Ponytail Picks #15 - Villains
The villain vs. hero dynamic is engrained in our culture. Is there some nuance to be found beyond the binary? Join us as we ponder the question while looking at some notable villains in literature, music, cinema, and (even scarier) the real world.
WATCH
5 Monsters from the Movies
The most terrifying villains are always either the faceless systems that run our world or the people whose humanity is buried so deep that even the most sympathizing of souls finds it hard to find.
Alex in A Clockwork Orange (1971)
All at once an amiable English lad and a terrifying dystopian pirate, raping and pillaging with a song on his lips (I'll never hear “Singin’ in the Rain” the same way again).
The patriarchy in Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2021)
The oppressive environment weighs so heavy here: the stream of normalized wounds is endless and becomes a flood of pain and tears during the titular scene. Fuck the patriarchy and fuck any male defensiveness taking the place of empathy in reaction to this film.
Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men (2007)
Spoilers ahead:
Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (2000)
Beware of men in suits.
The town of Dungatar in The Dressmaker (2015)
Just desserts are served to the villains here in fabulous flambé fashion with ingredients like hash brownies, red carpets, costumes, arson, Kate Winslet, and pools of blood.
-JB
Escape that villainous algorithm with a new algorithm.
Scrolling for info can lead you down some dark valleys. Newsletters offer a way out. And The Sample helps you find new ones to subscribe to by sending you one article each day from a random blog or newsletter that matches up with your interests. When you get one you like, you can subscribe to the writer with one click.
One that was sent my way recently was a Substack focused on inspiring “communal solidarity” called Bracero. Why not take a gander?
LISTEN
My Eminem experience goes back to my days as an early 2000s pre-teen holed up in my bedroom waiting with tense fingers beside my stereo for “Sing for the Moment” to come on the Vancouver top 40 radio station so I could record it onto a blank cassette tape.
As the CD age quickly took over, I would move on to importing songs from my A&B Sound-purchased copy of The Eminem Show into the audio editing freeware program Audacity in order to manually cut out the numerous swear words and anything else I found offensive to my moderately sheltered Christian house-held ears. This included a phrase from “Cleanin’ Out my Closet” (an angry critique of his mother’s failings as a parent) where Eminem says to his mother that she will never get to see his daughter Hailie, that Hailie “won’t even be at your funeral.” “How unkind,” 13-year old me thought. “Surely a grandmother, however flawed, at least deserves respect on her deathbed.”
Another memory: Sitting awkwardly and silently with my dad on the edge of my bed, sweating profusely while playing “Mockingbird” on my stereo, desperately wanting my father to see Eminem’s softer side, the one where he’s a loving dad who has experienced hard times, I suppose to justify to him and to myself probably that Eminem wasn’t “all bad,” and perhaps more importantly to my pious self, that I wasn’t bad for listening to his music, swear words and all.
See the thing was, there were no other real options for rap music of Eminem’s quality for a squeaky clean Christian kid like me. My local Christian bookstore recommended artists like tobyMac or KJ-52 for “fans of Eminem” but I found that comparison laughable. They were all white rappers, and that was pretty much where the similarities ended. So I was left with the Eminem Conundrum: He was a rapper irresistible in his lyricism, flow, and beats, but he used these things to say bad stuff sometimes. What’s a young evangelical teen to do?
Twenty years later, and my perception of Eminem (at least 2000s Eminem—it feels like he sort of slowly lost his spark along the way to Relapse) as a sort of complicated musical villain with redeeming qualities still holds true, though for different reasons. Gone are the days where I can’t handle hearing certain four letter words, and a song like “Cleanin’ Out my Closet” I now believe represents Eminem at his very best: a lyrical wizard digging deep into his story and raw emotions to produce something utterly compelling:
Remember when Ronnie [Eminem’s uncle, around his same age] died and you said you wished it was me?
Well guess what, I am dead, dead to you as can be!
No, I know now that there is nothing villainous about anger in and of itself. The discussion around Eminem’s villainy for me today is instead tied up in his fascinating crafting of different identities for himself as his career started to take off (case in point: his first three albums post-big break were entitled The Slim Shady LP, The Marshall Mathers LP, and The Eminem Show, respectively), and most significantly, in his “Slim Shady” persona—an ultra violent, misognyist, and homophobic bringer of chaos, a true villain.
Most of us are used to digesting such villains in the movies, since they are viewed from the outside and usually with a condemning or at least neutral perspective, but with Slim Shady’s first-person raps it’s more difficult, even when taking into account the “Public Service Announcement” he includes at the beginning of the The Slim Shady LP (“The views and events expressed here are totally fucked, and are not necessarily the views of anyone”). Part of the problem is that the line between the villain Slim Shady and Eminem’s other identities isn’t always clear. Take this provoking line from the first verse of the next track from the aforementioned LP, the introductory “My Name Is”:
Since age twelve, I felt like I'm someone else
'Cause I hung my original self from the top bunk with a belt
Eminem’s twisted 12-year-old self seems to make an appearance later on in verse two as he blends memory with absurd juvenile fantasy:
My English teacher wanted to flunk me in junior high
Thanks a lot, next semester I’ll be thirty-five
I smacked him in his face with an eraser, chased him with a stapler
And stapled his nuts to a stack of paper
The chaotic, scrambled nature of Slim Shady as an outlet for whatever thoughts come spilling out of Eminem’s brain seems to be cemented in verse three:
Stop the tape, this kid needs to be locked away
Dr. Dre, don't just stand there, operate
I’m not ready to leave, it’s too scary to die
I’ll have to be carried inside the cemetery and buried alive
Am I coming or going? I can barely decide
I just drank a fifth of vodka, dare me to drive?
Anyone else familiar with Eminem’s early work knows I’ve only quoted the tamest bits here. Songs like the next track “Guilty Conscience” straight up promote murder and rape. The weird thing is, of course, how such songs stand in such stark contrast to other tracks on the album like the earnest and touching pleas for salvation from his life of poverty, “If I Had” and “Rock Bottom”:
Minimum wage got my adrenaline caged
Full of venom and rage, ‘specially when I’m engaged
And my daughter’s down to her last diaper, it’s got my ass hyper
I pray that God answers, maybe I’ll ask nicer
The wild contrasts continue on Eminem’s next LP. In the tender “Stan,” Eminem uses his own lyrics against himself (“Hey Slim, I drank a fifth of vodka, you dare me to drive?”) when he imagines himself as one of his fans who ends up following Slim Shady’s lead from the previous album (see the chilling “‘97 Bonnie and Clyde”) by tying his girlfriend up in his car, putting her in the trunk, and driving away drunk. In the final verse, Eminem as himself writes back to Stan with some words of wisdom (“You got some issues, Stan, I think you need some counseling… I really think you and your girlfriend need each other / Or maybe you just need to treat her better”), but it ends up being too late.
This apparent awareness of the effect of his words disappears quickly, however, on the revolting “Kill You,” where Eminem responds to reaction to his first album (“These motherfuckers are thinking I’m playing / Thinking I’m saying the shit ‘cause I’m thinking it just to be saying it”) by doubling down on the misogynist violence, before ending the song with “I’m just playing, ladies. You know I love you”.
It’s a frightening flip-flop that Eminem practices over and over again, and while in other tracks he scoffs at the expectations that he should be a role model for kids (e.g. “Role Model”; “White America”), a talented lyricist like himself should know at the very least that words and stories have immense power, especially when presented with the artistic talent that he possesses. “Cleaning out My Closet,” “Mockingbird,” and other songs like “Yellow Brick Road” (“Journey with me as I take you through this… place / That I once used to call home sweet home”), “Like Toy Soldiers” (a reflection on conflict and loyalty within the hip-hop world), and “Deja Vu” (a harrowing account of his battle with drug addiction) show this power in compelling, invitational, and more responsible ways that he would do well to follow more consistently.
-JB
READ
Substack Posts to Get You Thinking Differently about Villains
Of all the potential IRL villains in our culture right now, I think ol’ Vladi offers up the most consensus. If you start an unprovoked war, you’re a bad guy. It’s that simple.
Still, labels like “villain” can quickly work to dehumanize the people we give them to, and in the above article, Robert Wright does a pretty good job of calling out our biases while continuing to hold Putin responsible for his deplorable actions.
Every villain implies a struggle. Alexander Beiner’s essay above looks closely at the class struggle on display in Amazon’s new billion-dollar show, The Rings of Power, and compares it to our current situation. It’s an interesting take on Middle Earth and the actual Earth that ends on a familiar note: the One Ring must be destroyed.
Looking for a few more ideas centred on class struggle?
Check out this past post from Ponytail Press.
Another Russia-related post, but I couldn’t help myself.
Nikita Petrov left his home country when it invaded Ukraine but recently returned to get married and bury a grandparent. While there, he had the above interaction with an Orthodox clergyman, and it was shocking to read how the priest’s mind seems to live in such a different yet similar place to some folks in the West. I promise you will not predict where this one is headed.
Beyond offering a look behind the newly resurrecting Iron Curtain, the key thing I got out of “Priest on a Train” was how composed Nikita stayed throughout the conversation. Maybe we should try this next time we hear someone spewing an unhinged conspiracy theory—see where it leads.
Who’s the villain of Moby Dick? It’s the kind of question you’d ask high schoolers after forcing them to read the thing (don’t do that, by the way). The plot famously centres on a captain and his men seeking out a remorseless sea monster. But through the eyes of Ishmael and his exhaustive sidebars, we get the sense that morality isn’t so simple. Is it ever?
-AK
We’re putting our Darths, Jokers, and Saurons to bed. Come join us around the table next time as we gorge ourselves on the theme of
Great write-up on Eminem. I truly enjoy some of his music, but yeah--he's definitely got multiple facets. I actually had a similar conversation (though not nearly as thoughtful as yours) with one of my sons when he hit the teen years (~2012) and discovered Eminem. While I was well into my 20s when he arrived on the scene, I've continued to listen to him for 25 years. And I'm a mom who loves Jesus. :) I've always tried to make sure my kids know that lyrics can be good storytelling, even with expletives and uncomfortable phrases. But when it graduates to degrading other humans, it's probably time to find another song.