I'm in the process of deciding who is The Best Worst Villain, EVER, a task I am convinced has some value to society.Yesterday I did Part One: Naming The Villains. Today I begin the process of reducing that list of villains, a process that will continue until there is only one villain left, with that villain being The Best Worst Villain, EVER.
Before I begin narrowing down the list, though, I'm going to add to it, because I thought of a few more villains. So to the List of Villains (everything sounds more important if you capitalize it... try it yourself: President. Cure For Cancer. Pop Tarts. See what I mean?)
To the List of Villains, I will add:
Plankton (From SpongeBob SquarePants.)(See: Capitalization!)
Gorilla Grodd.
Dr. Impossible (from Soon I Will Be Invincible.)
[SPOILER ALERT! IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE OR READ THE COMIC BOOK THIS'LL KIND OF WRECK IT FOR YOU] Ozymandias, from The Watchmen.
Those were all I could come up with last night, even though I devoted a substantial amount of time to thinking about Villains, at least until I got distracted by Parks & Recreation.
I realized, again last night, that I had no real women villains on the list, and so I asked Sweetie if she could use her insight to name some Female Villains for me. Sweetie's insight into that is (a) she's a woman, and (b) she watches a lot of movies and TV shows that I don't, so maybe she could think of some. Sweetie thought and came up with:
"Lara Flynn Boyle's Character from Men In Black II." Which movie, I note, actually had roman numerals in it, making Men In Black and the Superbowl the only two pop culture events which take themselves so seriously they require Roman numerals to keep track of them.
Or, at least, Men In Black was one of the two; it isn't any longer, I guess, something I just found out because I couldn't remember if there had ever been a Men In Black III, one that I hadn't seen, like I didn't see Pirates of the Caribbean 3 or Spider-Man 3. I never seem to make it to the third installment of movies, which you'd think would be bad, because it would seem to leave me hanging and never knowing how things turned out, but I'm surviving all right. Don't worry about me.
They are, it seems, going to make Men In Black 3, giving up on Roman Numerals but continuing the adventures of the guys in black suits erasing people's memories and making jokes about aliens living among us, an exercise that seems kind of pointless since the first two movies, which had their charms, ultimately were so throwaway that I can't, as I sit here now, remember which scenes that I liked took place in which of the two movies, or, even, what the plots of the movies were, beyond Will Smith fights aliens who are trying to take over the planet.
Nor can anyone, even Sweetie, who's usually good about that, remember details of the two movies, details like: What was Will Smith's character's name? (It was "Ofcr. James Darrel Edwards III", then "Agent Jay," according to IMDB, which I think has it wrong because I believe the conceit of the movie was that the agents were named after letters, so it should be Agent J, but maybe I'm wrong... who cares?) Nor can anyone remember what Lara Flynn Boyle's character was called. I had to look that up, too.
It was "Serleena." Generic and nonmemorable, and also, Lara Flynn Boyle was never really very hot. They should've gotten someone else to play that part.
I then asked The Boy, who likes movies and stuff, to name some female villains and he came up with Aileen Wuornos (although he put it this way: "Charlize Theron in that one movie where she was ugly,") and then he came up with, too, "Jason's Mom in Friday the 13th," and then Carrie, (asking "Was she really a villain, though?')(To which I responded "I don't know. Did she kill someone?")
He finished up with: "How about Daryl Hannah from Kill Bill?" which made me proud of The Boy because he's finally given in and agreed with me that Kill Bill is one movie. That's a huge pet peeve of mine: People who refer to Kill Bill as two different movies. It's ONE movie. It was released in halves because it is one long movie. I've run into people time and again, though, who say "I liked Kill Bill One but not Kill Bill Two." Do you realize, you people, how idiotic that sounds? It's like saying "I liked the first half of The Godfather but not the second half," if in saying that you meant to imply that the first half of The Godfather was an entirely different movie than the second half.The Godfather, by the way, was not a good movie. I got a little bored watching it and had no desire to see The Godfather II.
Oh! Three things that use roman numerals!
Having then exhausted our collective knowledge of Female Villains, I gave the issue some thought today and made a decision. Originally, I was going to have the first cut-off be something different, but having spent nearly 24 hours thinking about it, off and on, I had to change my plans and make the first cut-off Are you a man?
That is, if the villain is female, then the villain has absolutely zero chance of being The Best Worst Villain, EVER, as I am hereby today removing all women villains from the list.
I have to do that, because Women Villains are either nonexistent, or terrible, or both. Everyone I ask to name a Woman Villain stumbles around and then comes up with some half-baked villain that they can't even remember the name of, really, and can't remember what she did or what she was all about.
The Boy, in talking about Daryl Hannah, said "I don't remember her name in the movie." I don't, either. I remember that she had an eye patch, and was blond, but beyond that, I don't remember much about her at all, making her a useless villain.
As most women villains are. Desperate to pad out the list, I considered my options: Make up a villain? I thought about that, seriously thought about it. Reverse Wonder Woman, I figured I could make up, adding Reverse Wonder Woman to the list and figuring that nobody would figure it out because nobody really cares about female villains, and because Wonder Woman was a lame superhero, anyway, with no good villains of her own, so far as I know. She was always fighting Flash castoffs, or maybe Greek goods, or just palling around with the rest of the Superfriends. Reverse Wonder Woman, I bet, could easily have passed for a real supervillain. I could invent a backstory that ripped off Bizarro and Reverse Flash (did he run backwards? Go really slowly? DC Comics, you really have a problem with understanding opposites) and move on, eventually dropping Reverse Wonder Woman off the list at some stage of this process.
But that seemed too easy. There must, I thought, be some female villains out there, and just because I don't know about them doesn't mean they don't exist, right? (The fact that I don't know about something doesn't mean it doesn't exist; it just means it doesn't matter. I am the first-ever practitioner of Egocentric Existentialism.)
So I finally googled around to try to find some female villains, and came across a couple of sites that attempted to claim that the Woman Villains they were discussing were worth paying any attention to whatsoever.AfterEllen.com has the Top 10 (Hottest) Female Villains, which isn't exactly feminist, I think, or is it? Is it anti-feminist to say women are hot? What if it's women saying women are hot? Is that okay? What if it's women who like women saying women are hot? Isn't that just as sexist as if a man says a woman is hot? Modern politics confuse me.
Whatever credibility that list had, though, was undermined quickly by putting Demi Moore on it. Demi Moore apparently played a female villain in those worthless and annoying Charlie's Angels movies that came out a while back. Appearing in Drew Barrymore's twice-a-decade "Chick Empowerment" flick is not to your credit; every few years, Drew Barrymore puts out a movie that promises to totally empower women and be fun and female centric and blah blah blah and every few years we have to hear how Drew Barrymore is on top of Hollywood, and then the movie bombs and we can go back to our regular lives, which hopefully include neither Drew Barrymore nor Demi Moore.
The AfterEllen list also has Meryl Streep from The Devil Wears Prada, and that, too, is an argument against counting female villains towards anything. I'm ashamed to live in a society where people like me, God-fearing, honest, hard-working (?) people know what Prada is, let alone that there was a movie about people who know what Prada is.
Then I went to something called the "OFCS Top 100 Villains List," and scoured that for female villains. Out of 100, I counted 15:
8 Wizard of Oz, The - The Wicked Witch of the West
17 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Nurse Ratched
18 Manchurian Candidate, The - Mrs. Iselin
22 Misery - Annie Wilkes
49 Double Indemnity - Phyllis Dietrichson
53 All About Eve - Eve Harrington
54 Bad Seed, The - Rhoda
57 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - The queen
63 Basic Instinct - Catherine Trammell
66 Rosemary's Baby - Minnie Castevet
69 What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? - Jane Hudson
70 101 Dalmatians - Cruella De Vil
71 Metropolis - The evil Maria -
75 Last Seduction, The - Wendy Kroy
82 Batman Returns - Catwoman
But there were also two villains who aren't even human
19 Jaws - The shark28 Alien etc. - The alien
But, technically, the Alien in Aliens was a female, or at least one of them was, the one Sigourney Weaver battled in the suit that the makers of The Matrix would then copy for their crummy sequels.
But at least we've got some women on the list now, right? Before I remove them from the list, that is, since, now that I've got some women on the list, I'm going to strike them right back off of it, because the first criteria I've established for being The Best Worst Villain EVER is: You have to be male.
Why is that, you may ask, while also thinking "Man, Sweetie has a jerk for a husband." Here me out here, though. I've got a valid point to make, and that point is this:
Female Villains Suck.
See how that looks better with capitals?
They do, though. They're terrible, for a couple of reasons:
1. They always focus on clothes. Every female villain in every movie, book, song, television commercial, or political campaign, at some point focuses on clothes. Take Lara Flynn Boyle in Men In Black II (I've already forgotten her name!). She begins her scene in the movie by crashing her (tiny and cute) spaceship into the ground and then...
... Picking up a fashion magazine with an underwear ad in it. Would male villains do that? Okay, probably, because men will look at an underwear ad under any circumstances. I guarantee you that the guys on the Apollo 13 mission, en route to the moon while trying desperately to fix whatever it was that had gone wrong with the ship, would have stopped to pass around an underwear ad had one been in that spaceship. The only reason that thing got fixed was because the Mission Control guys didn't have access to magazines, or the Internet, so they had the ability to focus on repairs instead of "just happening to glance at that ad, Sweetie." (Also a good line: "I was looking to see if there's something you'd like.")
(That latter one does not work if you were caught at a strip club. Be warned.)
Anyway, before I get too distracted, back to the point: Chicks and clothes. It's always about the clothes. Hillary Clinton ran for president, and talked about her pantsuits along the way. Sarah Palin ran for (in her mind) Empress of a Talk Show Or Somethin' and began her run by going clothes shopping. Both women wanted to be leaders of the country, and couldn't get their minds off clothes.
Cruella De Vil's entire reason for being evil was to get clothes. Sure, she wanted to get them in an evil way, but clothes, as a motivation? Lame.
Women trying to take over anything for clothing will face competition only from other women, ultimately. Men don't care. Or notice. "Go ahead. Rule the clothing department or whatever," we'll say, when confronted with women's evil demands. And we'll say that about ten minutes later, when it finally sinks in that you're talking to us.
Oh, and before I forget: Lara Flynn Boyle's quest in Men In Black II is to get a piece of jewelry. That alone ought to be enough to disqualify all women villains from Supervillainry, but there's more:
2. Women Villains Have Feelings. When not out shopping for kicky pumps to totally rule the universe with, Women Villains get all bogged down in emotions that men villains don't bother with, like love and having babies and love. You can't be totally evil if you love things; how are you ever going to push the button on the Universe Eraser (TM The Best of Everything 2009) and create a blank-slate new start that you can mold in your own image if just before you do that, you remember Your son/That man who left you at the altar/Fatty Shnookumkins, your widdle kitty who you totawy wuv, then wipe away a tear and walk away, head drooping down over your magnificent breasts, encased in...
... whoa. Got carried away there. But how will you do it? How will you not feel the love that women have overflowing in them all the time, for everything? Sweetie cries during Cheerios commercials, and Sweetie is a woman.
Catwoman loved Batman. Black Cat loved Spider-Man. Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction loved Michael Douglas, for reasons lost on everyone except Catherine Zeta-Jones. Rosemary had her baby (didn't she? I've never watched the movie, but I assume she did.) Annie Wilkes loved that writer. Willow loved, I don't know, someone or other who then turned her into Dark Willow, if my hasty reading of the AfterEllen list is correct, but Dark Willow probably still loved whoever it was that had turned her into Dark Willow. Jean Gray loved Cyclops before she became the Phoenix and tried to destroy the world. (I hope that's right, too, because I never really read X-Men, and I've fallen asleep each time I try to watch the movie, leaving my only lasting impression of the X-Men being that they mispronounce Magneto. They say Mag-neet-oh, but that's wrong. It's Mag-NET-oh, just like a "magnet" is a "magnet," not a "magneet.")Women love clothes, and women love feelings, and the two of those keep women out of the running for Best Villains, because it means they're focused on all the wrong things and can never make it to the big time.
That's the end result of women villains, if you think about: they never make it to the big time. They always focus on some little nagging detail, some project, or get hamstrung by emotions. All the women villains in all the movies, books and other media end up aiming low: they want their daughter Snow White out of the way. They want to kill some johns in Florida. They want to eat a little girl on a faraway planet, a little girl that they'd tolerated living there for years and years and years, even though they (the Mother Alien) were apparently able to not only move around but also to think intelligently, meaning that if it was really so important to kill that little girl, it would have been taken care of years before, instead of waiting for Sigourney Weaver to come along and try to rescue her, at which point Mother Alien pulled out all the stops. So it must not have been that important, or there was another motivation behind that big fight Mother Alien put up, and, as we've seen today, we know what that motivation was: Either Mother Alien loved little Newt, or Mother Alien loved what Little Newt was wearing.
In any event, I'm done with worrying about whether there are, or aren't female villains out there that I don't know about (or care about) because I'm removing them from the list of candidates. The first criteria to meet in being The Best Worst Villain EVER is that one must not be hamstrung by caring about clothes, or by caring, which means that one must be male to be in the running.
Out of deference to women, though, I will leave one woman on the list of potential candidates, a Token Female who can carry the torch (or Jimmy Choo strappy sandal, or picture of a cute puppy in a bow tie) for all of female kind.
With that, the list is hereby narrowed down to:
The Token Female: Reverse Wonder Woman.
Saddam Hussein.
The Lizard.
Sauron
Marvin The Martian
Frankenstein
"The Rake," from the Decemberists song of the same name.
The Red Baron (both the real one and the one from the Peanuts comic)
All the old guys who ran all the haunted amusement parks in all the episodes of Scooby-Doo.
The team that always plays the Harlem Globetrotters.
Doctor Octopus
Rob Lowe in Wayne's World
The T-1000.
Bowser (from Super Mario Brothers.)
Hitler
Walkin' Dude
Mangog
Klingons
Captain Hook
Mr Norrell (who I think turned out to kind of be a villain?)
Darth Vader
The Mariner (from The Mariner's Revenge Song by The Decemberists)
Lex Luthor
Master Control Program
The Joker
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Lex Luthor
Darth Vader (and absolutely nobody else from the Star Wars univere including especially not Boba Fett, so don't nominate him.)
Toth (from Raiders of the Lost Ark)
the Qotile from Yar's Revenge.
Voldemort
Ivan Drago (suggested by The Boy)
Galactus
The Anti-Monitor
The guy from Country Death Song by The Violent Femmes (Just to prove that I can think of bad guys from songs by groups other than the Decemberists)
Space Invaders.
Binky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde.Gorilla Grodd.
Dr. Impossible (from Soon I Will Be Invincible.)
[SPOILER ALERT! IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE OR READ THE COMIC BOOK THIS'LL KIND OF WRECK IT FOR YOU] Ozymandias, from The Watchmen.
In the interest of fairness, I need to note that Robot Chicken invented
Negative Wonder Woman and did a skit about Reverse Superheroes.
But Negative Wonder Woman would be nothing like Reverse Wonder Woman.
Reverse Wonder Woman would be made of anti-matter
and would have short blond hair and her bracelets would attract bullets, and...
...I give up. They're the same thing, essentially.
Seth Green, if you want to sue me, go ahead. But if you do, all I'm going
to do is keep pointing out that you read this blog.
Go on to part THREE: GO It Alone by clicking here.
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