By Jonathan Landaw

“Which ones are the bad guys?”

This is one of the most urgent questions children want answered when watching movies. They want to know exactly when to cheer and when to boo. It has been said that one of the reasons the first Star Wars installment was so popular, among adults and children alike, was the unambiguous way in which the heroes and villains were portrayed. In this sense it closely resembles the old-fashioned westerns and science fiction thrillers that clearly inspired it. From the very first scene, every viewer immediately knows that the inhumanely masked and armored soldiers of the Imperial Forces are no good and that the rebels fighting against them must eventually prevail if the story is to have a happy ending. The leader of the bad guys, Darth Vader, is the quintessential villain and everything about his appearance, voice and actions bespeaks evil; he is a high-tech version of Flash Gordon’s aptly named nemesis, Ming the Merciless.

Of course, not all movie bad guys are “guys” at all. So many of the scariest villains in the Disney cartoon classics, for example, were female that it makes one wonder which Freudian-styled anxiety the genial creator of Mickey Mouse might have been subconsciously tuned into. Consider the vengeful Malificent in Sleeping Beauty who, summoning “the powers of hell” (pretty strong language for a Disney flick), transforms into an overwhelmingly powerful fire-breathing dragon! Or the wicked step-mother in Cinderella and the extravagant Cruella De Vil of 101 Dalmatians. Or Ursula the sea-witch of The Little Mermaid and Madame Medusa, the scheming harpy in The Rescuers. What a sorority of evil! And at their head, the most frightening (for me) of all: the vain and murderous queen in Snow White. Although it is well over 40 years ago, I can still remember shutting my eyes in abject fear and grabbing onto my mother’s arm for security during the scene in the queen’s secret laboratory when she turns herself into a hideous crone. (Little kids nowadays don’t seem to be as frightened by that scene as I was. Perhaps it just doesn’t have the terror, when viewed on video, than it did on the giant screen in the dark of a movie theater. Or perhaps modern day kids are more accustomed than I was to fearful images. Or perhaps I was just a wimp.)

In any event, whether they are male or female, it is comforting to be able to recognize villains as villains and heroes as heroes. This recognition does not always accord with the film-maker’s intention, however. When the old-fashioned shoot-’em ups played in African-American neighborhoods, so I have heard, the black audiences rooted for the red Indians against the white cavalry, which is not what Hollywood had in mind at all. And when a sufficient enough shift in the public attitude comes about, the heroic General Custer of more traditional pictures is replaced on the screen by the megalomaniacal General Custer of Little Big Man and the savages of countless earlier films give way to the noble Native Americans of Dances with Wolves.

A good example of the changing status of our villains is provided by the Russians. In the paranoid days of the 1950s, it was clear they were America’s primary foe. As Dylan sang, “If another war comes, then it’s them we must fight.” Of course this view did not take into account that Russia was an ally during World War II, when Germany was the common enemy. But who wants to take the past into account – I am not referring to anything as esoteric as past lives here, when all beings have been our mother, but merely the preceding few years, or even months – when there is a nice, juicy enemy in front of us right now to hate?

With the break-up of what Reagan called “the Evil Empire,” there was another major shift in American opinion about the Russians; many hailed Gorbachev as a veritable Prince of Peace and there was scarcely any opposition to his setting up a study center in San Francisco. What public opinion in America will be if his successor (is that the hero Yeltsin, who thwarted the hard-liners during the attempted coup a few years ago, or the tyrant Yeltsin, who suppressed Chechen independence, or merely the drunken Yeltsin?) loses the upcoming election to the communists, who can tell? Maybe Russia will become Public Enemy Number One again, and Saddam Hussein (does anyone remember when he, too, was an ally?) can take a breather.

The clear distinction between “our side” and “their side” offered by most movies provides a welcome respite from the complexities of what passes for “real” life. Imagine, for the moment, that you were a member of the American Communist Party in 1939 and you received news of the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact between your idealized Mother Russia and the hated Nazis. Perhaps the only way to retain some semblance of sanity would be by spending a few hours at the movie theater escaping into the fantasy world of The Wizard of Oz (if that was playing then), where there is no danger that Dorothy is going to sell out the Munchkins to the Wicked Witch of the West.

Poor beleaguered readers, if there are any of you left by this time, can you guess who was the only friend that the young Judy Garland (playing Dorothy) had on the set of “Wizard?” No, it was neither Ray Bolger (the Scarecrow) not Bert Lahr (the Cowardly Lion) nor Jack Haley (the Tin Man): her three closest allies in the film. None of these three actors behaved warmly to her at all. It was Margaret Hamilton, who played her worse enemy: the Wicked Witch herself! What certainty is there in cyclic existence if even our fantasy worlds are confusing?

So, who are the bad guys?