Imaginary Worlds - Evil Plans

Episode Date: July 27, 2017

They've tried to take over the world. They've tried to take away our free will. They've gone after ancient artifacts with vaguely defined magical properties. But they almost always fail. The evil plan has become a meta-joke to the point where even the villains themselves can't help but comment on all the tropes. Yet we keep watching movies and TV shows to see more evil plans hatched.. Honest Trailers head writer Spencer Gilbert and Vulture.com writer Abraham Riesman talk about why super villains shouldn't try so hard to be evil geniuses, and how the best evil plans make us wonder if we'd do the same thing in the villain's situation.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Eric Molenski. Today's episode is going to be about a pet peeve of mine. Something that has been bugging me for years. Now the kinds of movies and TV shows that I watch, and probably many of you watch, I get exposed to a lot of villains with evil plans. And it really bugs me when the evil scheme is so complicated and so convoluted that I can't understand what the villain is trying to accomplish. And so I can't even root for the hero to stop the plan because I don't understand what they're trying to stop.

I mean, it's one thing if the whole movie's bad, but it's really frustrating when this happens in an otherwise really good movie, like Spider-Man 2, which was the second movie with Tobey Maguire. It's a great Peter Parker story, but the bad guy in the film, Doc Ock, played by Alfred Molina,

is obsessed with getting tritium, whatever that is, and Doc Ock needs tritium to continue his experiment of creating a ball of energy because the robotic tentacles on his back are telling him to. Hello, Harry. Otto, what do you want? That precious tritium. But I need more of it this time. Lord Tritium, are you crazy? You'll destroy the city! You're a half!

That is another pet peeve of mine. When somebody says to the villain, you're crazy, or you're insane, or you're psychotic, like that's supposed to explain why the evil plan is completely illogical. Now, when Spider-Man 2 came out in 2004, superhero films were not that common. Now there is a glut of them, which means there's a destructive arms race among supervillains to come up with the biggest, baddest evil plans. Which got me wondering, what makes a good evil plan? And why do so many of them go wrong?

got me wondering, what makes a good evil plan? And why do so many of them go wrong? I mean, not for the villains, they always go wrong for the villains, but why are they so unsatisfying for me and the audience? Well, today, I'm going to get to the bottom of those very important questions. So get ready to seriously geek out after the break. after the break. Alright, so before I began, I should say this episode is going to be full of spoilers because the evil plan is basically the plot of the movie.

From Lex Luthor to Palpatine, if you really think about it, your favorite villain's plan is really dumb. That is Spencer Gilbert. He's the head writer of Honest Trailers. And if the head writer of Honest Trailers. And if you haven't seen Honest Trailers,

get thee to YouTube. It is a brilliant ongoing series where a in-a-world type narrator breaks down everything that's wrong with these movies. Now, get ready for another generically evil one-off villain who hates the Avengers for reasons. With an overcomplicated plot to evolve and or destroy the world by turning an Eastern European city into a meteor? You know, Andy Signore, who created the series, had done the first 12 or so himself, and he needed some help.

The room is usually split between me on the, oh, it's just fun, like, enjoy it side. And then Dan and Andy on the, no, we need movies to be better. We need to take this seriously side. And it can get intense. That's interesting. There's almost like a sense of mission to it. Yeah. I mean, our mission is not to trash these movies.

It's not be a jerk trailers. It's not asshole trailers. be a jerk trailers, not asshole trailers. We just want to be honest and kind of be the voice of the fan who's out of the loop, who has no access, who just goes and watches these movies and the type of conversation you'd have with your friends after you see it. So I asked Spencer, why do so many evil plans make no sense? Why are they often a complete narrative mess? He says the first reason is because writers are usually trying

way too hard to prove that their villain is an evil genius. Unless it's part of the villain's character, like the Riddler. He needs to have an insanely complicated plan because he needs to put Batman into that cat and mouse game where he is peeling back the onion layer by layer.

Or Moriarty in Sherlock, he needs to prove to Sherlock that he is smarter than him and devise these super complicated mousetrap plans that he needs to pick apart. But for other villains, it's like, no, you want money, you want power, go get it in the simplest, most direct way possible, and the hero will try to stop you. You don't need to make it all about the hero. One of my favorite Honest trailers was the one for Batman vs. Superman Dawn of Justice, where they tried to break down everything it would take for Lex Luthor's evil plan to work. Watch the Dark Knight grow to hate Superman for clear, obvious reasons, while Superman grows to hate Batman back because Lex Luthor hired someone to kill a criminal Batman branded before

he put him in prison. So that when Clark Kent refused to cover the local football team and investigated the Gotham Vigilante instead, he would conclude that, look, I don't have time to explain the whole thing. Can we just roll Lex's plan real quick? And at one point they just stopped showing footage of the film and had this list like scrolling on screen.

We just wrote out what he's planning on doing and I think it's a 28, 29 step plan that requires a lot of luck and a lot of bank shots. And it's just this Rube Goldberg machine. Yeah, and then pee in the cup was a great detail there too. You have to do that. I mean, that's the best part of any plan.

Seriously, Lex Luthor in this film, played by Jesse Eisenberg, leaves a jar of urine on the Senate floor to let Senator Holly Hunter know that he's about to blow up the Senate with Superman in it because that ties back to a line of dialogue from earlier. Pee in a jar? Man, this is complicated. You don't have to throw everything but the kitchen sink into your evil plan. And there's the sink. Spencer says the second problem with evil plans is the question of motivation. Like in this movie, Lex Luthor gives a lot of grandiose speeches,

but it's not really clear why he's doing all this. I mean, wanting revenge is a good motivation. That's why Khan is such a great villain in Star Trek. But simply hating Superman for existential reasons doesn't work for Spencer. He says if a villain is going to have a philosophy, it should be clear and simple, like Magneto. Magneto in the first X-Men movie,

where he and Professor X always have this war of words and war of ideals and identity, and his plan is part of that. It's turning everybody into a mutant so that everybody will see the world from his perspective. part of that. It's turning everybody into a mutant so that everybody will see the world from his perspective. You get it. It's simple enough. It makes sense for both of them. I'm looking for hope. I will bring you hope, old friend. And I ask only one thing in return. Don't get in my way. The other thing that makes a compelling villain is that they need to have a legitimate gripe.

Like in the case of Magneto, we're made to understand why he assumes the worst of people and why he wants to protect mutants, his own kind. And so a part of us feels a little complicit when he carries out his evil plan because we kind of understand why he's doing it.

Now, I also talked with Abraham Reisman, who is one of my favorite journalists who covers comic book characters. He writes for the website Vulture. This is my whole career is just writing about niche obsessions. And he says one of his favorite villains is Ozymandias from the 1986 graphic novel Watchmen. Ozymandias, from the 1986 graphic novel Watchmen. Now, Ozymandias is a retired superhero who stages a fake alien invasion that obliterates half of New York because he thinks this will force the United States and the Soviet Union to cooperate

and avoid nuclear war with each other. And the really disturbing part about this plan? It actually works. Every time I read Watchmen, a very significant part of me goes, maybe Ozymandias did the right thing, which is, of course, the point of that ending. You're supposed to debate that for yourself. on some days not to feel like something that kind of that drastic, maybe not that murderous, but something that drastic might be what's required to fix the earth to kind of hit the reset button. Now, this is actually a sub genre of the evil plan, the utopian evil plan that the villain thinks will make the world a better place. For instance, the new Wonder

Woman movie, where Ares, the god of war, wants to rid the planet of these nasty humans so Earth can be a paradise for the Greek gods again. Or in Batman Begins, where the League of Shadows wants to release a toxic gas that will cause everyone in Gotham to fight each other until this corrupt civilization falls like ancient Rome and then tomorrow the world will watch in horror as its greatest city destroys itself the movement back to harmony will be unstoppable this time or as honest trailers put it wait what I thought this was supposed to be the realistic one. That sounds like something Adam West would go up against. It's a sad pill. No one would look into the massive citywide riot at all. They'd just say, oh, well, I guess law and order doesn't work.

In talking with Spencer Gilbert, I began to realize why I am so fascinated by evil schemes. Most of them rely on magical thinking. And as I've mentioned before, I have a little problem with magical thinking in real life. Like I'll often take a bunch of steps and I assume that everything in the world will fall in line just the way I expect without factoring in all the variables. Kind of like an evil plan which never seems to factor in the heroes. Now most of the time I can see that these evil plans are totally illogical. But then when I started telling Spencer about the evil plans that I thought were ingenious,

he reminded me they also rely on magical thinking. You plan to break into the world's largest bank, but not to steal anything. Like Goldfinger, everybody's favorite Bond villain, who wants to blow up an atomic bomb in Fort Knox so he can corner the market on gold. Even James Bond is impressed. It's an inspired deal. They get what they want. Economic chaos in the West and the value of your gold increases many times. I conservatively estimate 10 times. Brilliant. conservatively estimate, 10 times.

Brilliant. I'm not a history buff, but I'm pretty sure that the U.S. was off the gold standard at the time when he did that. Ah, yes, forgot about that. But then I mentioned my absolute favorite evil plan from the first Superman film, the one with Christopher Reeve and Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor.

Everything west of this line is the richest, most expensive real estate in the world. This, by the way, is one of the most famous evil plans in movie history. Lex Luthor wants to set off a nuclear bomb in the San Andreas Fault, which will cause California to break off into the sea, and then he will own all this brand new beachfront property in Nevada. Bye bye, California. Hello, new West Coast, my West Coast. Meanwhile, he distracts Superman by sending another nuclear missile to New Jersey

because he thinks Superman can't be in two places at once. I mean, that's kind of brilliant, right? Okay, well, it fits the tone of the movie, which is fun, it's lighthearted, but, okay, you're going to blow up half of California and sell property on it. Don't you think when the people move in, they're going to notice, you know,

the third leg growing out of their wife's head when she's sitting by the beach? It's going to be radioactive. Uh, true. You know, it's going to be radioactive. True. You know, there's probably easier ways to make a buck than nuking California to sell beachfront property. You know, hold the world hostage if you get a hold of nukes. He's taken it a couple steps too far.

He's overcomplicating it. I guess the thing I liked about it was the idea that Superman is supposed to be such a Boy Scout. And by forcing Superman to choose who lives or dies, New Jersey or California, it's like, ah, you're not such a Boy Scout anymore. Yeah, but it turns out it wasn't much of a choice at all. You know, he gets the ultimate get out of jail free card there with the old time travel thing. Ah, yeah, true. travel thing. Ah, yeah, true. But Abraham Reesman has a soft spot for that plan because it follows another important rule. The evil plan needs to be rooted in the villain's personality,

not just their political philosophy, but what makes them tick as a character. That's why he loves Luther's plan from Superman 2 when he agrees to help General Zod take over the Earth for a price. My needs are small. As it turns out, I have this affinity for a beachfront property. What do you want? Australia. That's terrific. Yeah. Because on some level, it's kind of relatable because you go like, if aliens were invading and it looked pretty certain that they were going to win, like some part of me might want to work with the occupying army and see what I could milk out of it. It's not the part of yourself that you're proud of, but you can see how you might collaborate with an invading power. He even likes Superman Returns from 2006 for the same reason.

This version of Lex Luthor, played by Kevin Spacey, decides to create new real estate by throwing a shard of kryptonite into the ocean and growing a brand new continent that Superman can't touch. It's not just relatable, it's kind of the whole point of buying real estate to a certain extent. Like you do it for the savings or the ability to flip it and make money off of it or to just to have control of your own domain. And eventually the rest of the world will be begging me for a piece of high-tech beachfront property. In fact, they'll pay through the nose

for it. But millions of people will die. Billions! Once again, the press underestimates me. This is front page news. Come on, let me hear you say it just once. Come on. You're insane. No! No, what's the other thing? Come on, I know it's just dangling out the tip of your tongue. Let me hear it just once, please. Superman will never... Wrong! Kevin Spacey is so great that he almost distracts me from the fact that there's that big red flag. The line where Lois Lane says, you're insane. In other words, this makes no sense. Or as Spencer Gilbert points out, Luther is banking all of his real estate dreams on a constantly expanding alien rock

that you can't grow any food on or even drill into. Oh, yeah. Who wouldn't want to live there? Which brings me to the next bit of advice that Abraham Reisman has for supervillains. Sometimes less is more. Sometimes less is more. hard to wrap your mind around what's going on that there's nothing exciting about it. I mean, it's the old line about when you watch somebody's arm get blown off in a movie, you go, hmm, wow, that's bad. But when you watch somebody stub their toe in a movie, you go, oh, God, ah, jeez, I can imagine what that feels like. Now, when I asked both these guys to name their favorite evil plans, they both mentioned Hans Gruber, Alan Rickman's character from Die Hard,

who just wants to rob a building. Everyone in the film and the audience thinks that he is a terrorist, but it's all a cover to manipulate the police into cutting the power so that he can just get away with a robbery. That's one of my favorites. For all your posturing, for all your little speeches, you're nothing but a common thief. I am an exceptional thief, Mrs. McClain, and since I'm moving up to kidnapping, you should be more polite. No, Hans Gruber's plot is one for the Hall of Fame, absolutely. It's something that's small-scale enough, you can wrap your mind around it, and part of you can relate to it. You're like, if I were that clever, I might try to pull something off like that. You don't want to kill people,

but as is true in any superhero story, and you can argue that Die Hard is kind of a superhero story, the actual violence kind of fades into the background. You're just thinking about what people want to do, what their motivations are, what their struggles are. Another example of an evil plan that's relatable, achievable, and grounded in the villain's personality and philosophy is the Vulture from the new Spider-Man movie Homecoming.

Played by Michael Keaton, this version of the Vulture is a construction foreman who steals alien technology left behind from the first Avengers movie because he can turn that tech into weapons that he can sell in the black market. And he's doing this because the city and Tony Stark unfairly took away his contract to clean up that alien technology in the first place. The world's changing. It's time we change too. He genuinely believes that he is this put upon working class guy and he hates government bureaucrats and he hates rich, high flying liberal elites. He doesn't use the word liberal, but I mean.

That's what he means. And they are literally high flying. And they are literally high flying in Tony Stark's case. And what you see over the course of the movie is like, he's actually doing pretty well for himself. Like, he's not struggling. He's just motivated by this grievance against the world, and the grievance isn't necessarily grounded in reality. Or if it once was, it no longer is. And when Michael Keaton gives the villain's speech,

you know, the classic, you and I aren't so different speech to the hero, it actually makes Peter Parker realize that he is more in common with the villain, this guy from the neighborhood, than he does with a rich and powerful Tony Stark. And that changes what Peter wants for the rest of the film. There's a reason why we're not so different. You and I pops up over and over again. And it's because on some level, if that line is done convincingly, it's the villain saying, I have a lot of affection for you. You're somebody that I care about and respect. And that means, A, I've studied you enough that I can defeat you. And B, it means

like I could maybe tempt you to come over to my side because I haven't just set out to destroy every memory of you. I would love it if you came to the dark side. I mean, that's that's the whole Luke, I am your father moment, right? That's the other thing he likes about the vulture. He's a parental figure. And Abraham thinks the best type of villains are often parental figures. You feel powerless in the face of this brilliant and accomplished and more prepared person. It's the way that if you're angry at a parent when you're a child, you feel because you don't have any ability to outsmart an adult when you're a kid. You don't have any way tosmart an adult when you're a kid. You don't have any way to outfight an adult when you're a kid.

Maybe that's why the Wicked Witch is such a good— Exactly. Wicked Witch of the West is a great example where you're like, this is somebody in a position of authority, somebody who has the world bent to their will in a way that I simply can't, and this person already has a certain degree of control over the world. Right. And little girl who just arrived here, what the hell do you know about how I got to be the Wicked Witch? Exactly. Although when it comes to villains that are too close for comfort, I actually prefer the ones that are romantically involved with the hero,

like in the TV show Elementary, where Sherlock Holmes is living in modern day New York. TV show Elementary, where Sherlock Holmes is living in modern-day New York. Now, in season one, we think that Natalie Dormer is playing Sherlock Holmes' classic love interest, Irene Adler. But then he discovers that Irene Adler is just another alias of his arch-nemesis Moriarty, who he thought was a man, because Moriarty is typically played by a man. Returning to me is a risk, and you'd only take it if I was close to undermining another of your plots. That's why you wanted me to leave the country with you earlier, was it not? Same old Sherlock.

You look at people and you see puzzles. I see games. You? You're a game I'll win every time. Now, these intimate types of villains tend to work better on tv when planning a blockbuster franchise usually it's more bankable to put the fate of the world or the fate of the universe at stake but that has changed over time too now way back in my episode about character alignments, I talked about the three types of villains. The villains that are lawful evil, neutral evil, and chaotic evil.

Now, villains in the Cold War were typically lawful evil because they wanted to manipulate a system, an ironclad system, for personal gain. iron-clad system for personal gain. But after the Cold War in the 1990s, we saw a lot of neutral evil characters that didn't have allegiance to anyone were out for themselves. In fact, a common trope during that era was the hero discovering that the real villain was their boss, and they don't know who to trust anymore. But since 2001, chaotic evil has gotten the most screen time. That may be why of all the villains in this century, the one that really struck a nerve with a lot of people was a classic villain that just felt right for our time. Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order and everything becomes chaos because the joker is you know as has been said a million and a half times an agent of chaos and the joker is the archetypal version of the

nihilist and a nihilist is you know it's it's the old pig lebowski line like say what you will about the tenets of national socialism dude at. At least it's an ethos. Like, the nihilists are terrifying because they'll go to any length. They have no limits. All they want to do is destroy or confuse. And, you know, he has no rules. How could you possibly defeat somebody who has no rules? I mean, typically, an evil plan is all about a villain wanting something

that they think will make their lives better, and the end justifies the means. But Spencer says the Joker is the real evil genius because he doesn't have an endgame. He doesn't really want anything for himself. What he cares about is how his evil plan changes, corrupts, or destroys the people that are trying to stop him. He's one of the best villains of all time for a reason.

That's because he does want to bring about chaos because it's motivated out of his character, but he also just needs to prove a point to Batman that he's no better than him. That's true because if the plan fails to some extent, that's okay, because he kind of enjoys, for the most part, he enjoys the chaos. He'll improvise and find a new route towards destruction. Oh, yeah, even if the Joker loses, he wins. He just loves it. I mean, in the end, it's easy to make fun of the evil plan.

Most of them are riddled with cliches, propped up by grandiose speeches, and tropes we've seen so many times, these days the villains often make jokes about them. But I think they keep showing up for a reason. On some level, watching heroes stop these evil plans over and over again kind of gives us a sense of purpose. If we're feeling cynical, they can remind us why we believe in our principles and why they're worth fighting for.

That's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Spencer Gilbert of Honest Trailers and Abraham Reisman. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. And by the way, if you have an evil plan for movies or TV that you love for the sheer bravado of it, even though it makes no sense whatsoever, let me know on the Imaginary Worlds Facebook page, tweet at emolinski.

You can also support the show by clicking the donate button on my site, imaginaryworldspodcast.org. What are we going to do tomorrow night? The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world. Here's the plan. We get the warhead and we hold the world ransom for...

$1,000,000. $1,000,000. Before wrapping up, I want to recommend another podcast. And we hold the world ransom for one million dollars. Before wrapping up, I want to recommend another podcast called 20,000 Hertz, which looks at the most interesting and iconic sounds in the world and even in the universe. A great place for my listeners to start would be the episode on 8-bit music from the old video games of Atari and Nintendo, would be the episode on 8-bit music from the old video games of Atari and Nintendo, where the host, Dallas Taylor, talks about why these sounds are still so pleasing to our ears. It was a really big deal to add sounds to graphics.

The very beginning, we have, oh my God, we actually have sound playback, and it's a single beep from Pong. My name is Zachary Quarles, audio director and sound designer for Microsoft Game Studios. The Atari 2600 and its contemporaries all had sound chips. Sound was now an integral part of the experience. The technology was limited though,

so the programmers had to get really creative. Subscribe to 20,000 Hertz wherever you get your podcasts.