Rooting for the bad guy is a delicious pleasure and that’s
not just my warped sense of values. Popular drama and fiction are awash with
anti-heroes who inveigled their way into our hearts. We cheerlead their lack of
morals in stark contradiction to current snowflakey pc sensitivities.
I love paradoxes.
How we tie ourselves in knots holding two polar opposite viewpoints at the same
time. One digressionary example from the height of feminism’s second wave -
female cinema audiences of Gladiator swooning over Russell Crowe in a very short
leather kilt growling ‘Give them hell.’ We’re Amazons but please can we have
one of him as well.
Back to the real
louses of whom there are myriad examples from Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester,
Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliffe, through to modern day George MacDonald Fraser’s
Flashman, James Bond, even Lee Child’s killing-solves-the-problem Jack Reacher.
There’s an even more fervent fandom in television addicted to the Mafia
Sopranos, meth-cooking Walter White in Breaking Bad, snakey politician Frank
Urquhart in House of Cards (until Kevin Spacey turned out to be a really bad
guy), gypsy gangster Peaky Blinders and money-laundering McMafia. 
It struck me
forcibly this week watching Billions (best thing on the box at the moment)
showcasing Bobby Axelrod, an amoral billionaire hedge-funder (Damian Lewis) and
Chuck Rhoades, a ruthless, corner-cutting US Attorney (Paul Giamatti). They are
lionised as they both cheat, lie, manipulate, indulge in egregious criminal
felonies to wriggle out of trouble, with the audience willing them to
succeed.
A financier and a
scumbag lawyer? Two of the most hated species on the planet and we don’t want
them to get their comeuppance. The one
decent character who grasps the full horror of their sins comes across as a sap
and he isn’t winning. Scrape off the
millimetre top layer of civilized behaviour, which murmurs pious words about
justice and fairness, and up pops gleeful envy of the rule-breakers.
Although maybe that
only lives and breathes in fantasy land. In real life, there’s precious little attractive
about the sharp practices of the obscenely wealthy ones, Mafiosa brutality,
drug dealers, the #metoo offenders, let alone the present US President’s
multifarious malfeasances (I’m not going there).
Usually there’s a
back story that evokes sympathy. Poor childhood followed by an anything-goes
struggle to make good in an unfair world. Or doing the wrong thing for the
right reasons – terminally-ill Walter White providing for his family allows us
to blank out the damage wreaked by his money-making meth. 
Living by society’s
strictures – law, order and fairness – provides communal cohesion. But clearly
in great swathes of the population there’s an inner anarchist and gangster
lurking below the surface that needs an outlet. The absolute joy of casting off
the Ten Commandments, being wicked and getting away with it. We covet our
fictional heroes’ risk-taking bravado, their chutzpah in assuming rules weren’t
made for them. A vicarious pleasure since deep down we know if we tried it
there would be instant retribution.
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