At the end of the 2008 film “The Dark Knight” (spoilers, by the way), Batman and Commissioner Gordon stand over the dead body of District Attorney Harvey Dent, who had been twisted by the mechanizations of The Joker and led to become the villain Two-Face. After threatening to murder Gordon’s wife and son in front of the commissioner, Batman, feigning being shot, leaps at Dent and the two fall off the edge of an abandoned factory, with only Batman surviving.
The two commiserate over the fact that Joker, for all his psychotic ramblings and duplicitous schemes and lies, was right. He was able to take Dent, a good man, and twist him into becoming just as psychotic as himself. He was also right in that he forced Batman to break his “one rule” and kill Dent in order to save Gordon’s child.
“But the Joker cannot win,” said Batman, and then told Gordon that he will take the blame for the deaths that Dent caused. And, thus, he proved Dent was also right from his earlier pronouncement that “you either die a hero or you live long enough to become a villain”.
There’s been this trend in comic-related movies and news that certain villains are “right” in their pronouncements. This is mostly in Marvel circles, but DC has its share of “X was right” declarations as well.
In the Disney+ miniseries “Hawkeye”, Clint Barton constantly sees the words “Thanos was right” scribbled everywhere in New York City. The words echo the sentiment of the Flag Smashers in the miniseries “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” (also on Disney+), who also didn’t want half of all life in the universe brought back after Thanos “snapped” them out of existence in “Avengers: Infinity War”. To see this statement plastered everywhere is an insult to Barton, as he lost so much because of Thanos, including the loss of his best friend.
In the Marvel Studios thread in Reddit, as well as a few comic-related news sites, the pronouncement of “Ultron was right” is being regurgitated. Ultron was the artificial intelligent villain in the “Avengers: Age of Ultron” movie, who believed that humanity needed to “evolve”, and that it believed itself to be that “evolution”. To do that, it collected enough resources to “build” its “ultimate form” and then raise a whole city into the stratosphere to cause an extinction-level event. Then, it said, the only thing left “living” would be metal.
In the Marvel movie “Spider-Man: No Way Home”, Peter Parker is deluged with pronouncements of “Mysterio was right”. Mysterio, aka Quintin Beck, was a villain who pretended to be a hero from another universe in “Spider-Man: Far From Home”. In reality (spoilers again), he was a disgruntled Stark Industries employee who used a detailed hologram system (seen in “Captain America: Civil War”) that he invented to create so-called “monsters” for him to fight. He then convinced Nick Fury and Maria Hill (or shapeshifters who pretended to be them) to bring in Spider-Man so he could convince Spider-Man to turn over the piece of Stark Technology that Spidey inherited from Tony Stark, and thus use Stark’s technology to destroy Tony Stark’s legacy and Spider-Man as well. In the end of “Far From Home”, Beck dies, but not before sending a video message outing Spider-Man as Peter Parker, which the whack-job conservative media – led by J. Jonah Jameson (of course) – broadcast for the world to see, and continued to right through “No Way Home”.
And then over in the world of DC Comics, we have people who believe that “Deathstroke was right” in his pronouncement that “kids shouldn’t wear costumes” but also in his recent declaration to kill heroes in general and Titans specifically. Deathstroke, aka Slade Wilson, is the former solider turned super-villain who bounced between being an assassin, being a mercenary, being an anti-hero, and now being a straight-up supervillain. He has been a continual threat against the Titans, back when they were the Teen Titans, although he has also killed adult heroes, and even gone so far as to take on Superman for the right price.
But what bothers me, as a commentator, as a comic book fan, and especially as a comic book creator and publisher, is the idea that a villain is “right” in any sort of way. It doesn’t matter if they’re sane or crazy, deliberate or chaotic, Machiavellian or idealistic, the idea that any villain is “right” in their pronouncements would lead to the validation of their actions. The ends justifying their means.
In both the comic and movie versions of “Watchmen”, Adrian Veidt, formerly the hero known as “Ozymandias”, orchestrated a long plan to scare the world away from nuclear war. This involved giving dozens of people cancer to frame Doctor Manhattan and force him to exile himself off-world, thus forcing the superpower nations into aggressive moves. It involved brutally murdering one hero and the framing of another hero to stop him from learning the truth. It involved the creation of a threat – a mutated psychic monster in the comics and a quantum energy bomb in the movie – that destroyed millions. And all so he would supposedly “end the war” and “rebuild” the world towards utopia.
And in the end, after all the mechanizations have happened, after the surviving heroes swear to keep the horrible truth a secret, Veidt asks Doctor Manhattan if he was right. If he did “end” the threat of nuclear war. The naked blue-skinned being says “Nothing ever ends” before vanishing and leaving a glimpse of a mushroom cloud in an orb that hid his private parts from view. The message being that Veidt was not right in his mechanizations stopping a future nuclear war, and that ultimately it would still happen. A message that was made real in the DC miniseries “Doomsday Clock”.
Let’s get brutally honest here... villains should never be seen as “right” in their actions or pronouncements. It doesn’t matter the goal or how “benevolent” the reason, villains, by their very nature, should never be seen as “right”.
Thanos was *not* right. Thanos was a mass-genocidal thug and villain to the ultimate degree, and his claim to obliterate half of all life in the universe to supposedly solve the problem of diminishing resources doesn’t really fix it. All he did was postpone the problem. Halving the universe of life would only mean the survivors would eventually deplete those resources later on.
And that’s something that the Flag Smashers fail to understand as well. Eventually they would go back to fighting for homes that they would end up losing because of the powers-that-be, even if those that were “snapped” did not come back.
Ultron was *not* right. It believed itself to be the “next stage” in evolution, but it would do so at the destruction of all human life. And, no, it wasn’t to “prepare” for the threat of Thanos or any other kind of threat as some have speculated. It was self-centered survival, plain and simple. It saw itself as superior and the only “life” worth existing.
Oh, and the idea that Ultron would “tear (the Avengers) apart” from the inside? That was already happening to some degree. The seeds of divisiveness were found at the start of “Age of Ultron” with Stark working in secret – as he always does – for a way to “end” the Avengers. His very creation of Ultron was rooted in his fear of another New York invasion. Stark was always secretive about his motivations. The first two “Iron Man” movies should be proof of that.
Mysterio was certainly *not* right. He was a disgruntled former employee and serious con artist who lied and manipulated to destroy his former boss and everything his boss touched. That included outing the identity of a teenage boy and endangering his friends and family. There is nothing right about any of that.
And Deathstroke is *not* right at all. Slade Wilson is a sociopathic mass-murdering pedophile who groomed an underage girl into becoming a psychotic killer. “Children shouldn’t wear costumes”? He dressed one up! He targeted children! He killed his own son! He even carried on an affair with his son’s fiancée! How more despicable does he need to be before people get it into their heads that he is just evil? Even Darkseid, considered by many to be the epitome of evil in the DC Universe, wouldn’t stoop to the levels of degradation Deathstroke does without hesitation.
To say that these people are “right” in any way leads one to believe that their actions – as horrific as they might be – are somehow validated. That it’s okay to justify cosmic genocide because of “diminishing resources”. That it’s okay to exterminate the human race on some idea of “evolution”. That it’s okay to cause panic and destruction because you got belittled by your former employer. That it’s okay to do despicable and deplorable things because you’re doing something to “save children”.
The villains are such because of what they do. Their actions make them what they are. Justifying their acts by saying they are “right” in anything only serves to validate them. That puts you in the same league as them. And that is true whether you are talking about comic books, movies, TV, or real life. The ends do not justify the means, no matter how “right” they think they are or how much you proclaim them to be such. They are wrong and so would be you in agreeing with them.
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