This is a small thought, hardly even worth a post, but it keeps niggling into my brain and not letting go. So I’m posting about it anyway!
I was listening to a crime podcast about a conwoman who pretended to be a victim of human trafficking. And part of why she was so successful is because she told the story people WANTED to hear. She was constantly embellishing and changing and improving depending on the feedback she got from her audience. Which is why she was the “perfect” victim, for each individual person to whom she spoke. She told them what they wanted to hear without any messy “truth” getting in the way.
And then I listened to a podcast about an internet stalker. He did really terrible things, destroyed women’s lives and enjoyed it. But there was an interview with his mother too, and she talked about how hard his father rejected him, the terrible bullying he endured in high school, how he never fit in, how she had tried to get him help. But here’s the interesting bit, to me, when this podcast was turned into a Netflix documentary, they didn’t include any of that. It’s too messy, it brings up too many questions, better to leave him as the “perfect villain”.
With the MeToo movement and similar things in America and in India, the “perfect victim” idea is a real problem. Mostly because people who aren’t “perfect victims” tend not to come forward at all. Which might mean male victims of sexual abuse, or victims who willingly entered into relationships they later regretted, or victims who did, ultimately, agree to have sex for a role. In India, this is a MASSIVE problem. The expectations of being a “good” woman are so high, and so unrelated to reality for many women in the film industry, that it’s almost impossible to tell your story in a way that will get sympathy and longterm action.
But what I’ve noticed particularly in the Indian coverage is that the “Perfect Villain” idea is almost equally toxic. Pretty quickly the narrative changed from “here are the people who did bad things” to “here is the list of people who defended them/were friends with them/worked with them and are therefore bad by contagion”. But what this is ignoring is that it is completely possible for someone to do bad things to one person in one place, and for them to do good things for a different person in a different place. And neither person is lying.
Salman Khan is one where I think about this a lot. There’s a sense that either everyone who says he is kind and generous and gentle and loving is lying because they are afraid of him/beholden to him/blinded by fame/immoral and covering for him. Or everyone who says he was scary and angry and abusive is lying because they want fame/hate him/etc. But what if both sides are true? Can we open our minds to accept that? They people who are friends with him possibly truly sincerely see more good in him than bad in their own personal experiences. They aren’t “condoning” or “covering up” because they have experienced nothing to condone or cover up.
Another one where this comes up a lot is intimate partner abuse. When there is a story of either famous people or just people you know where their partner says they were abused, often there is a former partner who says “I wasn’t abused”. And the assumption is one of the two people is lying. Or, being more generous, one of the two people hasn’t come to terms with their experience. But what if they are both being totally accurate? Can we accept that the same person could be a good kind supportive partner to one person and abusive to the other? That in different circumstances and with different people they can be totally different?
I guess there are two reasons understanding there are no “perfect villains” is imperfect. First, the pointless punishment of folks who are their friends, family, associates. They truly could have had only good experiences, they truly did not know the terrible person other people saw. And second, the belief that the bad act is a lie if the good act is true by the general public. Just because someone really truly did a good thing doesn’t mean they didn’t also do a bad thing.
And finally, that you can feel pity and sadness for something that happened to a Bad Person because ultimately they are still A Person. It’s not an excuse, or even an explanation, but it is still a bad thing that happened in the world to someone. Going back to the internet stalker example, he was Autistic, he wasn’t diagnosed until his teens, and then he was bounced around through the system without consistent support. That doesn’t mean he gets to stalk people online, there are loads of folks who went through the same thing and didn’t end up that way. But it does mean that he should have gotten more support as a child, that I can feel pity and sympathy for the boy he was, and that I can hope he gets support now. Without negating anything bad that he did. The American attitude towards the prison system is a really terrible example of this. We joke about bad food, bad medical care, even rape happening in prisons because they are prisoners, they are bad people. But, they are still PEOPLE!!!!
And in India, what I have noticed is the attitude toward celebrities has a flavor of the same thing. Yes. they are movie stars, they are famous, but they are still PEOPLE. They don’t deserve to be wrongfully imprisoned, stalked, harassed, blamed for every social problem, etc. etc. And they are allowed to point out the injustice of this. (to be fair, America and the west have been similarly bad at different points in our history, it’s just that at this moment I feel like India is worse)
Does any of this make sense? Acknowledging that someone can be a Victim and not be a sparkling perfect example of the ideal character? But also acknowledging that someone can be a Villain and not be the sparkling perfect example of a bad character? That in fact one single person could be both Victim and Villain?
dontcallitbollywood 
I get your point. Remember Nirbhaya? The juvenile accused in that case was reportedly sexually abused at least 600 times. What he did is still deplorable but you know what I mean.
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I agree. The juvenile who was one of Nirbhayas rapists was sexually abused atleast 600 times. What he did was still deplorable but given what happened to him one can understand why he never showed any remorse.
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I’ve been thinking about this in terms of consequences and rehabilitation and why it’s important for the justice system to function. Sometimes people do bad things and that puts them in legal trouble and there’s a trial and a consequence meted out by laws. We can debate whether the consequence is just or the system worked, but some measure of social contract is baked in. In those cases, it seems possible for the person to pay a price and then come back and try to live better and it’s more likely to be accepted. Whereas if the trial is purely public opinion, because the system doesn’t hold them accountable or what they did isn’t defined as a crime, then it just hovers like a poisonous cloud and the debate over how bad the person is feels impossible to resolve.
Emily
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Oh, this is so true!!!! The first one example that springs to mind for me is Roman Polanski. If he had served his jail time, I feel like the debate about him would be much simpler and clearer at this point. But since he went on the run to avoid jail, it’s left this lingering bad taste and confusion for people.
And something else that occurs to me is the lack of oversight in media. That is, in the past, if a reporter was racist or lying or just plain Wrong, their editor would hold them to account and the newspaper would fire them and so on and so forth. And then it was all over and done with. But now, it’s very fuzzy. Not just with newspapers, but with youtube celebrities for instance, there’s no TV network behind them, no one they have to answer to, no one who can come in and say “I am punishing you”.
My Dad worked with law enforcement for a while and people were very aware of the damage that the “no consequences” attitude did to EVERYONE. If law enforcement is never held to accountable, if there is no clear judgement on them, then it turns into poison in people’s minds and suddenly no one involved can be trusted. The smart and honest people wanted transparency and clear judgements, because it would benefit them, they could do their jobs better without this question always hovering over them.
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Trying to extract the key point here – are you talking about a mindset shift? What would you like to see change after the mindset shift? Sorry I read it earlier in the week but could only comment today. I may have missed the point!
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More an “Awareness” shift. Just because you had a good experience with a person doesn’t mean he was always a good person (that comes up all the time, folks saying “but he was such a great friend!”). But also, just because someone did bad things doesn’t mean you should assume everyone who says “He was always nice to me” is lying. Personal experiences can vary, everyone will see and feel different things.
It feels like too often we want it to be black and white. If this person is “Bad” than anyone who was ever friends with them is also “Bad” and must be lying when they remember good things. And if a person did Good things than the Bad things they are accused of must be a lie. A villain sneers and laughs and is always terrible all the time. They can’t be complicated people who started out as victims and then became villains, and helped some people at the same time they were huritng other people, and generally are MESSY.
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Yeah totally. Separating bucketing people from their actions – tough thing to do. It’s almost like it’s so much effort for people and there’s so much pride and shame attached to good/bad that it’s all twisted. It’s like the brain stereotyping to save cognitive energy and it requires more effort to be present with the reality and reconcile all the perspectives into formulating a view of someone’s humanity.
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Exactly! It’s easier to say “well, he was just a bad person all the time” than to acknowledge particular circumstances and situations that may have made him a bad person some of the time but not others.
Another interesting part, to me, is that I DO believe in actually 100% bad people. But I think they are rare. And I think it takes a lot of digging and confirming to find them. Lumping all “Bad People” into the same box makes it harder to pull out the really truly incapable of empathy people from the ones who, because of a combination of circumstances, did bad things to some people.
Like, Deadbeat Dads who don’t pay child support. It’s a bad thing to do, they are all to some degree guilty. But some of them maybe did it because of a complicated issue with this particular situation (not an excuse, still a very bad thing). And some of them just selfishly joyfully did it as part of a lifetime history of uncaring selfishness. You have to acknowledge that both kinds of people might exist before you are able to start pulling out the folks in that second category.
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For me with some “villains”, I don’t even want to look at their (potential) good… Eg Bill Gates the genius but skirt chaser… How it was well known at Microsoft. I’m much more interested in people’s character rather than their genius.
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Oh yeah, “genius” is a stupid reason to forgive anyone anything. I never accept that.
But I’m not going to judge people who take money from Bill Gates foundation, or think they are lying when they say they have had no bad experiences with him. He could give money to good causes, and be caring and professional, and also be a skirt chaser.
Does that make sense? For most people, their actual personal behavior shifts depending on the situation around them, and some folks could have good experiences while others had bad and neither is lying.
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Yeah but it seems to me that in the US, if someone was successful and made a lot of money – all their other actions seem to matter. The wealth and fascination with it seems to overshadow balanced opinions
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This reminds me when one of the bollywood actors (don’t remember who exactly) was accused of treating badly the women, and one of the directors who worked with the actor said something like: “Impossible he behaved badly, because he is always so nice and good person with me”. Of course he is nice with you! You’re a man and someone who can give him work!
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Exactly! And the converse, you (as a good person) understand that this director isn’t necessarily lying or covering up, he is just short sighted and only repeating his own experiences. Yeah, people can be nice and respectful some of the time and still be horrible.
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Your post has me thinking the last few days of one of my husband’s friends. A misogynist who may well have beaten up one of his former girlfriends, but was a loyal friend to his guys, worked hard on Search & Rescue, and could spin a good yarn.
So the spouse doesn’t believe that he beat up a girlfriend. The spouse acknowledges some of the misogyny, but looks past it. And occasionally the spouse will make a joke about how I think this friend is “evil”. Yet the spouse knows of the multiple times the friend crossed lines. It is like the spouse is at war with himself over his view of this friend, but it is a cold war, weapons stockpiled but never used.
Over the last 10 years this friend has faded from our lives. His name hasn’t been mentioned in our house for at least a year, and it’s been 8 years since he entered our house, and even then he wasn’t invited. But even now though, if his name did come up, it is like I watch the fight of not wanting to accept the faults of a “friend” play out in my beloved’s head. He knows, but he really really doesn’t want to.
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Yes! This is it exactly. Someone can be a bad person who does bad things, and also does good things, and that’s really hard to reconcile. And you can be sad about something that happens to a bad person who did good things without making yourself a bad person.
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