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.

MOVIE ON STORM: Gossip, lies and info broadcast on wildfire at Easy A

Sometimes helping others won't help yourself in return.

We must admit it: high school is more likely to be the most scandalous stage we can even get through in life. Rewriting our once-clean reputations, I observed, would abruptly evolve into proudly having a bunch of girlfriends/boyfriends, fans clubs and a flock of BFFs only to be well-known for its constant fall down of members because of sickening squabbles.

Others may say high school is their death sentence: zero social network, struggles in studies, occasional black eyes, unwanted visitors after classes and total isolation might be their nightmares.

They say sometimes in life, helping others is the surest way to help yourself. But for Olive Penderghast the Easy A, it was a complete irony.

THE LIE: I JUST LOST MY V-CARD

Olive is an anonymous high school student unfortunately tortured by the big fat lie she made up of losing her virginity (yep, that's the V-card) to a completely nonexistent college freshman, eventually leading her to be famous for being a "super slut".

The lies pile up after she told it to her best friend Rhiannon, then heard by a Jesus-freak schoolmate and the gossip suddenly spread like wildfire. And we must all agree her peer pressure towards her so-called BFF started it all.

To some extent, peers and "close friends" aren't really true comrades. I've seen girl and boy orgs in my class crumble into 2-5 members all because of secrets, pride, jealousy and senseless misunderstandings. I've also been taught to not take real social networking seriously, because these faces I see today will all be gone in the end, and won't really help me mold my future. It's all because the truth is, true friends should not really be at our side forever.

Olive and her BFF Rhiannon: "I worry about how information circulates in our school."

THE GOSSIP: FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT

I must say gossip is right next to love in making the world go round. Say your secret in the lavatory and the rest of the school disgustingly stares at you the moment you open the door. As Olive had described it, her "terminological inexactitude" traveled at an "accelerated velocity", the common knowledge about gossip we already shouldn't be surprised about.

And it's actually true; we even believe in and harvest gossips more rather than find out and analyze if our national hero was really gay or not.

I remembered my Filipino teacher said, "Ang naniniwala sa sabi-sabi ay walang bait sa sarili." Believing in gossip, we were taught, is a crime against ourselves, because we would actually believe in lies we even don't want to evaluate or question.

THE INFO BROADCAST: EVOLUTION OF COMMUNICATION

What's worse about gossip, is it has an element of "dagdag-bawas". And this is the truth about communication: Ms. Gossip Girl rumors about her BFF having a new boyfriend, eavesdropping ears pile up, and the last person in line receives the wrong tweet that the BFF is already pregnant.

The warped information dissemination has evolved long before the Tabon Man era. Primitive people drew figures and symbols on walls and poked messages in bottles to communicate with each other, but then nobody really knew if they understood each other.

For Olive's already-indecent status, her identifier of losing her V-card outrageously evolved into spanking a classmate because of a nasty comment, and being a "dirty skank".

Olive's redemption: "Log on to www.FreeOlive.com to confirm if I'm really a super slut or not"

Of course, in the end, she was able to get out of her hellhole and haunted her downtrodden "clients" online, who measly paid her automotive GC's just so to tell the whole school she did "things" with them. Until then, learning from this movie, LET'S NOT SAY WE DID SOMETHING WE REALLY DIDN'T.