A Case for the Bad Guy

We need bad guys. Without them, the world would be so full of average people that we'd all go nuts enduring the monotony of hero-lessness. Yeah, no bad guys - no heroes either! And I'm not talking about the average, mediocre bad-guy who knowingly walks away with the extra dollar the store-clerk mistakenly gave with the return change, or the guy who dings another car backing out his own and drives away furtively glancing for witnesses and heaving a sigh of relief finding no one. These are just small time wannabes who wouldn't do anything big and stinky, but the net effect of these wannabe crooks can be big. But if all we had were these itty-bitty annoyances, we'd not need big police forces and complicated laws. You'd just appeal to the head-man of your village and either tongue-lash the offender or reimburse the affected guy from the community insurance pool. That simple!


Reality is bad. So people binge on pot and chocolates in a valiant effort to escape it. Reality is bad because there are Real Big Mean Crooks everywhere. So the system is overwhelmingly complicated. Good Guys sometimes get trampled to death for innocuous mistakes - mistakes which the village headman would have simply pardoned with either words of stern warning or those of understanding sympathy.

So how can reality be made better? The answer is to have a bit more of the Really Big Bad Guys. Heroes are bound to emerge, and the distinction between Good and Bad would be so clear that every individual will be forced to make a conscious choice - to be good or bad.


I figured all this out after watching Unbreakable. Really, Cartoons and Comic books have more to them than what is obvious from the surface...