Dear Creative LazyWeb-sters:

[mlerules]

A friend is currently mulling over an idea for a film with a completely off-stage main villain. This is what he says and I'm spreading the question further w/this post:

I can think of a couple of examples of this that, in my opinion, don't work well (Blair Witch Project springs to mind, as does one horrific Enterprise episode), but I'm at a loss for examples of people who've done it well. As a general rule, if the audience doesn't ultimately confront the villain (vicariously through the main characters, of course) they're left feeling unsatisfied with the narrative. But for every rule there's an exception, so I'm sure they must be out there.

So, can anyone out there come up with an example (preferably on screen, but also in prose, and preferably in science fiction, comedy, or drama and not horror) where the non-appearance of the antagonist is either not a hinderance or actually an enhancement to the storytelling?

Comments

[argentla.livejournal.com]

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.