Sometimes, You Need to Be the Bad Guy

If you can’t be bad, can you ever be truly good?

If you didn’t know that stories matter, you wouldn’t be here.

You don’t need me to tell you that story serves some primal need, some archaic function that links us back through the generations, brachiating along the chain to the comforting campfires and mysterious magic of our most distant ancestors.

All the world’s a stage, said Will, and he had a point. Performance was the art form he knew, and it’s a form all of us have mastered to one degree or another. Who we are in public is not who we are in private. The gulf between the two varies from one person to the next, but exists in all of us.

Fiction’s aim — one of its aims, anyway — is to ape reality and use the untrue to tell a deeper truth. About ourselves. About our world. About who we are when the lights are off and the blinds are drawn. But where does the fiction end and the reality start?

It started on Facebook.

In a group I’m in, Medium writer Ryan Fan asked us all to name our three favorite TV characters. After I’d written my answer, I started to wonder what it said about me. Because my three favorite characters, to one extent or another, are at best antiheroes and at worst downright villains.

Omar Little is one of the main characters in what Ryan and I would agree is probably the best TV show ever made, The Wire. Omar is undoubtedly a criminal, a stickup man uses a 12 gauge shotgun to shake down drug dealers on the mean streets of Baltimore. No one would consider Omar to be a pillar of the community. But over five seasons of the show, he is shown to have a moral code of his own. He doesn’t rob civilians. He doesn’t put his gun on working people. He preys only on drug dealers.

Al Swearengen is one of the central characters in Deadwood, the relatively short-lived and much-missed revisionist Western by HBO. Al Swearengen was in fact a real person, a con artist and pimp in the notoriously lawless town. In the show, almost our first encounter with Al concerns his plot to kill a child who witnessed a crime committed by his henchmen. A Machiavellian schemer, he has no compunction about murdering people who stand in his way and is frequently shown beating and abusing the prostitutes that work for him.

In a book, Al might well come off far more vile. But he’s played with such sympathy by Ian McShane that it becomes difficult not to like him. And as the show progresses, we see more and more of Al’s good qualities and less of the murdering, pimping, abusing side. By the time we get to the recent film that wrapped up the prematurely canceled show, it’s quite clear that we’re supposed to feel sympathy for Swearengen.

My third pick was Alfie Solomons from Peaky Blinders. While Alfie is only an occasional presence on the show, thanks to the performance of Tom Hardy, he steals absolutely every scene he’s in. Alfie is an unrepentant gangster prone to violent outbursts and frequent treachery. But he also supports charities and defends the London Jewish community against the rise of fascism.

Additionally, he serves as a foil to the show’s main character, Thomas Shelby, reminding him that the business of organized crime is never noble, no matter how nicely the men at the top of it may dress.

Television antiheroes are so common these days as to be almost cliché.

Whether it’s Tony Soprano or Walter White or Don Draper, we can’t help loving the bad guy. Just so long as there’s some glimmer of goodness in them. Dexter only kills serial killers. Tony Soprano has deep reservations about the life he was born into. None of these characters are good, but they aren’t wholly bad. If they were, we wouldn’t be able to relate to them.

But we do. Because in the story we tell ourselves in our heads, we’re always the good guy. Everything we say or do is justified. Even when we admit our mistakes, we suspect that anybody else in our position would have done the same thing.

It’s a myth we need to be able to tell ourselves. There is no evolutionary advantage to low self-esteem. But deep down, we know the truth. Very few of us are real bad guys, true bastards, unredeemable villains. But if we’re honest with ourselves, most of us aren’t all that good either.

I’m the hero of my own story, purely because I’m always there. I can only experience the world through my own point of view, and that makes me the protagonist, likable or not. I’d never have the nerve to call myself a good guy. Not in a world where people risk their lives to provide medical care for strangers or devote themselves to curing diseases. I don’t do any of that. Does that make me a bad guy?

I’ve certainly played the villain in other people’s lives. I’ve fired plenty of people, including a family member. Not one of those people thought it was justified. I’ve ended relationships, often for reasons that must’ve seemed opaque and capricious. I’ve taken revenge on a landlord who wronged me.

If you get to be my age without any regrets, you’ve been living your life all wrong. There’s no question that there are people out there right now who, if they were asked for an opinion of me, would tell you I was a villain, or worse.

Is that why I have such a seeming affection for TV antiheroes? Perhaps it’s as simple as that. That Omar and Al and Alfie do the bad things I secretly want to but know I shouldn’t. They are more resigned to being the bad guy than I am. As though secretly, all I want is to be a villain, and the only thing that keeps me from it is my desire to see myself as good.

That’s one way of framing it.

But the reality is, none of these characters is completely good or bad, and they are compelling precisely because of that. Because none of us are completely good or bad either. We are one or the other as the situation demands.

After all, what seems like a great evil from one point of view can be an unpleasant necessity from another. If you’re going to view life as a work of fiction, you may as well go all the way. A story needs villains just as much as it needs heroes.

In a famous passage in the Bhagavad Gita, the warrior Arjuna questions the war he has found himself embroiled in. As he rides in his chariot across the line of battle, he sees the other side of the conflict is composed of his own family members, his gurus, and other people he loves.

As any of us would, he questions the wisdom of the destructive war that’s about to take place. But the god Krishna reminds Arjuna of his duty, of his role in the world as a warrior. Fight this battle even against those you love, Krishna instructs. Take part in it in the knowledge that those you fight are already dead.

In Western society, we are the inheritors of ethical myths.

Stories that are concerned with right and wrong, and how to behave according to those distinctions. But the myths we tell ourselves now are far more nuanced.

The days are long gone when you knew who to cheer for in a movie because he would be dressed in white, set off against a villain clad in sable. Now, our heroes are fractured and untrustworthy, and the bad guys we jeer at often turn out to have been right all along.

Speaking of antiheroes, controversial author and professor Jordan Peterson talks about this attraction to darkness in this lecture. As Peterson points out, a person incapable of cruelty is absolutely prey to those who are quite capable of it. We watch antiheroes, Peterson claims, to live out the darker parts of ourselves. Because it’s impossible to respect yourself until you’ve grown teeth.

Or as Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi framed it in The Periodic Table, a world of unarmed men would be tolerable. But it’s not reality. The armed build Auschwitz, and the unarmed pave the way for them. After Auschwitz, it is no longer permissible to be unarmed.

Moral relativism can be a dangerous argument. Ethics are a valuable thing, one of the greatest ideas our species has ever had. The fact that people try to be good, even when they often fail, is one of the most precious things about humanity.

And most people, most of the time, do try to be good. Few of us are great heroes, and most of us are lazy and selfish. But the fact we try to justify our actions shows that we believe in being good, even when we struggle to meet our own ideals.

So keep trying to be good. Keep trying to be the hero. That’s what makes the world run. But remember that no matter what you do, if you do anything at all, to some people, some of the time, you’re going to be the bad guy. Make your peace with that.