Frankenstein’s monster is in great shape, considering. Building muscle mass as a vegan requires care and planning. And working individual muscle groups is especially difficult if your muscle groups are from different individuals. Frankenstein's monster is straight up-ripped for a reanimated vegan. He’s also not real, so this may not be a good model of health to pursue. But it did get me thinking about what villains eat.
Before you get all professorial on me—I know the doctor is “the real monster in Frankenstein.” The monster seems to be a fine fellow, generally. He’s a sensitive sort, and seemingly an ideological vegetarian. I like him, and so did his creator. A little insight into Mary Shelley’s era tells us how much. The iconic monster’s abstinence from meat was likely a product of Shelly’s own “radical inclinations.” In 1818, vegetarianism was just finding purchase in circles where reading a lot and eating salad were “totally extreme.” Vegetarianism was revolutionarily weird, decried by the conservative establishment, and a crucial part of Shelley’s countercultural scene. In A Vindication of a Natural Diet, Mary’s husband Percy Shelley asserted that a vegetarian citizenry would not have "lent their brutal suffrage to the proscription-list of Robespierre." (Maximilien de Robespierre was a politician during the French Revolution... although calling Robespierre a "politician" is like calling Sauron's orcs "a group of disgruntled laborers.") So the monster’s vegetarianism brands him as the Good Guy, according to his creator.
This fact of the monster’s (invented) diet reminds me: the “villains” to which I refer are not real. So investigating their dietary choices requires oscillating between two (sometimes conflicting) judgemental paradigms: 1) Assessing villains as real people/creatures, subject to the logic and morality of the fictional universes they occupy, and 2) Assessing villains as constructs/pieces of art/folklore.
As constructs, villains are often drawn with broad strokes. While a hero may have a long list of defining traits, exploits, powers, and the all-important tragic flaw, villains are usually simplistic, out of narrative utility. Villains, in the classic sense, have no analogue to the “tragic flaw,” no “fortunate virtue.” They do not necessitate having any redeemable facets, incidental interests, or defining backstories. Surely many villains do have these things, and I’d argue the most memorable ones all do. But these ancillary facets are part of the villain’s cover letter, not his resumé.
And yet, within the logic of any story, all villains must eat. They may eat caviar, or plankton, or simply worlds, but eat they must. Many of our classic villains prefer the most cunning prey imaginable—that of mankind. If protagonists are proxies for the reader/viewer’s identity, or vessels into which we pour our perspective, then villains are the opposite. They are resistance and obstacle made flesh. They are the antithesis of our most lauded ideals. The villain is an avatar of all that is other. If one harkens back to humanity’s earliest days, our chief concerns were a scant few: eat, make more of us, don’t get eaten. The fact that so many villains enjoy humanity as their dish of choice should not be surprising. What is a more instinctual threat than something higher up in the food chain?
Tigers are apex predators, but few would consider tigers immoral. They exist outside morality, and therefore outside “villainy.” But they are cunning, lethal, and have aims that may interfere with yours, were you occupying the same room. But we don’t blame the tiger, even if it invites questions about its fearful symmetry. If said tiger prowled along the periphery of civilization, picking off stragglers and livestock, we may kill it, but we would not condemn it. After all, look at its claws and jaws; It’s doing what comes naturally.
This is what makes judging the English language’s oldest villain difficult. Grendel, of Beowulf fame, is a bipedal beast who generally stalks vikings and eats them. The vikings outsource some muscle in the form of the Geats, who are basically like vikings who have been exposed to gamma rays. Beowulf, the Geats' leader, confronts Grendel and (spoiler alert) tears off Grendel’s arm. Though my knowledge of Old English is...rusty, I don’t believe Beowulf says, “Disarmed!” or “Need a hand, Grendel?” or anything like that. A wasted opportunity. But Beowulf does make a point of facing Grendel unarmed, since Grendel is unarmed (especially later! Tee-hee). This is a sort of chivalric honor that one would only extend a fellow warrior; concerns regarding “fair fighting” would not apply when fighting a tiger, for instance. So Beowulf, ultimately, sees Grendel as more man than beast.
Physically, though, Grendel falls firmly into the beast camp. Scales, claws, enormity—he’s rocking the beast style full-on. He is clearly designed with the bloodiest sort of life in mind. Eating vikings, AKA “evil,” chose him, not the other way around. Aims that conflict with humankind’s are intrinsically “evil,” since we made up the word and get to decide its meaning. We do not condemn the tiger. But we might if it walked upright. We would if it had the vocabulary of a five-year old, despite the case the claws make.
So the English language’s first villain remains a unique and compelling entry among those villains who feed on man, if only due to reasons of imperfect taxonomy.
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| "What exactly makes a mimosa a 'girly drink?'" |
While it may be laughable that James Bond would ever use a low-rent paperweight like the Sony Ericsson C902 issued by MI6, it’s nowhere near as mind-shattering as watching the Joker shill for Snickers in this (obviously not American) commercial.
I suppose, when you’re selling food, there’s (almost) no such thing as bad publicity. (Almost. The film Se7en (1995) probably didn’t move a lot of spaghetti sauce.) At first, it seems that the rule regarding “embedded advertising” is simply that your food must be promoted by a character that is charismatic, powerful, or hip; said character’s moral alignment is simply not part of the equation. That seems true, but it’s not. It turns out that context is hardly even a factor in product placement.
You know how, about thirteen minutes into Fritz Lang’s 1931 classic M, you’re simultaneously feeling vexed about the the child murderer at large, but also inexplicably craving the fresh, long-lasting taste of a good spearmint gum? That’s because there’s a big Wrigley banner stretched over the action. Because nothing says “fresh” like a mob frantic about a child’s disappearance. (If you watch this scene without subtitles, and don’t speak German, it looks like you’re watching the most volatile product rollout in the world. There’s a guy who keeps pointing at the Wrigley banner and shouting. He probably just quit smoking. Good for him.)
So what we learn about what some villains eat is that they eat what they’re told, which not only drains their mystique, but renders a philosophical inquiry about their culinary habits empty.
At least we can mock icons of darkness as they become shills and spokesmen for fast food. I can imagine a snarky entertainment show quipping, “For a CEO of sorts, Darth Vader’s ‘golden parachute’ was pretty meager. Gorbachev selling Pizza Hut is the pinnacle of integrity compared to these Dark Side burgers.” Television and movies create a sort of shotgun wedding between art and commerce. Product placement, both as intentional mechanism of advertising, and as incidental prop, can color a story’s mood or tell us about a character’s sympathies. But are villain's culinary predilections ever telling in an era of inescapable advertising?
While Vader is certainly a villain (he might be the villain of 20th century pop culture), his 11th hour redemption and complex, if poorly expanded-upon, backstory contains elements of the “anti-hero.” Vader being an ultra-popular villain is no accident—it’s due to his anti-hero nature. As soon as people realized that anti-heroes are like heroes, except interesting, that’s all we got on cable serial dramas. For instance:
Don Draper (Mad Men); Walter White (Breaking Bad); Tony Soprano (The Sopranos); Nucky Thompson (Boardwalk Empire); Ray Donovan (Ray Donovan); Frank Underwood (House of Cards); Everyone (Deadwood); Everyone (Rome); Omar Little, and also Everyone Else (The Wire).
The moral ambiguity in cable dramas is fascinating from a culinary perspective, because anti-heroes actually eat. Since they are not strictly villains, and we spend lots of time with them, we get to see more of the minutiae of their lives, more humanizing and incidental choices they make. Their food selections are less iconic and more “real.” But since fiction isn’t real, and television isn’t real life, these are still choices that someone else is making. There is no “default setting.” Someone still has to decide that Jack Torrance wants Triscuits and not Oreos. (Is Jack Torrance not the anti-hero of The Shining? Huh… well, you’re entitled to your opinion.)
This new breed of anti-hero and likable villain is so far from the archetype of Snidely Whiplash, and all his mustache-twirling predecessors, that we find their eating choices simply natural consequences of their era and environment. Avon Barksdale is a great BBQ chef, Augustus Caesar eats stuffed quail. Such is the fictional culinary landscape as the stories we tell ourselves tend toward authenticity. Meanwhile, the cackling top-hatted villain of antiquity is left to survive via photosynthesis.
I suppose it's all right if we can’t pinpoint what Snidely Whiplash ate, since we have Daniel Plainview. Besides an almost psychotic enthusiasm for milkshakes, the oil man of There Will Be Blood (2007) favors (again) steak and whiskey. As a hyper-capitalist caricature, Plainview is a sort of apex predator, and this is reinforced by his choice of meal. I struggle to think of a better nexus between hyper-masculine predation and affluence than steak and whiskey.
And affluence is a big part of modern villainy. You don’t see a lot of paupers/homeless people with top hats and waxed mustaches. (I don’t mean to assume too much about your life, dear reader.) The classic villain archetype bears an uncanny resemblance to the classic robber baron/railroad magnate/ rich guy operating the levers of the machine in which you are simply a cog. Lex Luthor, King Joffrey, and Monty Burns all enjoy things delivered on silver platters. And since we’ve absorbed this socio-economic projection of villainy into our cultural mythology, the food choices of our classic villain template tend toward caviar and away from a nice fruit salad.
This is ironic when considering the origin of the word “villain” itself. If you were tilling the soil for your livelihood during the Dark Ages, you would be doing so on a farming compound, or villa, naturally. This would make you a “farmhand,” or vilain, in the Old French, from the Late Latin villanus. This meant that you were not a knight, not bound by the strictures of chivalry, and therefore likely to commit heinous, villainous acts. (My experience with moderns farmers implies that this is no longer much of a concern.)
So “villainy,” as an etymological construct, is intrinsically bound up with fresh, local, organic produce. While this doesn’t mean that you should wear a stab-vest in the produce section of Foods For Living, it’s worth noting how the concept of "villainy" was historically sanctioned by the affluent, until an emerging literate middle class decided to vilify them through fiction. These distinctions may have been obliterated by the explosion of fictional perspectives in every medium over the last hundred years, but the underlying class tensions are (obviously) going nowhere. (Many thanks to Aerosmith for reminding us.)
It makes me wonder: On what shall tomorrow’s villains dine? What will that say about their creators?
A SCIENCE Info Table at Article's End
Stimulus Your Feelings A Psychopath's Feelings
Getting Promoted Excited, proud Apathetic, detached
Making a successful
joke Proud Apathetic, detached
Having a child Grateful, proud,
joyous Apathetic, detached
Doing something Horrified, Really pumped
violently psychotic regretful,
disoriented
Eating some great food Content, Content, stimulated
stimulated on on a basic visceral
a basic visceral level level
