The sublime ambiguity of the tormented villain

by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — One of America’s most familiar figures, Rush Limbaugh, projected a persona that offered barely a smidgeon of nuance. Rush, who died last month, was a two-dimensional construction whom you either loved or hated, No middle ground between. This is how he chose to be esteemed. When interviewed about his incendiary broadcast style, he described himself not as a pundit, analyst or public intellectual. He was, he averred, an entertainer. He presented himself not as character but caricature. We hardly knew him. He was, for all practical and political purposes, a cartoon.

This facile and inch-deep facade made Limbaugh passionately popular. His “dittohead” followers, sensing in his bombast neither complexity nor self-doubt, found not just affirmation for their fears, superstitions and prejudices, but blind faith. For three blessed hours a day on talk radio, Rush was simple, blunt and absolute, conveying the conviction that life itself — uncluttered by the intrusion of second thoughts or moral misgivings — is simple, blunt and absolute.

Limbaugh’s believers reveled in the emotional validation that their hero was, to his radiclib, feminazi foes, the perfect villain.

Besides being radio provocateurs, perfect, impenitent, implacable bad guys are the grist of pulp fiction. As I read Limbaugh’s obituary, I pictured Lex Luthor, the cackling arch-villain of Superman comics. Luthor belonged to a literary tradition whose archetype was Professor Moriarty. In creating a nemesis for Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle fashioned a villain both thoroughly evil and hermetically enigmatic.

We never got to know Moriarty. We knew he was bad to the bone, but never knew what made him that way. Conan Doyle never let us — nor did he even permit Holmes — to pick Moriarty’s brain, dissect his motives, meet his family or scratch his dog behind the ear. He was a deep and perpetual mystery.

When we compare Moriarty to Holmes, we see the method to Conan Doyle’s mysteriousness. While Moriarty is smug and comfortable in his evil cocoon, Holmes is irreparably flawed and bothered by his flaws. Among his many symptoms, Holmes is addictive, manic and depressive, plus pompous and rude with a touch of the vindictive, a hint of misogyny and a haunting insecurity about his own brilliance — especially in comparison to Mycroft and Moriarty.

The reader learns all about Holmes and must decide whether to like him, or to stop reading because his many petty afflictions are just too annoying.

Holmes is a morally ambiguous protagonist who engages us through his or her angst, indecision, impulse and heartache. His heroism has been with us since Achilles chose to compromise his principles and fight an entire godawful war over Who Got the Girl. From the very beginning, storytellers have understood that the listener to Homer’s Iliad or the reader of Tom Jones must feel an intimacy, a mixture of affection and reproach toward the lead character. The audience might accept — but would never love nor long tolerate — a protagonist who’s flat, simple and predictable. The hero must evoke feelings, fears and misgivings that we feel in ourselves. A well-drawn hero has the power to break our your heart.

Ironically, the same rule doesn’t apply to evildoers. A villain who’s just plain bad, without nuance or introspection — is as fascinating as he is predictable. He fills us with righteous rage and makes us ache for his comeuppance. Dudley Do-Right is a crashing bore, but Snively Whiplash is a show-stopper.

However, the enterprising author can also create a villain imbued with moral ambiguity— a badass with redeeming qualities. This motif traces all the way back to Beowulf, in which the seemingly monstrous Grendel is the loneliest being in the kingdom he’s terrorizing and where, in Seamus Heaney’s translation, he “haunted the glittering hall after dark,/ but the throne itself, the treasure-seat,/ he was kept from approaching; he was the Lord’s outcast.”

I’ve always had a soft spot for villains with anxieties and misgivings. For example, John Milton’s greatest character, in Paradise Lost, is Satan himself, the quintessence of evil. Milton loved his Satan. Over and over, he thrusts the reader inside the mind of his villain where “the thought/ Both of lost happiness and lasting pain/ Torments him” for all eternity. Milton’s epic evokes a desolation that can’t help but wrest from the reader a reluctant pang of sympathy for the Devil.

Purveyors of pop culture and pulp fiction, of course, tend toward the easily sketched 2-D Lex Luthor villain, lest they offend their squeamish audience by glorifying mischief. But I’ve always contended that readers, watchers and listeners are smarter than their panders. Else why, for example, in “Leave It to Beaver,” was Eddie Haskell vastly more compelling than whitebread Wally? In the same light, the character who made the TV sitcom “Taxi” a classic was not Alex or even Latka Gravas. It was Danny DeVito’s virtuoso turn as Louie De Palma, mean, cheap, profane and lewd — but torn, troubled and secretly needy.

And then, there’s Tony Soprano. Talk about your rotten guys. He’s a ruthless mobster. He steals, kills, pimps, lies, bribes and cheats on his wife. But as we get to know him, episode by episode, we learn his secret anguish. Even as he rules an empire of sleaze, he struggles to give his kids a future undefiled by their father’s iniquity. He suffers anxiety attacks that overwhelm him with self-reproach and render him desperate for a shoulder to cry on. Because we’ve seen the tortured Tony who hides behind his brutish facade, we feel his plight, we hope for his redemption and we dread the prospect that he might be rubbed out by the Mob before he can summon up the better angels of his nature — although we’re pretty sure there are no better angels.

As Lloyd Bentsen might say, Rush Limbaugh was no Tony Soprano. But there is a celluloid analogy that comes to mind — in the baseball comedy, Major League. The villain of the piece is team owner Margaret Whitton (Rachel Phelps). Determined to ruin her team so she can move it to Florida, she’s as 2-D as a bad gal can be. She betrays no inner life or emotional range. True to her cartoon persona, her merrily defiant baseball players turn her into life-size cardboard cutout and wage their battle for redemption against a two-dimensional effigy. Of course, because Major League is a feel-good movie — rather than real life — Jake, Lou, Willy Mays Hayes and Wild Thing strip their cardboard nemesis and win the pennant.

Over here in reality, where one of the nation’s political parties is still pledging its undying allegiance to an exiled self-caricature of Rush Limbaugh’s self-caricature, and where social media is a vast illusion in which millions of neurotic mummers hide behind cardboard cutouts of their imaginary selves, we might be wise to appreciate the ambiguous real-life downfall of Andrew Cuomo.

Cuomo was a pandemic hero until he undercounted the elderly dead. He stood tall and truthful against a torrent of White House lies, but then he queered his hero act by talking dirty to women and kissing girls who didn’t want to be kissed. You’ll never love him, but can you really bring yourself to hate the guy? He was like all of us except, for a while, he was better. He was like all of us except, a few times, he was worse. He says he’s sorry but he doesn’t seem entirely sure what he did to be sorry about.

It was Yeats who saw Rush and Trump and Cuomo slouching toward Bethlehem and told us we better watch out, because “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”