#hannibal would pay for premium anyway

[stranded-labyrinth]

remember when this was my magnus opus

who is going to fully admit that will graham being louisianan probably means he loves country music. there's vague mentions but not enough. i want to see more. i want to see hannibal steadily die inside as will changes the radio and some bluegrass nonsense plays.

[wbwest]

New Post has been published on WilliamBruceWest.com

New Post has been published on http://www.williambrucewest.com/2017/07/14/west-week-ever-pop-culture-review-71417/

West Week Ever: Pop Culture In Review - 7/14/17

So, I saw Spider-Man: Homecoming. Unlike most of you, I didn’t love it. I really liked it, but didn’t love it. Part of the issue stems from the legacy of Spider-Man films. I kinda hate how every star has delivered a great performance as Spider-Man, yet the minute the roll is recast, fans with short memories start saying the last guy was “shit”. People love ragging on Tobey Maguire, especially after Spider-Man 3, but he was really good in those first two movies. There’s a Spider-Man for every generation, and he was the Spider-Man we needed in 2002. Sure, he wouldn’t work so well now, but to compare his movies to Homecoming is basically apples to oranges. I also kinda hate when people say “They finally got Spider-Man right!” Um, Tobey already got him right. Andrew Garfield, in his own way, got him right. And Holland is getting him right. For now. They’ve all brought something special and unique to the table, and I think it’s unfair to discount that because there’s some new, shiny thing to take your attention.

All that’s to say that I liked Homecoming, but it didn’t really offer anything new to me. I felt the same wide-eyed wonder seeing Holland do the ferry rescue as I did when Maguire did the same thing with the train in Spider-Man 2. Some might call that an homage, but it just felt…familiar.

What did I love? I loved Tony being there. I felt like there was just enough Tony Stark without the film becoming Iron Man 3.5. It’s always good to see Happy, and this movie did more with him than most of the Iron Man films ever did. I especially love movie Happy since comic Happy is no longer with us (sad trombone). I loved sexy, younger Aunt May, but I’ve loved Marisa Tomei ever since she filled out her college application wrong and ended up at that Black college. I loved the running joke of all the guys commenting on how hot she was. It’s a new concept for May, but it works. I loved the Miles Morales Easter egg (I won’t spoil it here if you didn’t catch it). I loved Not-Ganke (For those not in the know, Ganke is the name of Miles Morales Spider-Man’s best friend, who looks EXACTLY like actor Jacob Batalon), even if I don’t know why they insisted on calling him “Ned Leeds”. I loved that Damage Control was officially revealed. Keaton was great, even if he’s not an Adrian Toomes that I recognize. The Liz Allen swerve was cool, ’cause I really didn’t see that coming.

OK, now for the things I didn’t like. They introduced a good swath of Spidey’s rogue (Mac Gargan, Shocker), all at once as Vulture’s gang, only to be relegated to ancillary characters and henchmen. I know the MCU has a “Villain Problem” of wasting their villains, but this just takes the cake.

Now, this is gonna sound stupid, but I spent a good amount of time trying to reconcile the MCU timeline in my head. The movie starts immediately after Avengers, jumps 8 years to Captain America: Civil War, and then to the present day, which is shortly after the airport battle where Spidey debuted. Now, a big part of Act 3 is the fact that Vulture wants to steal a bunch of Avengers/Stark Tech on Moving Day – when everything was being moved from Avengers Tower to the upstate facility. Now, Tony’s rich, so it’s not like he can’t own multiple properties, but why is Moving Day happening NOW? I mean, the upstate facility debuted at the end of Age of Ultron, we saw it again in Ant-Man, and everyone seemed to be pretty moved in by Civil War. So, why the delay in moving everything up there? Does Homecoming maybe not take place when we think it does? Well, we know it’s post-Civil War because Cap’s hilariously referred to as a war criminal by gym teacher Hannibal Buress. If it were just a thrown away reference, I wouldn’t care, but the whole final action piece is based on this Moving Day concept. Anyway, I think it’s fair to say I probably wasn’t in the right headspace for this movie if that’s where my brain was going.

Oh, and the thing I hated most: that effing MJ reveal! First of all, it accomplished nothing. It was corny, and it was executed just as poorly as when The Dark Knight Rises did it. Secondly, at the end of the day, her name is MICHELLE, not MARY. You can call her “MJ”, but that does not make her Mary Jane. And to be honest, the movie would’ve been fine without her character. While she was funny, it seems like she was woven into the movie solely to make that hamfisted name reveal at the end.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll watch this movie a bunch more once it hits the premium channels, but I just didn’t fall in love with it as much as a lot of you did. I’m really sorry about that, too, ’cause I really wanted to love it. Something just didn’t work for me entirely, and I can’t put my finger on it exactly.

Things were heating up in the news world this week. Back when NBC announced they had hired Megyn Kelly from Fox News, Today co-anchor Tamron Hall abruptly quit, reportedly because her contract was about to expire. Industry insiders, however, believe it was because it was rumored that Kelly would be given the third hour of Today – where Hall was currently the co-anchor of Today’s Take. Well, that’s somewhat true, as this week it was revealed that Kelly’s show will premiere September 25th, and will feature a live studio audience, like a traditional talk show. It will, in fact, occupy the third hour of Today, sandwiched between the regular Today and the Kathie Lee & Hoda hour of Today. Not to be outdone, it was also announced that Tamron Hall is developing a daytime talk show with Weinstein Television. It’s also believed that, in several major markets, this talk show will go head to head with Kelly’s daytime show. Now the race is on to see which one of them earns the coveted “Fake News” label first!

In other television news, CBS announced an upcoming animated special called Michael Jackson’s Halloween, which sounds kinda sketchy. Apparently, it’s about two Millennials (there’s THAT buzzword), which is basically to say “two shits too young to appreciate the King of Pop’s music”. Anyway, they meet at a party, end up at a weird hotel, and crazy stuff happens – all capped off by a dance number by an animated Michael. If you ask me, he already contributed his greatest gift to the Halloween industry: “Thriller”! Unless this is just a one-hour animated version of “Thriller”, I don’t think the world needs this. Somebody tell his mama to stop letting his estate make crap like this.

Things You Might Have Missed This Week

John Cho joins Fox’s The Exorcist next season. While some are all, “Yay, representation!”, I’m like “Why the F is Sulu doing television?!” Well, I guess since Kumar’s already doing television…

In a move that’s somewhat baffling to me, Lucy Liu will direct the season 2 premiere of Netflix’s Luke Cage

Speaking of Netflix, Bojack Horseman season 4 will premiere on September 8th.

Fresh of the Boat dad Randall Park has been cast as S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Jimmy Woo in Ant-Man & The Wasp

Netflix has also renewed the Castlevania animated series for a second season

Jeremy Renner essentially broke both arms while filming the movie Tag, though it’s not expected to affect production on Avengers: Infinity War.

Smallville‘s Lois Lane, Erica Durance, is taking over the role of Alura from Laura Benanti on Supergirl.

Despite flopping in North America, the Baywatch film is on track to make $100 million overseas

Showtime is planning a sequel to the hit lesbian series The L Word. If it were up to me, it’d be called The K Word, and it would be about non-binary gender Millennials as they make their way through NYC, but nobody pays me for these ideas, so…

After 27 years of voicing Kermit the Frog, it was revealed that Steve Whitmire was fired back in October, and it currently lobbying to get his job back. Apparently, it’s not east being Steve.

In probably the biggest TV news this week (at least for the geek set), it was announced that AT&T Lily herself, Milana Vayntrub, has been cast as Squirrel Girl in Marvel’s New Warriors on Freeform. I cared NOTHING about this show until that announcement. It still doesn’t really inspire any confidence for me, as I don’t know if the superhero comedy genre works on television (see Powerless), but I’m definitely more inclined to check it out than I had been prior to the announcement. I mean, who doesn’t love that chick?! I love her in the commercials, I loved her in Other Space, and I even loved her as a bitchy ex-girlfriend in Love. Here’s hoping this leads to the big break she deserves. It was a slow entertainment news week so, ya know what, Milana Vayntrub had the Breas…I mean West Week Ever.

[troger]

What Happened to Jordan Peterson?

(ami a legérdekesebb, az a történetben meghúzódó Orbán-szál)

Adored guru and reviled provocateur, he dropped out of sight. Now the irresistible ordeal of modern cultural celebrity has brought him back.

HELEN LEWIS

This article was published online on March 2, 2021.

One day in early 2020, Jordan B. Peterson rose from the dead. The Canadian academic, then 57, had been placed in a nine-day coma by doctors in a Russian clinic, after becoming addicted to benzodiazepines, a class of drug that includes Xanax and Valium. The coma kept him unconscious as his body went through the terrible effects of withdrawal; he awoke strapped to the bed, having tried to rip out the catheters in his arms and leave the intensive-care unit.

When the story of his detox became public, in February 2020, it provided an answer to a mystery: Whatever happened to Jordan Peterson? In the three years before he disappeared from view in the summer of 2019, this formerly obscure psychology professor’s name had been a constant presence in op-ed columns, internet forums, and culture-war arguments. His book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, published in 2018, sold millions of copies, and he had conducted a 160-city speaking tour, drawing crowds of up to 3,000 a night; premium tickets included the chance to be photographed with him. For $90, his website offered an online course to better understand your “unique personality.” An “official merchandise store” sold Peterson paraphernalia: mugs, stickers, posters, phone cases, tote bags. He had created an entirely new model of the public intellectual, halfway between Marcus Aurelius and Martha Stewart.

The price of these rewards was living in a maelstrom of other people’s opinions. Peterson was, depending on whom you believed, either a stern but kindly shepherd to a generation of lost young men, or a reactionary loudmouth whose ideas fueled the alt-right and a backlash to feminism. He was revered as a guru, condemned as a dangerous charlatan, adored and reviled by millions. Peterson has now returned to the public sphere, and the psyche-splitting ordeal of modern celebrity, with a new book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life—an intriguing title, in light of his recent experiences. The mystery deepens: What really happened to Jordan Peterson, and why has he come back for more?

Growing up in Fairview, Alberta, Peterson was small for his age, which fostered both a quick wit and a fascination with the power and violence of traditional masculinity. He once recounted in a Facebook post how he’d overheard a neighbor named Tammy Roberts joking with another girl that she wanted to keep her surname, so she would have to marry “some wimp.” Then she turned around and proposed to the teenage Jordan. He spent a youthful summer working on a railroad in Saskatchewan, with an all-male group that nicknamed him Howdy Doody, after the freckle-faced puppet. As a student, he visited a maximum-security prison, where he was particularly struck by a convict with a vicious scar right down his chest, which he surmised might have come from surgery or an ax wound: “The injury would have killed a lesser man, anyway—someone like me.”

How to be a greater man was very much on Peterson’s mind. Raised in a mildly Christian household, he decided as a teenager that “religion was for the ignorant, weak and superstitious.” He yearned for a left-wing revolution, an urge that lasted until he met some left-wing activists in college. Then, rejecting all ideology, he decided that the threat of the Cold War made it vital to understand the human impulse toward destruction. He began to study psychology.

Alongside pursuing his doctorate, teaching at Harvard and then the University of Toronto, and raising a family—he married Tammy in 1989, and yes, she took his surname—Peterson started work on his first book, a survey of the origins of belief. Its ambition was nothing less than to explain, well, everything—in essence, how the story of humanity has been shaped by humanity’s love of stories. Maps of Meaning, published in 1999, built on the work of academics like Joseph Campbell, the literature and religion scholar who argued that all mythic narratives are variations of a single archetypal quest. (Campbell’s “monomyth” inspired the arc of Star Wars.) On this “hero’s journey,” a young man sets out from his humdrum life, confronts monsters, resists temptation, stares into the abyss, and claims a great victory. Returning home with what Campbell calls “the power to bestow boons on his fellow men,” the hero can also claim the freedom to live at peace with himself.

In the fall of 2016, Peterson seized the chance to embark on his own quest. A Canadian Parliament bill called C-16 proposed adding “gender identity or expression” to the list of protected characteristics in the country’s Human Rights Act, alongside sex, race, religion, and so on. For Peterson, the bill was proof that the cultural left had captured public-policy making and was imposing its fashionable diktats by law. In a YouTube video titled “Professor Against Political Correctness,” he claimed that he could be brought before a government tribunal if he refused to use recently coined pronouns such as zhe. In the first of several appearances on Joe Rogan’s blockbuster podcast, he made clear that he was prepared to become a martyr for his principles, if necessary. His intensity won over Rogan—a former mixed-martial-arts commentator with a huge young male fan base and eclectic political views (a frequent critic of the left, he endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2020). “You are one of the very few academics,” Rogan told Peterson, “who have fought against some of these ideas that are not just being promoted but are being enforced.”

The fight over C-16, which became law in 2017, was a paradigmatic culture-war battle. Each side overstated the other side’s argument to bolster its own: Either you hated transgender people, or you hated free speech. In Peterson’s view, the bill exposed the larger agenda of postmodernism, which he portrayed as an ideology that, in denying the existence of objective truth, “leaves its practitioners without an ethic.” (This is not how theorists of postmodernism define it, and if you have a few hours to spare, do ask one of them to explain.) He was on the side of science and rationality, he proclaimed, and against identity politics. Feminists were wrong to argue that traditional gender roles were limiting and outdated, because centuries of evolution had turned men into strong, able providers and women into warm, emotionally sensitive nurturers. “The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence” is how he later phrased it. (This was during Donald Trump’s presidency.) The founding stories of the world’s great religions backed him up, as did the hero’s journey: It is men who fight monsters, while women are temptresses or helpmates.

The mainstream media began to pay attention. Peterson had posted some advice on the Q&A site Quora, which he turned into his second book, 12 Rules for Life, a mashup of folksy wisdom, evolutionary biology, and digressions on the evils of Soviet Communism. (His daughter, Mikhaila, is named after Mikhail Gorbachev.) It stresses the conservative principles of self-reliance and responsibility, encouraging readers to tidy their bedrooms and smarten themselves up to compete for female attention—a message reinforced by a questionable analogy involving lobsters, which fight by squirting urine from their faces to establish their place in the mating hierarchy. “Parents, universities and the elders of society have utterly failed to give many young men realistic and demanding practical wisdom on how to live,” David Brooks wrote in a New York Times column. “Peterson has filled the gap.” He offered self-help for a demographic that wouldn’t dream of reading Goop.

Yet the relentless demands of modern celebrity—more content, more access, more authenticity—were already tearing the psychologist’s public persona in two. One Peterson was the father figure beloved by the normie readers of 12 Rules, who stood in long lines to hear him speak and left touching messages on internet forums, testifying that he had turned their lives around. The other Peterson was a fearsome debater, the gladiator who crowed “Gotcha!” at the British television interviewer Cathy Newman after a series of testy exchanges about the gender pay gap and the freedom to give offense. His debates were clipped and remixed, then posted on YouTube with titles announcing that he had “DESTROYED” his interlocutors.

I know this because one of them was me: Our interview for British GQ, which has garnered more than 23 million views, is easily the most viral moment I’ve ever had. While dozens of acquaintances emailed and texted me to praise my performance and compare Peterson’s stern affect to Hannibal Lecter with a Ph.D., mean comments piled up like a snowdrift below the video itself. I was “biased and utterly intellectually bankrupt,” “dishonest and malicious,” and “like a petulant child who walked into an adult conversation.” What kind of man, several wondered, would marry a dumb, whiny, shrill feminist like this? (Quite a nice one, thanks for asking.)

Peterson lived in this split-screen reality all the time. Even as he basked in adoration, a thousand internet piranhas ripped through his every utterance, looking for evidence against him. One week, Bari Weiss anointed him a leading culture warrior, including him in a New York Times feature as a member of the “Intellectual Dark Web.” Ten days later, the newspaper published a mocking profile of him, reporting that his house was decorated with Soviet propaganda and quoting him speculating about the benefits of “enforced monogamy” in controlling young men’s animal instincts. After he was accused of pining after Margaret Atwood’s Gilead, he quickly posted a note on his website arguing that he meant only the “social enforcement of monogamy.”

The negative publicity affected him deeply, and it was endless. After the Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra charged him with peddling “fascist mysticism,” Peterson tweeted that Mishra was an “arrogant, racist son of a bitch” and a “sanctimonious prick.” He added: “If you were in my room at the moment, I’d slap you happily.” Even sleep brought no relief. Peterson is a believer in dream analysis, and after one particularly ill-tempered interview in October 2018, he blogged about a nightmare that followed. In his dream, he met a man who “simply would not shut up.” The man reminded him, he wrote, of an acquaintance at university in Canada he calls Sam, who drove around in a Mercedes with swastikas on the doors, saying the worst things he could, unable to resist inviting attacks. “I can’t help myself,” Sam had told Peterson. “I have a target drawn on my back.” Eventually, at a party, Sam overstepped the line; he was about to be assaulted by a mob until another acquaintance “felled him with a single punch.” Peterson never saw Sam again. In his dream, the Sam-like man talked and talked and “finally pushed me beyond my limit of tolerance … I bent his wrists to force his knuckles into his mouth. His arms bent like rubber and, even though I managed the task, he did not stop babbling. I woke up.”

It is hard to resist reading the subtext like this: Peterson had spent months being casually described as a Nazi and associated with the alt-right, labels he always rejected. He had metaphorical swastikas on his car door. He couldn’t resist putting a target on his own back, and he, too, couldn’t stop talking. Indeed, in May 2019, after railing against left-wing censoriousness—now widely called “cancel culture”—he met with Viktor Orbán, the proudly illiberal prime minister of Hungary, whose government has closed gender-studies programs, waged a campaign to evict Central European University from the country, and harassed independent journalists. Orbán’s state-backed version of cancel culture—or, to use the correct word, authoritarianism—apparently didn’t come up in their meeting. Peterson had previously told an interviewer to describe politicians like Orbán not as “strongmen,” but as “dictator wannabes.” Nonetheless, the visit—and the posed photograph of the men in conversation, released to friendly media outlets—gave intellectual cover to Orbán’s repressive government.

All that time, the two Petersons were pulling away from each other. As the arguments over his message raged across YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and traditional media, he became an avatar of our polarized media climate. People were consuming completely different Petersons, depending on their news sources. When I saw him on his speaking tour at a theater on Long Island, the first question he was asked was not about pronouns or the decline of Western civilization; it was When was the last time you got drunk? The second was a heartfelt plea that will be familiar to any new parent: How can I get my baby to sleep?

The past two years have clearly been hell for Peterson. In a June 2020 video interview with his daughter, he looked gaunt and restless as he described his struggle with drug dependency, a torment that he revisits in the “Overture” to Beyond Order, his new book. As he describes it, an allergic reaction during the 2016 Christmas holiday manifested as intense anxiety, leading his family doctor to prescribe benzodiazepines. He also started following what Mikhaila calls the “lion diet,” consuming only meat, salt, and water. In 2019, “the tumultuous reality of [being] a public figure” was exacerbated by a series of family health crises culminating in his wife’s diagnosis, in April, of what was thought to be terminal cancer. (She has since recovered.) Peterson—who notes that he had been plagued for years by “a tendency toward depression”—had his tranquilizer dosage upped, only to experience rising anxiety, followed by the ravages of attempted withdrawal. He was at the edge of the abyss—“anxiety far beyond what I had ever experienced, an uncontrollable restlessness and need to move … overwhelming thoughts of self-destruction, and the complete absence of any happiness whatsoever.”

Throughout this turbulent time, Peterson was working on Beyond Order. He makes no claims that his suffering provided a teachable moment (particularly, he notes, when a pandemic has upended lives everywhere). He also declines the opportunity to place his addiction in the context of the prescription-drug-abuse crisis. Peterson seems to have softened his disdain for religion, and as for Tammy, “passing so near to death motivated my wife to attend to some issues regarding her own spiritual and creative development.” Notably, Peterson is not ready to give up on the hero’s journey, despite the terror he has endured. “All of that misfortune is only the bitter half of the tale of existence,” he writes, “without taking note of the heroic element of redemption or the nobility of the human spirit requiring a certain responsibility to shoulder.”

This book is humbler than its predecessor, and more balanced between liberalism and conservatism—but it offers a similar blend of the highbrow and the banal. Readers get a few glimpses of the fiery online polemicist, but the Peterson of Beyond Order tends instead to two other modes. The first is a grounded clinician, describing his clients’ troubles and the tough-love counsel he gives them. The other is a stoned college freshman telling you that the Golden Snitch is, like, a metaphor for “ ‘round chaos’ … the initial container of the primordial element.” Some sentences beg to be prefaced with Dude, like these: “If Queen Elizabeth II suddenly turned into a giant fire-breathing lizard in the midst of one of her endless galas, a certain amount of consternation would be both appropriate and expected … But if it happens within the context of a story, then we accept it.” Reading Peterson the clinician can be illuminating; reading his mystic twin is like slogging through wet sand. His fans love the former; his critics mock the latter.

The prose swirls like mist, and his great insight appears to be little more than the unthreatening observation that life is complicated. (If the first book hadn’t been written like this too, you’d guess that he was trying to escape the butterfly pins of his harshest detractors.) After nearly 400 pages, we learn that married people should have sex at least once a week, that heat and pressure turn coal into diamonds, that having a social life is good for your mental health, and that, for a man in his 50s, Peterson knows a surprising amount about Quidditch. The chapter inviting readers to “make one room in your home as beautiful as possible” is typically discursive, but unusually enjoyable: Peterson knows his Wordsworth. (It is not free from weirdness, however. At one point, he claims to have looked at 1.2 million paintings on eBay while selecting his living-room decor.) His prose also lights up when he describes the wonder of watching his granddaughter encounter the world.

On the rare occasion that Beyond Order strays overtly into politics, Peterson still can’t resist fighting straw men. What Peterson sees as healthy ambition “needs to be encouraged in every possible manner,” he writes.

It is for this reason, among many others, that the increasingly reflexive identification of the striving of boys and men for victory with the “patriarchal tyranny” that hypothetically characterizes our modern, productive, and comparatively free societies is so stunningly counterproductive (and, it must be said, cruel: there is almost nothing worse than treating someone striving for competence as a tyrant in training).

But who is reflexively identifying all male ambition as innately harmful? If any mainstream feminist writers are in fact arguing that the West is a “patriarchal tyranny”—as opposed to simply a “patriarchy” or male-dominated society—he should do the reader the favor of citing them. Is he arguing with Gloria Steinem or princess_sparklehorse99 on Tumblr? A tenured professor should embrace academic rigor.

Peterson writes an entire chapter against ideologies—feminism, anti-capitalism, environmentalism, basically anything ending in ism—declaring that life is too complex to be described by such intellectual frameworks. Funny story: There’s an academic movement devoted to skepticism of grand historical narratives. It’s called … postmodernism. That chapter concludes by advising readers to put their own lives in order before trying to change the world. This is not only a rehash of one of the previous 12 rules—“Clean up your bedroom,” he writes, because fans love it when you play the hits—but also ferocious chutzpah coming from a man who was on a lecture tour well after he should have gone to rehab.

The Peterson of Beyond Order, that preacher of personal responsibility, dances around the question of whether his own behavior might have contributed to his breakdown. Was it really wise to agree to all those brutal interviews, drag himself to all those international speaking events, send all those tweets that set the internet on fire? Like a rock star spiraling into burnout, he was consumed by the pyramid scheme of fame, parceling himself out, faster and faster, to everyone who wanted a piece. Perhaps he didn’t want to let people down, and he loved to feel needed. Perhaps he enjoyed having an online army glorying in his triumphs and pursuing his enemies. In our frenzied media culture, can a hero ever return home victorious and resume his normal life, or does the lure of another adventure, another dragon to slay, another “lib” to “own” always call out to him?

Either way, he gazed into the culture-war abyss, and the abyss stared right back at him. He is every one of us who couldn’t resist that pointless Facebook argument, who felt the sugar rush of the self-righteous Twitter dunk, who exulted in the defeat of an opposing political tribe, or even an adjacent portion of our own. That kind of unhealthy behavior, furiously lashing out while knowing that counterattacks will follow, is a very modern form of self-harm. And yet in Beyond Order, the blame is placed solely on “the hypothetically safe but truly dangerous benzodiazepine anti-anxiety medication” he was prescribed by his family doctor. The book leaves you wishing that Peterson the tough therapist would ask hard questions of Peterson the public intellectual.

To imagine that Peterson is popular in spite of his contradictions and human frailties—the things that drive his critics mad—is a mistake: He is popular because of them. For a generation that has lost its faith in religion and politics, he is one of notably few prominent figures willing to confront the most fundamental questions of existence: What’s the point of being alive? What kind of personal journey endows our existence with meaning? He is, in many ways, countercultural. He doesn’t offer get-rich-quick schemes, or pickup techniques. He is not libertine or libertarian. He promises that life is a struggle, but that it is ultimately worthwhile.

Yet Peterson’s elevation to guru status has come at great personal cost, a cascade of suffering you wouldn’t wish on anybody. It has made him rich and famous, but not happy. “We compete for attention, personally, socially, and economically,” he writes in Beyond Order. “No currency has a value that exceeds it.” But attention is a perilous drug: The more we receive, the more we desire. It is the culture war’s greatest reward, yet it started Jordan Peterson on a journey that turned a respected but unknown professor into the man strapped into the Russian hospital bed, ripping the tubes from his arms, desperate for another fix.

[victoriagloverstuff]

40 of the Best Villains in Literature

Villains are the best. We may not love them in our lives, but they’re often the best part of our literature—on account of their clear power, their refusal of social norms, and most importantly, their ability to make stories happen. After all, if everyone was always nice and good and honest all the time, literature probably wouldn’t even exist.

To that end, below are a few of my favorites from the wide world of literary villainy. But what exactly does “best” mean when it comes to bad guys (and gals)? Well, it might mean any number of things here: most actually terrifying, or most compelling, or most well-written, or most secretly beloved by readers who know they are supposed to be rooting for the white hats but just can’t help it. It simply depends on the villain. Think of these as noteworthy villains, if it clarifies things.

This is not an exhaustive list, of course, and you are more than invited to nominate your own favorite evildoers in the comments section. By the way, for those of you who think that great books can be spoiled—some of them might be below. After all, the most villainous often take quite a few pages to fully reveal themselves.

Mitsuko, Quicksand, Junichiro Tanizaki

The brilliance of Mitsuko (and the brilliance of this novel) is such that, even by the end, you’re not sure how much to despise her. She is such an expert manipulator, such a re-threader of the truth, that she is able to seduce everyone in her path (read: not only Sonoko but Sonoko’s husband) and get them to like it. Including the reader, of course. In the end, Sonoko is still so devoted to her that the grand tragedy of her life is the fact that Mitsu did not allow her to die alongside her.

Mr. Hyde, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson

Because the very worst villain is . . . get this . . . actually inside you. Also, you just fell asleep one time and when you woke up it was your evil id and not you? We’ve heard that one before. (So has Buffy.)

Infertility, The Children of Men, P. D. James

Sure, Xan is also a villain in this novel. But the real, big-picture villain, the thing that causes everything to dissolve, and people to start christening their kittens and pushing them around in prams, has to be the global disease that left all the men on earth infertile.

The shark, Jaws, Peter Benchley

A villain so villainous that (with the help of Steven Spielberg) it spawned a wave of shark paranoia among beach-goers. In fact, Benchley, who also wrote the screenplay for the film, was so horrified at the cultural response to his work that he became a shark conservationist later in life.

The kid, The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein

Take, take, take. This kid is the actual worst.

Professor Moriarty, “The Final Problem,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

A criminal mastermind— “the Napoleon of Crime,” as Holmes puts it—and the only person to ever give the good consulting detective any real trouble (other than himself). Though after countless adaptations, we now think of Moriarty as Holmes’s main enemy, Doyle really only invented him as a means to kill his hero, and he isn’t otherwise prominent in the series. Moriarty has become bigger than Moriarty.

Mrs. Danvers, Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier

The housekeeper so devoted to her dead ex-mistress that she’s determined to keep her memory alive—by goading her boss’s new wife to jump out of the window to her death. That’s one way to do it, I suppose.

Vanity, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

You could argue that it’s Harry who corrupts Dorian, and James who stalks and tries to murder him, but the real source of all this young hedonist’s problems is his own self-obsession. Sometimes I like to think about what this novel would be like if someone wrote it today, with Dorian as a social media star. . .

Uriah Heep, David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

Few villains are quite so aggressively ugly as Uriah Heep (even the name! Dickens did not go in much for subtlety). When we first meet him, he is described as a “cadaverous” man, “who had hardly any eyebrows, and no eyelashes, and eyes of a red-brown, so unsheltered and unshaded, that I remember wondering how he went to sleep. He was high-shouldered and bony; dressed in decent black, with a white wisp of a neckcloth; buttoned up to the throat; and had a long, lank, skeleton hand.” Some Dickens scholars apparently think that Heep was based on Hans Christian Andersen, in which case, mega burn—unless Andersen was into heavy metal.

The Grand Witch, The Witches, Roald Dahl

As “the most evil woman in creation,” she is on a mission to torture and kill as many children as possible, and often uses murder as a focusing device in meetings. She’s also kind of brilliant—I mean, murdering children by turning them into animals their parents want to exterminate? I have to say, that’s smart.

Cathy Ames, East of Eden, John Steinbeck

Cathy Ames is cold as ice—a sociopath who had to learn as a child how to mimic feelings to get by—but soon also learns how easy it is to manipulate, destroy lives, and murder people to amuse herself. Apparently all this is available to her because of her remarkable beauty. In the end, she has a single feeling of remorse and promptly kills herself.

Mr. Rochester, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

That’s right, I said it. Mired in self-pity! Sullen and annoying! Dresses up as a gypsy to mess with Jane’s mind! Keeps his first wife locked in the attic! Thinks he can marry a nice girl like Jane anyway! Gaslights her constantly! Whatever.

Zenia, The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood

In Atwood’s retelling of the Grimm fairy tale “The Robber Bridegroom,” an evil temptress named Zenia steals the partners of three women (among many, one presumes). Roz, Charis, and Tony, however, use their mutual hurt and hatred to form a friendship—and unpack the many lies and revisions of herself Zenia has offered to each of them. But I can’t really put it better than Lorrie Moore did in a 1993 review of the novel:

Oddly, for all her inscrutable evil, Zenia is what drives this book: she is impossibly, fantastically bad. She is pure theater, pure plot. She is Richard III with breast implants. She is Iago in a miniskirt. She manipulates and exploits all the vanities and childhood scars of her friends (wounds left by neglectful mothers, an abusive uncle, absent dads); she grabs at intimacies and worms her way into their comfortable lives, then starts swinging a pickax. She mobilizes all the wily and beguiling art of seduction and ingratiation, which she has been able to use on men, and she directs it at women as well. She is an autoimmune disorder. She is viral, self-mutating, opportunistic (the narrative discusses her in conjunction with AIDS, salmonella and warts). She is a “man-eater” run amok. Roz thinks: “Women don’t want all the men eaten up by man-eaters; they want a few left over so they can eat some themselves.”

Becky Sharp, Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray

A cynical, manipulative, intelligent beauty with many artistic talents and a premium can-do attitude at her disposal. You’ve never met a more dedicated hustler. By the end, the novel seems to judge her pretty harshly—but I’ve always loved her.

Henry, The Secret History, Donna Tartt

Oh, Henry—brooding, brilliant, bone-tired Henry. Some in the Lit Hub office argued that it was Julian who was the real villain in Donna Tartt’s classic novel of murder and declension, but I give Henry more credit than that. His villainy is in his carefulness, his coldness, his self-preservation at all costs. He is terrifying because we all know him—or someone who could oh-so-easily slide into his long overcoat, one winter’s night.

Hubris, almost all of literature but let’s go with Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton

Isn’t it awesome? We can just make dinosaurs! There is no foreseeable problem with this. We can totally handle it.

Arturo, Geek Love, Katherine Dunn

Here’s another novel with multiple candidates for Supreme Villain—should it be the Binewski parents, who purposefully poison themselves and their children in order to populate their freak show? Or should it be Mary Lick, a sort of modern millionaire version of Snow White’s Evil Queen, who pays pretty women to disfigure themselves? I think we have to go with Arturo the Aqua Boy, the beflippered narcissist who grows into a cult leader, encouraging his followers to slowly pare away their body parts in a search for “purity.” (But for the record, it’s all of the above.)

Dr. Frankenstein, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

It’s true that the monster is the murderer in Shelley’s classic novel—and also, you know, a monster—but it’s Dr. Frankenstein who decided he had to play God and build a creature in his own image without thought to the possible ramifications! Shelley treats him as a tragic figure, but that only makes him a much more interesting villain.

Hannibal Lecter, Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, etc., Thomas Harris

Made iconic by Anthony Hopkins, of course, but made brilliant and terrifying—a serial killing psychiatrist cannibal, come on—by Thomas Harris. “They don’t have a name for what he is.” Also, he has six fingers—though they’re on his left hand, so it couldn’t have been him who killed Mr. Montoya. Still, it puts him in rare company.

Captain Ahab, Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

Did you think the villain was the whale? The villain is not the whale—it’s the megalomaniac at the helm.

Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, William Shakespeare

The villainess of choice for every man who has ever claimed his wife made him do it. But I’ve always found Lady Macbeth more interesting than Macbeth himself—she’s the brains behind the operation, not to mention the ambition. Her sleepwalking scene is one of the best and most famous of all of Shakespeare’s plays. Even this makes me shiver:

Out, damned spot! out, I say!—One: two: why, then, ’tis time to do’t.—Hell is murky!—Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?—Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.

Sand, The Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe

It may be the devious villagers who trick the poor etymologist into the sand pit, but it is the sand itself that is the main antagonist in this slim and wonderful novel. The sand that keeps coming, and must be shoveled back. The sand that constantly threatens to swallow everything: first the man, then the woman, then the village—though one assumes the villagers would replace him before that happened. Sand.

Suburban Ennui, Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

In everyone’s favorite horror novel about America in the ’50s, onetime bohemians Frank and April Wheeler move to the ‘burbs, and find it. . . extremely stifling. But it’s not the suburbs exactly but the Wheelers’ inability to understand one another, their fear, their creeping, cumulative despair, that are the forces of destruction here.

“The book was widely read as an antisuburban novel, and that disappointed me,” Yates said in a 1972 interview.

The Wheelers may have thought the suburbs were to blame for all their problems, but I meant it to be implicit in the text that that was their delusion, their problem, not mine. . . I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the 1950s. Because during the fifties there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs—a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price, as exemplified politically in the Eisenhower administration and the Joe McCarthy witch-hunts. Anyway, a great many Americans were deeply disturbed by all that—felt it to be an outright betrayal of our best and bravest revolutionary spirit—and that was the spirit I tried to embody in the character of April Wheeler. I meant the title to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776 had come to something very much like a dead end in the fifties.

David Melrose, Never Mind, Edward St. Aubyn

Fathers don’t get much worse than David Melrose: cruel, brutal, and snobbish, a man who enjoyed humiliating his wife, who raped his young son, and who seemed to doom all those close to him to a life of pain. You could also argue that the British Aristocracy is the villain in the Patrick Melrose books, but . . . David is definitely worse (if slightly less all-encompassing).

Tom Ripley, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith

Here’s a villain you can’t help but root for—I mean, sort of. You feel his pain as he tries to insinuate himself into the life of the man he so admires (and perhaps loves), and as he is first welcomed and then pushed away. Less so when he murders his beloved and assumes his identity—but somehow, as you read, you find yourself holding your breath around every corner, hoping he will escape yet again.

Rufus Weylin, Kindred, Octavia Butler

As slaveowners go, Rufus isn’t the worst (his father might rank) but he isn’t the best, either. He’s selfish and ignorant, and (like most men of the time) a brutal racist and misogynist, who doesn’t mind raping women as long as they act like they like it. Actually, the fact that he thinks he’s better than his father actually makes him worse. That said, the real antagonist in this novel might actually be the unknown and unexplained force that keeps transporting Dana from her good life in 1976 California to a Maryland slave plantation in 1815. What’s that about?

Nurse Ratched, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey

Big Nurse rules the patients of the asylum ward with an iron fist. She is addicted to order and power, and can be quite cruel in commanding it. In comes McMurphy, our hero, who wants to undercut her. He does undercut her, in fact, a number of times—but when he goes too far, she has him lobotomized. The end! I know Ratched is meant to be evil, and it’s supposed to be depressing that she wins, but I can’t help but sort of like the fact that after a man chokes her half to death and rips off her shirt in an attempt to humiliate her (because no one with breasts can have power, you see!), she simply has him put down.

The Prison-industrial complex, The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner

Who is really the villain in Rachel Kushner’s most recent novel? It can’t be Romy; serving a life sentence for killing a man who was stalking her. It can’t be the man himself, who didn’t quite understand what he was doing. It can’t be any of the prisoners, nor any of the guards in particular. Nor is this a book with no villain, because the pulsing sense of injustice is too great. It is the whole thing, every aspect, of the American prison system—meant to catch you and bleed you and keep you and bring you back—that is the true villain in this novel (and often, in real life).

Big Brother, 1984, George Orwell

Of course it’s O’Brien who does most of the dirty work—but it’s Big Brother (be he actual person or nebulous invented concept) that really, um, oversees the evil here.

Patrick Bateman, American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis

He’s a shallow, narcissistic, greedy investment banker, and also a racist, a misogynist, an anti-Semite and a homophobe, and also a sadist and a murderer and a cannibal and Huey Lewis devotee. He’s also weirdly pathetic. Can’t really get any worse than that as a person—but as a character, he’s endlessly entertaining.

The General, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel García Márquez

It’s José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra who is the most bloodthirsty, but the unnamed General (of the Universe) who is the most compelling villain in this novel: an impossibly long-lived tyrant who has borderline-magical control over the populace, and even the landscape, whose roses open early because, tired of darkness, he has declared the time changed; who sells away the sea to the Americans. He is desperately unhappy; he considers himself a god. Luckily, we get to spend almost the entire novel within his twisting brain.

Humbert Humbert, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

The genius of old Hum is how compelling he is—that is, despite the horrible thing he spends the entire novel doing (kidnapping a young girl whose mother he has murdered, driving her around the country and coaxing her into sexual acts, self-flagellating and self-congratulating in equal measure), you are charmed by him, half-convinced, even, by his grand old speeches about Eros and the power of language. In the end, of course, no amount of fancy prose style is enough to make you forget that he’s a murderer and worse, but for this reader, it’s pure pleasure getting there.

Ridgeway, The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead

The slave-hunting Ridgeway, Whitehead writes, “was six and a half feet tall, with the square face and thick neck of a hammer. He maintained a serene comportment at all times but generated a threatening atmosphere, like a thunderhead that seems far away but then is suddenly overhead with a loud violence.” He’s a little more interesting and intelligent than a simple brute—in part due to that sidekick of his—which only makes him more frightening as a character. Tom Hardy is a shoo-in for the adaptation.

Annie Wilkes, Misery, Stephen King

Listen: Annie Wilkes is a fan. She’s a big fan. She loves Paul Sheldon’s novels about Misery Chastain, and she is devastated to discover—after rescuing Sheldon from a car wreck—that he has killed off her beloved character. Things do not then go well for Paul, because as it turns out, Annie is already a seasoned serial killer who is very handy (read: murderous) with household objects.

The Republic of Gilead, The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

The government that has taken control of America in the world of Atwood’s classic dystopia is a fundamentalist theocracy whose leaders have eliminated the boundary between church and state—and worse, have twisted religious principles and political power in an attempt to utterly subjugate all women, erasing their identities and allowing them to exist only so far as they may be of use to the state. It is super fucked up and exactly what I worry about in a country where fundamentalists have any among of political power.

The Earth, The Broken Earth series, N. K. Jemisin

It’s pretty hard to fight back when the thing you’re fighting is the earth itself, which punishes those who walk upon it with extreme, years-long “seasons” of dramatic and deadly climate change. Ah, Evil Earth!

Iago, Othello, William Shakespeare

The worst villain is the one who knows you best—the one you might even love. The scariest motive is the lack of one—what Coleridge called Iago’s “motiveless malignity.” The most interesting villain is the one who has even more lines than the titular hero. He is a fantastic villain, a dangerous trickster, whose character has stumped (and intrigued) critics for centuries.

Judge Holden, Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

Possibly the most terrifying character in modern literature (or any literature?), Glanton’s deputy is over six feet tall and completely hairless. More importantly, despite the fact that he might be a genius, he inflicts senseless and remorseless violence wherever he goes. The man murders (and, it is suggested, rapes) children and throws puppies to their doom. He might actually be the devil—or simply evil itself. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

Slavery, Beloved, Toni Morrison

This entire novel is based on a single idea: that a loving mother might murder her baby daughter to save her from life as a slave. Sure, the slavers are bad (and the schoolteacher is particularly chilling). Sure, you could make an argument that the vengeful spirit Beloved’s presence is destructive, splintering further an already fractured family. But these are only symptoms, in this the Great American Novel, of the Great American Sin.

Satan, The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri

Good read found on the Lithub

[stranded-labyrinth]

who is going to fully admit that will graham being louisianan probably means he loves country music. there's vague mentions but not enough. i want to see more. i want to see hannibal steadily die inside as will changes the radio and some bluegrass nonsense plays.