mlerules

I guess the Bible stories in general fit in this category...

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The obvious example is Lord of the Rings, where Sauron himself is never really seen in the main story. (Tolkien said in his letters that Sauron is corporeal, but we don't really see him.) This plays into the idea of LOTR as a parable about wars and human evil; there are any number of people, creatures, and entities who serve Sauron (in metaphorical terms, serve evil), but where, ultimately, is that evil? The central struggle of that story is not to defeat Sauron through power, but to resist the allure of power, and ultimately to sacrifice it. The primary antagonist is not Sauron per se, but the Ring.

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There's also the original version of The Prisoner, where there's the elusive question of who Number One might be (if there is a Number One). The final episode takes that question in an ambiguous direction, and depending on your point of view, we either never see Number One or had seen him the whole time.

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See, I fall into the latter category, but perhaps that's just because I feel so strongly that we must confront the villain somehow for the story to wrap up...

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Well, it's necessary to confront the forces of opposition, which may or may not be the villain, depending on the nature of the central conflict.

For example, I recently watched the late-seventies British espionage drama The Sandbaggers, which is a Cold War procedural about a beleaguered special operations director of the British SIS. The nominal villains of most episodes are the Russians or their satellite states, but in a dramatic sense, the forces of antagonism are Burnside's own superiors and colleagues, against whom he schemes to get things done and who sometimes scheme against him. The villains of any given storyline may not appear at all, and the action plot is often resolved off screen (in part because the show's total budget is about what the average American production spent on catering). The central dramatic impetus of the episode, however, is "Will Burnside unravel the complex scheme?" or "Will Burnside and his men realize they've been set up as patsies?" The force of the dramatic conflict is not in the action plot, so we often don't need to see the KGB officers or the Bulgarian policemen or what have you.

By the same token, in a romance or romantic comedy, the force of opposition is the love interest, not the bad guy. This played out in over-the-top fashion in Moonlighting, where the villain would often stumble in out of exasperation that no one was chasing him, or the mystery would go unresolved -- the central conflict was the will-they-or-won't-they tension between David and Maddie Hayes.

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Hmm, I'm going to have to see if I can track down The Sandbaggers. What others do to creatively work around budget constrictions is always enlightening.

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It's all on DVD from Netflix; I just finished it.

The interesting thing is that they do some location scenes, although most of the action takes place in the permanent sets of the SIS offices. Their biggest economy measure, so far as I could see, was to be quite ruthless about the number of characters, especially in the first series. They had seven or eight regular, recurring characters, and a very, very small number of guest stars per episode. (In the second episode, for instance, the plot concerns the rescue of a group of Norwegian technicians whose plane has crashed in Soviet territory; we actually see the technicians, but they have no dialogue, so they're represented by extras.) There a number of times when it's quite surprising. For example, Neil Burnside, the main character, was previously married, and his wife divorced him for being an insufferable workaholic (and generally insufferable). His ex-father-in-law, who's the Home Office permanent undersecretary, is a recurring character, and his ex-mother-in-law appears two or three times, but his ex-wife never appears in any form.

In a way, it adds to the realism of the atmosphere, because you get a clear sense of the way these life-or-death decisions are often made by a few people in great isolation, where they don't necessarily know what's happening on the ground. (The creator was an ex-SIS officer, and the reason the show ended in 1980 was that he mysteriously disappeared.)

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I really like your interpretation that The Ring is the true antagonist. It's ever-present, and ultimately is what the characters need to overcome and destroy. But by having it be an inanimate object, it very much creates the sense that the villain is a disembodied force, without leaving the reader dissatisfied (beyond the usual complaints about Tolkien's meandering narrative style, of course).

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The film make this point fairly explicit, particularly in The Fellowship of the Ring, where the allies start bickering at Rivendell, and you see their argument reflected in the surface of the Ring, as the whisperings of the inscription drown out the dialogue. Frodo looks at it and realizes that it is fomenting the conflict, directly or in directly.

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knifeyspoony.livejournal.com

Inspector Gadget. Dr Klaw does get voice overs though.

What about The Usual Suspects? Does that count?

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I've never seen The Usual Suspects. I'll have to give it a rent.

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That's a case where we've seen the antagonist throughout, though, even though we didn't know it.

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evilgerbil.livejournal.com

I know I've seen this before but the first and only thing that comes to mind is the movie "Jarhead" about Operation Desert Storm. The marine are all pumped up to go shoot some bad guys, but they get to Iraq and battle with frustration, boredom and isolation instead. A lot of people didn't like, but I found it very different, and good. Definitely shows what happens when characters are groomed to meet the opposing forces, and no antagonist(s) ever show.

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Interesting. I wouldn't have thought of the docudramas (and documentaries for that matter), but now that you mention it, they do often lack an antagonist (as is often the case in real life). I'll have to rent it. I do love Jake Gyllenhaal.

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suddenlynaked.livejournal.com

Keifer Sutherland plays a really eveil guy in Phonebooth who we only see at the end of the film. But he talks through a lot of the movie. Great movie...

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I agree Em. As an actor and director, I can tell you that the audience ABSOLUTEY hates that kind of film. The only time it "sort of " works is when the antagonist is a demon or ghost. Even then, the audience feels ripped off if it doesn't manifest somehow (appearing in smoke, shadow etc..). There was one good film "FALLEN" (1998 with Denzel Washington and John Goodman). Here it was a demon and it got away, but the audience still saw it move around the film and take over characters (Great rental btw: )

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clayshaper.livejournal.com

Yeah... I would say they take it allright if no one 'else' sees the antagonist- but they /audience/ has to get some kind of GLIMPSE of it...

And if you draw it out too long, they can get annoyed- at the very least, a shadow, footprints, some indication of IT, should show.

In the movie "Paranormal Activity", you never 'see' the ghost/demon/whatever... but you DO see manifestations of it- and even then some people are vaguely put out that there's not more.

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evilgerbil.livejournal.com

I might be an atypical movie watcher, but I don't feel this way. The point of the antagonist is to give the protagonist something to struggle against. If the struggle is portrayed well, I don't care if there's never any "payoff". Maybe I don't have the right definition of these terms. I'm thinking X-Files, where for years Mulder is chasing shadowy alien conspiracies and it works, because it's not about seeing them and who they really are, but what it does to him. In fact when there is a payoff, it's a huge let down because all the tension is gone.

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Ah the X files T.V. show. Well don't forget that the alien conspiracy was actually a sub plot. It was the motivation for why Mulder did what he did. The vast majority of the shows were about he and Sculley finding the monster or person behind the problem of the day. The antagonist was witnessed and then it died, was killed or "taken care of" by the smoking man crew. Then there was the movie The X files (a good demonstration of what I was trying to say). The movie showed you the antagonist right up front.

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stacymckenna.livejournal.com

Another series with a good overarching [sub]plot involving an unknown or nebulous antagonist was Alias. While the beginning seasons of the show were better at this than the later seasons, even in the later seasons while you saw all the different characters, there was enough uncertainty about what their roles really were that it was essentially like having the antagonist "hidden in full view" half the time.

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The irony is that Fallen was a terrible bomb, and it has poisoned the waters for anyone trying to do something like that.

It's very difficult to have a disembodied or non-present antagonist in an action story; if there's nobody for the hero to challenge directly, it's very frustrating. (You can sometimes deal with that by giving the villain corporeal allies/henchmen/worshippers, like the aforementioned LOTR.) In a story that's really about something else, like a procedural where the hero must struggle with his or her superiors, or a romantic comedy, you can get by, because the nominal villain really becomes a stalking horse for the actual conflict.

Still, the less tangible presence the villain or threat has, the less dramatic force it carries. This is why Back to the Future 2 doesn't work as well dramatically as Back to the Future. In the first movie, if Marty doesn't reunite his parents, he will cease to exist, and we have the (contrived) device of the photo that keeps changing as a gauge to measure his progress against nonexistence. In the second film, the threat is not even Biff himself, but the unfavorable alterations of history, which is awfully murky from a dramatic standpoint.

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stacymckenna.livejournal.com

Moriarty is frequently mentioned but only rarely seen in the Sherlock world, much like any good organized criminal boss. I know there's got to be a good mobster movie out there where we don't really see the head man, but I am horrible with remembering ultimate plots/titles...

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dritikol.livejournal.com

While not a villain per se, the first thing to come to mind was waiting for godot.

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quetz.livejournal.com

The bad guy in The Fifth Element is a big black void. (okay it's also the Ross Perot wannabe)

Even better: The bad guy is THE SYSTEM in things like Falling Down or Network.

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Falling Down and Network are excellent examples, actually. Psychological dramas in general are about an internal conflict that need not have an external force driving them. It's rare to find films that do them well, and these two certainly did.

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Ah I love this discussion! As it turns out Falling Down was actually the story of the antagonist (Michale Duglas). It went through examples of what pissed him off and in the end the good guy (detective Prendergast) killed him. There was a secondary antagonist in the story too, it was the gang that Michael fought against. Brilliant, but it still showed you the antagonist and he was killed.

Network was twisted, so it's hard to make out. The two antagonists in that story though are (1) The networks chairman Arthur Jensen and (2) One of the network's producers Diana Christensen. Unfortunately in this story, the bad guys win and anchor Howard Beale is assassinated.

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Although psychological dramas and individual-against-the-System stories still need to have some visible sources of conflict. Falling Down presents a whole series of external obstacles, while Network has several "villains." This is the reason I think some well-intentioned movies like The Constant Gardener don't work dramatically; they don't have forces of antagonism or goals that the viewer can engage emotionally.

One of the more skillful recent examples of that trick is again, The Fellowship of the Ring, where the film builds up a central orc captain as the big heavy of the orcs, and then has Aragorn kill him after the death of Boromir. It's noteworthy because that character is in the movie purely for that piece of emotional catharsis. In a rational sense, it's a false catharsis, since it accomplishes nothing in the furtherance of the characters' actual goals; it's not even a setback for Saruman and Sauron, who clearly consider the orcs disposable. It's just there so that at what is really quite a bleak point in the story, the audience can breathe a sign of relief and say, "Well, at least they got the bad guy who killed Boromir."

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