Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: MGM, Netflix, Everett Collection Humans are exceptionally cooperative creatures — most of us, anyway. On the whole, we grudgingly, but largely peacefully, pack into crowded subway cars and airplanes. We leave celebrities alone when they’re ordering a latte. We go to therapy instead of murdering our exes.
“Inherent in the challenge facing Prosecutor Nocerino in his arduous search for the killer is the fact that an amazing number of people had it in for the victim,” Judy Bachrach wrote in Vanity Fair reporting on Gucci’s murder, detailing the lavish life the Guccis led and the rage both Patrizia and the Gucci family, who had never much cared for Reggiani, felt when Maurizio lost the company.
We’re especially drawn to characters who add a twist to the standard hero, villain, victim relationship. “We are pretty satisfied when somebody that we’re supposed to admire turns out to be not as good a person as we thought — we like the downfall narrative,” Jasper says, pointing to Elizabeth Holmes and Bernie Madoff. Villains who make victims out of people we’re secretly — or openly — happy to see punished also provide this pleasing element of narrative complexity.
When we watch, say, a Netflix miniseries about a villain like Anna Delvey, we get to see inside the secret world of the very rich, confirming our suspicions that the rules are entirely different when you have a seven-figure trust fund. Her scam plays to our innate sense of justice — it’s not fair that we have to have a working credit card to cover a charmless $179-a-night room at the Holiday Inn while the wealthy glide into suites with an air kiss and the promise of a wire transfer.
What we consider fair, though, isn’t static. Tonya Harding’s staying power in the American imagination has to do with her journey from villain to victim to anti-hero. She’s gone through several of those satisfying narrative twists we so enjoy, which have been driven by shifting notions of class and fairness.
annalieseg The obsession with declaring everything an “Hollywood obsession”…
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