I've hardly ever written about 'bad guys' and had them play a major role in the story-- mainly because of the difficulties that you've highlighted in this post. I think gender does play a very important part, quite apart from the memorable-villian gender bias you've noted occurs in dS, I think that gender also has an affect on the crimes themselves.
Um, to try to explain; crimes themselves seem to have a gender bias. I'm sure everyone's heard the old saw about poisoning being a woman's crime, but it is documented that certain types of crime tends to be committed more by one gender than the other; the majority of serial killers are male, for example. There's also a certain cultural force at play along with the gender bias-- it's gangsters and molls, not gangsterettes and bois-- and I think that affects how and why a type of crime is committed (I also think that I've wandered completely off topic and gotten myself tied up in a knot. Um... oops).
I'm not really sure that there really is any one type villain that works fine in any setting, I think the type of story itself defines just what the villain is going to be like, but I can't think of any clear way to describe this... shall have to think.
Fictional villains that rock my socks and that I think stand up really well include:
- Pretty much the whole cast of The Usual Suspects. I seriously, seriously love this film. Verbal is such a fantastically realised character, and is I think a brilliant example of someone who's on the wrong side of the law simply because there isn't any other way to survive, and how he's had to learn to exist (and enjoy existing) on the darker side of things. Keaton is the arch-typical gone-bad character who seems to have almost stumbled into his badness: he's a fallen cop, sure, but as much as he moves in the underworld and does terrible things, he still has a certain sense of moral justice-- he fulfills an almost guardian-angel like role for both his ex-wife and Verbal during the course of the film, and he's largely responsible for the hit on the corrupt Police 'taxi service'. McManus, Fenster and Hockney are less fully realised characters, but they all provide different facets of what it means to be bad-- to be a villain-- albeit in a somewhat mundane fashion. And, of course, there's Keyser Sose, the shadowy myth-man, looming in the background of the whole film, seen through the unreliable lens of Verbal's narration (as the others are, although I've always thought that the portrayals of the other four 'suspects' are more true to what they actually are, given that Kujan-- the lesser narrator of the film-- also inputs into their portrayal). For me this uncertainty, this lack of solid definition (apart from what Verbal recounts as 'stories he's heard') is what makes Sose one of my favourite villains ever, that and the fact that despite the fact that's he's portrayed as someone who is ruthless, evil and thoroughly bad, there are still those hints and flashes about the family that he once had, about that fact that once-- hey-- he was something approaching a normal person.
Part the first
Um, to try to explain; crimes themselves seem to have a gender bias. I'm sure everyone's heard the old saw about poisoning being a woman's crime, but it is documented that certain types of crime tends to be committed more by one gender than the other; the majority of serial killers are male, for example. There's also a certain cultural force at play along with the gender bias-- it's gangsters and molls, not gangsterettes and bois-- and I think that affects how and why a type of crime is committed (I also think that I've wandered completely off topic and gotten myself tied up in a knot. Um... oops).
I'm not really sure that there really is any one type villain that works fine in any setting, I think the type of story itself defines just what the villain is going to be like, but I can't think of any clear way to describe this... shall have to think.
Fictional villains that rock my socks and that I think stand up really well include:
- Pretty much the whole cast of The Usual Suspects. I seriously, seriously love this film. Verbal is such a fantastically realised character, and is I think a brilliant example of someone who's on the wrong side of the law simply because there isn't any other way to survive, and how he's had to learn to exist (and enjoy existing) on the darker side of things. Keaton is the arch-typical gone-bad character who seems to have almost stumbled into his badness: he's a fallen cop, sure, but as much as he moves in the underworld and does terrible things, he still has a certain sense of moral justice-- he fulfills an almost guardian-angel like role for both his ex-wife and Verbal during the course of the film, and he's largely responsible for the hit on the corrupt Police 'taxi service'. McManus, Fenster and Hockney are less fully realised characters, but they all provide different facets of what it means to be bad-- to be a villain-- albeit in a somewhat mundane fashion. And, of course, there's Keyser Sose, the shadowy myth-man, looming in the background of the whole film, seen through the unreliable lens of Verbal's narration (as the others are, although I've always thought that the portrayals of the other four 'suspects' are more true to what they actually are, given that Kujan-- the lesser narrator of the film-- also inputs into their portrayal). For me this uncertainty, this lack of solid definition (apart from what Verbal recounts as 'stories he's heard') is what makes Sose one of my favourite villains ever, that and the fact that despite the fact that's he's portrayed as someone who is ruthless, evil and thoroughly bad, there are still those hints and flashes about the family that he once had, about that fact that once-- hey-- he was something approaching a normal person.