Why Watching Star Wars and The Silence of the Lambs Makes Us Good People

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Why are fairy tales and stories filled with such disgusting characters that we lose our heads from love and hate for them? This question has long been of interest to literary scholars, but now psychologists have taken up it.

Darth Vader. Hannibal Lecter. Lord Voldemort. In literature and cinema, it is the villains that rivet our attention. In John Milton's novel Paradise Lost, the handsome and charming Satan has succeeded in pushing even God into the background. No matter how dire the aspirations of such heroes, we seem to take conflicting pleasure in watching them.

Danish scientist Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen decided to shed some light on dark literary figures through the lens of evolutionary psychology and understand why we love to hate villains so much.

To understand the attractiveness of evil, one must first study its complete opposite - good. In the past, people living in tight-knit groups had to determine who was good and who was bad and punish the villain. Today we do this not with the help of intuition, but with rational thinking.

We are able to assess how much a person is willing to donate for the good of the group. Anyone who is not ready for such charity and does not want to compromise with other members of society is regarded by us as a dangerous and unreliable type. We do not trust such people.

It is obvious that continuing to communicate with unreliable people means putting the whole society in danger. After all, they are able to provoke such emotional reactions as disgust, fear and anger. These feelings can be so strong that we can justify the killing of such a villain, because this removes the danger to society.

We unmistakably identify the character traits of villains. Such characters are not capable of sacrifice, they are selfish. And this has an evolutionary meaning: the connection with society is destroyed, and the possibility of the spread of immoral behavior to other members of the group is minimized.

In the movie "The Exorcist" we saw on the screen an incredibly frightening image of evil: a demon possessed the body of an innocent child. The only person able to resist this fiend of hell was Father Merrin, who uttered important words:

I think that the demon's target is not the possessed one, but all of us … Watchers … Everyone in this room. And I think the main thing is to make us despair and lose faith in our own humanity.

These words are the cornerstone. After all, this is how you can describe the threat that our ancestors felt in the distant past. They were guided by the fear that one villain could destroy the foundations of society, cause anarchy.

We know a lot about our own psychology and we can stop feeling disgust for an immoral hero, start analyzing his actions and accept his point of view.

The most interesting hero in this regard is Hannibal Lecter, an incredibly complex and contradictory personality, believable and infinitely evil. We have no doubt that Lecter is bad, although we are imbued with interest in his person. Other villains also have the mark of an outsider, they are definitely strangers in our world.

In order to heighten a person's instinctual response to a villain, writers and filmmakers carefully choose their tools. They often endow evil characters with distinctive, repulsive looks.

Take Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, for example. He has a clearly nasty appearance, and this makes us immediately feel disgust and hatred for him, not only on the physical, but also on the emotional level. His roar and monkey gait immediately warn: there is something very wrong in the hero, this legendary hermit is very dangerous.

The same goes for Voldemort (he has a serpentine, frightening face) or Raul Silva from 007: Coordinates of Skyfall, for a reason he is covered with terrible scars.

All these fairy tales, novels, stories have a much deeper and more important purpose than an ordinary tickle of nerves.

By taking these short journeys to the dark side and witnessing the triumph of good, we reaffirm our ability to be good and learn to cooperate with others.

This is how the villain works, according to Jens Kjeldgaard-Christensen. I wonder if a scientist can test his theory in practice. A good way to test it is to show the participants in the Silence of the Lambs experiment and then test it on them. By assessing how cooperative they are, we would be able to understand how much we are influenced by the images of villains on the screen.

Prior to that, Dr. Travis Proulx of Tilburg University proved that the work of absurd writers like Franz Kafka or Lewis Carroll, who violate all the laws of the real world, have a destabilizing effect on us. As a result, we begin to seek confirmation of our morals and beliefs.

Some people fear that the pictorial villains on the screen can affect us badly. Well, Jens Kjeldgaard-Christensen thinks differently. Perhaps by looking into the darkness, we are going back to get better.