When the Bad Guys Win

  My wife and I have been binging on the Neflix series, Peaky Blinders and tonight we will be watching the last two episodes of the final season.  If you’re not familiar with the series, it’s a story of a gangster family, taking place right after WWI in 1919 and through tumultuous years into the 1930’s.  The name Peaky Blinders is from the gang sewing razor blades into the peaks of their hats so that they can be used as a cruel weapons. 

Much like the series the Sopranos and Breaking Bad, we’ve watched episode after episode quietly rooting for the bad guys…the antiheroes. Rooting for them, more or less. 

We’ve seen this particular family overcome incredible obstacles while using absolutely detestable methods.  But still, they hold on to a modicum of morality, at least when it comes to their own family. 

After watching the end of the last season, my wife asked, “How do you think this all will end?”

Good question.  Do we want the bad guys to win?  

Spoiler alert…if you haven’t seen Breaking Bad or the Sopranos, you may want to stop reading. 

At the end of Breaking Bad, the main protagonist, Walter White is gunned down.  True, he did so while heroically fighting a gang who had enslaved his protégé and was forcing him to manufacture methamphetamines.  He’s been doing that anyway before being captured, but he hadn’t been chained up in the lab.

So, Walter wins but he’s riddled with bullets.

Tony Soprano doesn’t go down in a blaze of glory like Walter White.  As a matter of fact, we don’t know what exactly happened to him because while Journey is playing “Don’t Stop Believin’” on the jukebox, he’s sitting in a diner with his family, and the scene goes black.

When I saw that, I thought at first my television had glitched out.

Best guess as to that ending, Tony never saw or heard his bullet.  

But when we read mysteries, I’m a firm believer we want a satisfying ending.  We want the good guys to win and justice to prevail.  Most of the mysteries, indeed, most of the books I’ve read have that kind of ending.  Not always an ending that screams, “Happily ever after”.  But enough where you can close the book and say, “They had it coming.”

Once in a while, I read a book where that’s not the case.  Two in the last year.  I won’t name them because I don’t want to spoil the ending if you haven’t read them.

One of these was a New York Times bestseller.  It got wonderful reviews and when I read it, it really was a page turner.  And then I got to the end.  The villain kills the good guy…and not only gets away with it, but is successful at stealing his work, becoming wildly rich and famous. 

Will I ever recommend the book?  I don't think so. 

In a second book, not a best seller but written by a highly respected author, the good guy is really relatable.  You love the guy.  He overcomes incredible odds. I loved the book until, once again, I got to the end.  The villain not only kills the good guy, but nobody ever knows what happens to him.  He vanishes, his body never found.  His loved will never know what happened to him. It was awful. 

I was left with a feeling of anger and annoyance. 

When asked about his ending, this particular author said, “There aren’t always happy endings.”  No worries.  I'm angry enough, I probably won't read another one of his books. 

If I want unhappy endings, I’ll read the newspaper or watch a cable news station.  That’s real life.

In the meantime, don’t tell me how Peaky Blinders ends, okay?   

The Bad Guy Question

Sorry to have been away. It was end of semester and I lost track of my day to blog while reading student papers and getting my grades in. 

Douglas's Monday post caught my eye. I've thought a bit about The Sopranos and the bad guy question. As I may have mentioned here, I've been working on a book about the factual aspects of gangster films. The publisher asked me to do nine films and include The Sopranos as my tenth entry because of the TV series influence on popular culture.

I hadn't seen all of the episodes of The Sopranos  because I didn't have a subscription to HBO when it was on. I only caught an occasional episode when I was staying at a hotel during a conference. Even so, the show was popular enough that I was able to watch clips and read the commentary by critics and fans. With the book in progress, I decided to watch all six seasons. A daunting undertaking (86 episodes), but fascinating.

Tony Soprano and his crew presented me with a dilemma. It was the same moral dissonance that I experienced with the protagonists in the other gangster movies that I watched or re-watched. As Douglas noted about Tony and Christopher in The Sopranos, the display of humanity by characters who do really bad things can be disorienting. 

Michael Corleone in The Godfather does not intend to become a mobster. He has served in World War II and returned home planning to have a life outside the "family business". But when his father, Don Corleone, becomes the target of a rival crime family, Michael kills two men as they are dining in a restaurant. Sent off to Sicily, he marries and suffers the loss of his innocent young bride when one of his men plants a car bomb. Back home in America, his brother Sonny is ambushed and killed. Michael comes home, seeks out Kay, the woman who told he would never become a mobster, and persuades her to marry him. When Don Corleone dies of a heart attack while playing with his grandson in the garden, Michael steps into a role that his other brother is unable to assume. Michael becomes the head of his crime family.

Although many fans rate The Godfather, Part II as a even better movie than the first, I have to say that I find Michael Corleone unredeemable. He has settled too comfortably into his reign as don. He enjoys power too much. He is a dark character, ruthless, cruel. He is not a tragic hero, and I don't care about his fate. Oddly enough, Tony Soprano does worst things, literally has blood on his hands. But the life he leads give him panic attacks. He needs to see a psychiatrist to cope with his anxiety. I care about whether Tony will live or die, and still feel frustrated by the way the series ended. Was Tony dead or alive when the screen went to black?

Ray Liotta's portrayal of real-life mob soldier, Henry Hill, in Goodfellas is another riveting depiction of an incredibly violent man. But Liotta's voiceover narration is engaging. Liotta's Hill is unrepentant and jaunty. He normalizes the violence that he and the other mobsters engage in. He draws us into the subculture, makes us complicit as we root for him because he seems less vicious than other members of his crime family. 

Thinking about these two gangsters and the others in the films and the television series I've watched has been useful as I plotted my 1939 historical thriller. I have a character who is a bad guy. He cheats, he lies, he kills. But the deeper I go into his motivation, the more I understand his "why." The more I try to step into his shoes, the better I am able to understand why he is who he is. This makes my feelings about him more ambivalent. I want to be on the side of my protagonist, but I find my bad guy more complex. I need to restore balance between the two.

At any rate, Douglas's post has given me more to think about as I work on my bad guy's back story. I'll ponder the matter after I've enjoyed my Christmas dinner with friends. Speaking of food, that reminds me of the Liotta's detailed description of the meal he was preparing in between the errands he had to do to prepare his female drug courier for a flight she was scheduled to make. . . .

Happy Holidays, everyone!  I'll check in with you again in the new year. Wishing us all less stress and more joy.

About Heroes

Like many of my fellow bloggers, during this time where we’re self isolating, practicing social distancing, and wearing masks to the grocery store, I’m finding it difficult to dive into my current work in progress.

I fear that anything I write will pale in comparison to the drama tragically unfolding hour by hour all around us.

But I do have time to think and observe.

The subject of heroes occurs to me.  Earlier this year I taught a creative writing class (we still have two more classes to complete) and talked extensively about protagonists. We discussed how they need to be relatable but flawed in some way. And they're always up to the task at hand, no matter the consequences or the danger.

We have them in real life. We always have, but it’s much more obvious now. The doctors, nurses, and health care workers risking their own lives in overcrowded hospitals, not able to access enough ventilators to keep up with the number of people suffering from Covid-19, unable to get the proper gear to keep themselves from getting sick.

As always, our heroes are also the law officers, firemen and EMTs that continue to work even though they’re putting themselves in danger of contracting the disease. And many of them have.

Less obvious are the people who are working in our grocery stores, pharmacies, gas stations, and (thank heavens) the liquor stores. We also need to thank the truck drivers, the mail carriers, and sanitation workers.

In our creative writing class, we also discussed bad guys. We have those in real life as well. We have the people who refuse or ignore the call to practice safe distancing. There are decision makers who refused to recognize the virus as a threat or moved much too slowly to mitigate it. Then there are those individuals and companies that hoard needed supplies and profiteer from tragedy.

What we don’t have yet is a proper ending. We're not sure what that would look like.

One of the many reasons we enjoy reading mysteries, especially in uncertain times, is that we’re pretty certain that by the last page, justice will be served and the heroes will be victorious.

But this isn’t fiction.

It’s real life. And it's scary as hell. So, when you interact with our real life heroes, thank them and tell them how much they are appreciated.

Real life heroes, good on you! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Our Fascination with Bad Guys and Evil

I enjoyed reading the latest blogs from Donis Casey and Frankie Y. Bailey about their take on their literary villains. When blocking out a story, I often fixate on the villain and then I wonder why. Why do we have such a fascination with bad guys and evil?

I reached out and asked a number of writer friends who their favorite villains are. Some of the answers were quite interesting: Randall Flag (from Stephen King’s The Stand), Tony Soprano, Jack the Ripper, Long John Silver, The Joker, Draco Malfoy, Maleficent, the Pied Piper of Hamelin (well, when he wasn’t paid for eradicating the plague ridden rats from town, he reciprocated by stealing all the town’s children), Hannibal Lecter, Nurse Ratched, and of course, Darth Vader.

Some answers drew more than a one word answer. “Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. He could seem so normal as to be a sociopath. She really placed a light into that dark world. A villain…anti-villain.”

“Jack in Lord of the Flies. He is proof we are all base when stripped of rules, that hunger is what drives us all.”

“John Wilkes Booth…even though he killed Lincoln, he was a somewhat sympathetic character, a lost soul, pathetically delusional.”

When she mentioned John Wilkes Booth, it stopped me in my tracks for a moment. Booth thought what he was doing was the right thing. Don’t most villains rationalize their crimes as ‘doing what’s right’? Don’t they view their actions as beneficial for the greater good…even though their ‘greater good’ is criminal, repugnant, and destructive?

And the statement about Tom Ripley seeming so normal? The philosopher Hannah Arendt, while watching the Nazi engineer of genocide, Adolf Eichmann, stand trial in Jerusalem, realized that the most striking thing about evil was its banality. Eichmann looked like a bank clerk not a textbook villain. He was a bureaucrat who murdered millions of innocent people.

Ted Bundy, boyish, handsome, and charismatic, was a sadistic sociopath who confessed to thirty murders. But he looked so normal.

John Wayne Gacy tortured and murdered at least thirty-three teenage boys and young men. Before he was caught, he attended parades, children’s parties, and charitable fundraisers dressed as a clown. A CLOWN!!!! Okay, that’s pretty scary.

How many times have we heard the television interview with the neighbor of a serial killer who had been arrested say, “He seemed so normal”?

So back to why we’re so fascinated with evil.

Carl Jung believed we need to confront and understand our own hidden nature to grow as human beings. Healthy confrontation with our shadow selves can unearth new strengths, while unhealthy attempts at confrontation may involve dwelling on or unleashing the worst parts of ourselves.

Sigmund Freud viewed human nature as inherently antisocial, biologically driven by the undisciplined id’s pleasure principle to get what we want when we want it. We’re born to be bad but held back by society.

In the early 1970s, Stanford psychologist, Philip Zimbardo carried out his infamous Prison Experiment. The mock jail he created in Stanford’s psychology building where “guards” abused “prisoners”, revealed the speed with which ordinary people can begin to carry out depraved acts in a toxic environment.

I’m certainly no expert, but is it possible the reason why we’re fascinated with bad guys is that the line that we need to cross to get to the Dark Side is incredibly narrow?

Or is it that being good is boring and being bad is wicked fun?