Word: villains
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...power. But newspapers today cannot be so certain who is comfortable and who is afflicted. Charles Stuart at first appeared to be an innocent suburban victim of urban violence. After his body was fished our of the Mystic River, he became a calculating villain, intent on fanning the flames of racial hatred...
Suddenly, we were the focus of much of the community's anger--an awkward position for many of us at The Crimson. We were the "privileged classes," the "public plunderers," the comfortable. We thought of ourselves as a community watchdog; instead, our readers cast us as a villain...
...comrade-in-arms, Claudio (Mark Fish), inject a sinister tough into their otherwise straight-forward characters, rather complacently consigning a poor maiden to eternal shame. Don Pedro's brother, Don John (Ian Lithgow), on the other hand, is interpreted as a buffoon. He is a Peter Ustinov-style villain, bumbling and ineffectual. The comic actors take the Shakespearean "rude mechanical" to the limit. Dogberry and Verges (Tom Giordano) revel in the slapstick. So, too, do Borachio and Conrade--at times at the expense of the darker, more thoughtful side of the play...
Cohn is the ideal villain. He stole from clients. He corrupted the political system. He illegally lobbied a judge to secure the execution of Ethel Rosenberg (who haunts Cohn in his dying days, then says the Kaddish over his corpse, ending with a blasphemous but heartfelt "son of a bitch"). But for Kushner's polemical purposes, Cohn's greatest evil was his willingness to tolerate, in fact promote, discrimination against gays even as he secretly enjoyed boundless gay sex. He is embodied with robust humor and seductive malevolence by Kushner and actor Ron Leibman, who make Cohn a villain...
There is also human nature, which, as Cooper's tales present it, is a sorry thing. Sophistication doesn't improve it: the bloodiest deed in the Leatherstocking tales, a frontier My Lai, is the responsibility of a French aristocrat. Nor does the simple life guarantee innocence. Cooper's blackest villain is an Indian, his second blackest a hermit trapper who hunts scalps for bounty. The scene in which the trapper, scalped himself and dying, fears he may go to hell, is one of the most powerful Cooper ever wrote, and it owes its power to ethical earnestness as much...