When I saw Gladiator and Joaquin Phoetrenix told Russell Crowe, “You are not so different, you and I,” my friend Jon and I were the only two people in the theater laughing.
It had been a pet peeve of Jon’s for a while. It’s one of those phrases that, once pointed out, you start hearing everywhere.* In dramatic storytelling, it makes sense for the protagonist and antagonist to meet or hero and anti-hero, whatever the technical terms are.
The villain has to have a reason for doing what he’s doing. They want power or money and they say things like, “And Alexander the Great wept for he had no more lands to conquer,” or, “Kill a few hundred people and you’re insane, kill a hundred thousand and you’re a king,” or something like that.
But I think we started getting bored with power hungry villains. We started wanting more gray than black and white.
The first movie I remember really playing with this was Heat with Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino. Pacino the cop pulls over DeNiro the criminal and says, “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” It was an iconic moment because DeNiro and Pacnio had never been on screen together but also because it was the first time I think we’d seen cop and criminal take a time out to talk shop while in the midst of their conflict.
And that, I think, is how we came to a new trope in movies and shows: the hero and villain meeting.
It’s on my mind because finished Killing Eve last night. It was a good show and I highly recommend it.
Spoiler alert.
Villanelle the assassin breaks into Eve’s house, not to kill her but just to have dinner. It was tense and effective. They did it right in this show.
Further spoilers.
Ready?
In the last episode, they meet again in Villanelle’s apartment and Eve confesses that she wonders about Villanelle (Oksana at this point), what she’s doing, what she’s wearing, who she’s with. Are we so different, you and I?
To be honest, it may have been a bit too much, this final meeting.
The meeting between hero and villain has to be a spice, not the main course. Heat did it right. They met once and the conversation was short.
I think you could even say that we had a meeting in The Silence of the Lambs. Clarice and Hannibal met face to face a couple of times but there was always a wall separating them: both a literal wall and a formality that kept them apart. But the tension in those scenes was strong enough to drive the whole movie.
The show that gets it completely wrong, in my opinion, was Homeland. It started off interesting with Carrie and Brody meeting up, discovering a mutual attraction, and, eventually, having sex. It was a dangerous gamble for both of them and it worked for the story. The only problem was the writers kept going back to it to the point where Carrie and Brody became, like, a couple. That was when I lost faith in the show. In fact, it’s when I started hate watching the show.
I wanted to break into executive producer Alex Gansa’s house, tie him up and demand answers like a crazed fan, Misery style. “What the hell were you thinking? Why did you take the story there? You ruined a perfectly good show! You should have stopped while you were ahead!” then I’d pause and take a breath. “Look, I get it, you wanted to write a great show. And I wanted to watch a great show. You know, we are not so different you and I…”
