The making of villains 101

The world creates its own enemy.


A father, a son and a heart transplant. Not one father would ever bear the thought of his child's death to happen long before his, especially when there's still a chance. John Q (Denzel Washington), unfortunate enough to lose health insurance, money, and eventually his son, was a desperate man in a desperate situation.


The making of villains doesn't only exist in Walt Disney movies. The script writer designs the ugliest violet-painted monster he can imagine, sets him up with the classic hero-beats-enemy scene, and his noble death is next to garbage, left with no legacy to be remembered as the selfish, unreasonable guy who justified the existence of heroes.

But such bad guys--sketched villains in the least--won't be too unreasonable if they don't have their own reasons to be. Desperation, survival, family, blind justice--reality proves it. Unlike any scripted existence, or story, John Q was forced to be unreasonable just so he could save his son.


The movie basically portrayed how far a loving father would go to prove his determination that he'll never bury his son. How a father is more than willing to lose his life so his son could live in return. And so the enemy had his own reasons nobody even cared to understand, because we didn't want to.

"I am not gonna bury my son;
my son's gonna bury me."

It also proved how the world creates its own enemy. Even though it's worse in the Philippines, the unattended health insurance of thousands of American citizens justifies enough why a lot of people want to bulldoze the White House and Malacañang Palace. If not for the fake HMO insurance company and his son's fake diagnoses over the years, John would've not even thought of buying a gun.


Hostage. Fear. Understanding. The movie portrayed a chunk of the science of human behavior as well, showing the nature of Stockholm Syndrome. Hostages primarily aquire such syndrome, where they develop great sympathy over their hostage taker. John Q's hostages had, for once, understood why he took such radical action, and even saved and defended him from the police.

John Q's hostages

To some extent, they're not really bad guys; they simply justify their unacceptable actions with the unacceptable situations they've been exposed to.