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The Good Guy/Bad Guy Myth

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CATHERINE NICHOLS

e first time we see Darth Vader doing more than heavy breathing in Star
Wars (), he’s strangling a man to death. A few scenes later, he’s blowing
up a planet. He kills his subordinates, chokes people with his mind, does all
kinds of things a good guy would never do. But then the nature of a bad guy
is that he does things a good guy would never do. Good guys don’t just fight
for personal gain: they fight for what’s right – their values.

is moral physics underlies not just Star Wars, but also film series such as
e Lord of the Rings (-) and X-Men (-), as well as most Disney
cartoons. Virtually all our mass-culture narratives based on folklore have the
same structure: good guys battle bad guys for the moral future of society.
ese tropes are all over our movies and comic books, in Narnia and at
Hogwarts, and yet they don’t exist in any folktales, myths or ancient epics.
In Marvel comics, or has to be worthy of his hammer, and he proves his
worth with moral qualities. But in ancient myth, or is a god with powers
and motives beyond any such idea as ‘worthiness’.

In old folktales, no one fights for values. Individual stories might show the
virtues of honesty or hospitality, but there’s no agreement among folktales
about which actions are good or bad. When characters get their
comeuppance for disobeying advice, for example, there is likely another
similar story in which the protagonist survives only because he disobeys
advice. Defending a consistent set of values is so central to the logic of
newer plots that the stories themselves are often reshaped to create values for
characters such as or and Loki – who in the th-century Icelandic Edda
had personalities rather than consistent moral orientations.

Stories from an oral tradition never have anything like a modern good guy
or bad guy in them, despite their reputation for being moralising. In stories
such as Jack and the Beanstalk or Sleeping Beauty, just who is the good guy?
Jack is the protagonist we’re meant to root for, yet he has no ethical
justification for stealing the giant’s things. Does Sleeping Beauty care about
goodness? Does anyone fight crime? Even tales that can be made to seem
like they are about good versus evil, such as the story of Cinderella, do not
hinge on so simple a moral dichotomy. In traditional oral versions,
Cinderella merely needs to be beautiful to make the story work. In the ree
Little Pigs, neither pigs nor wolf deploy tactics that the other side wouldn’t
stoop to. It’s just a question of who gets dinner first, not good versus evil.
e situation is more complex in epics such as e Iliad, which does have
two ‘teams’, as well as characters who wrestle with moral meanings. But the
teams don’t represent the clash of two sets of values in the same way that
modern good guys and bad guys do. Neither Achilles nor Hector stands for
values that the other side cannot abide, nor are they fighting to protect the
world from the other team. ey don’t symbolise anything but themselves
and, though they talk about war often, they never cite their values as the
reason to fight the good fight. e ostensibly moral face-off between good
and evil is a recent invention that evolved in concert with modern
nationalism – and, ultimately, it gives voice to a political vision not an
ethical one.

Most folklore scholarship since the Second World War has been concerned
with archetypes or commonalities among folktales, the implicit drive being
that if the myths and stories of all nations had more in common than
divided them, then people of all nations could likewise have more in
common than divides us. It was a radical idea, when earlier folktales had
been published specifically to show how people in one nation were unlike
those in another.

In her study of folklore From the Beast to the Blonde (), the English
author and critic Marina Warner rejects a reading of folktales, popularised
by the American child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, as a set of analogies
for our psychological and developmental struggles. Warner argues instead
that external circumstances make these stories resonate with readers and
listeners through the centuries. Still, both scholars want to trace the
common tropes of folktales and fairytales insofar as they stay the same, or
similar, through the centuries.
Novelists and filmmakers who base their work on folklore also seem to focus
on commonalities. George Lucas very explicitly based Star Wars on Joseph
Campbell’s book e Hero with a ousand Faces (), which describes
the journey of a figure such as Luke Skywalker as a human universal. J R R
Tolkien used his scholarship of Old English epics to recast the stories in an
alternative, timeless landscape; and many comic books explicitly or
implicitly recycle the ancient myths and legends, keeping alive story threads
shared by stories new and old, or that old stories from different societies
around the world share with each other.

Less discussed is the historic shift that altered the nature of so many of our
modern retellings of folklore, to wit: the idea that people on opposite sides
of conflicts have different moral qualities, and fight over their values. at
shift lies in the good guy/bad guy dichotomy, where people no longer fight
over who gets dinner, or who gets Helen of Troy, but over who gets to
change or improve society’s values. Good guys stand up for what they
believe in, and are willing to die for a cause. is trope is so omnipresent in
our modern stories, movies, books, even our political metaphors, that it is
sometimes difficult to see how new it is, or how bizarre it looks, considered
in light of either ethics or storytelling.

When the Grimm brothers wrote down their local folktales in the th
century, their aim was to use them to define the German Volk, and unite the
German people into a modern nation. e Grimms were students of the
philosophy of Johann Gottfried von Herder, who emphasised the role of
language and folk traditions in defining values. In his Treatise on the Origin
of Language (), von Herder argued that language was ‘a natural organ of
the understanding’, and that the German patriotic spirit resided in the way
that the nation’s language and history developed over time. Von Herder and
the Grimms were proponents of the then-new idea that the citizens of a
nation should be bound by a common set of values, not by kinship or land
use. For the Grimms, stories such as Godfather Death, or the Knapsack, the
Hat and the Horn, revealed the pure form of thought that arose from their
language.

e corollary of uniting the Volk through a storified set of essential

characteristics and values is that those outside the culture were seen as
lacking the values Germans considered their own. Von Herder might have
understood the potential for mass violence in this idea, because he praised
the wonderful variety of human cultures: specifically, he believed that
German Jews should have equal rights to German Christians. Still, the
nationalist potential of the Grimm brothers’ project was gradually amplified
as its influence spread across Europe, and folklorists began writing books of
national folklore specifically to define their own national character. Not
least, many modern nations went on to realise the explosive possibilities for
abuse in a mode of thinking that casts ‘the other’ as a kind of moral monster.

In her book e Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (), the American
scholar Maria Tatar remarks on the way that Wilhelm Grimm would slip in,
say, adages about the importance of keeping promises. She argued that:
‘Rather than coming to terms with the absence of a moral order … he
persisted in adding moral pronouncements even where there was no moral.’
Such additions established the idea that it was values (not just dinner) at
stake in the conflicts that these stories dramatised. No doubt the Grimms’
additions influenced Bettelheim, Campbell and other folklorists who argued
for the inherent morality of folktales, even if they had not always been told
as moral fables.

As part of this new nationalist consciousness, other authors started changing

the old stories to make a moral distinction between, for example, Robin
Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Before Joseph Ritson’s  retelling
of these legends, earlier written stories about the outlaw mostly showed him
carousing in the forest with his merry men. He didn’t rob from the rich to
give to the poor until Ritson’s version – written to inspire a British populist
uprising after the French Revolution. Ritson’s rendering was so popular that
modern retellings of Robin Hood, such as Disney’s  cartoon or the film
Prince of ieves () are more centrally about outlaw moral obligations
than outlaw hijinks. e Sheriff of Nottingham was transformed from a
simple antagonist to someone who symbolised the abuses of power against
the powerless. Even within a single nation (Robin Hood), or a single
household (Cinderella), every scale of conflict was restaged as a conflict of
values.

Or consider the legend of King Arthur. In the th century, poets writing
about him were often French, like Chrétien de Troyes, because King Arthur
wasn’t yet closely associated with the soul of Britain. What’s more, his
adversaries were often, literally, monsters, rather than people who
symbolised moral weaknesses. By the early th century, when Tennyson
wrote Idylls of the King, King Arthur becomes an ideal of a specifically
British manhood, and he battles human characters who represent moral
frailties. By the th century, the word ‘Camelot’ came to mean a kingdom
too idealistic to survive on Earth.
Once the idea of national values entered our storytelling, the peculiar moral
physics underlying the phenomenon of good guys versus bad guys has been
remarkably consistent. One telling feature is that characters frequently
change sides in conflicts: if a character’s identity resides in his values, then
when he changes his mind about a moral question, he is essentially
swapping sides, or defecting. is is not always acknowledged. For example,
when in the PBS series Power of Myth () the journalist Bill Moyers
discussed with Campbell how many ancient tropes Star Wars deployed, they
didn’t consider how bizarre it would have seemed to the ancient storytellers
had Darth Vader changed his mind about anger and hatred, and switched
sides in his war with Luke and the Rebels. Contrast this with e Iliad,
where Achilles doesn’t become Trojan when he is angry at Agamemnon.
Neither the Greeks nor the Trojans stand for some set of human strengths or
frailties. Since their conflict is not a metaphor for some internal battle of
anger versus love, switching sides because of a transport of feeling would be
incoherent. In Star Wars, the opposing teams each represent a set of human
properties. What side Darth Vader fights on is therefore absolutely
dependent on whether anger or love is foremost in his heart.

Bad guys change their minds and become good in exactly the same way in
countless, ostensibly folkloric, modern stories: e Lord of the Rings, Buffy
the Vampire Slayer (-), the Harry Potter series (-). When
a bad character has a change of heart, it’s always a cathartic emotional
moment – since what’s at stake for a character is losing the central part of his
identity. Another peculiarity in the moral physics of good guys versus bad is
that bad guys have no loyalty and routinely punish their own; whether it’s
the Sheriff of Nottingham starving his own people or Darth Vader killing
his subordinates, bad guys are cavalier with human life, and they rebuke
their allies for petty transgressions. is has been true since the earliest
modern bad guys, though it scarcely exists among older adversaries who
might be hungry for human flesh, but don’t kill their own.

Good guys, on the other hand, accept all applicants into the fold, and prove
their loyalty even when their teammates transgress. Consider Friar Tuck
getting drunk on ale while Robin Hood looks the other way. Or Luke
Skywalker welcoming the roguish Han Solo on side. Good guys work with
rogues, oddballs and ex-bad guys, plus their battles often hinge on someone
who was treated badly by the bad guys crossing over and becoming a good
guy. Forgiving characters their wicked deeds is an emotional climax in many
good guy/bad guy stories. Indeed, it’s essential that the good side is a motley
crew that will never, ever reject a fellow footsoldier.

Again, this is a point of pride that seems incoherent in the context of pre-
modern storytelling. Not only do people in ancient stories not switch sides
in fights but Achilles, say, would never win because his army was composed
of the rejects from the Trojans’. In old stories, great warriors aren’t scrappy
recruits, there for the moral education: they’re experts.

Stories about good guys and bad guys that are implicitly moral – in the
sense that they invest an individual’s entire social identity in him not
changing his mind about a moral issue – perversely end up discouraging any
moral deliberation. Instead of anguishing over multidimensional characters
in conflict – as we find in e Iliad, or the Mahabharata or Hamlet – such
stories rigidly categorise people according to the values they symbolise,
flattening all the deliberation and imagination of ethical action into a single
thumbs up or thumbs down. Either a person is acceptable for Team Good,
or he belongs to Team Evil.

Good guy/bad guy narratives might not possess any moral sophistication,
but they do promote social stability, and they’re useful for getting people to
sign up for armies and fight in wars with other nations. eir values feel like
morality, and the association with folklore and mythology lends them a
patina of legitimacy, but still, they don’t arise from a moral vision. ey are
rooted instead in a political vision, which is why they don’t help us
deliberate, or think more deeply about the meanings of our actions. Like the
original Grimm stories, they’re a political tool designed to bind nations
together.

It’s no coincidence that good guy/bad guy movies, comic books and games
have large, impassioned and volatile fandoms – even the word ‘fandom’
suggests the idea of a nation, or kingdom. What’s more, the moral physics of
these stories about superheroes fighting the good fight, or battling to save
the world, does not commend genuine empowerment. e one thing the
good guys teach us is that people on the other team aren’t like us. In fact,
they’re so bad, and the stakes are so high, that we have to forgive every
transgression by our own team in order to win.

When I talked with Andrea Pitzer, the author of One Long Night: A Global
History of Concentration Camps (), about the rise of the idea that people
on opposite sides of conflicts have different moral qualities, she told me:
‘ree inventions collided to make concentration camps possible: barbed
wire, automatic weapons, and the belief that whole categories of people
should be locked up.’ When we read, watch and tell stories of good guys
warring against bad guys, we are essentially persuading ourselves that our
opponents would not be fighting us, indeed they would not be on the other
team at all, if they had any loyalty or valued human life. In short, we are
rehearsing the idea that moral qualities belong to categories of people rather
than individuals. It is the Grimms’ and von Herder’s vision taken to its
logical nationalist conclusion that implies that ‘categories of people should
be locked up’.

Watching Wonder Woman at the end of the  movie give a speech about
preemptively forgiving ‘humanity’ for all the inevitable offences of the
Second World War, I was reminded yet again that stories of good guys and
bad guys actively make a virtue of letting the home team in a conflict get
away with any expedient atrocity.

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