partly because it fitfully renders them capable of thinking of someone else but themselves. Sue has one more person she cares for – her foster-mother Mrs Sucksby – but Maud’s is not an affectionate nature. She is the hardest to warm to, the festering lily to Sue’s weed. But though there is a refreshing frankness to Sue’s selfishness, it is no less real than Maud’s. Both girls can sweep aside comparably innocent characters or use them for their own ends without any qualms to speak of. They don’t become noticeably mellower either as the story progresses. But they are good at getting out of scrapes, I’ll give them that.

The portrait of  the villain, a rogue nicknamed Gentleman, is typical of the tricksiness of the novel. From the moment he appears and proposes an unspeakably vile plan to Sue and the band of thieves she lives with, you think that he will represent the true force of darkness in the book,  compared with whom Sue will seem almost guiltless. In a novel where almost everyone is on the make, though, you soon have reason to wonder whether Gentleman is indeed the worst character around. Be that as it may, he’s not particularly appealing, and though his ostensible role at first is that of the fortune-hunting seducer, he behaves – when off-duty – more like a Sikesy thug than like a Wickhamish smoothie.  My villain-loving heart remained unmoved, though there was fun to be had from Gentleman’s patent lack of interest in either of the two girls, which makes for an unusual triangle relationship.

Normally, I’m not that fond of the use of anti-heroes and anti-heroines. I don’t much see the point of them. After all, a hero can have all sorts of weaknesses and humanising faults and still be a hero. An anti-hero tends to be like a bumbling hero, but without the conscience part. He tries to make his way, while not considering others, and fails. Which makes him fall between two chairs, in my view: why should the reader care for someone who has neither the good qualities of a hero nor the charisma of a villain? There is a similar problem with the anti-heroine: just look at the awful Madame Bovary.

Of course, there is a definition problem. What separates a bumbling hero from an anti-hero? What separates an anti-hero from a villain in distress, a type of villain for whom I am an absolute sucker? Is Pip in Great Expectations a hero or an anti-hero? Is Bulstrode in Middlemarch a villain in distress or an anti-hero? After all, in spite of his shady past, he doesn’t really wish the protagonists of Middlemarch any harm (except possibly Farebrother, and he is a minor character), and rule one for a villain tends to be that he should constitute a threat of some kind to the story’s nicer characters.

For my part, I’d call Pip a hero, and Bulstrode a villain in distress. The difference between a hero and an anti-hero is, for me, a question of fundamental decency. If a character has a core of decency, then no matter how matter how many mistakes he makes, I’d still see him as a hero. Much has been made of Pip’s supposedly “snobbish” behaviour, but only because he makes so much of it himself. He is most ashamed about his own state of mind at different stages: his crimes are for the most part “thought-crimes”. Had he been an anti-hero, he would not have had these qualms.

As for the difference between an anti-hero and a villain in distress, it is harder to define. I should say that it is not a question of success rate – most villains fail to reach their aim, just as anti-heroes do, because the story demands it – but a question of the potential of success. Anti-heroes are natural losers:  they can certainly wreck people’s lives, but not by design. They merely mess up (and can prove irritatingly self-pitying and unrepentant when they do). Whereas villains, even the ones who get into trouble and become picturesquely anguished, are and remain a credible threat: they’re carnivores who might very well lick their wounds and rise again, if they are not redeemed in time. A temporary set-back certainly won’t keep them down for long.

I realise that the anti-heroines of Sarah Waters don’t quite fit into this pattern. They’re not losers, but on the other hand they can’t be called villainesses, as the whole story is about them, and the biggest threat they constitute are to each other. They’re not, in my opinion, good-hearted enough to be called heroines. Maybe the main thing is that in this context, and much thanks to the central love story, they work.