Cheering for the Bad Guy: Part One

As my mom can directly attest, I’ve grown a serious dose of cynicism about politics and business over the years. Where my mom sees routine bureaucratic and administrative delays or honest mistakes, I see this government agency or that phone/cable/internet/baseball Empire trying to pull a fast one on us and score a quick buck. Behind every polished civil service advertisement or insurance commercial, I see Stephen Harper and his corporate cronies laughing at all our idiocy and above all our fear and selfish greed. And this army commercial? In Canada/anywhere but America? Really? (Does "our values and freedom" mean that freedom isn't a Canadian value?) And as unlikely as this result may be, I won’t bat an eye if Toronto City Council is manipulated into picking now-deposed Rob Ford’s plan to keep the eastern arm of the Gardiner Expressway right where it is. Far more likely, he might just find a way to bury the vote in piles of procedure by paying off his buddies at John Tory and co. (To be fair, the most likely outcome is a compromise “hybrid” option supported by Tory and others, but what is Rob Ford still doing around anyways?) I even show a little caution—and far less emotional loyalty than most—to the party and politicians I support: that I find Tom Mulcair to be rather dull doesn’t help matters. Rachel Notley’s revolution in Alberta may be exciting, but how much will she have to compromise with oil and agri-business executives in order to actually govern?

So what does all this real-life politics have to do with the genre fiction to which this blog is dedicated? Well, despite (or given?) the above, I have another confession to make:

I enjoy cheering for the bad guy.

Actually, the proper confession is that I have thoroughly enjoyed the recent spell of TV series, movies and books that fudge the lines between good and evil by seeking to transcend traditional notions of ethical, virtuous limits on power. Contemporary television is very suited to this type of story-telling, with its serial, long-arc, format that gives time to explore alternative universes of the physical and moral variety. Examples of shows presenting this broader Nietzschean vision abound, but two that spring to mind are the Battlestar Galactica reboot and the most popular and soon-to-be-most-infamous show of this decade, Game of Thrones. Battlestar Galactica actually managed to end on a positive note: the erosion of a “good-guy/bad-guy” narrative resulted in cooperation and literal procreation between humans and cylons. The final result of Game of Throne’s intra-human squabbling and religious fanaticism has yet to be seen: I don’t even think George R.R. Martin or the TV version’s creators know that yet. I can’t speak for the books, but for now the show seems to be on a mission to push as many buttons as it can by presenting a brutal, strongest-man-standing (mostly man, but occasionally woman) universe. Valar morghulis and Winter is coming, walkers, dragons, warging and all, but those have only served to reinforce rather than challenge the show’s anti-moral mythology. I’ll comment more on this in Part Three

Ex toto corde paenitet me (not really): I have most enjoyed the focus on a particular protagonist (to use the term loosely) that can artfully navigate the game of power towards his (yeah, always his) endgame. I stand back and admire a master plan coming to fruition, one that held me in suspense during its unfolding but has now, at the end, been revealed. TV is a great genre for this as well, and House of Cards serves as a fascinating example. Regardless of who he had to step on, destroy or ignore, Frank Underwood made it to the top and it was an exhilarating ride.

Taking the cake in my bad-guy-cheering recently has actually come in the relatively obscure form of an Expanded Universe Star Wars novel, James Luceno’s Darth Plagueis. As a foray into the culmination of the Sith "Great Plan" as the emergence of a "phantom menace," it delves straight into the political machinations that led to the the crisis that opens Episode I and results in the devastating Clone Wars. This fascinating novel will take up the focus of Part Two.