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Read Part One, if you like

Now, one does not in fact have to sympathize with the motives of a villain to receive the cathartic effect. Hannibal Lecter, for instance: What he wants to do is kill people so that he can eat them. Now, that’s no good! Don’t do that! And yet he remains the most compelling figure in all of his movies – intelligent, powerful, self-assured, capable of persuading a man to swallow his own tongue. And at the same time, he operates in total opposition to society. I will not trouble my intelligent and physically attractive readership with an explanation of why “opposition to society” is an impulse with which one might identify, albeit one that requires harmlessly roundabout methods of rattling about inside one’s head. Lecter provides a remarkably sophisticated face for the supposedly childish impulse of Badass Revenge Fantasy.

Of, course, it can be fun if the villain is, in fact, in the right. Let us consider for a moment a one Dr. Zaius, Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith.

Put yourself in his position. You have attained a rank of importance and responsibility, and with it has come a great secret: A foul and rapacious sort of animal – humans for him; let’s say rats, for us – was once intelligent, and in fact technologically superior to your civilization. And these rats were dizzyingly savage and cruel – so much so that they destroyed their own society, reducing themselves to a bestial level, and very nearly destroying the entire biosphere in the process. And now, you are confronted with a talking rat. A throwback. What do you do with it? You destroy it, that’s what you do with it, pausing momentarily to try to figure out where it came from, where there might be more. It would be unthinkably irresponsible to let their terror again take root upon the Earth. The tragic ending of Planet of the Apes - the reason Chuck Heston loudly proposes that “you all” be damned to Hell – is that he realizes, in effect, that Dr. Zaius was right.

(Fun fact: In order to get “Damn you all to Hell” past a 1960s ratings board, the filmmakers had to persuade said board that Taylor wasn’t swearing, but using “damn” as a verb – literally damning his subjects to Hell. This did the trick, and the board ultimately gave the movie a rating of G. G, people. A movie in which people are rounded up and shot, thrown into cages together in hopes they’ll mate, thought of as more fun-for-the-whole-family than, say, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off would be considered in the future. So much for permissive modernity. The attentive reader will have noted by now that I digress.)

But Planet of the Apes is an unusual sort of movie, in that there’s a good guy, and a bad guy, and the good guy doesn’t really win, because he, like you and me, doesn’t have all the facts. Which permits the villain to be in the right, and to have moral virtues lacked by the hero. (“I’m pretty handy with this,” Taylor says of a rifle to the tied-up Zaius; “Of that I’m sure,” is the Doctor’s withering response.) Most movies, though, the good guy’s supposed to win. I get that. A love for catharsis, however strong, actually has no bearing on moral sense. Fun as it is to think about blowing up the world or turning everybody into lizards or whatever, we understand that we don’t get to do this, and that such urges must not be granted free reign. The hero-beats-villain thing reinforces this. Which has, presumably, helped the world to not be blown up, and everyone to not be turned into lizards. Sure, yeah, okay. However, it is important, in the standard, moral-reinforcement sort of film, that the villain not have a better-thought-out worldview than the hero.

To be concluded…

When I was a boy, I worshipped Darth Vader as a god. Seriously. I mean, I propitiated him with offerings, here. More importantly, I wanted to become him, to ascend to Vaderness, or at least take on Vaderlike qualities, while, at he same time, recognizing that murder was wrong and blah blah blah. Only recently – when I was 62, I think – did I stop dressing up as Vader every single Halloween. So what led to this spontaneous religious feeling – and why has it softened a touch in my dotage?

The answer to the second question provides a partial answer to the first: I am no longer terrified of my father. He’s a good guy, understand, and never did anything to truly warrant this, but he’s very big, and very ill-tempered. Nowadays, I am bigger than he, and still more ill-tempered, and have been so for much of my life. But during my formative years – which, I’m told, are important in some way – I was small and meek. Now, the man in question was my dad, and so it transpired that I also felt some positive and respectful feelings for him. Indeed, so much so that the terror could not be felt entirely appropriate. And so I found an object of transference: huge, deep-voiced, authoritative, and, hell, “I am your father.” Worked like a voodoo charm! And how better to master your fear than to attempt to become it? Oldest trick in the book – hence the propensity of kings and warriors of old to identify themselves with lions, wolves, that kind of thing. (This being back when lions and wolves might at any time come out of the woods and devour your person or loved ones.) What could be less scared than the scary?

There’s a simpler aspect of Vaderphilia as well: catharsis. When Darth Vader is disappointed in the people around him, he kills them. With his mind! Now, I am told that there are people on this earth who feel no aggression toward those around them, or toward society in general – but I do not care to know them. Me, I need an outlet. It helps that Vader doesn’t really appear to have much of an ethos (other than, perhaps, a high standard for those providing him services – and who doesn’t sympathize with that?). Oh, except “The Dark Side.” Which, we are told, is “anger, fear, aggression.” And who among us is not pretty goddamned familiar with anger, fear, and aggression, within our own heads at least?

To be continued…