Word: villainizing
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...always, the legend is primarily concerned with Good and Evil and with man's relation to the powers of light and night. But in recent years a difference can be discerned. In earlier times (Buffalo Bill, William S. Hart), the hero was completely identified with Good, the villain with Evil. In the upshot, Good destroyed Evil. But the victory often proved an illusion. Usually, the prize for which the hero fought was a woman; but in the end he often did not claim her at all, or if he did, what he got was a sexless ninny...
...same time, something of a more deeply problematic nature is happening to the western legend. Good and Evil, it seems, are beginning to understand each other, to be reconciled to each other's existence. Often in the modern western a sudden sympathy flashes between hero and villain, as though somehow they feel themselves to be secret sharers in a larger identity. Often the hero cannot bring himself to kill the villain until fate forces his hand, and then he performs the act almost like a religious sacrifice (Shane...
...then there is a western story-more often seen in print, but sometimes on film as well-in which there is neither a hero nor a villain in the traditional sense, but only a man, containing both Good and Evil, taking up the burden of his life and his times. In such stories the myth seems to discover what it may have been seeking all along: a way of rising above itself. The myth is transcended in the individual, the free man. In the freedom of the great plains the story of the West had its beginnings; in the freedom...
Williams can be easily criticized: his writing is sensational; he is too general; he has done relatively little research; he yields to the human desire to find a tangible villain, and discovers it always in the college teacher. Still, Williams is basically right. American colleges are selling their students short...
...suicide when their children drowned. From Athenia's SOS, Lemp learned his victim's name. "So eine Schweinerei!" he exploded: "Warum fährt der aber auch abgeblendet?" (What a mess! But why was she blacked out?) The British called it murder. Goebbels screamed that the villain Churchill had ordered Athenia sunk by British forces, to make a new Lusitania incident and drag the U.S. again into...