Inside Qaddafi's compound, many items have been found that give us a unique look inside the private life of a murderous dictator. Much has been made of the album of photos and writings about Condoleezza Rice. And more recently, they found another photo album with pictures of family and outings: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/a-qaddafi-family-photo-album/
One particular photo stands out to me. Qaddafi is holding a baby, looking to the right at someone who has called his attention off-camera. On his face is an expression of honest, untroubled delight. He is not weighted down with the burdens of rule or the guilt of his monstrosity. He has, for a moment at least, forgotten to look officious and serious. He is grinning like an idiot.
I think as writers, we have a tendency to try to write characters with a kind of unity of emotion. Characters become a kind of avatar of whatever emotion is their driving force in the story. Brooding heroes are never allowed to laugh at their own farts, and the lovelorn romantic lead never suffers from allergies that make her cranky. The dutiful soldier never has a nervous breakdown in his car because he can't find a parking space at a department store. Or at least, if he does, it's because of PTSD.
Books have trained us, as readers, to take every character action as significant, so if the serious law student laughs at something that no one else finds particularly funny, we want to know why, and what that says about him. As writers, we have to be aware of that, so we include only relevant details, and airbrush all the others away, until what we have is not a human being, but a representative of one, a little fictional packet that contains one or two real emotions that respond accordingly to the world we toss them into. We do little things here and there to humanize them.
But we humanize our villains the least. It's unacceptable to us to have a villainous character who is having a completely non-evil, light-hearted chuckle. You can't be a murderer without being removed from humanity. That doesn't fit into our personal narrative. We need to alienate monsters. We need to pretend that they are not like us. You can't be human and be a villain. What does Darth Vader do when he's not Force-choking dudes? He goes and sits in a creepy giant Pokeball. He doesn't have a photo album. Colonel Kurtz doesn't miss having coffee with his mom. Martin Chatwin doesn't suddenly remember that embarrassing moment he had at a science fair. And when movies or books do these things, then it's played up for comedy.
There's an old phrase called "the banality of evil." I hear most people use it incorrectly these days. They use it either to refer to the evil of banality, as a kind of commentary on how the ordinary, routine, humdrum life is miserable and soul-crushing, or they talk about how evil itself is ordinary and boring. But the phrase comes from a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem, written by Hannah Arendt about the trial of Adolf Eichmann. The point of the book was that Eichmann was not inhuman. He was not a monster. He was an ordinary person who had done some terrible, monstrous things. The things that he did did not negate his humanity; they were part of it. He still had friends and close relationships. He still wanted to belong.
I think if fiction is going to serve as any kind of guidepost for human behavior, if we're going to look into fiction to find out who we are, our villains need to be more human than everyone else, not less. We need to see ourselves in them. We need to see what we can become.
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