Antiheroes often arise in apocalyptic, sci-fi, and action-adventure settings: Mad Max, Road Warrior, Thunderdome, Waterworld, and The Fifth Element. One of the best is the swashbuckling yet sensitive Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) in The Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
On the less lethal side, since they’re mostly just skewering convention, are TV characters Larry Sanders, Archie Bunker, Dr. Gregory House, Bart Simpson, and the little monsters in South Park.
C. IN YOUR CREATIONS
Inner Drives Center of Motivation - Aspirational Solar Plexus masquerading as Lower Solar Plexus.
Be sure the society in which your antihero operates is moving towards or entrenched in over-regulation, decline, or decay.
Use a tenet of the culture currently ignored by most people as the watchword of the antiheroine: freedom, liberty, equality, justice, peace, prosperity, etc. She brings back the true meaning of the ideal, often by showing how horridly corrupted it is.
How much Darkness is a little, how much is too much? Show ways of balancing the bad things that have to be done with the good of what President Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”
Antiheroes in the old film noir genre, such as John Garfield, Robert Stack, and Robert Mitchum, had great dialogue establishing their roles, rather than just physical violence. In your stories, show us the psychological context; why are these people renegades? Don’t just cut to the action; show us what they’re fighting for or against; give us understandable reasons.
Rogue Warriors are great antiheroes. Have an honorable backstory, a time they fought valiantly for the Good, the True, the Beautiful, but then were disillusioned or disinherited. At heart, they still long to serve the higher cause.
In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare observed, “They say the best men are molded out of faults, and, for the most, become much more the better for being a little bad.”
6.
BAD BOYS AND GIRLS
The Trickster
The Rake and the Temptress
Pimps, Panderers, and Pushers
Mommie Dearest and Bad Dads
Killer Kids
Evil Twins
Pirates, Rebels, and Traitors
Bad Cop, Worse Cop
Bumblers
Dictators, Tyrants, and Cult Leaders
Mad Scientists
Psychopaths, Pedophiles, and Serial Killers
What is it about bad boys and bitches that is so darn attractive?
They personify our own internal rebel, the one we aren’t courageous enough to be. They challenge our mores and beliefs about proper behavior. They give us a chance to be saviors. They also challenge our own powers of seduction. Some primitive part of us still loves the chase, and like a cheetah cub, we don’t recognize food unless it’s running away from us. The unobtainable, scary, dangerous person is exciting.
Some of us become bad boys and bitches around weak-willed or needy people. Something about cringing just brings out the bully. Animal instinct to cull the herd or spiritual instinct to heal the world? Not a pretty picture either way, but a very interesting one.
Sometimes it’s a supreme selfishness, most often found in creative types. They’re married to the Muse, their creativity takes first place, and frankly, if you can’t handle it, too bad for you, but it’s not their problem.
Here are some archetypes of Bad Boys and Bitches. If your character fits any of these, there is a wealth of examples from life, psychology, and media to inspire the development of traits and foibles. Then add your own unique spin and voila — an exciting new character.
THE TRICKSTER
Most mythologies include a trickster god who’s always getting the better of pompous or silly people. The medieval court jester injected perspective and self deprecation to keep the regent mindful that it’s all just a game. Some tricksters are malevolent, like the jealous Norse god Loki, responsible for the death of the beloved god Baltar. Southwest American Indians find their god Coyote sharp, but not so deadly.
CHARACTERISTICS
Mentally sharp. Sharp tongue. Good command of language, twists words and phrases, double entendres, puns. Somewhat mean, sometimes downright cruel.
A. IN ACTION
Royal courts traditionally had a jester to break tensions, deflate egos, and entertain. Modern court jesters are media comedians, political cartoonists, satirists. Their sharp tongues and pens puncture the pomposity of assumed power and cry shrilly that not only is the emperor quite naked, he’s ill-formed as well. The establishment loathes the Trickster; the populace usually loves him.
B. IN MEDIA
This is not the comic relief in a story. The Trickster is strong and calculating, not a buffoon — though he may play one on TV. Think Batman’s Joker.
The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Saturday Night Live, Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury, The Simpsons, and South Park all skewer convention and pomposity.
C. IN YOUR CREATIONS
Inner Drives Center of Motivation – Throat: assessing situations, finding weak spots, pointing them out, and/or using them to bring down a power figure or deflate a situation.
Have your Trickster be clever and observant, ask probing questions, and be very facile with language. Using others’ faults against them is a favorite maneuver.
Entrapment: have your Trickster ferret out people’s secret desires and lure them in for the kill.
Have others underestimate your Trickster and either reveal things they should not or otherwise let their guard down.
Show that softening or redemption ruins this character, as their entire being is about their role to poke and prod.
THE RAKE AND THE TEMPTRESS
Sex can be a doorway to heaven, flinging wide the prison of the self for a joyride through the starry cosmos. It’s also a doorway for lots of other stuff, some of it really icky, like manipulation by Rakes and Temptresses.
Our innate desire for union lowers our physical, emotional, and psychic barriers. These people use that lowering of defenses to conquer others for the sheer pleasure of the chase or for darker motives.
Sometimes people are stereotyped into this category simply because of how they look, like cartoon femme fatale Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, who breathily protested she was only drawn bad. Then again, once you know how people perceive you and you keep projecting that appearance.…
CHARACTERISTICS
Pheromones gone wild. They exude an aura of irresistibility and they know it. Some don’t actually enjoy sex, but they use sex to gain power and control. Some may be searching for sexual fulfillment, coldly angry they’ve never found it. They’re not always physically beautiful, but they instinctively know what you think is beautiful and play that up. They quickly assess your pride (hair, profession, etc.) and your shame (weight, family, etc.) and use those to seemingly bond with you. They can boff you for days and murmur all the love words, but there’s always a deep chasm and a steep wall between you and their real self.
A. IN ACTION
The aging Roman Emperor Claudius was felled in part by his seductive, teenage vixen wife, whose insatiable sexual and political appetites extended to most of the Roman Senate.
Texas law used to look the other way if a man shot his wife and her lover. After all, like the jailbird babes sing in Chicago, they had it comin’.
The honey trap is a standard ploy in a spy’s toolbox, and there are rumors of special espionage sex schools.
B. IN MEDIA
Jewish lore says Adam’s first wife was headstrong Lilith. She was too sexually demanding (wanted to be on top), so he put her aside and got the supposedly more submissive Eve. That worked out real well, didn’t it? And remember Frazier Crane’s demon wife Lilith from Cheers and Frasier.
Casanova, Mozart’s opera “Don Giovanni,” The Portrait of Dorian Gray, I Claudius, Dangerous Liaisons, The Wedding Crashers, Looking for Mister Goodbar, Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, The Last Seduction, Bound, Secretary, Chicago.
C. IN YOUR CREATIONS
Inner Drives Center of Motivation – Lower Solar Plexus: narcissistic control over others via sex, & Sacral: sex, sex, and more sex.
The Wisdom Teachings warn that when you have sex with someone you download their Karma. Show how a character starts taking on the qualities, actions, and dialogue of the seducer.
Have a character get into Tantric sex practices and learn how they affect different energies and aspects of self and partner. He could discover these powers with horror, realizing he’s been manipulated; or with glee, realizing he can manipulate others.
Slowly reveal this archetype’s revulsion for others through cruel words, reluctance for nonsexual contact, or fastidiousness (showering immediately after sex, changing bed sheets, etc.).
Construct a turning point where this ultimate sex machine is knocked over by a simple touch or one tender kiss that begins to crumble her emotional fortress.
Turn the tables. Have your wronged character search out his seducer’s deepest (nonsexual) fear or desire and use that as the weapon of revenge.
PIMPS, PANDERERS, AND PUSHERS
These are really bad guys because they slave out other humans to the lowest desires of still other humans. Not to say that sex and lust aren’t simply basic desires, but when you’re enslaving a person to your own economic advantage, well, that’s like, um, slavery.
Getting innocent people hooked on addictive substances is simply evil. Offering someone a martini? Yeah, the dividing line here is vague, isn’t it? Is evil a factor of whether or not it’s illegal? Legal substances like tobacco and alcohol cause plenty of harm, yet unlike during Prohibition, those who make and sell them aren’t incarcerated.
CHARACTERISTICS
Control freaks. Users. People intent on wallowing in the degradation of others. Low self regard and low regard of others. Pessimistic. Defeatist. Cynical. Greedy. Sociopaths.
A. IN ACTION
Read history. Watch the news. Drive past a drug-sales street corner. Cruise the red-light district. Go to a nightclub. Go to a courthouse and observe pusher/dealer/user trials.
B. IN MEDIA
Scarface was so over the top it became a comedy. Traffic is a troubling, personal look at drug dealing. City of God illustrates both the lure and the dangers of pushing drugs, via two friends growing up in the slums of Rio de Janeiro.
Anne Bissell’s book Memoirs of a Sex Industry Survivor gives relevant insights into how girls get involved, and how they get out. Butterfly 8 with Elizabeth Taylor and Klute with Jane Fonda are classic films about call girls caught up in this pattern.
In the HBO series Deadwood both Al Swearingen and Cy Tolliver run whores. Their deepest motivations are reflected in their styles of management. Al is crude yet protective. Cy is slick but deadly.
C. IN YOUR CREATIONS
Inner Drives Center of Motivation – Sacral: sex-money-fear, & Lower Solar Plexus: personal power.
Not to make us sympathize but to make us understand, show us how and why a character started dealing or pimping.
Delve into their deeper motivations of displaced love, anger, vengeance, disappointment.
Show why wandering souls are drawn to the discipline and seeming protection of these strong-arm types.
Show how people with low self esteem would be drawn to a profession offering faint praise for who and what you are.
What does it take to walk away? To stay away?
Is this a societal necessity, like toilets and trash collecting? If so, defend that position. If not, how do we evolve out of this continuing tendency?
MOMMIE DEAREST AND BAD DADS
If it weren’t for the bonding drug oxytocin, fatigued and frustrated new moms might toss out that messy, squalling little blob of a newborn. Some parents seems a bit short on oxytocin and do just that; postpartum depression is a very real chemical imbalance, with sometimes tragic results.
When a new tomcat comes into a territory, he kills all the kittens and starts new batches to ensure gene-pool purity; are there evolutionary echoes in stepparents and the high percentage of them committing child abuse? There’s a reason “red-headed stepchild” has come to mean “poor little thing.”
CHARACTERISTICS
Some are incompetent and uncaring. Others are just downright mean. All are selfish. Some are hypocritically nice to the kids in public. Others snub them. Fear and resentment seem the foundation of their attitudes towards the young. Granted some kids do try your patience, and most parents occasionally want to strangle their teenagers, but for most it’s a fleeting expression of frustrated parental love.
A. IN ACTION
Child abuse is a huge problem in many parts of the world. Sometimes it’s exacerbated by poverty or fundamentalist cultures; sometimes it’s just twisted individuals taking out their frustrations on weaker creatures.
One abusive father claimed he “made the kid,” so she was his to do with as he wished.
In Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy, parents cause illness or injury in their children in order to get attention for themselves.
Second (and third and fourth) wives are stereotypically greedy of the family fortune and push aside others’ kids; see more in the supermarket tabloids.
B. IN MEDIA
Most mythic heroes are missing at least one parent, and some get stuck with a dysfunctional stepparent. Hercules got the jealous Hera who sent two snakes to strangle him in his cradle, Cinderella’s mean stepmom and stepsisters used her as a drudge, and poor Hamlet got his murderous uncle.
Celebrities, notoriously self-centered to begin with, are models for Mommie Dearest (Joan Crawford and her coat hangers: cruel) and Postcards from the Edge (Carrie Fisher’s mom Debbie Reynolds: comedic).
Blue Sky and The Great Santini show how the restrictions of military life affect some parents; Jessica Lange is a sensual and psychologically unbalanced Army wife in the former and Robert Duvall is an abusive Marine dad in the latter. Deadly parents feature in the suspense-horror film Stepfather, starring Terry O’Quinn, Jack Nicholson’s psychotic romp in The Shining, the mom in The Manchurian Candidate, and in Beyond Honor about female genital mutilation.
C. IN YOUR CREATIONS
Inner Drives Center of Motivation - Lower Solar Plexus: power and self-indulgence.
Reveal the damaged personal boundaries of the parent, her wounded sense of self, as in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.
Show the adult powerless in one arena (at work, with the spouse) and then wielding power over children to compensate.
Going up against a grown-up can be terrifying for a young child. Explore ways they can get allies or learn coping skills.
Check out the Adult Children of Alcoholics organization for insights into this family dynamic, where kids have to be more mature than the grown-ups.
Abuse breeds abuse, some say. Show two kids going down different paths, one of them breaking out of the cycle of bad parenting.
KILLER KIDS
Some kids just seem to have been born mean, like Lucy Van Pelt in the Peanuts cartoons, always yanking the football away from Charlie Brown. Others turn to it for survival, like kids in ghettos and gangs. Gangs of kids beat up outsiders, bully the weak, and act out animal instincts to cull the herd.
CHARACTERISTICS
Selfish. Verbally abusive. Arrogant. Instinctive cruelty — either no real grasp of others’ pain and the finality of death, or a too-real grasp of it and a fascination with it.
Or the quiet, shy type who ultimately takes to the tower with a rifle.
A. IN ACTION
Bullies have always been around, pulling wings off flies and sticking gullible kid’s tongues to icy things. Nowa
days the bullies, or their victims, are often armed and really dangerous. School shootings, often a backlash to bullying, are all too common.
Some blame violent computer games, some blame lack of parental supervision, others the schools, still others the hormones in food, etc. Wise observers see the entire system as faulty and address it with programs involving entire communities.
Child soldiers are forced into violence; if their empathy circuits get fried, redemption is unlikely. Some kids simply never wire up those circuits; they’re the psychopaths.
B. IN MEDIA
The young killers in The Bad Seed and Village of the Damned were horrifying in the mid 1900s, back when most kids seemed innocent and post WWII life seemed safe. Then came Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, and their spawn.
Originally a Japanese film, the 2002 American remake of The Ring is a horrifying excursion into the twisted psyche of a troubled child.
Draco Malfoy comes close to killing in the Harry Potter series. Youngsters in His Dark Materials get into killing spots, with various psychologically complex reactions and actions.
Acclaimed film City of God follows the lives of two boys growing up in the favelas (slums) of Rio and how the act of killing affects them differently.
Power of the Dark Side Page 8
