Pinning Down Villainy

[tealin]

Transcribing this mostly for my own reference (you never know when these things come in handy) but in case anyone else finds it interesting:

Although superheroes have this wonderful sense of being able to deal with and so forth, what a supervillain does is it gives us an understandable centre of evil, and evil is something we find hard to deal with in its complexity. Real evil is a horrible big amorphous thing. One single person with evil intent, you can begin to understand that, and you can somehow or other deal with them, in the same way that Neanderthal man* possibly was drawing paintings on the wall of his cave to represent the animals he wanted to control and hunt. So in the same way by imagining evil as a single person we can deal with it more easily.

Neil Brand on The Film Programme**

*Educational Footnote: Neanderthal man is somewhat famous for not having art; that is one of the clearest cultural divisions between him and modern humans. Later Neanderthals seem to have been capable of parroting Homo Sapiens' creativity but they do not seem to have any of their own. Dunno why I felt like I had to point this out aside from being a know-it-all, but there you go.
**The segment was not on villainy so much as linking The Sorcerer's Apprentice to German expressionism (stranger things have happened)