What the villains say about the rest of us

Nov. 4—You ever notice how movie and TV villains often make really good points? Sure, they're evil, and they kill innocents, but then they'll say something and you think, "OK, I actually sort of agree with him on that."

Take Thanos, of the "Avengers" films. He wants to wipe out half the population of the universe in order to preserve life. When he proposed that solution for his home planet, "They called me a madman. And what I predicted came to pass."

And then Thanos said, "The hardest choices require the strongest wills." Choosing genocide, of course, is a cop-out. But he had a point about overpopulation and the strain it puts on the environment. This is what makes for a great villain — they have sincere motivations that extend beyond their desire for personal gain. They are nuanced. They might even have good qualities.

At the risk of being cliché, I give you Heath Ledger's Joker in "The Dark Knight." That character has been examined and dissected from every possible angle, and yet it remains fresh, even 15 years after that movie premiered. Much of that is due to Ledger's brilliant performance, but the writers gave him a lot of great material with which to work.

The Joker claims he wants chaos and says his acts of violence and thievery are random — but they are not. He is very calculated and manipulative; he knows exactly what he's doing, even when having to improvise.

He is a man who has seen and experienced terrible things, and his motivation is to expose everyone as corrupt — the mob, the police, the mayor, the district attorney, Batman, even the everyday citizens of Gotham. He undresses them all in public while hiding behind his purple suits and clown makeup.

We all want to see corruption exposed, but the Joker went a step further to try and prove that even the best of humanity could be just as corrupt as the authorities.

During his pivotal hospital scene with Harvey Dent, the Joker fills the cracks in the district attorney's freshly shattered heart with a summary of his motivation. He tells Dent how the mobsters and cops are all just "schemers trying to control their little world. I'm not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are. ... You were a schemer, you had plans, and look where that got you."

The Joker then gives one of the movie's most memorable lines: "You know what I've noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan — even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that, like, a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up — nobody panics. Because it's all part of the plan." The Joker urges Dent to embrace chaos, because chaos is "fair."

And so Dent embraces chaos, because in his broken state, it appeals to his sense of justice. It's easy to see why. Crooked cops were the reason his girlfriend got killed, and the reason Dent became disfigured both physically and psychologically. He had tried fighting evil the right way — within the system — and it hadn't worked because the corruption ran so deep.

Even outside the context of Dent's situation, the Joker's words have a ring of truth to them. Chaos doesn't discriminate, where as the plans of men quite often do. Few could ever commit to the bit like the Joker did, but you can see the appeal.

A great villain feels relatable on some level, which causes us to look inwardly and examine those areas of our heart we'd just as soon let be. A part of our human nature is reflected — perhaps dimly, perhaps strikingly — in the words and deeds of a great villain. That's a good thing, because if we gaze upon this reflection with right eyes, it can help us keep our own villainous tendencies at bay.

Brad Locke is senior sports writer for the Daily Journal. Contact him on Twitter @bradlocke or via email at brad.locke@journalinc.com