In popular culture, the villain seems to prevail more than the hero. As Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) underscores, the villain can quickly become the focus of popular attention. Indeed, Ledger’s is still the only performance in the superhero film genre to have garnered an Academy Award. In critical analyses, however, the hero, replete with many neuroses and conflicted desires, has tended to draw more attention. This focus seems related to two factors. First, notwithstanding the genre’s invasions from masses of uniform, faceless adversaries which might speak to a range of trauma and fears of ‘others’ which permeate post-9/11 American culture, the superhero film has tended to favor strong interpersonal conflicts between the hero and villain. Second, superheroes and their transformative bodies, especially those of male heroes, have provided critics with a more congenial subject to analyze “how contemporary America (through its most effective ambassador, Hollywood) projects social sexual models as well as ideological postures concerning masculinity” (Roblou 78). Supervillains perhaps are less amenable to that ideological project.
This paper proposes, however, that the male supervillain plays a central role in conveying and challenging the models of masculinity on offer in the superhero film. Partly this centrality comes from the relative scarcity of female supervillains so far represented in the superhero film. With the exception of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) in X-Men: The Last Stand (Brett Ratner, 2006) and Taliah Al Ghul (Marion Cotillard) in The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012), the superhero genre has been far more fascinated with the conflict between the hero and his male nemeses. Some suggest this focus on the male villain might stem from a desire to explore the hero’s darker side. However, this approach elides the way the male supervillain, with his Machiavellian plans and powers, perpetually threatens to overwhelm the hero and the aligned structures of hetero-masculinity which produce and sustain him. If the superhero provides his spectators with a handy checklist of “what makes a man a man” (Roblou 77), then the villain presents the audience with an offsetting guide to “what makes a man unmanly.” In fact, linked to excessive greed, irrationality, and characteristics stereotypically associated with homosexuality and/or femininity, the villain primarily serves as a potent representation of a failed masculine subject. No matter how brilliant, powerful or cunning he may be, the villain seems doomed to succeed only in his perpetual failure to achieve his stated ambition, a paradoxical outcome that serves to improve the appeal of the hero and his version of white hetero-masculinity. But, what if the villain’s propensity to fail points beyond the hero and his normalizing social structures and to more disturbing possibilities?