
The bad guy compels because he isn’t afraid to speak truth and
break
rules. But more than this – he is a product of his zeitgeist.
There’s been a funny trend of late, in film and other media.
The bad guys are sexy.
They’re cool. Way, way cooler than the good guys.
Vincent in Collateral.
Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old
Men. The Joker in The Dark
Knight.
And among the coolest guys in cinema who aren’t out-and-out bad
guys? Well, the other cool guys aren’t good guys either. They’re
anti-heroes, like Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow, Brad Pitt’s Tyler
Durden, or Guy Pearce’s Eric in The
Rover.
The bad guy hasn’t always been cool. In most older movies, the good
guy is significantly cooler, more interesting, and more relatable than
the bad guy.
Yet in more recent films, the good guy is often... Too gullible. Too
naïve. And he stays that way.
You watch old movies, and if the good guy starts off too naïve, he
eventually comes to understand the way of the world, yet remain a
strong, firm good guy at the end of it. In more recent films, the good
guy always finds a way to remain more or less entrenched in his bubble
of ‘correctness’, despite whatever pitfalls befall him along the way.
I propose that in topsy-turvy times, when black is white and up is
down and left is right, those men who attack and upend the established
order of things are those we most intuitively grasp as those who must
be ‘correct’. And because they see fit to buck a powerful trend that
has most individuals cowed, not only are they correct... they are powerful.
And power, no matter what the era, is always sexy and cool.