Stories We Can‘t Stop Telling
I’ve seen a lot of trickster villains recently. Of course, tricksters are nothing new under the sun - they’ve been an archetype for a very long time - but I’ve seen a lot of them lately and I’ve noticed a bit of a pattern: trickster villains tend to be paired with vigilante heroes.
Tricksters “…violate principles of social and natural order, playfully disrupting normal life and then re-establishing it on a new basis.” The more corrupt or illegitimate the viewer finds the social order, the more satisfying these violations are.
Similarly, to accept our vigilantes as heroes we must reject the legitimacy of the current social order. Of course, this rejection is complicated, and our vigilantes all engage in various ways with their fictional worlds’ power structures:
The example of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes is particularly indicative. Mycroft is literally Big Brother, a secretive, unelected figure whose misuse of CCTV cameras is wildly evocative of the surveillance state. Sherlock struggles with the power Mycroft represents, often refusing it, frequently mocking it, occasionally using it, but never fully embracing it. By casting the relationship as familial, the writers are able to approach these themes symbolically, rather than laying bare the cold truth that in some ways, Mycroft is a more sinister figure than Moriarty.
As far as I can see, our cultural obsession with tricksters and vigilantes is a way of wrestling with systems of power and government we longer feel we can control or affect. The vigilante has the agency we lack, and is able to pursue the justice we fear is lost. The trickster acts out our darkest frustrations, while also functioning as a shadow to the vigilante, whose extralegal actions looks positive in comparison.
I get the appeal of these narratives, believe me. But to borrow a line from one of them: they may be the stories we deserve, but they’re not the stories we need. Nor are the “revolutionaries in dystopia” narratives popular in recent films like The Hunger Games, Divergent, Mad Max, or Snowpiercer a particularly good fit for our time. What I want to see instead is stories of reform, stories of collective action and systemic change.
So long as our heroes are fighting the wrong battles, they’ll never be able to inspire us the way heroes should.