On Election Day, Elon Musk posted a video on X, his social media platform, presenting himself as an avatar of “Dark MAGA.” A blizzard of pop-culture memes evoking anime, comic books and action movies, the two-minute supercut bristles with a familiar chaotic energy. Donald Trump, in his trademark blue suit and red tie, strides across the frame in broad daylight, while Musk, in a black cap and T-shirt, cuts a gleefully diabolical figure. To date, the video has garnered 91.4 million views.
A visitor from outer space, versed in the semiotics of the internet but ignorant of the political context, might have guessed that the two men were adversaries rather than allies: hero and villain. Whatever archetype actually describes Musk’s relationship to Trump — minion, sidekick, wartime consigliere, “first buddy” — there is no question that he radiates supervillain energy. In his own way, Trump does too.
Let me be very clear: I mean this not as a moral judgment but as the description of an aesthetic, a matter of style rather than content. To observe that Trump’s opponents and Musk’s critics see them as villains would hardly count as much of an insight. What is interesting is that many of their admirers see them that way. More than that, the supervillain persona — world-dominatingly ambitious, wildly unpredictable, unbound by norms or rules — is one that both the president-elect and the richest man in the world have cultivated.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. As Steve Bannon — another exuberant self-styled prince of MAGA darkness — is fond of saying, quoting the late right-wing media gadfly Andrew Breitbart, politics is downstream from culture. Up there, where the snowpack of collective dreaming melts into the watersheds of commercial storytelling, the villains have been in the ascendant for quite a while.
The bad guys, reliable, sometimes interchangeable antagonists in our movie and TV morality plays, have been promoted to main character status. The second “Joker” movie, “Folie à Deux,” may have flopped, but that had more to do with the fact that it was a musical (and terrible) than with fan rejection of the titular clown. He has been joined this fall by another longtime Batman nemesis, the Penguin, who holds down a grim and gripping HBO series in the prosthetically uglified person of Colin Farrell.
One of the likely blockbusters of the holiday season is “Wicked,” another musical, adapted from the long-running stage show that rehabilitates the green-skinned witch (now known as Elphaba) from “The Wizard of Oz” with a sympathetic back story. Disney did the same a few years ago with “Cruella,” a revisionist origin story of the notorious puppy-hater from “One Hundred and One Dalmatians” that may have predicted the selection of Kristi Noem as secretary of homeland security.
In these movies, the characters aren’t so much evil as bullied, belittled and misunderstood. What might have seemed like their essential flaws — the Joker’s nihilism, Cruella’s ambition, Elphaba’s defiance — turn out to be virtues, or at least understandable responses to unfair circumstances. Their stories, built on familiar source material, invite us to believe that we’ve been looking at the world, or at least those imagined worlds, all wrong.
The Triumph of the Heel
“When did it become cool to cheer the heels?” a user named lilbebe50 wondered earlier this year on a Reddit thread about professional wrestling. In wrestling, a heel is the equivalent of a comic-book supervillain: the outrageous, rule-breaking character whose job is to inspire boos from the audience as he taunts and manhandles his wholesome opponent, known as the babyface (or sometimes just the face).
Other Redditors obliged with answers drawn from the history of professional wrestling and their own experiences as fans. One of them — luciferslarder — offered an explanation that resonates beyond the ring. “Heels are frequently the better actors and frequently the better realized characters in feuds,” this commenter wrote. “When the heels get too much presence or their actions start making sense compared to the ‘oooh you better not you meanies’ response, they become the favorites.”
In wrestling, the line between face and heel is not fixed. Especially in the last 25 years or so, many performers have played both sides of the divide, including such superstars as the Rock and Hulk Hogan, who flipped from face to heel and back again.
Trump, whose involvement with the sport goes way back — and who has named Linda McMahon, one of the prime movers of World Wrestling Entertainment, as his secretary of education — has mastered this dualism, even transcended it. During his campaign, he toggled continually between the two roles, sometimes in the course of a single public appearance. He could enact both the babyface tropes of wounded innocence and flag-waving wholesomeness and the belligerent, transgressive, over-the-top rantings of the classic heel.
Many observers outside the world of wrestling wondered why Trump’s threatening, vulgar, sometimes outright bizarre behavior didn’t faze his supporters. But his campaign was demonstrating the truth of luciferslarder’s axiom. This heel was making sense.
Sympathy for the Devil
In 1667, John Milton published “Paradise Lost,” a literary blockbuster, more than 10,000 lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter with an explicit theological intention. Milton retold the story of Adam and Eve against a backdrop of celestial combat, a “war in heaven” between the forces of God and a rebellious faction of angels led by Lucifer, also known as Satan.
The Devil, as many readers have noticed, is the most interesting character in the poem. Compared with his rivals — a one-dimensional omnipotent deity and his large adult son — Satan is dashing, clever and, to use a Hollywood anachronism, relatable. He is endowed with a point of view, an inner life, a palette of emotions and a sense of grievance that serve to humanize him.
Over the centuries, some critics have argued that Milton wrote the character that way to demonstrate his diabolical power, so that readers would experience, on the page, a version of Eve’s temptation in the garden, and be inoculated against sin by understanding its dangerous allure.
The poet William Blake, the Romantic era’s ultimate Milton stan — he wrote an epic of his own with Milton as the hero — saw it otherwise. “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of angels and God, and at liberty when of devils and Hell,” Blake argued, “is because he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”
That judgment — a premonition of luciferslarder’s insight about wrestling — can be applied to storytellers before Milton and since. The more interesting the villain, the more chance that audiences will be enchanted rather than appalled. Some villains have a compelling back story, a primal wound that explains their grudge against the world. Others have an argument that, however extreme its consequences, has some justice to it.
Of course, there are embodiments of pure, metaphysical evil, Voldemorts and Saurons cut off from sympathy by their absolute, causeless badness. But even Darth Vader was once the idealistic young Anakin Skywalker, and even Thanos, the most monstrous of the recent Marvel baddies, had a semi-legitimate grievance against the universe. Lucifer, a freethinking rebel kicked out of heaven for asking the wrong questions, fulfills both criteria.
Those characters, though, are foils, which is what Milton intended Satan to be — a figure set up to be righteously vanquished by God and his loyal angels. “Paradise Lost” tries to uphold a moral lesson that its psychological nuance and narrative momentum work to undermine. To Blake, that negative energy is what makes Milton a “true poet,” his imagination free to roam in the darkness. It’s also what makes him, and his demonic antihero, recognizably modern.
The Antihero and the Bad Fan
The early 2000s were the golden age of the pop-culture antihero. Existentially troubled, morally ambiguous, internally conflicted protagonists had flourished in literature and movies before, but the simultaneous ascendance of prestige television and comic-book-based movie franchises placed those guys (and they were mostly guys) at the center of attention.
Comic books had been sending their caped and costumed warriors into angsty, queasy ethical and psychic territory for decades; in their earliest incarnations, both Batman and Spider-Man were notably alienated modern souls. Until the 21st century, though, the movies mostly treated comics as kids’ stuff. The modern Hollywood superhero boom, which started with Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” in 2002, eagerly exploited the gritty, grown-up potential of the genre. The big screen welcomed a parade of glowering, cynical, troubled paladins: Wolverine, Deadpool and, above all, the Batman of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.
The middle chapter of that series, “The Dark Knight,” marks a pivotal moment in the evolution of the supervillain. It’s not only that Heath Ledger’s Joker is the hot charismatic center of a notably icy movie. (Nolan, you might say, was of the Joker’s party without knowing it.) Or that the way the Joker provokes Batman — “To them, you’re just a freak like me” and all that — shrinks the moral distance between them. The likeness only makes sense because Batman has already embraced the vibes of villainhood.
Bruce Wayne, the Dark Knight’s alter ego, is a man rich enough to live without accountability or consequences. His masked persona is an instrument of retribution, formed in response to the murder of his parents. Not only is Batman a vigilante, he also refuses to distinguish between his personal vendettas and his societal mission. He’s a hero because he says he is; the audience and the citizens of Gotham City have no choice but to take his word for it. Unless we choose the Joker, who steals the movie — and the zeitgeist — by being more fun, more memorable and memeable, than his dour antagonist.
“The Dark Knight” was released in 2008, the same year as the first season of AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” which in retrospect proves to be the paradigmatic supervillain origin story of our moment. At the time, though, it looked like another cable-TV exercise in antiheroism, following in the footsteps of shows like “The Sopranos,” “The Shield” and “Mad Men,” about a fallible everyman sucked into an ethical gray zone by circumstances beyond his control.
Walter White, a beleaguered, bumbling high school chemistry teacher living with his wife and teenage son in a drab house in Albuquerque, responds to a midlife crisis and a cancer diagnosis by going into the methamphetamine business. Very quickly, though — by the second episode — the show zeros in on Walter’s burgeoning ambition and his ruthless assertion of control. As the seasons progress, he manipulates, corrupts and outright destroys everyone who stands in his way.
He evolves into a remorseless killer and a criminal mastermind, complete with a sinister alter ego. Far from an average guy, Walter is a genius, a disrupter, a Silicon Valley-style innovator who happens to cook crystal rather than write code.
Were we supposed to root for him? During the fifth season of “Breaking Bad,” Emily Nussbaum, then The New Yorker’s television critic, noticed that some online admirers of the show were answering aggressively in the affirmative. It wasn’t that they overlooked Walter’s increasingly abusive treatment of his wife, Skyler, or his coldblooded willingness to sacrifice the lives of innocents in the service of his hubris. On the contrary, his sociopathy is what they liked best about him.
“Breaking Bad” was a prime site of what Nussbaum called the “bad fan” phenomenon, in which the most passionate members of the audience embrace what they are meant to condemn. It’s as if the most devoted readers of “Paradise Lost,” a poem written “to justify the ways of God to man,” had become devil worshipers.
More than a decade after “Breaking Bad” concluded with Walter’s death, his magnetism remains undiminished — Bryan Cranston won four Emmys for what is surely one of the all-time great feats of television acting — and the bad fan idea seems at once prophetic and moot. The bad fans understood what the creators of the show could not quite see, which was that Walter is the hero because he is the villain. It turned out to be a distinction without a difference.
The Timeline Shifts
What are superheroes, anyway? The answer, advanced through the Cold War and its confusing aftermath in countless movie and comic-book timelines, is that they are defenders of the status quo. In their own worlds, they face down threats to the urban, national, planetary or cosmic order. In ours, they keep the machinery of commercial entertainment running profitably.
Not long ago, their dominance seemed unshakable. The universe — the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Yes, but not only that one — was home to an ever-expanding executive committee of good guys serving an army of good fans. There was a talking raccoon, a sentient tree, a Norse god, an African king; Iron Man, Ant-Man, Spider-Man, Black Widow.
And then the timeline shifted. The last “Avengers” movie came out in the summer of 2019; a few months later, “Joker” took the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. Those are just movies, of course. They made tons of money. A lot of people enjoyed both of them. But they were also part of a dialectic that has continued to play out over the past five years, a contest between good and evil not as antithetical moral principles but as competing styles of expression.
“Good” in this story means proper behavior, responsible fandom, obedience to the norms and regulations that govern the cosmos. “Evil” is the rude, defiant, anarchic, sometimes violent refusal to go along with any of that. It signifies disruption, rebellion, a wickedness that is both frightening and fun. The Devil’s party is just getting started.
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