The Good Guy/Bad Guy Myth

The Good Guy/Bad Guy Myth

Catherine Nichols

Novelists and filmmakers who base their work on folklore also seem to focus on commonalities. George Lucas very explicitly based Star Wars on Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), which describes the journey of a figure such as Luke Skywalker as a human universal. J R R Tolkien used his scholarship of Old English epics to recast the stories in an alternative, timeless landscape; and many comic books explicitly or implicitly recycle the ancient myths and legends, keeping alive story threads shared by stories new and old, or that old stories from different societies around the world share with each other.

Less discussed is the historic shift that altered the nature of so many of our modern retellings of folklore, to wit: the idea that people on opposite sides of conflicts have different moral qualities, and fight over their values. That shift lies in the good guy/bad guy dichotomy, where people no longer fight over who gets dinner, or who gets Helen of Troy, but over who gets to change or improve society’s values. Good guys stand up for what they believe in, and are willing to die for a cause. This trope is so omnipresent in our modern stories, movies, books, even our political metaphors, that it is sometimes difficult to see how new it is, or how bizarre it looks, considered in light of either ethics or storytelling.

When the Grimm brothers wrote down their local folktales in the 19th century, their aim was to use them to define the German Volk, and unite the German people into a modern nation. The Grimms were students of the philosophy of Johann Gottfried von Herder, who emphasised the role of language and folk traditions in defining values. In his Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772), von Herder argued that language was ‘a natural organ of the understanding’, and that the German patriotic spirit resided in the way that the nation’s language and history developed over time. Von Herder and the Grimms were proponents of the then-new idea that the citizens of a nation should be bound by a common set of values, not by kinship or land use. For the Grimms, stories such as Godfather Death, or the Knapsack, the Hat and the Horn, revealed the pure form of thought that arose from their language.

The corollary of uniting the Volk through a storified set of essential characteristics and values is that those outside the culture were seen as lacking the values Germans considered their own. Von Herder might have understood the potential for mass violence in this idea, because he praised the wonderful variety of human cultures: specifically, he believed that German Jews should have equal rights to German Christians. Still, the nationalist potential of the Grimm brothers’ project was gradually amplified as its influence spread across Europe, and folklorists began writing books of national folklore specifically to define their own national character. Not least, many modern nations went on to realise the explosive possibilities for abuse in a mode of thinking that casts ‘the other’ as a kind of moral monster.

Not a bad article, though I feel like the net is cast rather wide. For example the Mahabharata has much more complex moral questions than she lets on, and I'd say so does the Arthurian Mythos - even the introduction of Galahad as a story of Golem crafted from Goodness itself can introduce questions for the discerning reader.

And comic books have had much more complex stories than she describes, even when inspired by bad editorial mandates - see the damnation and redemption of Hal Jordan, or the less contentious Cat Woman's struggle with morality. [Also Lex Luthor may have started as a simple villain but grew into a complex character, see also Flash's Rogue's Gallery.]

Beyond this the disagreements in fandoms can be heated but this seems as tied into the nature [of] online discourse as it does the contents. In fact I'm not sure the contents [of Good/Evil binaries] matter as much. People accept complex morality in their stories, the debate is over how these stories are told as much as what the politics are though the latter does seem to play a role.

All to say there's some value there, but the article itself makes an appeal to the Good by marking the Good/Evil mythologies as Bad. [So this "Evil" of binary simplification ironically extends into the article itself, or so it seems to me...]