The Smug Villain in TV

I stopped watching House of Cards shortly after....

Yeah, ok, going to put this in a spoiler cut. I will say that we're probably a little too spoiler-averse these days. A good story stands on its own even if you know what's going to happen (see: Hamlet. Spoiler Alert: Everybody dies.) Sometimes twists are even more fun if you figure them out ahead of time (though that's a narrow path to walk. It's only fun if it's a clever twist. The best example of this I can give is when I figured out the twist ending to Fight Club, and for vindication, in the commentary Edward Norton pointed out the exact scene where I figured it out as the first part of the movie where he'd believe people could predict the ending. On the other hand, if it's not clever enough, like Shutter Island, you spend the movie yawning and waiting for the film to catch up with you.)

But I also recognize that sometimes, seeing a movie or show with fresh eyes and no preconceptions can be a unique experience. (I first saw the Matrix, a fairly non-twisty movie, without knowing anything about the premise, and that was pretty cool.) A good show will still be entertaining when you watch it the second time, but I think that the "unblemished snow" viewing is something ephemeral that, while not necessarily better than watching it with foreknowledge, is an experience that the audience can only have the one time (barring memory loss, of course.)

Ahem, I seem to be going off on a tangent. Spoiler warning for House of Cards, Hannibal, and Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire (book spoilers, so even if you watch the show, beware!) I also mention Breaking Bad, but there's not much spoiler-wise for it here.


To begin again:

I stopped watching House of Cards shortly after Frank pushed Zoe in front of a speeding subway train. Zoe's death was horrific, surely, not only for the brutal violence of it and the shock, but also because of the strange Electra-complex-laden relationship between the two characters, and the betrayal of what Zoe clearly felt was a solid foundation of trust. I don't know that Zoe was all that interesting of a character, but her death meant something more frustrating for Frank.

Essentially, the moral of the story seemed to be that Frank doesn't ever lose. He doesn't ever come close to losing. If someone is a threat to Frank, he will immediately deal with them, and there won't be consequences. In the next episode or perhaps the one after, another character watches security footage where Zoe's attacker is hidden by a construction barricade. Yet her death is still ruled an accident, even though you could easily rewind the tape a bit and clearly see that before her death, Zoe was talking to someone on the other side and was, in fact, pulled back there before being pushed in front of the train.

The promise of House of Cards (which is right there in the title) seemed to be that Frank would have a harder and harder time holding things together. Yet the writers didn't seem to trust themselves to really build a house of cards that could collapse at any time, which is a shame, because that's where the tension is supposed to come from.

As a counter-example, Breaking Bad (which I have not finished - I'm a few episodes into season 4) makes things extremely hard for Walter White. Walter's clever and a talented liar, but for all his strengths, he's a flawed and imperfect person. Frank Underwood can brush off just about anything he's done and even gloat directly through the fourth wall to the audience, but Walter White's inflated ego and his maladjusted moral sense keep him constantly in a state like a rat on a sinking ship. Walter's self-built desperation is where the drama comes from, and we're right there with him, even as we are able to stand back and see exactly what Walter is doing wrong.

Game of Thrones has many villains. In fact, the number of characters who have good intentions, or at least want to live peacefully without causing anyone else trouble, are a minority. For every Daenerys or Jon Snow, there's a Joffrey or a Ramsay Snow, and then some additional horrible people.

Yet the large variety of horrible people has some interesting consequences. Namely, that each of these villains is convinced that they are running the show, and doesn't imagine that there's some cleverer villain who can outwit or out maneuver them. And those who think they are in control are poorly-adapted when things don't go the way they plan. Hubris, thy name is Tywin Lannister. For most of A Song of Ice and Fire's initial trilogy, Tywin proves to be quite the adept Grandmaster at the Game of Thrones. Even before Robert's death, Tywin has positioned his family to be the true power behind what is theoretically the Baratheon dynasty. King's Landing is all Stags and Lions with equal status, and it's clearer and clearer as the story goes on that the Stags are getting pushed out in favor of the Red and Gold. Of course, as it turns out, Joffrey is not even Robert's son, being born of incest between Tywin's twin children, so as soon as Robert is out of the picture, the Lannisters are really the only family controlling the Iron Throne. After Robert's death, the Lannisters consolidate their power and once Stannis is defeated at the Blackwater, they have uncontested control of King's Landing, and thus the majority of Westeros.

Yet as powerful as Tywin is, he gets taken down by his inability to love Tyrion. His youngest son is treated so horribly by the family, and abandoned as a scapegoat for Joffrey's death (which Tywin navigates well in other regards, quickly raising Tomen as a, frankly, preferable alternative to Joffrey,) that Tyrion winds up killing his father.

And this is actually brilliant. The first book in the series caught our attention by killing off Ned Stark. George R R Martin established that, contrary to the standard fantasy of knights in shining armor coming to save the day with chivalric virtue, this was a world where people who thought that way were destroyed by realpolitik. It's so tough in this world that even though some might have thought Ned would slowly grow corrupted by King's Landing (which, if I were looking at it with fresh eyes, might have been my prediction) and transform into an anti-hero, A Song of Ice and Fire doesn't even give him that chance, killing him after metaphorically just barely brushing his first Pawn on the game board, as it were. It would be easy, then, to adopt a cynical attitude and say that this was just a world where the bad guys won because they weren't impeded by the limits of morality. But the death of Joffrey and then Tywin Lannister raises the stakes and makes things more dire: No, it's not just that bad guys win - it's that ultimately, everyone's a mortal human being, and sometimes, shit can go wrong. People can make bad mistakes. No one is safe. And what that means is that the future is really up in the air. Sure, Ned's death warned us that Daenerys won't necessarily be riding her dragons into Westeros to save the day, and Jon Snow might not be able to fend off the invading legion of the undead. But Tywin's death told us that the smug bastards like Littlefinger and Ramsay Snow shouldn't be so smug either.

Hannibal is a series that uses inevitability to play nasty games with us. We think we know that eventually, Hannibal Lecter will be behind bars, offering cryptic advice to our heroes. Yet the show has also pulled the rug out from under us, killing characters from the books that are not yet supposed to be dead... maybe. Unlike Game of Thrones, I haven't read the corresponding books, but there are some characters, such as Doctor Chilton, who I've seen in the movies and yet have died on the show (or at least appear to have. We've had two characters come back from what looked like death, so who knows?)

Season Two ends with Hannibal in a state of what could maybe be called victory. The core cast is pretty much all bleeding out in his house from their various injuries, and Hannibal walks out into a cleansing rain. Yet is this really a triumph? Hannibal is now exposed publicly as the killer he is. Never again can he hide as the high-society intellectual. Technically, he's fleeing when he steps over Alana and leaves his house forever. Yet again, the line between triumph and defeat is blurred. With his false life - his "Person Suit," as Bedelia puts it - now open knowledge (though admittedly, the suit might be a little unbuttoned, but I imagine he's still got it on,) Hannibal can step out of the cocoon and present himself as a fully-formed being. Hannibal is thus allowed to transform from the seductive, deal-making devil and present his true self, which is the apocalyptic beast.

And yet...

We know he'll be caught, and he'll be put in a cage. Perhaps most intriguingly, as Will clutches his own guts and tries feebly to keep pressure on Abigail's spurting neck-wound (and sorry for the imagery there - blame Bryan Fuller and his team,) we see in Will's mind's eye the Ravenstag - that haunting, mythic beast that represented Hannibal to him - is also on the floor, bleeding out, its breathing slowing. What does that mean?

Hannibal is inhuman. Actually, there's an interesting dichotomy between Hannibal and Game of Thrones. The latter is a fantasy series that nevertheless attempts to treat its characters and setting with as much realism as possible - truly trying to imagine a medieval civilization in a world where magic and dragons exist - while Hannibal takes a world that is ostensibly governed by the same physical laws as our own and expands upon the psychological metaphors in its characters to generate stories that have mythic resonance.

While Hannibal is technically a flesh-and-blood human character, in the world of the imagination (which is of course where all stories truly take place anyway,) he is truly the embodiment of murder and evil. It's tempting, then, for a character who is such an elemental force, to simplify his emotions and mental state. A lesser show might have Hannibal waltzing out of the abattoir of a home he's made without a care in the world, but as close as the show comes to that, it doesn't quite allow for it. The cleansing rain that Hannibal absorbs isn't just there to get rid of the blood. Hannibal needs it to feel that he's truly made his transition, and perhaps to recover from what has been an emotionally difficult farewell. And if the ultimate embodiment of evil needs that, we know that there's fundamentally some room for good to get back in the fight.

It's a boring story when the good guys always win, and many have tried to subvert that by making the bad guys always win. But drama needs tension, and tension needs something like balance. A good villain, just like a good hero, needs to be flawed. The flaws give drama its texture, and the ambiguity makes for a good story.