Nicole Kidman in To Die For (1995).
Give me someone irrefutably awful and give her to me now!
I’m writing this after watching Hulu’s ill-conceived A Teacher, followed by the Netflix venture I Care A Lot starring Gone Girl’s bob-on-legs, Rosamund Pike. While the latter did a better job than the former in delivering to me what I wanted, it accomplished that goal primarily by removing the emotional core of every character. That isn’t exactly the same thing as getting me inside the villain’s head and making me want to stay even though it’s a gross place. Pike’s Marla was certainly sufficiently evil for my tastes, but I can’t say I had the necessary context or character history to understand her motivations.
A Teacher had the opposite problem - we were only ever in Claire’s head (even when we’re supposed to be in the head of her high school paramour) and it was too relatable and comfortable a place to be given her crime. It felt like a PG-rated version of 2014’s Tampa by Alissa Nutting, wholly sanitized for the TV screen. Everything from the instructions Claire gives to her mark (how to use the burner phone, using tutoring as a cover for spending time together, escaping school for illicit meet-ups in vehicles) to the trope of abusers never becoming emotionally involved with their targets was straight out of Nutting-ville. Everything except the fact that somehow, Hulu still wanted Claire to be well-liked by the viewer. Streamers are too afraid to make anything genuinely transgressive (with the exception of HBO, and only on occasion) but they want some shock value to draw us in, so they dabble in verboten subject matter and then cover it like it’s an after-school special.
For the uninitiated, Tampa is a fictional account of a predatory hebephile working at a junior high school in Florida. It shocked readers when it came out in 2014 and landed Nutting in the crosshairs of a lot of controversy. This was mostly because she dared to write a disgusting, deviant character who she a) opted not to make a man and b) painted as completely unapologetic in their paraphilia and cutthroat in their manipulation, with little fear of retribution. This is heat Kate Elizabeth Russell, author of My Dark Vanessa, avoided by making the ‘I’ narrator the victim instead of the criminal. In Tampa’s daring conclusion, things go the way they often do in public trials of attractive, female sex offenders, to devastating effect (in fact the whole story is based off of Debra Lafave, who Nutting attended high school with prior to the offense). I think about Tampa often. Like most of my favorite books, I can’t recommend it due to the subject matter, even though I want to all the time.
You can imagine my dismay then, when I heard one of the aforementioned streaming behemoths (albeit the best one) was planning to adapt one of Alissa Nutting’s books for the screen, but that it wasn’t going to be Tampa (Harmony Korine has been rumoured since 2016 to be interested in doing so and I hoped it had come to pass). Instead, the vivid Made For Love has a shiny HBO Max trailer for a limited series run. They have categorized the series as a comedy. I wish it was Tampa, since Made For Love’s big villain is an Elon-like tech bro, a mostly vanilla concept that will be relatively easy to sell the audience on.
It may be the cultural climate we’re living through, but such half-assed depictions of so-called depraved women leave me desperately wanting more. Something about every evil character being excused from their predilections - whether it’s because they themselves are damaged, or abused, or abandoned in their marriage and sent looking elsewhere for affection - deprives me of the autonomy I want to see in any main character-based story. This doesn’t mean there can’t be a history of violence, so to speak. It’s possible even, that the neutrality with which most of us are now forced to approach power dynamics and sexuality robs the art itself of having any impact. I mean, do we really need a Cruella Deville origin story? All the explanation we need is right there in her name.
Frank and I recently watched Lars Von Triers’ The House That Jack Built, and all I could think about was how much more interesting it would have been if Jack had been a woman. Why won’t anyone write a hit screenplay starring a realistic, megalomaniacal, controlling, modern killer woman? Bonus points if she has a taboo obsession or fetish. Why does big media feel they have to spoon feed us a sugar-coated version of even our own worst impulses? Is it just not chic at the moment to point out that women can be evil too?
I’d even swallow it in the synthetic way “we” favor today, i.e. coming from a place of feigned virtue. One could make the argument that a faithful account of a story like the one in A Teacher would “shine a light” on male sexual assault victims, or some such made-up garbage reasoning so that the creator can still be considered a good person and make their art anyway. Now that the fervor of online cancellation has extended beyond workplaces, crimes and injustices to the mundanities of psychic warfare in interpersonal relationships, these concessions are practically required by the artist. It makes me feel robbed of not only my right to be ugly, but also of my own imagination.
All I can ask is that someone writes it soon, so that I don’t have to.
Who are your favorite non-male villains? If something springs to mind, maybe you’ll consider replying to recommend me some books?
The gnarlier and more unflinching, the better. I’m in a weird reading zone and I don’t want to come out.