Villains
Audible.com has listed its top 20 fictional villains. Lists like these give me heartburn because they are often internally inconsistent and arbitrary. (This one is for an audible book seller and is a clear advertising ploy, so I guess it makes sense they include plays and books but not movies for their "fiction"). This one though got me thinking. I'm not sure all the people they list should really be classified as villains. For example, Alex from A Clockwork Orange- plenty of evil qualities for sure but he's the hero/antihero of the book not the villain (I think Dr Ludovico is the villain). I have similar reservations about Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Jack in the Shining, Mr. Hyde and Big Brother. I am reserving judgment on Satan in Paradise Lost. (maybe if the book cited were the Bible).
Out of 20 top books too, they come up with at least crime novel I never heard of. Of course it leads to the issue of all the great villains left out- Sauron from Lord of the Rings, Comrade Napoleon from Animal Farm (a better Orwell choice), Huck's father. Who else are we missing?
posted by New England Guy @ 11:50 AM
9 Comments:
I agree. Too many of these characters are nasty protagonists, not villains.
By the way, Oddjob in Goldfinger? Very memorable, but he's just the beta villain in that piece.
Yup, that's an important distinction, but sometimes it's blurred. E.g. what distinction do you make between Hannibal Lechter and Jame Gumb? Other great villains are: Doctor Christian Szell (Marathon Man); Smaug (The Hobbit); Long John Silver (Treasure Island); Nurse Ratched (One Flew Over...).
Nurse Ratched made the list.
Pap, from Huck Finn, may be a villain, but he disappears pretty quickly. The Duke and the Dauphin are more memorable, though they're more scoundrels than straight villains. How about Injun Joe from Tom Sawyer?
I would also object to HAL from 2001. It was not a villain, it had simply been misprogrammed. It was trying to dothe right thing.
How about Captain Queeg from "The Caine Mutiny"? Or Bligh from Mutiny on the Bounty (I don't know if that was a book first).
Thernadier in "Les Miserables" is a lot worse in the book than in the show - extremely villianous.
Lady MacBeth from MacBeth?
Lady Whatever-her-name-was from Great Expectations was pretty nasty.
It's tough to think of villains who don't have some redeeming qualities, like the Hunchback of Notre Dame or the Phantom of the Opera. Without redeeming qualities, villains can be boring characters.
Are you referring to Miss Havisham? She's more a pathetic figure, I'd say.
I thought that Bill Sykes was the villain in Oliver?!?
I was thinking of Havisham. I guess when i read it, I really despised her.
Also i think of Sykes as the greater villain in Oliver Twist, but haven't read that, only seen various movies, so I'm not sure if the movies lighten up on Fagin.
In the 1970s, both Fagin and Shylock (I'm thinking of performances by Geo C Scott and Laurence Olivier) have been reinterpreted as less villainous to take into account of modern sensibilities and of course the Holocaust (Sir Laurence specifically explains this in a BBC production I think I saw on PBS) . Though, Shakespeare being great, there's enough in the text to support such a reading though there's also clearly enough to support the truly villainous portrayals too.
NEguy
Havisham is nicely re-invented in the Jasper Fforde Thursday Next books. And my guess is they lightened up on Fagin because the book's portrayal is pretty blatantly anti-semitic.
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