View this post on the web at [link removed]

The Wicked Witch of the West may finally get an Oscar more than 80 years after her big-screen debut. Cynthia Erivo’s Best Actress nomination for “Wicked” makes sense because, in addition to being talented, she is also one of those rare people on screen to turn the character from a one-dimensional, cackling villain into a hero.
But not everyone wants to give villains a second chance. While “Wicked” wowed audiences around the world, some critics complained about yet another villain backstory stealing the show. The evangelical writer Brett McCracken [ [link removed] ] worried that these stories “complicate our categories of good and evil.” From a more progressive perspective, the film critic Alisha Mughal [ [link removed] ] gave “Wicked” an F in feminism for turning a powerful, norm-defying woman into a weak victim.
Although they write from different cultural perspectives, McCracken and Mughal agreed that villain backstory films such as “Wicked,” “The Joker” and “Maleficent” do too much to let villains off the hook. “To continually humanize every character is to ultimately lose morality,” Mughal wrote. “Lines between goodness and badness are blurred and nobody bears the responsibility for their actions.”
I agree with both these critics about the importance of moral clarity. But both of them missed just how badly Americans need to learn to humanize villains right now.
At the same time villain backstory films have made billions of dollars for Hollywood in recent decades, Americans have increasingly viewed their fellow citizens as villains. Polls in 2018 [ [link removed] ] and 2024 [ [link removed] ] tell us that more than 40% of Americans describe those outside their political party as “downright evil.” Democrats often describe Republicans [ [link removed] ] as racists, sexists and bigots, but half of each party sees their opponents as ignorant, spiteful and motivated by hate [ [link removed] ]. Remember how Donald Trump branded news reporters as “the enemy of the people,” while his political opponents labeled his supporters “deplorables” and “garbage”?
Viewing others as villains leads to a politics of domination and elimination. We want to see witches melt and Death Stars explode. But if we see our own neighbors, classmates and relatives as two-dimensional bad guys whose only redeeming quality might be ignorance, then we could take a cue from stories that show us not every villain is wicked.
Sympathy for the Devil
For example, before we could compare our political opponents to Hitler, Satan was the obvious choice. People on opposite sides in the English Civil War of the 1600s often accused each other of following the prince of darkness. “Everyone could be considered a devil by someone else,” the scholar Evan LaBuzetta wrote in an essay [ [link removed] ] tracing the cultural influences of Mick Jagger’s “Sympathy for the Devil.” “The atmosphere of the mid-seventeenth century [consisted] of the splintering of allegiance [and] demonization of opponents.”
During that war, John Milton began planning his epic poem “Paradise Lost” while also serving as the voice of the English revolutionaries who overthrew King Charles I. By the time he committed the poem to paper, though, the revolution had fallen apart. Charles II had taken back the throne and cast Milton aside like Trump firing Biden-era bureaucrats.
Perhaps that is why Milton portrayed Satan less as an archvillain responsible for sin and suffering and more like a rebel with a passionate opposition to tyranny. Satan wallows in a fiery lake only a short time before he declares that it is “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” and plots his next move. In most of our stories, defeat and rededication are part of the hero’s journey, not the villain’s. “Paradise Lost” is Satan’s villain backstory, and it gives him a strong argument, effectively turning him into the hero.
Two centuries later, Mark Twain took this devil’s advocacy a step farther. He wanted to completely repair the devil’s reputation through a series of tongue-in-cheek stories. “Of course Satan has some kind of a case, it goes without saying,” Twain wrote [ [link removed] ]. “As soon as I can get at the facts I will undertake his rehabilitation myself. ... It is a thing which we ought to be willing to do for any one who is under a cloud.”
One of Twain’s best Satan stories was “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” a retelling of “Paradise Lost.” It shows how a stranger gets revenge on a self-righteous town by tricking the elite citizens into falsely claiming a bag of gold coins, then by exposing their lies. Some scholars think Twain was trying to make Satan an innocent tempter who exposed preexisting corruption. Others say Twain made the devil a redeemer by ushering in a “fortunate fall” that leaves Hadleyburg better off. Either way, Twain’s version of the Eden story lets Satan off the hook.
Twain also used the devil’s voice to weigh in on social issues of his day. When a religious missionary board debated whether to accept a $100,000 gift from John D. Rockefeller [ [link removed] ], Twain wrote a letter from Satan [ [link removed] ] claiming that most money donated to charity was “the wages of sin,” thus making it his. “The American Board accepts contributions from me every year,” he wrote. “Then why shouldn’t it from Mr. Rockefeller?”
If Twain had been alive in the fall of 2024, when several writers made hay over the fact that J.D. Vance believes in the devil [ [link removed] ] (like most Americans [ [link removed] ]), he would have tweeted on Satan’s behalf, “Of course Vance believes in me. He just agreed to be my vice president.”
Why We Need Devil’s Advocates
John Milton and Mark Twain treated Satan better than many partisans today treat their political opponents. They gave him the benefit of the doubt and made the archvillain of Christianity into a full-fledged character with a history, a goal and positive qualities such as intelligence and leadership. Their Satan probably could win Employee of the Month.
They weren’t devil worshippers—although Twain wrote a story about selling his soul, he also explained, “We may not pay [Satan] reverence, for that would be indiscreet.” Milton’s goal in “Paradise Lost” was to “justify the ways of God to men,” but he seemed to know any argument he could make for God would wither without a compelling foil: the heroic Satan.
They understood what the philosopher John Stuart Mill explained [ [link removed] ] during Twain’s lifetime: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” According to Mill, we must hear competing views from people who actually believe them, and if such adherents cannot be found, we must “imagine them, and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skilful devil’s advocate can conjure up.”
Our politics does not like devil’s advocates or other dissenters, though. Both Republicans and Democrats tend to punish their more moderate or bipartisan members. “In our hyper-polarized social media era, anybody ... who dissents is going to be called all kinds of horrible names and slurs and are going to be called out, going to be shamed, maybe fired,” social psychologist Jonathan Haidt told NPR [ [link removed] ]. He said the refusal to grapple with dissent makes American politics “structurally stupid.”
The reality of a large republic is that Americans will never all agree on everything. It’s impossible to silence opponents out of existence. This is what the founders intended, Yuval Levin argued [ [link removed] ] in his 2024 book “American Covenant: How the Constitution United Our Country—and Could Again.”
“Social peace ... cannot be achieved by conquest or surrender, but only by mutual accommodation,” Levin wrote. “It is the condition of differing without rejecting one another’s legitimacy, of disrupting without being at war.” At his conclusion, he adds, “Those with whom we disagree in our society are not our enemies. They are our neighbors.” Without true disagreement and devil’s advocates, America would betray its pluralistic foundations.
More Villain Backstories, Please
Villain backstory films are the modern-day equivalent of “Paradise Lost” and “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.” They flip the script on villains from our cultural canon and ask us what the original story missed.
Sometimes they make the villain a virtuous hero. “Wicked” does this by showing the Wicked Witch of the West as a compassionate misfit reviled for her green skin and feared for her magic. No one calls her wicked until she defies the corrupt wizard, who tells her, “The best way to bring folks together is to give them a really good enemy.” This should cause us to pause when our political leaders describe other Americans as “vermin” or “deplorables.”
Other films let the villain be evil but explain where he or she went wrong. Two decades ago, “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith” showed how Anakin Skywalker was led—as Yoda had warned—from fear to anger, hate and suffering. We don’t suddenly applaud Darth Vader’s choice to force-choke subordinates or vaporize a planet, but his tale could inspire us to examine our partisan political rage.
“Maleficent” lands somewhere in the middle, showing how abuse and anguish turned a defiant fairy into a spiteful sorceress who curses a child for revenge, but how coming to love that child could win her back. Humanizing villains in this way doesn’t mean we can’t send bad guys to jail, but seeing how hardship shapes a person can inspire better engagement on the issues rather than attacks on individuals.
As these kinds of movies help us see longtime villains in a new light, certainly we can extend the same feeling to people whom our politics tell us to treat as enemies.
I’m not saying you need to sacrifice your beliefs or cheerfully accept ideas you oppose. You don’t have to like Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. You don’t have to stay silent when a politician lies or proposes policies you consider harmful. But good-faith deliberation under our Constitution depends on our ability to engage with voters on the other side and with those in the middle.
If we consider those who disagree with us to be two-dimensional villains, there is little room for discussion. Two groups that vilify each other only grow farther apart. But if we approach disagreement with curiosity, charity and empathy, we may find common ground or room for compromise. Or at the very least, we learn the best arguments for the other side, strengthen our own arguments and elevate our debates above accusations of evil.
So as long as American politics teaches us that the other side is evil, we will need more villain backstories. Can I suggest a few? We need a “Gaston” movie about how the villain from “Beauty and the Beast” started out as a scrawny kid who ate four dozen eggs a day hoping to build brawn and win respect, but eventually it went to his head. Let’s see Snow White’s stepmother struggle through life until she learns a magic spell to make her beautiful and loved—only to see the magic fade. Although the Harry Potter stories eventually redeem Draco Malfoy, seeing more parts of the entire series from his point of view would give us a new appreciation for a character who wrestles with the hate he was taught and eventually rejects it.
In 2021 the journalist Amelia Tait complained [ [link removed] ] that stories like these were complicating “perfectly straightforward villains.” But I say, let’s keep these stories coming until more people see that not everyone who votes differently from them is wicked.

Unsubscribe [link removed]?