“Am I a good person doing ‘bad’ things, or a bad person doing ‘good’ things?”

If you go back and examine the entertainment narratives from the past century, it’s always fairly easy to determine who is the bad guy and who is the good guy.  They were necessary niches that a story needed to have filled.  There’s that old adage in the comics about how heroes are defined by their villains.  The stalwart hero needed a blackly dressed villain, perhaps with a wickedly-curving mustache or an aptitude for evil science.  At the very least, it had been common practice to give a protagonist a clear antagonist.  This is one of the first things you’ll learn in a fiction writing class; both are necessary.

And it seems like, in the past decade or more, this notion of clearly-demarcated good and evil has begun to blur a little.  With comics like The Punisher, we can track the rise of the anti-hero, the good guy who chooses to do bad things to bad people to prevent good people from getting hurt.  The Punisher to me is a unique example in that, from his inception, he was a killer.  He is perhaps the only canonized Marvel “hero” he does what he does from behind the iron sights.  He has willingly crossed a line that other heroes like Batman had been toeing for years, resistance to cross.

Even more recent–and a personal favorite–is the television show Dexter.  On the show, Dexter Morgan (played by the incredibly talented Michael C. Hall, on whom I’ve had a serious man-crush since I started watching the show) works as with blood-spatter analysis for the Miama Metro Police Department.  Dexter is also a killer.  I intentionally resist calling him a serial killer, because that to me implies randomness, and there is nothing random about Dexter’s killings.  Brought up from childhood by his adoptive father Harry, Dexter was trained to channel his murderous urges, to make himself seem normal to the world at large when, internally, he is decidedly not.  He has these murderous urges, but instead of randomly killing the denizens of Miami, Dexter uses his inside knowledge of the police department to track down and kill other murders who have escaped justice.

Without getting into a protracted analysis of why I love this show, I’ll say that one of the reasons I find it so fascinating is how the show plays with the notion of perspective.  Were the show to have, say, Dexter’s sister Deb, or Detective Angel Batista as the main protagonist, Dexter would almost certainly be viewed as an antagonist.  In Season Two, when Dexter’s underwater body stash is uncovered, and Miami Metro goes on the hunt for the “Bay Harbor Butcher,” we are cheering the whole time for Dexter to get away, to not get caught.  Considering that this is the direct obverse of traditional police dramas, it seems apparent that the show has tapped into something very interesting.  The fact is, as viewers of the show, we are privy to Dexter’s internal logic–narrated in voice-over–and, because of that, we feel empathy.  Instead of a killer, we see him as a person, with all concomitant flaws and strengths that go with that.  Because he is our protagonist, because we empathize, Dexter will never be the antagonist of his own show.

Much the same as the Punisher, there is a part of us that thinks that what he is doing–outside the parameters of the law of course–is still something that we can fundamentally get behind.  We understand their motives and their logic, and though we may never be willing to replicate their actions in our own physical and moral space, we nonetheless empathize and understand.

With the advent of the information age, it has become much easier to understand movements and individuals.  And when you understand the motivation and the logic behind an action–for example, in a recent college class we examined new research that attempted to lay out the theological origins of Hitler’s regime–it ceases to be a random, alien, heinous act toward which we can have a knee-jerk terrified reaction.

Which brings me around to the Joker.  In the past, the Joker has been portrayed in myriad ways, sometimes as little more than a slightly-demented clown, and other times as a relentlessly insane serial murderer.  And getting back to a post I did earlier about heroes, incarnations of the villain have been molded to the perception of evil that the culture has in place.

In the recent film The Dark Knight, the Joker has no obvious motive.  He has no back story, no logic, no reason to rationalize what he does.  When trying to explain the Joker’s actions, Alfred tells Bruce, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”  And it precisely this notion of illogical violence, of mayhem without motive, that seems to be the definition of modern evil, if such of definition can even be presented.

The reason for this seems to be that, when we can rationalize evil, when we can understand it, trace back it’s causes and tease out its implication, in some fundamental way, it often ceases to be evil.  It instead becomes a different perspective.

But illogical, random chaos, uncertainty, the inability to rationalize or explain, that is what’s scary, and that is where it seems that our fears currently reside.