"Can We Make the Villain a White Guy?"

A feature film or television series has at its core only a handful of key parts. The Protagonist - the person who the central problem, “agon,” or struggle happens to, and who succeeds or fails at solving it. The classic example is Chief Brody in Jaws. The shark appears, he tries to stop it, eventually succeeds, movie over. The Antagonist - the person on the other side of the struggle, who opposes the protagonist, forcing them to change and grow in order to win, or fail to, in order to lose (tragedy). Hans Gruber in Die Hard is a classic example; his terror attack forces Bruce Willis to not only kill a bunch of bad guys, but to acknowledge that he’s been self-centered and foolish in his marriage. A slew of supporting characters, who generally line up on one side or the other, delivering exposition, offering support, occasionally switching sides in dramatic betrayals. I really like the Belgian movie 2 Days, 1 Night where a depressed office worker has to convince her coworkers to give up their bonuses instead of voting to fire her. Her husband is an indefatigable ally and source of support, pushing her to fight to keep her job, which they desperately need. Realistically, there are usually 2-3 really big parts in a movie, and 3-4 bigger supporting parts. You can tell by where they go on the poster. Some people don’t believe Marion Cotillard as a hardscrabble worker, but I do!The core game audiences play while watching stories is trying to guess what happens next. Narrative functions as a series of causes and effects, or setups and payoffs, that begins with a problem and escalates into a series of crises. The audience’s game is to identify and anticipate patterns, to guess how those causes make effects. If you’ve ever watched a movie with someone who says out loud “oh he’s the one who did it” or… “she shouldn’t sleep with him,” this is the mechanism at work. A lot of the fun comes in guessing who among the subsidiary characters will be good or evil. The uncertainty tantalizes; who will betray or hinder the protagonist? Who’ll help them at the last minute? It’s an essential part of most good stories, and it’s a core part of why we engage with them; they’re experiments in living other lives.

But our pleasure is diminished when the guessing game is too easy. Stringer Bell is an iconic antagonist, driving the protagonist to take bigger and crazier risks to try and overcome him. Many television shows structure their seasons around the battle with one or several antagonists; Avon Barksdale in the Wire season one (who’s defeated, while Stringer escapes), Livia Soprano and Uncle Junior in season one of the Sopranos. The season ends when these antagonists are defeated, killed, incapacitated, or their betrayal revealed. By the end of these shows’ season one, for example, Avon and Junior are arrested, Livia’s betrayal and true villainy is revealed. Livia Soprano is one of the greatest antagonists of all time.In most great narratives, there’s only one true conflict, a zero-sum agon, or struggle, around which a broad story arc revolves. In the Wire, Stringer and Avon want to stay out of prison, our hardy police officers want them in prison. In the Sopranos, Tony wants to stay boss, his uncle and mother want his power. When that core struggle ends, the season or movie ends. The last two minutes of Jaws are two men kicking away through the ocean on a piece of flotsam. Nobody gives a shit after the shark’s dead; they came to see them kill the shark, risking death along the way, and are satisfied when it’s over. I had a very smart screenwriting teacher who once called the core of drama “two dogs, one bone.” The dogs are the protagonist and antagonist, the bone is the thing both of them want, but only one can truly have. Identify the dogs, introduce the bone, have the dogs fight like hell over it, then make the protagonist’s win both surprising and inevitable. Inevitable because all the pieces add up, surprising because they did so in a way you didn’t expect. The joy is the ride along the way. The great dramatist William Archer put it thus: drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty. Drama requires uncertainty. But there is a creeping challenge across our film and television dramaturgy; progressive ideology, in which we’re told that certain groups are inherently more oppressed, and thus more moral than others.

This sits uneasily with dramatic storytelling, particularly in mixed-race casts, for a simple reason: Unlike drama, which requires uncertainty, progressive ideology requires moral certainty based around people’s identities. We all know the moral totem pole that progressive ideology has constructed, with cis white hetero able bodied men at the bottom, and a trans black disabled woman at the top. Casting a black trans disabled woman as a psychopathic murderer is substantially riskier than casting a white man in the same role.In the last decade, this inverted moral hierarchy became an unintentional guidebook for writing drama, with disastrous effects. You’ve all conducted this exercise before; you start a movie, and are presented with a group of characters. Who’s good, who’s evil, and why? Who should the protagonist trust? Who will betray them? Have you ever immediately, unconsciously guessed the outcome solely on the character’s identity and a basic social justice template? You probably have, even if you’re unwilling to admit it. So… Drama requires uncertainty. Progressive ideology rewards certainty. You can’t have certainty and an entertaining story.ShareAfter the activist waves of #Oscarssowhite and #Metoo, it was very easy to get accused of an “ism” for not including a lot of diverse characters in a movie or TV show. Activists soon discovered that they could criticize both the diversity of the characters in the show, and that of the people creating the show.A sort of strange moral calculus began to take over Hollywood, which is still mostly white. We have to have more diverse characters, but can the gang leader be black? Should the muslim man be cheating on his wife? Can the black female entrepreneur be committing fraud? Wouldn’t that screw up the moral totem pole? Will we get fired? Following the rules of intersectionality in screenwriting is a surefire way to bore audiences and perhaps be accidentally racist.This activist-inspired risk management incentive pushed more and more Hollywood writers, particularly the white majority, toward caution. Each of those diverse characters might be perfectly valid dramatic creations. But they also carry a risk of being interpreted as a statement about the group rather than the individual. Faced with that possibility, many writers simply choose safer options.If a story requires a villain, as a lot of genres do, casting a heterosexual white man is often perceived as the lowest-risk option.

Part of the joy of Lando Calrissian is his early, trickster betrayal.This is another unintended consequence of the rise of nonprofit organizations as a key path into Hollywood. They often slowly whittle away the risk from projects, especially small independent ones that arguably should be risky. Independent films are the startups of Hollywood. With tiny budgets and limited marketing resources at their disposal, risk, novelty, and transgression are often the only ways they can attract attention. Yet many of the institutions that support these projects want the opposite: a textbook moral universe, which reduces reputational risk. The problem is that risk, uncertainty, and transgression are core ingredients of great drama. Great stories are surprising and inevitable. Right now many are just the inevitable part. This creates a problem dramatically: if we only have six main roles, AND half of them must be diverse, AND that diverse half needs to be fundamentally moral, well, the number of potential dramatic combinations becomes incredibly narrow. Let’s say we have six characters, one protagonist (who we know is good) and one antagonist (who we know is evil). In between are 4 characters who can switch sides. If each of those characters has a full moral range, i.e. can be good or evil, there are 2^4 potential combinations, or 16 potential outcomes. Now let’s say that two of those four characters are from marginalized groups and can only be represented as skilled, wise and good. That means we only have two characters who can flip, or 2^2, which gives us 4 potential outcomes. Do you see why this is a problem? Especially for certain types of stories? The important point is that this doesn’t require anyone to consciously believe that minority characters are morally superior. Most writers are simply responding to incentives. If one choice carries a substantial reputational risk and another doesn’t, people will naturally gravitate toward the safer option. The executives writing the checks certainly will. Over thousands of development meetings, notes sessions, and greenlight decisions, those individual choices begin to produce recurring patterns. Certain characters retain a full moral range, while others gradually become protected from it. Kima Greggs, a talented but philandering black lesbian cop who gets kicked out by her pregnant wife for cheating, would spontaneously combust in a progressive 2020s writers’ room.

Now a brilliant, pre-woke show like The Wire can have a whole moral range of black characters, from Bunk Moreland, McNulty’s philandering but lovable and competent partner, to his colleague Kima Greggs, an equally intelligent but philandering lesbian. We know these characters have a spectrum of moral behavior, that they are flawed, just like McNulty, also a philanderer, but they are trying to do good in the world, and reduce the horrors of the drug trade.There are many good and bad black characters, with the harder edges defined by the gang leader Marlo, a true psychopath. Since he becomes the main antagonist after Stringer and Avon, he of course has to be crazier to satisfy the problem of dramatic escalation. I once attended a lecture by a brilliant black professor on the power of the Wire, one of the most diverse shows in history at the time. She said that the great achievement of the Wire was that there was a broad range of black characters, so no one character carried the moral weight of representing blackness. That always stuck with me; there are all kinds of black people in the real world, just as there are all kinds of white people. This is why it’s so easy to have a black villain in a nearly monoracial world like that of Black Panther; Killmonger the villain is not standing in for all black people, who are heavily represented in all kinds of roles and thus not forced to stand in for their entire race. It’s also not a realistic universe, which can help too sometimes. Beef is another interesting example; because the central conflict is between two asians, they can be more morally flawed than they would be in a more mixed world.As the activist waves of the mid 2010s rolled on, our media diversified in new and unexpected ways. Mixed casts soon became the default, which makes sense; entertainment properties want to appeal to the largest number of people, and avoid activist criticism, so why not go as diverse as possible? Fargo exists in a morally compromised universe that has virtually no diversity outside of one crazy asian. Fantasy, for one, was an extremely white world. So they diversified it, why not? Some shows, like House of the Dragon, did it better than others, like the new Lord of the Rings (at least in this humble writer’s opinion).