What Ruined Modern Villains? | The Deep

This summer, Netflix will release Steps, which critics are calling a fresh look at the Cinderella story. The evil stepsisters are now kind, misunderstood, and unfairly judged. Is it just me, or is something strange going on with how we create or re-imagine our movie villains? It feels like for the last 20 years, movies have turned into a parade of rehabilitated sociopaths. We even have marketing firms and consultants who tell studios exactly what characteristics will make a villain most attractive. It's a tragic backstory, scores at 76%, followed closely by childhood trauma at 67%, and misunderstood motives at 61%.

Like Thanos, sympathetic villains have become inevitable. Increasingly, we're not even excusing or explaining. bad behavior. We're just celebrating our villains. With a quick search, you can find thousands of fandom pages and online communities that celebrate not great deeds or noble heroes, but the very worst in us. We have memes for adults who identify more with their childhood villains than their childhood princesses. As one adult Disney fan put it, I looked at the bad guy and said, I want to get to the bad guy.

I want to get to the bad guy. I want to get to the bad guy. Wait a minute, that's me as hell. It's a twisted nostalgia where adult fans have come to identify authenticity, living freely, and fulfillment with lying, theft, and mass murder. How did we get stuck in this endless loop of rehashing our childhood villains? Have we, as one film critic put it, made a societal lurch in the direction of fairness because of our evolved principles?

Or is there something much darker going on? The list is endless, so I'll start with a few stunners. The misunderstood outcast scar from Mufasa. No longer a fratricidal sociopath with fascist aspirations, now he's the Prince Harry to Mufasa's Prince William, the sad spare. In the Wicked franchise, we get Elphaba, once the symbol of pure evil, who runs a slave empire of flying monkeys. Now, she's an intersectional political scapegoat and the true hero of the tale. Cruella de Vil, the puppy killer?

She's just a fashion rebel, victimized by childhood trauma and rejection. From Sleeping Beauty, we got the splendid Maleficent, a truly demonic sorceress driven by envy and hatred for all that is good. Today, she's a wronged woman who just wants to be a mom. And my personal favorite, Loki. The Norse god of mischief, traitor to his brother and father, midwife of Ragnarok, personally responsible for the deaths of thousands of New Yorkers. He's actually just an abandoned frost giant baby with an identity crisis, an aging but still attractive dude, searching for glorious purpose, totally relatable.

Today's movies are overwhelmingly repeats, with a twist, a way for Americans to visit the past remade in our own image. It's the millennial nostalgia effect. American nostalgia has fed an insatiable market for the constant re-presentation and fresh looks of childhood stories, heroes, and villains. 71% of American consumers say films are the number one trigger of nostalgia.

That longing to return to a better past is a powerful feeling. Memory triggers nostalgia and presents the past as better times when life was simpler. It can be a tremendous force for good if we harness it to discover what our parents got right, and then pass on what is best from our history. But it also has a dark side, because misplaced nostalgia can easily become overwhelming. Stunting innovation and creativity. Instead of applying our knowledge of the past to solve today's issues, we leverage nostalgic feelings to escape the here and the now and avoid creating for the future.

Marketing experts warn producers, writers, and directors that they can't just rehash old stories. Consumers don't want to learn from the past so much as pick and choose what made them feel good as kids. GWI, a global consumer research firm, advises creatives, A lot has changed since the decades people feel nostalgia about, and while use in media and fashion is likely to be popular, that's only if it's forward-thinking, inclusive, and retains the healthier aspects of the era. The healthier aspects, they advise, are almost entirely superficial.

The same princess dresses and makeup, the same names, the same sets, the same voices, and variations on the same music. At the same time, everything below the surface, moral lessons, deeper questions, should swing in the direction of more intersectionality, more victimization, and more girlbossing. And this is exactly where the sympathetic villain industry cashes in. Entertainment is banking on the idea that millennials and Gen Z want to feel nostalgia, but we don't want to remember those icky days when the battle between good and evil was so black and white, so judgmental, so heteronormative.

Nobody likes memories that reproach us. We hate being confronted with the ways we failed to live up to our principles and ideals. Villains and stories that prick our conscience are the ones that we don't want to remember. Don't make for a good binge watch. Regret doesn't sell plushies. We want reimagined memories that say, you're okay, I'm okay, because Darth Vader, he's okay. If Anakin Skywalker had a reason for going over to the dark side, well, I do too. With that in mind, GWI warns creators against using anything that would make a millennial consumer consider repenting.

GWI wants movies that let us feel like you're okay, and you're okay, and you're okay. Even if we did turn into the baddies, it's all fine. Some would say that the old villains were one of the healthier aspects of the past. They gave the heroes the challenge to rise to. They were big, brilliant, and bad. They were the nightmares of our childhood. Now, they're the mirrors of our adult selves. Which brings us to one of the causes of an intensely nostalgic culture.

Decadence. If our cast of sympathetic villains proves anything, it's that progressivism won the culture war. The men and women rewriting our stories and re-presenting our past were almost exclusively formed by progressive and leftist ideologies. Having rejected the ideas of meaning, natural ends, virtues, and vice, these ideologies strip memories and lessons from the past of their power. The drivers of decadence, producers, writers, actors, directors, aren't just feeding a narcissistic nostalgia to make a buck, although I'm sure there are those who do.

They themselves are also the victims of decadence, searching for life in old stories of their childhoods. The endless rehabilitation of evil is an attempt to find a pulse in a dying culture, to discern some vitality in a meaningless universe. To discover that there is some kind of hope, even if it's a villain's hope, in the face of hostile power systems. The movie industry resists starting new storylines because progressive ideology isn't creative. It's dialectic, always reacting against what came before it. In short, it's destructive.

In the long march through the institutions, progressive and leftist thought leaders... Conquered a film industry already in the throes of cultural ennui. We're not watching a new civilization rise. We're watching the old one decay in a cycle of remakes, reboots, prequels, and sequels. Philosopher Jacques Barzun defined a decadent society as one in which the forms of art as of life seem exhausted. The stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. But unlike holy scriptures or true western classics, when a decadent society retells an old tale, it isn't in order to connect us with our heritage or the best of what came before.

It's endlessly remaking our heritage in the mold of ourselves. Decadence means being stuck in an eternal now. And it feels like we can't get out. Worse, today's children can't get out. Adult nostalgia and decadence will deprive gens alpha and beta of the formative experience of simple villains and noble heroes.

Instead, young children swim in the prequel-sequel backstory spinoff and marinate in sympathetic villains. But this is backwards. In our formative years, we are building an interior vision for the kind of man or woman we will become. Thank you for watching. Longing for ideals and great deeds beyond an ordinary, comfortable, safe life prepares us to grapple later in adolescence and adulthood with the fact that the good life is hard, and few find it. I would rather have a child believe in good and evil and need to learn self-reflection later than a child who grows up believing in nothing but swimming in identity issues.

Children need the simple villains like the original stepmother, Not Cate Blanchett's used woman excuses for cruelty. We skip that step of storytelling to their detriment. But a decadent society produces media for perpetual infants, not for actual infants. They don't get the Snow Queen. They get Elsa. Which brings me to the third reason the villains lost their groove. In addition to a very human desire to find meaning in a decadent civilization, there is also a more sinister motive here. A deep hatred of reality, shared by movie makers and moviegoers alike.

In a way, our new sympathetic villains are more realistic characters. After all, didn't Solzhenitsyn say, the line between good and evil runs down the center of every human heart? And yes, the best stories teach us that the best and wisest of men face temptation and will fall into sin. They will also grapple with the villainy of evil and the threat of suffering precisely because they are good. But that's not what's going on with Scar, Loki, Cruella, or Kylo Ren. The decadent society rejects a moral universe where men commit great evil, but seek redemption by sacrificing themselves to defeat the evil they once promoted.

Instead, we embrace what Pope Benedict XVI called a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive, and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own. and desires. Moral relativism is corrosive. Sin makes us stupid, destroying our ability to tell stories that can help us see reality more clearly. Case in point, the Disney movie that best exemplifies extreme moral relativism was actually not a remake. Its early creators set out to add The Snow Queen, one of Hans Christian Andersen's most morally fraught fairy tales, To the Disney canon.

The original storyline for Frozen was dark. The Snow Queen was a straight-up baddie, a beautiful but calculating villain, a la the original Maleficent. The writers were all in on a return to a classic tale of good versus evil, you know, for young children. But as production got going, Frozen quickly morphed into Disney's most revised fairy tale ever. Instead of a young girl's noble quest to snatch her true love from the clutches of an evil, all-powerful queen, we got Elsa. Fun fact, it was actually the song, Let It Go, that changed the filmmakers' minds.

We have a hit here, they said, and so they kept the superficial, the ice and the snow, and completely rewrote the substance. No good versus evil, just The drama of self-acceptance and no right, no wrong, no rules for me, I'm free. The ultimate anthem to relativism. Millennials and Gen Z are the most nostalgic and the least religious generations in modern history. We do terrible, even villainous things. We break up families, we cheat, we abort our children for the most superficial reasons, we gamble, and we steal.

But we can take comfort in the words of Elsa. That perfect girl is gone. Here I stand in the light of day. Let the storm rage on. The cold never bothered me anyway. If we did grow up to be our childhood nightmares, at least now it doesn't bother us. J.R.R. Tolkien predicted that relativism would destroy storytelling. If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth, Facts or evidence? Then fantasy would languish until they were cured.

If they ever get into that state, it would not seem at all impossible. Fantasy will perish and become morbid delusion. We want to think that we're all good people, just getting along in an ultimately gentle universe. In the dictatorship of relativism, there's always a reason it might be okay to do wrong, and that's enough to let us off the hook. The sympathetic villain trope only works if the people telling the backstory are trying to say something true, that we must overcome the evil within as well as the evil without.

But we are way beyond that today, and our trope has gone too far. We accepted the evil within and broke down what was good simply because it was good, rewriting it all together as boring, fake, and selling something. Humans tell stories, write books, and make movies for many reasons to move the heart, inspire greatness of soul, and understand ourselves. But the most powerful reason for telling stories, to paraphrase Anthony Esselin, is to get ourselves free from navel-gazing, from the egotistic presumption that our own time, our own obsessions in politics, are the center of the human drama.

Great literature and great movies help us stand outside the prejudices and fads of our era to see the permanent things. At our best, we tell stories to remember realities we have forgotten, not to obscure uncomfortable truths about ourselves. From the time we are little, we hear, In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, that sin came into the world by one man, and that God so loved the world, he sent his only begotten Son. Every good story makes that fundamental, true myth clearer and more real to us.

Even if they're not Christians, writers, producers, directors, and actors make excellent films insofar as they are committed to putting flesh and blood of Christ into the world. Flesh and Bones on Eternal Truth. The great French novelist, Leon Bois, once wrote, the only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life is not to become a saint. Villains are defined by what they hate. Saints are defined by what they love. We can create stories that explore why men and women choose to define themselves by hate.

Including forces outside of their control, without being perpetually trapped in the sympathetic villain trope. We have to be able to recognize the line between good and evil in each of us without rejecting the reality of good and evil. In that way, we can tell our old tales and create new stories that aren't just an escape from an imagined rosy past, that aren't just rehabilitating our vices and sins so that we feel better, but stories that help us see the truth about ourselves and our role in the battle between good and evil.

more clearly, that give us more courage to get up and try again when we fail, and more hope in the promise of redemption. If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe to the LOOPcast. We bring you a new episode of The Deep every Thursday at 4 p.m. Eastern.