A Ramble About Villains

I have recently become infatuated with the television series Once Upon a Time. The truth is that I'm a bit of a sucker for this kind of thing to begin with. I love the concept of taking the old fairy tales and bringing them into the real world and mixing the two up. As a result, I'm also partial to the movie Enchanted and the older TV miniseries The 10^th Kingdom. I never watched it on the TV when it was broadcast, because we rarely had our TV channels come in clear enough, but I was always curious. I burned through the entire series in a matter of three or four days watching the DVDs, now I find myself looking up sneak peak clips on Youtube to get the gist of what's happening this season. Yes, I'm sorry to say, my macho credentials (if there ever were any) have now been completely flushed down the toilet.

What fascinates me most about the series is the backstory it gives the familiar storybook characters, especially the villains. The evil queen is evil because she's been hurt and emotionally, and physically abused by her overbearing and well... abusive mother. Rumpelstiltskin lost his son and now everything he does is to try and find him again, but competing with a father's love is his terrible fear of losing the security his enormous power gives him. These characters started out as essentially good people but “fell” because of the enormous pain which they suffered and the choices they made in response to that pain.

As human beings, we have a disorder which theologians call sin. We got it when our first ancestors also fell and we live with the inherited consequences of their choices. Part of this disorder is the psychological drive to judge things or people as good or evil, right or wrong, black or white. There is generally little rhyme or reason to the way this drive gets programmed except for the values given to it by environment, upbringing, and our own choices. The common denominator underneath it usually turns out to be “I am good, and anything not like me is bad.” Don't believe me? Check Genesis 3 and the fall of man, by what real logic is nudity somehow bad? Every other creature on the planet is and was naked, yet this is the first thing pronounced as bad by our newly fallen first parents.

We especially like to label people as either good or evil and see them only through that lens. Thus the storybook villains that do bad for the sake of doing bad. But reality isn't like that. Every human being does what they think is the best decision, the “good” decision, in the moment. But what happens is that what we think is the “good” decision often turns out the be the one which causes the most harm. We then have to come to terms with the fact that we did or said something harmful, which most people might agree was “bad”. This causes a problem for the disordered (or sinful) human psyche something like the “fatal error” that a computer will sometimes give you when the processor receives a series of calculations which give it answers which can't possibly exist according to its own internal logic (maybe I'm showing my age here because this happens much less frequently with modern computing devices than it used to).

The psyche then has to resolve this fatal error according to it's own internal rules. Often, but not always, it refuses to acknowledge that it did something “bad”, or if it did then it begins to rewrite its rules so that “bad” is somehow now “good” and therefore it didn't do anything “bad” in the first place. With these kinds of continual rewrites, the psyche can maintain its sanity (in the computing sense of the word). This is how evil queens and Rumpelstiltskins are made, and it is a very easy slippery slope to walk into. More often than not, the people who find themselves in this position are suffering horrendously because there's still some part of their internal programming telling them that they've done “bad” and the thing they want most, even if they don't realize it, is to go back and not start down the slippery slope at all. It is my observation that everyone I have ever met has gone through this themselves at least a little. I know I have.

When you learn of Rumpel's and the queen's backstories (at least according to the show), you begin to have compassion for characters for which you would never before have thought of having compassion and empathy. You want to see them go down, but there's a part of you that also wants to see them redeemed because of the hurt and pain they themselves are suffering.

There are people in our lives, with all of us (let's be honest), that we tend to view as villains like the queen and Rumpel with hearts as black as can be. When we look at those people we need to ask the question, why are they that way? We also need to ask, what would it take to bring me to that point, or am I already there? And then the final question, what would it take to redeem that person, and how can I help bring it about? Before you decide the last question is too hard, remember God's answer to it concerning you.