WANTON CHARM

There is currently ambivalence among actors of Arab descent in that while there are many more jobs available to them, most of the roles are the same: middle-eastern terrorist. The problem is not only, or even mainly, a matter of predictable typecasting. It is primarily that these roles are renditions of straw villains, mere placeholders for villainy––they are poorly sketched and easily defeated––while the true villain, historically significant or fictionally potent, is substantial and irresistible. We recall that in the play named for him, it is not Othello but his nemesis, Iago, who has the larger role, and that The Merchant of Venice is actually Antonio––Shylock is simply described as “a rich Jew”. That the villain is always the most interesting character is the basis for my series of self-portraits, Despots & Bardsmen. The characters in these self-portraits have no appetite for self-sacrifice. They do not want to be liked. They would rather be in charge. Despots & Bardsmen (the Despots are real life tyrants, the Bardsmen are Shakespearian villains, or inventions from an imagined apocrypha) are each theatrical and I have assigned myself the plum roles in both performances for these villains are proud practitioners of their art and invariably compelling.

In fiction villains are often marked in some significant way in order that their malefaction is made apparent. In this regard one is immediately reminded of the incorrigible Rufus in Flannery O’Connor’s, The Lame Shall Enter First. Pitied by bleeding hearts, this club-footed boy, into whom no kindness can penetrate, admits at the end of the story, “I lie and steal because I’m good at it! My foot don’t have a thing to do with it.” Similarly Aaron, from Titus Andronicus, one of only three black characters in Shakespeare, has his negritude as an outward indicator of his evil character. Aaron, too, glories in his evil, “I have done a thousand dreadful things as willingly as one would kill a fly, and nothing grieves me heartily indeed but that I cannot do ten thousand more”. Non-fictional villains, however, are not as accommodating. They are indistinguishable from the rest of us except for their love of intrigue and their quest for power, traits that are, most often, expertly concealed.

The imagery employed in these self-portraits is drawn from expected sources; 17th century portraiture, political propaganda, theatrical broadsides, self-aggrandizing currency and postage, and religious icons, as well as less direct examples; velvet Elvis paintings, romance novels, Saul Bass posters, advertising mascots, and mug-shots. The paintings and drawings are in the tradition of self-invention, as seen in the compulsion of Macbeth and Mobutu; a desire, no matter the consequences, to make palpable an imagined ideal self. The imagery the villain creates of himself, for himself, is the evidence he uses to prove his megalomania is not madness but a sign he is the chosen one and those who resist him are heretical, counter revolutionary, or unpatriotic and whom, for their own good, must be given a stern reeducation.

The self-portrait is a confession, constructed of vanity, doubt, and false modesty. We would like to see ourselves as an agent of action, a solver of problems but most of us, honestly assessed, fit the description of vanquished, not conqueror. The villain is jealously, if secretly, admired. His victims, even when memorialized, remain anonymous, expendable. As Idi Amin famously said, “In any country there must be people who have to die”. Of any scenario the villain is always the most memorable.