“You are Bad Guy, but this does not mean you are bad guy”: Guilt, Culpability and the Office of the Villain

Timothy Peters

Keynote Presentation. What is the role of the villain today? The dominance of the superhero genre in contemporary comics, television and film has focused on the superhero’s exceptionality, their need to challenge the law and operate beyond its limits in order to save it, to take down the villain and rescue the city, nation, world or galaxy. However, the supervillain’s disregard for the law, and for the lives and societies the law is designed to protect, is often presupposed. Whether it is with figures of pure evil and destruction (think the Joker in The Dark Knight, or Ronan in Guardians of the Galaxy), or those of necessary evil using terrifying means for a purportedly good end or justice (Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, Killmonger in Black Panther or Ra’s Al Ghul in Batman Begins), the villain is often presented as both the narrative counterpoint of hero, but also the structural precondition for the heroic feats of the superhero on screen. This paper challenges such presentations of the villain by examining the way in which they are deliberately caricatured by a number of recent animated children’s films: Megamind, Wreck-it Ralph and the Despicable Me franchise. In the midst of their light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek probing of the tropes of the superhero genre, these films provide a systematic interrogation of the structural role of the villain. Rather than reproducing the gritty realism of either the DC or Marvel Universes on screen of recent years (which more and more focus on the flawed and dangerous psyches of the superheroes), these films render visible aspects of the villain themselves—and do so by considering the villain as a pre-figured role, an office that must be performed or a duty that must be fulfilled. What is significant here is the way in which this focus on the structural role of the villain itself challenges the traditional tropes of the villain. It calls into question their culpability and guilt at having been the cause of mass destruction, crime and villainy not in the usual stereotypes of being criminally insane or otherwise acting out their psychological traumas, but in terms of calling attention to the structure of their pre-figured role, understood in the paradigm of the office which, as Giorgio Agamben has demonstrated, encompasses a praxis that is wholly effective and operates independently of the qualities of the subject who carries it out. At one level the office has been that which protects the individual subject from the culpability of their actions, and yet analysing the villain in terms of the office reveals its connections to the paradigms of guilt and imputability that it makes operative. In the office ‘what a human does and what a human is enter into a zone of indistinction’—it is what it has to be and has to be what it is. And yet, these comic interrogations of the villain challenge this rendering together of what is and what has to be—with the villain rejecting their pre-defined role, claiming that they do not want to be the bad guy anymore…and yet, in the end returning to the mantle of the office it in a way that allows us to see more clearly the functions of duty and responsibility that operate explicitly in the attempts to render subjects culpable and guilty.

“You are Bad Guy, but this does not mean you are bad guy”: Guilt, Culpability and the Office of the Villain

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