On Villains and Heroes

In late September, I was chatting with a work colleague and our conversation meandered to the topic of children and television. Though strict about time limits for screens, I am fairly permissive when it comes to the viewing choices of my elementary school children. My kids have considerable latitude about what they watch so long as the movie or tv show is age appropriate and isn’t deemed too scary by either viewer. In contrast, my colleague, whose kids are now teenagers, was much stricter when his children were younger, disallowing any programming that had a hero-villain or good guy-bad guy focus.¹ Looking back, my colleague wondered whether he had been overly restrictive. While he may have been, his underlying concern about movies or tv shows which depict certain characters as thoroughly and permanently bad or evil lingers with me.  

While hero-villain or good guy-bad guy narratives persist across all forms of media, the essentialized nature of the villain / bad guy has become more contested recently. For example, my daughter has enjoyed “The Bad Guys” graphic novel series, which centers on a group of anthropomorphic animals who perform good deeds, aiming to redeem themselves from their well-earned criminal reputations. We, of course, watched the 2022 film based on the book series as a family. Moreover, scholars and fans of popular media have posted various articles and blogs exploring not only whether villains / bad guys deserve redemption, but what constitutes a solid redemptive arc.² Within the Christian tradition, villains / bad guys present a thorny problem. While evil exists and all humans share in the guilt of original sin, no one is beyond God’s grace and forgiveness. To cast someone as thoroughly and permanently evil is to call into question fundamental Christian truths about creation and salvation.  

As I continue to reflect on that September discussion, I find myself intrigued by the other figure in the binary – the hero / good guy. If there is good reason to reexamine the villain / bad guy, is the same true for the hero / good guy who is portrayed as thoroughly and permanently good? I think so, though a second look reveals complications. On the one hand, in the Christian tradition, humans are part of God’s good creation. Though marred by original sin and forever contending with sin, we are made good and innocent by God’s grace. Theologian Marika Rose highlights how Christian sacraments witness and enact this. She writes that “baptism cleanses us – according to the Western Christian tradition – of original sin. It cleanses us, that is, of complicity: of the guilt we incur simply by being born into this world, into relation with all those who have sinned before us.”³ In addition, “Christian identity is maintained, in some way, by repeated participation in [the eucharist] by which we partake of, or symbolize, the body and blood of this Christ who died for our sins. The eucharist is important at least in part because of the way it repeats or invokes the process by which our sins are dealt with.”⁴ Thus, just as the quintessential hero / good guy is secure their goodness, with bad acts framed as aberrations and infinitely forgivable, so too are Christians assured of their innocence because Jesus died for our sins.  

At the same time, theologian Judith Gruber points to the troubling possibilities which might accompany a hero / good guy assured of their goodness in a world full of violence and evil. In “White Innocence / White Supremacy: Exploring the Theo-political Intersections of Race and Salvation,” Gruber builds on Gloria Wekker’s concept of White Innocence, a form of willful ignorance about one’s embeddedness in racist hierarchies, and deepens its connections with Christian theology. Gruber argues that White Innocence relies on an account of salvation which focuses on “an arch of redemption that spans from an innocent origin through a fall to the restoration of original innocence” and fails to be “constitutively affected by violence and suffering.”⁵ In other words, this soteriological understanding masks Christian complicity in the perpetuation of violence and, instead “produces an original/ultimate innocence that absolves…the need to confront issues of theological accountability.”⁶ Against such a simplistic rendering of redemption, the assuredness of Christian innocence is emphasized at the cost of acknowledging and wrestling with one’s ongoing guilt and entanglement with violence.  Thus, Gruber illuminates how the essentialized nature of the hero / good guy may be wielded to obscure participation in violence and conceal critical moral responsibilities.  

If problematic hero-villain or good guy-bad guy narratives were confined to popular media, the remedy might be as simple as more nuanced storytelling and richer character development in both secular and Christian productions. Yet, Gruber and Rose both implicate the Christian tradition as well. What, then, might be required? For her part, Gruber urges a rethinking of salvation. Rather than stylizing salvation as overcoming violence, we ought to attend to “possible transformations in the midst of historical trauma” which keep alive the hope for salvation.⁷ Such a shift would aid in collectively confronting histories of guilt and violence. For Rose, the way forward involves reckoning with our own preoccupation with innocence. She writes “Can we learn how to stop building this edifice of self-satisfaction, to cease from walling ourselves off from responsibility, and learn instead to be scandalized by the problem of our own reliance on the logic of absolution? Can we recognize and confront our own complicity even if to do so might also mean to let go of the desire to be counted as a good person?”⁸ This is the provocative challenge that I now sit with. As for my children, when we have discussed their movies and tv shows, I have focused on complicating essentialized depictions of the villain. I think it’s time I gave more attention to the hero.  

References:  

Gruber, Judith. “White Innocence / White Supremacy: Exploring the Theo-political Intersections of Race and Salvation.” Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society, vol. 7, no. 2, 2021, pp. 515-538, https://doi.org/10.30965/23642807-bja10022.

Rose, Marika. “For Our Sins: Christianity, Complicity and the Racialized Construction of Innocence.” In Exploring Complicity: Concepts, Cases and Critique, edited by Robin Dunford, Afxentis Afxentiou and Michael Neu, 53-46. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017. 

Notes:  

1. While I use the language of hero-villain and good guy-bad guy throughout this piece, I am conflicted by its underlying androcentrism. That said, I can think of no alternative that captures the paradigm I examine here and so the language remains. 
2. For example, see Elissa’s “The ‘Big Bad’ Conversation Narrative.” https://womenintheology.org/2021/12/02/the-big-bad-conversion-narrative/  
3. Rose, 53.  
4. Rose, 54. 
5. Gruber, 529. 
6. Gruber, 529. 
7. Gruber, 536. 
8. Rose, 59.