playing the villain

when an actor becomes a villain, how does it effect them mentally, physically, and emotionally? i'm not sure what this blog aims to discover but hopefully it will be something. -- written by robyn johnson, a freshman at the university of memphis. this...

[steveinaspeedo]

[thevanisher]

[dothrakidaenerys]

[transcharacteroftheday]

Today’s trans character of the day is: Jason Dean from Heathers

[saif-umair]

HEATHERS

[iaminfiniteus]

[malefactoriing]

Not That Subtle

I can't believe you did it. I was teasing. I loved you. Sure, I climbed up here to kill you, but first I was going to try and get you back. With this amazing petition. It's a shame you can't see what our fellow students really signed. Listen. "We students of Westerburg High will die. Today. Our burning bodies will be the ultimate protest to a society that degrades us. Fuck you all." Not that subtle but neither's blowing up the school. Talk about your suicide pacts. When our school explodes tomorrow, it's going to be the kind of thing that infects a generation. A Woodstock for the 80's. Damn, we coulda toasted marshmallows together.

Ah, Evil Gloating. A Trope that is the most convenient way to cause a villain’s downfall. In how many circumstances can it be said that if a villain hadn’t gloated to the hero about how they were going to succeed (revealing their entire plan in the process) that they would have ACTUALLY succeeded? 

The question that haunts me as I prepare to do Jason’s monologue - is this really gloating. We get hints of almost regret or apprehension a few times - in the way he says he was going to try and win Veronica back (surely this is sincere, why would he lie to her corpse?) and in the wistfulness of the Damn in the last sentence. And yet, it is obvious that, narcissist that JD is (noted by how he calls his petition ‘amazing’ and says his bombing will be a ‘Woodstock for the 80′s), I’ve decided that he really is just.. gloating.

But this isn’t rub-it-in-your-face gloating, this is more.. wishing to share his accomplishment with the girl he loves. It reminds me of a child bringing a painting to his mother in hopes that she’ll put in the fridge. There’s almost a mirror moment in how the two women that impacted Jason’s life - his mother and Veronica - both killed themselves and he either saw it happen or found the body (or so he believes).

So, what motivates Jason’s murderous urges? Granted, most kids who get picked on envision... killing their tormentors, I’m sure. I mentioned in class about how the girl behind her said she wished someone would shoot the entitled children in the front of the room.. and I sort of agreed. I’d never wish death, especially not one so gruesome, upon anyone.. but..

WARNING. THIS IS GOING TO BE DARK. I’M ABOUT TO RELATE TO JD MAJORLY. PLEASE DON’T CALL THE COPS. I’M NOT GOING TO KILL ANYONE.

When I think about those kids, my skin crawls. There were about 5 boys in the grade below mine, 2 girls in the grade below mine, and 2-3 girls in my grade. All of them were conventionally attractive people, well-dressed (aka the shirts in the mall that cost like 30 dollars just because they’re from a white store - as in hollister or aeropostale etc), and mostly white people (there was one black guy) from financially sound families. I actually grew up with about 3 of them. Our parents are friends; we all go to the same church.

But I know them as high school students. I know them as the guys and girls who all serial date out of the same group, fight about it, make fun of people based off of their appearances, smoke and drink all the time and brag about it (and they’re 16-18??), brag about sex and hooking up (???), and culturally appropriate and say homophobic remarks and use the word ‘retard’ and just are AWFUL people.

I don’t want to kill anyone. I don’t want anyone else to kill anyone.. but

1. The idea of them being out of my life forever is really appealing

2. They are SHITTY PEOPLE. I would be so happy to know that there about 10 less privileged people bullying people and just being assholes in the world.

It’s like.. the fact that I’ve moved off to college almost isn’t enough - because I know they’re still out there being fuckboys and bitches. 

SORRY ABOUT THE LANGUAGE.

So, I can understand JD for that reason. When Heather not-so-accidentally gets poisoned, of course he probably never even CONSIDERED killing someone.. but it’s like, not ONLY is she not his problem anymore, but she isn’t going to cause problems for anyone else. The world is a little cleaner. And Veronica is the perfect getaway for the crime - the suicide note is bought so easily. Of course the idea, for Jason, who has grown up without a mother and with an abusive father, moving from city to city and never making any true emotional connections, becomes an almost.. addictive one. Wow, Heather, who was cruel and entitled and awful.. is out of the way, never to hurt anyone ever again, and there were no repercussions for it! Of course he wants to take out Kurt, Ram, Heather, Heather.. anyone that would threaten a pure world.

END MY RELATING TO JASON. I’M DONE BEING A PSYCHOPATH NOW I PROMISE.

I’m one of the people who questions the double standards in race, of course. Middle Eastern guy commits mass murder? Terrorist. Black guy commits mass murder? Thug. Hispanic guy commits mass murder? Ruining the country. White guy commits mass murder? Mentally disturbed :( Needs love :( 

That double standard isn’t fair! And you can’t simply write JD’s manslaughter of Heather Chandler nor his COLD BLOODED MURDER of Ram Sweeney and Kurt Kelley as a poor boy who was abused by his dad and just needed some friends and a mothers love (not that that doesn’t have anything to do with it) but the thing is.. JD was pretty much evil. Veronica, the girl he loved, got in his way, and the only way she was able to save herself was to fake her death. He would’ve killed her. He would’ve killed everyone. In this case the end does not justify the means. Sure, he is killing to clean up the world, but he’s also killing to cover his ass.. and he was going to blow up the entire school!

Betty Finn wasn’t a bad person! Most of those kids weren’t bad people, but he was going to kill them all just to get rid of the handful of jerks. JD was the kind of person he was trying to rid the world of (if this was even the real reason he was killing.. maybe he just wanted blood and this was a good excuse idk). 

Plus, everyone’s got some bad in them. You can’t kill someone just because they have a flaw. If that happens, it’s just like American Horror Story: Murder House or Scream Queens or Scandal. Everyone DIES for some petty reason. You can’t do that! That’s not how real life works!

The only unanswered question left for me is what took JD so long? It isn’t mentioned in the movie, so it is possible that this isn’t his first killing spree. He’s moved more than once, so maybe there’s a trail of bodies in his wake. However:

1. He seems pretty dumbstruck and uncertain initially when Heather actually dies and

2. At the Snack Shack, he seems genuinely sad to have moved so much.

So, what took so long JD? Never meet a villain who was truly deserving of your prey? Were you waiting for your perfect getaway car in the form of Veronica? Or maybe something to fight for?

I’m going to go with the last one. Sure, he ended up trying to kill her, but in his words, it was because their love was God. He needed to sacrifice everything for the girl he loved, even her, in order to achieve their vision of a pure world. He kills Heather to protect Veronica, and Kurt and Ram for revenge for their rumors. He attempts to kill Veronica in order to stop her from ruining their plans -

look, I’m not saying he’s a good guy or he’s smart, but I guess I see why he acts the way he does. Veronica transformed him from bitter guy with no purpose and a general hatred for other humans to bitter guy with a hatred for humans and a girl to protect. Does that make sense? It sounds so much better in my head. Veronica motivated him because she loved him, and nobody else ever had.. and he was going to cultivate that love even if he had to kill to do so (at first, anyway)

Thank you.

[malefactoriing]

Harry Potter

Harry Potter! Of course everyone has been looking forward to this freakin’ lesson all semester long. Now, we don’t do scenes until tomorrow so I’m gonna hold off going too far into this until then, but I’ll start you off with a fun little anecdote.

In middle school, I became friends with this guy.. we’ll call him Dan. So, Dan is in a group of friends with me, a girl we’ll call Faye, a girl we’ll call Catherine, and a girl we’ll call Ashley. Dan is in seventh grade, Faye is in sixth, Catherine’s in eighth grade (like me) and Ashley is in seventh. Dan’s new to the school, and as an eighth grader, I decide to take him under my wing. And we bond over the fact that we’ve never had really great friends before and we both used to want to kill ourselves and other emo middle school bullshit. 

Dan tells me that once, he went to a concert at the Midsouth Fair with some friends, but they left him behind, and when he wanted to find them, they texted him that they didn’t want to be seen with him in public because he was fat, ugly, and an embarrassment. That broke my heart, because he was my friend and I can’t believe anyone would ever be that deliberately mean.

Fast forward to the second semester of eighth grade, where after I miss school for a couple of days (a death in the family), I come back and.. there’s not as many chairs at our table where we play Uno, and they won’t make room for me. They won’t sit with me at lunch. They won’t talk to me in our study hall class. I’m really confused, because I don’t know what I did.

Then Dan messages me on Facebook that the group (except Catherine because she’s cool as hell) thinks I’m weird and ugly and they don’t want to hang out with me anymore.

And I wasn’t really upset at what a bunch of petty kids (who all decided their anxiety was too much for public school and all but 2 of them were homeschooled the next year) thought about me. What really made my blood boil was Dan, who had confided in me about his insecurities and pain of rejection over small reasons by people who had claimed to be his friends, who should’ve understood while that whole scenario was fucked up, was the first person to ridicule and outcast me.

How does this relate to anything?

Slughorn had described Dolores Umbridge of being an idiotic woman whom he never liked. Ollivander said she had a stunted character. It is hinted at throughout the novel that she wasn’t a Lily Evans type of character, but rather a loner, a nerd, and a bit of a closed-minded and rude person. Her father taught her to be a snob, which doesn’t really help. 

So someone who never really fit in with her peers would probably be the first one to cause them trouble. Someone who associated her worse times with Hogwarts (mostly Slughorn, but whatever) would probably grow to resent the headmaster and the teachers and give them grief by getting a position in the school where she has authority over them, even costing some of them their jobs. A woman like this would also love to wield this same authority over children, continuing an abuse-type of cycle, where she can inflict the pain that she felt from not liking her instructor.

How accurate am I? I guess we will find out.

[malefactoriing]

Titus Andronicus

Blood, Gore, Betrayal, and Shakespeare. What more could a girl ask for? Kidding. As a feminist, Titus was hard for me to absorb, because of course I just want to point out the absolute evil of Tamora sending her sons to rape Lavinia, because she, as a woman, would know of the inherent fear that all females have of that very scenario. It’s why women are afraid to go places alone in the dark, and even in Shakespeare’s time that should’ve been a common fear of women. Maybe not spoken about like it is now, but surely all women knew of sexual harrassment and warned their friends about it, a quiet murmur to be careful around men. And, of course, the fact that the boys were so willing to defile Lavinia is an entire encounter in itself. They didn’t question the order to kill and rape, so their fate, I say, is not a crime.

Titus is a very.. Caesar-type character, in my opinion, but Caesar had his faults. Titus, in my opinion, was doing just fine. I think he was justified in killing Tamora’s eldest son. An eye for an eye, as they say. But, the play is described as a ‘revenge cycle’, so of course Tamora would have Lavinia raped and frame the other sons for murder, and then Titus’s poor other son was just a product of trying to explain to his father what is right and wrong. Even in the end, Titus Honor Kills Lavinia, then Tamora, and then he’s killed by the emperor who is killed by Lucius to avenge his father.. It reminds me of shows like Scandal and American Horror Story (Murder House & Coven especially). Like, you can’t just kill someone because they pissed you off or because they killed someone else or because they wronged you. If everyone killed everyone they felt needed to be killed, everyone would be dead. It’s ridiculous!

So, what am I saying here? I’m trying to find some reasoning, some motivation behind Titus and Tamora and everyone else in the play because probably the only innocent people in the entire thing were Lavinia and.. Mucius? I think that was his name. Anyways, first off, excuse my language, but I think the primary reason that all of them have for doing their horrible deeds is that they are fucked up people!!!! Beyond that, I’d just say that they are impulsive and grief stricken people. Someone kills your son, you’re not going to sit there and think ‘Hm, I can understand his actions as an act of war and forgive him’. You find out the guys who rape/mutilate your daughter, the first thing you want to do is cause them 10000x the amount of pain they caused her, and same to their mother if she warranted it. I can understand it, I guess. They’re angry and upset and the whole thing is very Shakespearean. (Romeo and Juliet would’ve been FINE if they hadn’t been so impulsive, but NOOO they had to do everything right then, huh?) It’s kind of ‘go go go’ and ‘revenge now, logical thought process later!’ etc.

Lavinia, I can actually kind of relate to, mainly because she’s a girl and I tend to kind of favor the romantic female characters. Call me biased. But here she is, a girl in a time where she can’t really be allowed to pick her husband, minding her own business with her betrothed, and then he gets murdered and she gets violated and tortured.. like, Hell yeah. It is perfectly fine for you to call those assholes out and bake their bodies into pies. In fact, I encourage it. Sucks that she died, but I think, at the same time, Titus really did put her out of her misery. It was like Million Dollar Baby. You know she was ready to go, even if she was a great character.

Did this make sense? I feel like this was a stream of conciousness and that it wasn’t hardly organized. Oh well, I hope you enjoyed it. I know I did.

[petrasvonkant]

Jessica Lange and Harry Lenox in Titus, 1999.

[donttemptmeiknowyourmother]

Titus Andronicus is real fucked up yo

[wiseloudowls-blog-deactivated20]

Who worked for nothin’ in that war? When they work for nothing’, I’ll work for nothing’. Did they ship a gun or truck outa Detroit before they got their price? Is that clean? It’s dillars and cents, nickels and dines; war and peace, it’s nickels and dimes, what’s clean? Half the Goddamn country is gotta go if I do!

Joe Keller, All My Sons, Arthur Miller (via kirsteinandarlert)

[tachypodion]

It is the view of the Ministry that a theoretical knowledge will be sufficient to get you through your examinations, which after all, is what school is all about.

Just when I thought Umbridge couldn’t get any worse, I remembered that she said this. Even more reason to hate her. (via asexualpadfoot)

[malefactoriing]

All My Sons

How far is someone willing to go to get out of trouble? Of course, any child will probably lie to a teacher if they know it will stop a call home. There’s a certain amount of integrity someone has to develop in order to make the crucial decision between self preservation and doing what is right. For Joe Keller, this is particularly intense, because he makes the decision more than once. Not only does he have to decide whether to send off his defective machinery to save his family, his money, and himself (an instinct the Great Depression instilled in him) or to put a halt to the entire thing, which would ensure failure by the means of the business but could have, perhaps saved lives... Keller has to make the decision on whether he wants to continue to live in his fragile web of lives to his family, himself, and the community, or if he wants to do what is right and accept the consequences.

I don’t see Keller as an evil character - it is actually particularly difficult for me to even consider him a villain. Sure, people died based on a selfish decision he made. Yes, the men were trusting that their own side would at the very least send them efficient weapons and armor to at least let them stand a chance on the battlefield, but it’s important to know that Joe never had malice in his heart. His own son was in the military - of course, everyone that was lost was his son, when it came down to it - and there’s of course no way that he would want someone to die. He was of course aware that sending those plane parts to the cause could result in death and he did selfishly choose his own life over the lives of the men fighting (only to take his own life, so look how far that got him). But this was a man trying to protect his family and to cement their future in a manner that he wasn’t able to have.

Now, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but it serves as an important factor to bare in mind that Keller lacks a lot of the malice to serve as a true villain. An antagonist, yes, I can agree with that, but I feel a villain is a bit more... doing evil for the enjoyment of it whereas our villain in All My Sons seemed to be doing evil for the sake of survival. More to come.

[malefactoriing]

Response to Scenes

Last Wednesday in the classroom, everyone got to work a few scenes from The Wizard of Oz. Due to an absence, I was unable to read for the Wicked Witch of the West. I feel like, for this reason, I was unable to truly analyze her on a deeper level - although this is also due to the fact that I missed our table working. That being said, there is a lot of truth behind the fact that our Witch, who was an icon of terror in her day, was just that - terror. In the movie, Hamilton plays our Witch as a dark and ruthless woman who wants nothing more than the death of Dorothy Gale, for the sake of her slippers, a form of revenge (for the death of her sister and for the fact that Dorothy was a thorn in her side from the beginning) and possibly even for her own sadistic pleasure.

However, be it from my analysis or perhaps my love for a certain broadway show, I have to see the Wicked Witch as more than just some broomstick-riding, cackling, green-skinned vile thing. How would you react if some bitch fell from the sky, crushed your sister under a house, stole her shoes, and was treated like some princess by everyone around who had just witnessed the manslaughter? 

Looking into Wicked, it’s important to notice that in the land of Oz, the Wicked Witch probably did face some sort of discrimination because of her green skin, whether or not it’s actually mentioned in the script that we dissect or not. 

Of course, that’s no excuse for her antagonizing a girl who, in the books, was supposed to not be much older than twelve or thirteen. After all, Dorothy quite literally fell into the lap of all of these troubles, and it would hint that the Wicked Witch is quite deranged, be it from grief or stress or a difficult past, and that is what goads her into attacking her. The shoes, however powerful they must be, were in a position where they could not be returned, and attempting to kill a little girl in order to retrieve them is what made our green-skinned gal deserving of her fate.

[malefactoriing]

McGonagall (with the utmost grandiloquence): And now…back to this bitch that had a lot to say about me in my own classroom. Umbitch, WHAT’S GOOD?

[fictionandtheatre]

Defense Against the Dark Arts: Year Five - Dolores Umbridge

“‘I should have made my meaning plainer,’ said Professor McGonagall, turning at last to look at Umbridge directly in the eyes. ‘He has achieved high marks in all Defense Against the Dark Arts tests set by a competent teacher.’”

{Year One} {Year Two} {Year Three} {Year Four}