🔒 Why Normal People Idolize Movie Villains

I can’t help but think, whenever Pete Hegseth speaks, that he is imitating somebody he saw in a movie.

 Of course, this isn’t surprising. This is the Ratings Administration, staffed full of television personalities and social media influencers, whose whole thing is using modern persuasion methods to get people hooked into the same old scams.

 There is nothing so predictable as the Republican Party becoming the party of war again. After spending the 2010s selling themselves as peaceniks who roundly rejected the Iraq war as a mistake based on a lie, as soon as the TV President came on the scene and brought on his TV Secretary of Defense—Fox News host, Manosphere influencer in another life, “Hollywood” Pete Hegseth—he immediately retitled himself (colloquially, with no authority to do so) the “Secretary of War,” reclassified drugs as a “weapon of mass destruction” and thus drug dealers and traffickers “terrorists.”

 (A terrorist, by definition, is someone who threatens or commits violence in order to instill fear in a population for an ideological reason. Difficult to crowbar Cheech and Chong into that, but you know, words don’t actually mean anything anymore.)

Now (stop me if you’ve heard this one) Iran and Venezuela are part of an “Axis of Evil” who are harboring “weapons of mass destruction” and need to be invaded and conquered to force a more America-friendly regime change. Naturally, the indignant born-again opponents of the Iraq War are one thousand percent on board with this.

 Hegseth is a big, bombastic, superstar with a perfect jawline and hair gelled with Krazy Glue, who steals the spotlight more than anyone in his role probably ever has. How many Secretaries of Defense can you even name, between him and Rumsfeld? (There have been seven).

 But all of his off the cuff diatribes come off as so practiced and scripted. He sounds like he’s acting, and not just that, but impersonating.

With all his talk about the military being an organization of men who sometimes need to do things that might churn the stomachs of civilians in air-conditioned offices, an organization that needs to be free of “woke” rules against officers beating the snot out of recruits, he sounds like a composite reel of Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessep from A Few Good Men. Given that Hegseth is currently under scrutiny for ordering the summary execution of shipwrecked and stranded “drug dealers,” it’s very easy to imagine him ordering a lethal “Code Red” on a troublesome Marine.

 Hegseth obviously doesn’t think of himself as a bad person, so why would he style himself after a classic movie villain?

 A simple answer is that Pete Hegseth is an illiterate idiot.

And that’s true, but it’s also more than that. The Trump administration is doing this all the time, venerating characters you absolutely aren’t supposed to look up to.

I have a theory of a kind of paradox: that the better the writer, the harder it is to prevent an audience—even a smart audience—from coming away from a movie, show, or book with the impression that the villain was right. Many people will simply reject the notion that these characters are bad influences, and believe their defeat, if they are defeated, is a tragic ending.

A favorite film of mine is 1993’s Falling Down, which follows a divorced, laid-off defense contractor over the course of one very bad day. It’s a rare example of a story in which the villain is also the protagonist. This is a difficult way to structure a story—it’s just kind of the way our brains work that we empathize with the characters that we spend the most time with. Fighting the urge to root for Foster, played by Michael Douglas, as he orchestrates a one-man crime spree during an LA heatwave, is kind of a workout for your ethical muscle.

 A lot of people hate this movie and a lot of people love it. You are of course free to hate or love a movie for any reason, but there’s one particular reason people either love or hate it which is based on a misconception: They think Foster is portrayed as the good guy.

 He’s not. He’s the protagonist, but he’s a loser whose problems all trace back to shitty decisions he made by his own free will. He’s a stalker, whose ex-wife justifiably divorced with a restraining order due to his short and violent temper. He’s a racist conservative who hates young people and poor people and taxes and inflation and bureaucracy and modernity and minor inconveniences. Foster would definitely have been a Trump supporter.

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