EVIL IS NOT STUPID (movies) The Butcher (2014) is a pretty good innovation on Se

EVIL IS NOT STUPID

(movies)

The Butcher (2014) is a pretty good innovation on Seven. Pretty impressed. Hadn’t seen it. Just got it over here where the only way to see English movies is by downloading them.

I had this discussion with Steven J. Woron back in the early 80’s, I think, when he was working on a script. And of course, I hadn’t grown up in comic-culture so I didn’t understand Steve’s mythos. I grew up in a world where evil was a real thing I had to deal with: stronger, smarter, faster and more powerful in every respect.

And as I read it I kept saying to myself that “evil isn’t stupid and brutal”. Just the opposite. Any evil to be feared is cunning. And you can see that in the economic failure of scripts that don’t follow that, and the overwhelming success of scripts where evil humiliates us with its genius. The great villains are not stupid, they are brilliant.

I always think it is a childish disservice, and completely counter to the western mythological tradition, to position villains as impulsive brutes with childlike self interest. I can’t really ever enjoy pop villains brought to screen for this reason. They are paper maché masks worn by bunny rabbits, at a victorian costume party.

The western aristocratic tradition is quite simple: be wary of hubris, for there are gods. They are evil. And that are cunning.

There is evil in the world and it is not defeated by deus ex machina. It is not defeated my supermen. It is defeated by the swallowing of terror by men of courage; the use of their wit; and the bearing of great costs, at great personal risk, to defeat it, for the common good.

The devil is not obvious. There is more evil in as mundane a criminal as Nancy Pelosi than in all the demons of literature. There is more brutality in a Barak Obama’s creation of a power vacuum that can only be filled by world war. There is more immorality in a Google algorithm to suppress dissent than in the arguments of any violence.