Hero/villain parallels

So, one of my favorite YouTube channels is Overly Sarcastic Productions, in particular the "Trope Talk" bits. The one trope mentioned was the "We're not so different" trope, where the villain makes parallels between them and the hero, sending the hero into an existential crisis. And it's got me thinking about my own writing too, so I'm gleaming with new insight and a fresh pair of eyes.

In a script I'm working on, I wrote a very standard villain. Almost cartoonish standard. After seeing the trope talk, It made me rethink about this villain's motivations. He's a power-hungry bastard who would backstab you in a heartbeat, but why oppose the hero? Maybe said villain sees a part of himself in the hero, or at least, an idea of himself in him. Both characters could have had a difficult upbringing where both had to have struggled to be where they are right now. My thought is that villain recognizes this, and has an over-abundance of hatred for the hero due to his insecurities of never being what he wants to be. At least that's where my mind was going.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

 

You'd have to sell that to me in the script, and it wouldn't be easy. I don't much care for two-dimensional villains (or heroes), but sometimes, a guy is just bad. Why would I, as the audience, care about the villain's motivation, unless it moved the story toward an unexpected ending (a trope in itself)?

ETA: I like my movies that have heroes and villains to move right along. I've seen several movies and series lately that would have been noticeably better if cut by 2/3rds. The stuff that should have been cut is mostly exposition about various characters' motives. Might just be me, though.

 

A good villain should be a worthy match for the hero. They should be on a par in capabilities and intellect. They should have some of the same characteristics, but the villain's are misdirected.

So it becomes a competition for the villain. Who will dominate? He must prove his worthiness by outsmarting or trouncing the hero. So in this way, I guess it does come down to insecurities.

 

I remember running across the idea that often the reason the hero can effectively combat the villain (I prefer the term opponent or antagonist) is because he has some of the same stuff in him. They're cut from the same cloth. For instance in one of the Harry Potter movies/books it's shown that Harry has the ability to understand the language of snakes. And apparently this is why he's got some connection to Voldemort and is able to defeat him.

And there's the very similar idea of "You made me", exemplified most famously by the Joker, because he was supposedly created by Batman (I don't pretend to know how). That was a reflection of the idea that Middle Eastern terrorism was created largely if not entirely by US policies.

In the Jessica Jones Netflix series there's a very direct and powerful connection between protag and antag—Killgrave is a psychopathic (and telepathic) killer who stands in as the ultimate abuser, and he has a very direct personal connection to Jessica. He used his mind control powers to kidnap her, force her to be his slave, and to use her superhero abilities in service to his evil agenda. He caused her to murder the wife of Luke Cage, not only another superhero in the same Hells' Kitchen area, but also her love interest. Well damn, that all ties everything together powerfully!! If there isn't a strong personal connection between protag and antag then it all feels pretty generic, like anybody could have ridden to the rescue.

In Lethal Weapon Riggs discovers the ultimate baddie (Mister Joshua) is Special Forces, from the same elite unit he served in. And at the end they drop the weapons and have a knock-down drag-out brawl to see who's the baddest. The movie was basically a big pissing contest between the two of them.

 

Then there's the movie Manhunter, precursor to Silence of the Lambs I think, where the FBI profiler goes to talk with Hannibal Lecter in prison to help him profile a new serial killer. The reason the FBI agent can so effectively profile these killers is because he has the empathic ability to walk in their shoes, to become more and more like them internally, which enables him to understand them. Hannibal likes to torment him by saying he's 'Not so different from us' or something to that effect. And at the end he has to go all the way, sink fullly into identification with the serial killer in order to stop his spree, which messes him up psychologically.

 

Dirty Harry was in some ways like the criminals he had to stop. He felt it necessary to step outside the strict limits of the law (the new 'kinder, gentler on crime' laws especially, which were being enacted at the time) in order to get the bad guys.

Xena was a recovering evil warlord, trying to turn over a new leaf to help atone in what small ways she could for her horrible bloodthirsty past. That made her far more interesting and compelling than goody-two-shoes Hercules, and also much more like the evil warlords she went up against. It was only because of Hercules' god-level strength he was able to fight them, but he seemed sort of silly and trivial in comparison to their more complex psychology. He was like an innocent child in the body of a Greek god. It's no good to have an innocent and naive hero matching wits with far more 'gray zone' baddies with a lot more real world experience. It makes him seem immature and out of his depth. Herc would toss off these silly little bumper-sticker phrases like "Come on guys, be nice to other people" before conking their heads together or whatever. In the real world somebody with such a shallow and simplisitic understanding of life and morality could never effectively combat nasty self-centered people intent on harming others. In order to understand them you need to have gone through enough terrible experiences (hardships) that you understand where they're coming from, and you need to have developed an understanding of what kind of peole they are. And when you've done that there's a certain kinship between you, though your motives and morals are very different.

These are all reasons why there's so often a connection or a similarity between the hero and the angatonist. They're two sides of the same coin.

 

Ok, getting more specific—
Maybe it isn't so much that the villain hates the hero, but that the hero for some personal reason of his own feels a strong need to stop the villain. Or is it baked in that the villain hates the hero? In either case, it would be because they're fighting over something only one can have. Territory or a woman or some moral principle. Maybe they both have very strong moral stances on the same topic? The villain was wounded and became nasty and resentful and blames other people for his problems (refuses to bear his suffering heroically), and the hero had a much different experience. He might have suffered the same things but come through without becoming resentful and nasty and blaming others.

 

One of the best:

Spoiler: Picture

It's true to life that some people are down right evil or immoral and without any reason (is there such a thing as a good reason?), just as it's true to life that certain life experiences will preclude nasty behaviour. It's just habitual of fiction to lean towards giving a 'why' because it tries to give a 'why' for everything else. Sympathetic or not, a villain just needs to be interesting, like our Boddicker above.

Using the villain as a foil for the protagonist is an old, time-tested trope. Another trope is a villain who clearly came from a terrible background facing off against a hero from an affluent one. The hero doesn't actually know how he would have turned out in worse starting circumstances, so his reprimands are challenged in a way he can't easily counter. Did he gain his virtue by chance, for by will?

Also No Country for Old Men is a good example of the villain being so alien that the hero has no chance of defeating him.