What if Othello had never met Iago? What if the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter didn’t have the forbidding and sinister Mrs. Danvers in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca?
Heroes and heroines shine because they are the light to a villain’s darkness but they need that contrast to come fully into their own.
Consider the White Witch in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia. She is tall, pale, ruthless and deceitful.
She has frozen Narnia into a centurylong winter and claims dominion over anyone she deems to be a traitor, torturing and killing them in a horrifying way.
But without the White Witch, we would never see the nobility and sacrifice and deep humanity of Aslan, the true ruler of Narnia. Lewis modeled Aslan as a Christlike character and the White Witch as Christ’s tormenters.
How about the relentless Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes novels? Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock confides to Watson:
“[Moriarty] is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.”
What a delicious villain and worthy adversary for Holmes, who must use every resource to outthink, outplot and outmaneuver the menace of London.
Film director Alfred Hitchcock, who certainly knew his way around ominous villains, mused once:
“In the old days, villains had mustaches and kicked the dog. Audiences are smarter today. They don’t want their villain to be thrown at them with green limelight on his face. They want an ordinary human being with failings.”
Do you have a favorite villain from a book or a movie? Tweet me @KerriMPR.
— Kerri Miller | MPR News
