This is a small thought, hardly even worth a post, but it keeps niggling into my brain and not letting go. So I’m posting about it anyway!
I was listening to a crime podcast about a conwoman who pretended to be a victim of human trafficking. And part of why she was so successful is because she told the story people WANTED to hear. She was constantly embellishing and changing and improving depending on the feedback she got from her audience. Which is why she was the “perfect” victim, for each individual person to whom she spoke. She told them what they wanted to hear without any messy “truth” getting in the way.
And then I listened to a podcast about an internet stalker. He did really terrible things, destroyed women’s lives and enjoyed it. But there was an interview with his mother too, and she talked about how hard his father rejected him, the terrible bullying he endured in high school, how he never fit in, how she had tried to get him help. But here’s the interesting bit, to me, when this podcast was turned into a Netflix documentary, they didn’t include any of that. It’s too messy, it brings up too many questions, better to leave him as the “perfect villain”.
With the MeToo movement and similar things in America and in India, the “perfect victim” idea is a real problem. Mostly because people who aren’t “perfect victims” tend not to come forward at all. Which might mean male victims of sexual abuse, or victims who willingly entered into relationships they later regretted, or victims who did, ultimately, agree to have sex for a role. In India, this is a MASSIVE problem. The expectations of being a “good” woman are so high, and so unrelated to reality for many women in the film industry, that it’s almost impossible to tell your story in a way that will get sympathy and longterm action.
But what I’ve noticed particularly in the Indian coverage is that the “Perfect Villain” idea is almost equally toxic. Pretty quickly the narrative changed from “here are the people who did bad things” to “here is the list of people who defended them/were friends with them/worked with them and are therefore bad by contagion”. But what this is ignoring is that it is completely possible for someone to do bad things to one person in one place, and for them to do good things for a different person in a different place. And neither person is lying.
Salman Khan is one where I think about this a lot. There’s a sense that either everyone who says he is kind and generous and gentle and loving is lying because they are afraid of him/beholden to him/blinded by fame/immoral and covering for him. Or everyone who says he was scary and angry and abusive is lying because they want fame/hate him/etc. But what if both sides are true? Can we open our minds to accept that? They people who are friends with him possibly truly sincerely see more good in him than bad in their own personal experiences. They aren’t “condoning” or “covering up” because they have experienced nothing to condone or cover up.
Another one where this comes up a lot is intimate partner abuse. When there is a story of either famous people or just people you know where their partner says they were abused, often there is a former partner who says “I wasn’t abused”. And the assumption is one of the two people is lying. Or, being more generous, one of the two people hasn’t come to terms with their experience. But what if they are both being totally accurate? Can we accept that the same person could be a good kind supportive partner to one person and abusive to the other? That in different circumstances and with different people they can be totally different?
I guess there are two reasons understanding there are no “perfect villains” is imperfect. First, the pointless punishment of folks who are their friends, family, associates. They truly could have had only good experiences, they truly did not know the terrible person other people saw. And second, the belief that the bad act is a lie if the good act is true by the general public. Just because someone really truly did a good thing doesn’t mean they didn’t also do a bad thing.
And finally, that you can feel pity and sadness for something that happened to a Bad Person because ultimately they are still A Person. It’s not an excuse, or even an explanation, but it is still a bad thing that happened in the world to someone. Going back to the internet stalker example, he was Autistic, he wasn’t diagnosed until his teens, and then he was bounced around through the system without consistent support. That doesn’t mean he gets to stalk people online, there are loads of folks who went through the same thing and didn’t end up that way. But it does mean that he should have gotten more support as a child, that I can feel pity and sympathy for the boy he was, and that I can hope he gets support now. Without negating anything bad that he did. The American attitude towards the prison system is a really terrible example of this. We joke about bad food, bad medical care, even rape happening in prisons because they are prisoners, they are bad people. But, they are still PEOPLE!!!!
And in India, what I have noticed is the attitude toward celebrities has a flavor of the same thing. Yes. they are movie stars, they are famous, but they are still PEOPLE. They don’t deserve to be wrongfully imprisoned, stalked, harassed, blamed for every social problem, etc. etc. And they are allowed to point out the injustice of this. (to be fair, America and the west have been similarly bad at different points in our history, it’s just that at this moment I feel like India is worse)
Does any of this make sense? Acknowledging that someone can be a Victim and not be a sparkling perfect example of the ideal character? But also acknowledging that someone can be a Villain and not be the sparkling perfect example of a bad character? That in fact one single person could be both Victim and Villain?
