Why ‘Ozark’ Should Be a Model for Villain Origin Stories
“OMG, Wendy is a monster” was a text I received from a friend after watching an episode of Ozark recently from season 4. There’s no need to spoil it for those not caught up with the show: if you watched it, you know the exact moment I’m referring to.
That’s been the strange delight with watching ‘Ozark’: the antagonists are the stars, and the antagonists are unequivocally bad guys, unlike most shows where the villains are painted with many shades of gray.
Sure, some publications argue Marty or Wendy are the hero compared to their spouse, but assuming you’re not auditioning for ‘Hot Take Theater’, it’s clear that the Byrdes (and maybe even the kids) are the villains of the show by just about any code of morality.
Let’s be clear, there is no mustache twirling going on with either Marty or Wendy. They were typical white collar suburban parents, who made a business decision to lock up their morals and go for the money. The show is unapologetic about the consequences of the decision, and the dire consequences on doubling down repeatedly.
There hasn’t been a prestige TV show that has been this focused on the dire consequences of the antagonists’ wrong choices on their environment, and there certainly hasn’t been a major Hollywood movie like this, ever? (don’t @ me if I missed one!)
Hollywood should learn some lessons from Ozark on this, because villain origin stories are in vogue and, frankly, they all kind of suck.
You heard me.
Oh, some of them have high rotten tomato scores and have even been nominated for Oscars, but they all generally follow the conceit that the villain was originally a good person who fell into villainy because
1) They had to protect their loved ones against a villain even worse than they were.
3) Society didn’t care about them or their struggles (therefore, we the audience are to blame!)
Those motivations defangs the villains whose origins the movies are portraying, therefore, making them suck.
By itself, any single movie following one of these arcs can work; Joker is a compelling movie which required arc #3 for it to make sense. But when this principle of “The bad guy is really the good guy” is applied on a mass scale, Hollywood is basically telling us there are no real bad guys, including the villains that we have been told for decades are so fun to hate.
As someone who takes pride in his ongoing top ten movie villains ranking of all time, I was in despair over this Hollywood trend. Hollywood was purposely de-mythologizing our favorite villains, and they were doing it because (my theory only), they have no idea how to make a Hollywood movie centered around an unapologetically bad villain.
“There has to be a hero’s arc!”
“The audience must sympathize with the protagonist!”
“We must demonstrate to the audience that there is no moral high ground in life!”
All of the above have surely been bandied about in producer’s offices for 20 years. It’s all nonsense, as ‘Ozark’ has demonstrated.
Why is it nonsense?
Because Hollywood’s bias about who the protagonist of the story can be is all wrong.
The protagonist of the story doesn’t have to be a sympathetic person; heck it doesn’t have to be a person at all.
The protagonist of Ozark is not the Byrdes, (and don’t get me started on the people who are confused whether the Byrdes are heroes or villains. It could not be more clear), and its not even Ruth.
The protagonist of ‘Ozark’ is the Ozark community itself.
Before the Byrdes arrived, the Ozarks was a residential ecosystem that sustained itself, however imperfectly, to the needs and wants of everyone inside of it. Yes, it’s a community of addiction, of abrasive drunk tourists, and of some very disparate outcomes of income inequality. But its a relatively peaceful community, with order, and regularity. Audiences tend to identify with these values.
When the Byrdes came in with their boatloads of cash (pun intended) and injected the Navarro Cartel into its ecosystem, lives were pushed into chaos and ruin, if not death entirely. The Byrdes care about only themselves (and arguably Ruth, at least for Marty, perhaps as long as she is of use to him), and have little regard for what happens with the community.
The Ozark community is the show’s protagonist (with Ruth as the avatar, especially from season 3 on), and its arc is to survive the Byrdes. So far, the community is failing miserably, as cornerstones of the community die left and right and have no idea how to combat the force of nature that is the Byrdes.
That is what Hollywood is missing in the villain origin story. Fans want to see that force of nature from the villain. They haven’t been able to understand how to portray that force of nature as evil unless its against someone or something even worse.
This is why Hollywood is out of touch with its audience. Fans are fine seeing villains they love do villainous things!
Here’s something they are also fine with: seeing a tragedy! Some of our best films have really sad endings: Titanic, American Sniper, No Country for Old Men, Uncut Gems, just to name a few.
To put some Hollywood executives’ fear at rest about having a movie end on a bad ending, a movie that makes no bones about the evilness of, say, Jafar, would get fans even more jazzed to see him brought down in the sequel to the prequel. You could make it a comedy or a dark comedy too if you really wanted.
Just keep the villains villainous.
Please don’t make any more movies like Maleficent, which depicted her as not only wildly misunderstood, but even a hero figure.
Sorry, but doesn’t that defeat the purpose of wanting to root against her in Sleeping Beauty?
Villains are supposed to be rooted against, no?
I understand the conundrum Hollywood has in adapting a villain origin story the way Ozark is framed would be difficult and frankly scary. Ozark took balls, and its one of Netflix’s biggest hits.
Its time for Hollywood to follow suit, otherwise they will have to do something even scarier for them: create original content.