Bad Metal
On the villain arc in the age of real villainy
Thanks for reading my newsletter! The breakdown: first a personal essay, a round up of my writing, then some thoughts on my recent work experience, media I am consuming and finally some vegan food and recipe recommendations. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own.
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BAD METAL*
Everybody says they’re in their villain era, or at least getting a little unhinged.
At a birthday party for the kind of sweet friend that checks-in on whether you’re doing ok every fifteen minutes, they pinpoint a set of 90s Cartoon Network villains as an inspiration for their next trip around the sun. After turning 30, a friend texts about a newfound courage, or maybe a lack of concern, for wearing a tiny bikini during the long weekend. Internet acquaintances I’ve long admired from afar are discussing leaning into their own villainous power. The villain era is a TikTok meme that many have thoroughly digested already and Ann Friedmann is shouting-out hot regression summer. My mom broke up with her partner of eight years.
At the same time, people whose villainy comes coupled with power are also turning it up to eleven, or maybe eleven hundred. I have written about the Supreme Court recently, but the Dobbs ruling, on the heels of NYSRPA v. Bruen, and the EPA ruling, on the heels of Dobbs, still really shook me up. In a hushed conversation with a coworker, they reminded me that I had forgotten about Vega, and I really don’t want to write or think about coach Kennedy again.
What does it mean to want to be a villain in a time when harm as great as stripping away rights from huge swaths of the population is in the news every day? And why would anyone want that?
***
My parents used to tell an anecdote about a childhood friend of mine who cried so hard when Scar was killed in Lion King that they had to be escorted out of the theater. I, having been kindergarten age at best when this presumably happened, have no memory of it, but have still invoked the story many times over the years for comedic effect. Me and the friend drifted apart as we got older, and our parents sort of did too, but the fact that they were a chubby kid who wore a lot of black, read odd books and told morbid jokes coupled with the Scar story bought me points with the adults in the room while we were all still regularly hanging out. It wasn’t so much that my parents could deny that I was many things that my friend was too, but at least I wasn’t so weird as to have liked a character that was selfish, petty, kept lowly company, had darker fur and was effeminate and foppish enough to read as at least a little queer. As Lion King is essentially Hamlet then Scar is Claudius. Being Claudius also links him with Fjolnir from Robert Egger’s wildly violent Northman which flips the script and redeems his crimes some. The deeper you get into the sequence of characters inspiring characters, the more complex they get.
I’m not sure what the appeal of Scar was to my childhood friend, but the reasons for liking villains in stories that seem most compelling are that the villains are always more complicated, confusing and therefore interesting and, quite plainly, cool than the more predictable protagonists (which may explain the rise of the anti-hero in recent years) or, in contrast, that there is always potential for big emotional storytelling payoff if a villain has a face-turn or a redemption arc. The latter is a big theme in Star Wars and the recent Obi-Wan Kenobi series could not resist introducing a very explicitly very villainous character just to give them a somewhat baffling moment of possibly turning towards the light. What worked incredibly well for Darth Vader in the original trilogy fell pretty flat here, but the point is really that the trope is so beloved that franchises of this size keep regurgitating it.
The fact that villains are complex and cool comes coupled with them doing something corrupt and forbidden (which is why they’re often coded as queer, as queerness has also long been seen as corrupt and in need of being forbidden) and we all sort of want to do forbidden things, no matter how small, at least sometimes. So we tie emotional knots in our minds to justify feeling small bits of identification with a bad character. Bad writing and bad filmmaking can stop this process before it even starts, but then we complain about villains being overly two-dimensional. It is worth noting how many times even fiction intended for children gives a villain’s backstory because it seems fundamentally hard to believe that someone can just be born a villain, that they did not have some “good reason” at least at one time.
***
Outside of fiction, in real life, our sympathy and our capacity for recognizing complexity and bits of good in people we see as villains or, worse, an enemy, is constrained by who we are and the biases that that identity brings with it. It’s easier to villainize people we disagree with, people we never interact with and people that we learned to think of less than human through centuries of unfair laws and state-sponsored violence. What I’m saying is, you may cut Darth Vader some slack because he used to be a pretty, white sad boy that eventually just wanted to be a dad, but not extend the same understanding of being more than one thing to a black teenager jumping the turnstile in the subway or a queer relative that acts out at a family gathering (both smaller offenses than galaxy-wide genocide).
On a more serious note, you may think that senators that are shocked at Supreme Court justices having lied to them when they said they’d uphold precedent are just naive older white people, or that the same Court is not out to oppress anyone, just abides by a legal doctrine that they truly believe in. Sure, some real life villains are murderers and scammers and criminals and if we are to ever transcend the carceral state we should be invested in complicating their stories and investing in their next story arc. Some other villains, though, do not get called out as such out of some misguided sense of decency or belief in institutions that were always villainous to some groups of people, and we just didn’t see it until they came for us personally. Marches and protests of the last two weeks point to this, empathy for folks unlike us did not bring us to the street to yell for dark-robed figures, but when they went so far as to launch an offensive so broad that most layers of privilege cannot protect you, then we did all suddenly get very reactively, publicly mad.
That same dark-robed, unelected, life-appointed, mostly self-regulated group of people also get to decide who is deemed a villain according to the law, and after Dobbs everyone with a uterus has come a step closer to being one. Others have outlined this better than I could, but the possibility of committing a crime if you have a body that may be able to carry a child, like I do, rises dramatically in a post-Roe world. I am particularly haunted by the idea of people that will experience a miscarriage and be told that it’s criminal to take the drugs that can prevent sepsis and further complications, who will be seen as wanting to do the same thing that villainous pregnant people want as they are going through an unimaginable sadness.
And I don’t believe that anti-abortion activists consciously want to expand the circle of villainy so much, I think they just choose to forget that worlds with only exceptionally righteous and exceptionally villainous characters don’t truly exist, even in fiction.
***
Five or six years ago, around the time I started writing these letters, one of the main villains in my microcosm was my mom. My parents had had a very messy and contentious divorce while I was graduating college on the other side of the world. My visits home, and other feeble attempts at figuring out what was even going on, afterwards were always contentious and messy as well. There was a tension in who wanted to reject the old and who wanted to embrace the new, and everyone involved was too emotional to not think picking a side was something like a matter of survival. In some sense it probably was - we all emerged from that stretch of time as new people. I am one of those new people and I think I am happier for having let go of a lot of the old acrimony. My mom is another new person that has, since, managed to live a fuller life than I think any of our older selves even dared imagine.
My mom travels more than anyone, she manages international projects, she dances, she does photoshoots, she still wears her hair boldly large and boldly red like the Leo that she is. And though I see her tiredness when she videocalls me as I’m just getting out of work, but it’s the middle of the night in Croatia, and when I visit home I notice that she’s often buzzing with the kind of anxiety that stops her from sitting still, I still see her as someone who is doing everything other than trying to be small.
It was easy to cast my mom as the villain when my parents divorced. Part of it was just how some of the facts played out. Part of it was, simply, growing up in a culture that taught me that women who refuse to be small are almost by default villainous. That refusing to suffer for the sake of a nuclear family invented by the heteropatriarchal state or wanting to, after years of compromise and compliance, do something impulsive, is forbidden and corrupt. That heroes reach deep inside of themselves and find a strength to keep going that they didn’t even know they had, and it is the villains that rewrite the script instead of unwavering accepting that righteous suffering.
When my parents got divorced, my mom said she had felt caged for years and some of my relatives whispered about how that cannot possibly be true because she never had any filter when she got into heated conversations at family parties. They never got to see her cry in the car on the way home like I did, gritting my teeth in the backseat. But that probably didn’t matter because you talk smack about haughty, loud women as a matter of principle, details be damned. When kids accused me of being pretentious or stuck-up as a teenager my mom would sometimes share that she ran into the same kind of trouble when she was young. I am embarrassed that it took me so long to realize that what was happening to me had nothing to do with who I objectively was and even longer to realize that the people that talked to my mom the same way, in 1980 or thirty years later, also really just could not suffer a woman with opinions most of the time.
Certainly, mistakes are always made in the breaking up of a family and people do and say hurtful things while they seek their truth. I am not absolving either of my parents of the pain they have brought to each other or my brother and me. I am, however, sitting with it with a cooler head than I used to. And more than ever I am starting to see my mom’s heel-turn and her villain arc as if not aspirational then at least a little inspiring of a certain kind of courage. Having taken on the role of the villain for a few years, she is now more free and more spiritually large and bright than I can ever hope to be. I am still giving myself little pep-talks before going out on a Thursday night to places where I know everyone will be like me, and she is taking pole-dancing classes and winning trips to Spain.
When my mom told me about wrapping up her long post-divorce relationship, we had just had a new moon in Cancer. An astrologer would tell you this cosmic occurrence is a good nudge towards resetting relationships that don’t make you feel like you’re at home within yourself. Fictional villains are often portrayed as selfish, but maybe that’s just feeling like yourself within yourself taken to an extreme.
***
When my friends, or even many meme-savvy kids on the Internet, talk about entering their villain arc they are not necessarily talking about being selfish or adapting some me-before-everyone attitude that already dominates American culture. They all seem to be after similar things: not having to make themselves small and not taking harassment or abuse or disrespect without snapping back as much as is safe. Like my friend who doesn’t want to cover up as much anymore or the one from the birthday party that says they’ll ask folks to buy them a drink if they misgender them at a bar.
The thing to underline here is that feeling like you have to hide yourself or being misgendered is just bad and many of us are, for reasons having to do with to whom and where we are born, socialized to just accept that. It only feels villainous to not take people’s shit if you were forever told that the morally correct thing is to value the shit-givers comfort more than your own.
In contrast to all the main character memes and expectations of a hot, free summer in the past few years of this never-ending pandemic, folks are turning the language of villainy because personal growth and being hot is not enough in a world where real villains are not being called that, but are still doing damage. Ironically, many of the self-proclaimed meme villains are also people that are very community oriented and willing to lend a helping hand when they are treated like a full person. It’s like the guild of supervillains in The Venture Bros (a show that unfortunately leaned pretty heavily into unsavory trans jokes), but they’re all sorta into mutual aid and won’t hug you without a heads up. Not surprisingly, the people I am thinking off as I type this are female or queer or both and so stand to be turned into villains by various narrative pushed by politicians and courts anyway. It then makes sense to choose the kind of villain you want to be for yourself and use that choice to survive with a little more self-assurance, maybe even a little more cool.
Best,
Karmela
*In physics, so-called bad metals are materials that have a hard time supporting eclectic currents.Traditionally, physicists divide materials into metals and insulators depending on how easy it is for electrons within them to form running rivers of charge or electric currents. For insulators, electrons don’t move at all so currents are impossible while “normal” metals support fast, strong electric currents. Some modern materials, odd ceramics and the like, can be perfect conductors at very low temperatures but at room temperature behave not quite as insulators, but also not as a useful metal. The currents within them are weak and slow so they’re dubbed bad metals.
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ABOUT ME LATELY
WRITING
I had a few busy weeks at work this past month which means that I have been writing pretty much constantly. Though the New Scientists New York newsroom has grown some recently, I am still covering a very broad swath of physics and technology so I got to write about time loops in theoretical physics and a new kind of neutron matter, and I also got to write about using EEG to see around corners and more than one type of non-traditional computer, one that uses sound and nanoscopic “trampolines” and one that uses molecules walking in a maze inside a silicon chip. I have been trying to Tweet about my stories more and also had the chance to discuss one of them on the New Scientist Weekly podcast so, hopefully, I am embodying the job of a professional science writer more and more.
LEARNING
How to get a neuroscientist on the phone within an hour then file a story within the next. How to pitch dozens of stories every week, have about half of them commissioned, file them all on time and still not stay at work too late. How to interview someone in Australia or Singapore without having to come to work hours before the office opens.
How to ignore loud officemates and be friendly in the line for the microwave. How to call into a podcast without accidentally turning your mic upside down and having your name mispronounced. How to churn out a lot of content when you’re tired and have it be as good as when you had lots of pep.
How to go on team retreat and not be terribly antisocial and how to push on a vision you don’t like without being terribly adversarial. How to throw out big ideas without sounding pretentious and how to advocate for small ideas without making them sound insignificant.
And, finally, I did learn that antibubbles exist.
READING
Joseph Osmundson’s fantastic essay collection Virology which probably deserves a letter of its own when I finish it. Osmundson is a queer physicist-turned-biologist-turned-writer and writes with both the succinctness and clarity of a scientists and care and drama of a queer artist. As some reviews pointed out this is a book of essays about viruses when you first pick it up and becomes a book about love and community care by the time you put it down. If you follow me on Instagram then you’ve seen me ramble about this in stories, but this book feels like it both sees and encourages someone like me to keep learning and writing.
This issue of the Dirt newsletter on screenshots and this issue of Blackbird Spyplane on the ‘fit pic’ are a good double-feature on how the Internet gives us tools for flattening space and stopping time and what the upshots or downsides of either are.
This poem by Rosamond S. King, about permanence of writing and revision of mistakes as opposed to erasure.
Alicia Kennedy for Mold magazine on lifestyle journalism and, more generally, lifestyle as politics. As sharp and insightful as always, Kennedy writes
As our day-to-day lives become so encumbered by expensive necessities, housing insecurity, and looming natural disasters, the question I consistently ask is: Where is lifestyle media? It’s pondering whether burger rankings are still important; it’s accepting defeat and painting a picture of the future of food that relies on lab meat fantasies. Changing diets, though, is a crucial climate change mitigation strategy. This means changing our lifestyles: how we live them, of course, but also how we write about them and how we share them.
Recipes, in particular, could be written in ways that push people toward different understandings of access, regionalism, and seasonality. They can force a reckoning between the false universality of the American supermarket and one’s actual regional food system. But that’s only if they’re written in a way that challenges dependence upon the animal products and imported products that are known to be ecologically destructive. Rather than think of this as a restriction, it can open up possibilities for variations.
And then
When it comes to food consumption, an important aspect of changing lifestyle is increasing the desirability of plant-based diets specifically. This requires normalization, and perhaps a bit of discomfort. In what we call “lifestyle media,” causing discomfort has always been a big no-no—opening up a food magazine to find anything about habit-changing for climate change might happen once per year, while steaks are on offer the other eleven months. Even vegetarian recipes are promoted in a special section, while lamb and chicken are the norm for the main.
How we live our lives, how we choose to move around the world and consume, has effects: Maybe we just feel slightly better, maybe we influence change in our immediate communities, maybe that change in our communities causes local policy change and eventual regulation of deeply destructive industries. The imperial mode in which people in the Global North consume will change, whether because of climate change and extreme weather events or as a way to stop it. Finding a way to create joy and collective participation in new modes of living is a political responsibility, and it offers new possibilities for our lives.
LISTENING
A few really great records: Cult of Luna’s The Long Road North, I Name You Destroyer and If Thine Enemy Hunger by Jucifer and Stoner Witch by the Melvins. The latter three are older records with the Melvin’s one being something of a classic while the Cult of Luna album came out in February of this year. It doesn’t surprise me that I love all of these: The Long Road North feels loud and dense yet thoughtful like Salvation and Vertikal era Cult of Luna records I love, Jucifer is loud but playful and there is a sense of cool to their sound, almost like if Sonic Youth did sludge metal (but better) and the Melvins are just the Melvins, kinda sick in the colloquially positive use of the word and the prescriptivist negative use of the word, kinda catchy, definitely full of fat riffs.
At work, I have also been listening to Järnnätter by Civilistjävel!, a Swedish ambient industrial act that, as Sasha Frere-Jones says, makes an “an honest loaf of dread” in a world of uninspired drone music. This is a record that picks up sort of slowly and the first track did not really get to me. But I also can’t say which track exactly did because the whole thing is really seamless and I got so immersed into it that I eventually only really noticed my annoyment when it ended and the playlist I had added the record to flipped to something different. This is not a grating kind of drone or an aggressive kind of electronic music I occasionally recommend, it’s more like if you were trying to use TV static to meditate or were stuck in a snowy forest but in a Gibson-era version of the metaverse. I could never listen to this on the train or while speed walking down 3rd avenue, but a few weeks ago I was writing an article about causal loops in theoretical universes and this record was a perfect pairing.
WATCHING
The 2010 Ben Affleck Boston extravaganza The Town is a ridiculous movie, but also pretty solid entertainment if you love heists and aren’t a stickler for practicality. Charitably, this is Affleck’s Heat. Less charitably, it’s an excuse to wear a lot of Boston sports jerseys and give a lot of monologues that pop into your head when you see a white mean brooding because they think brooding is attractive. The heist scenes, however, are well done and riveting and everyone in the cast gives their all, really their grimiest and pulpiest best. On a similar note, we watched Point Break which was another zany, overly masculine movie about bank heists (and surfers) that made me laugh and made me think The Town is actually a dramatic masterpiece.
We meant to watch the new Chip’n’Dale movie, but the style and premise of it got us talking about Who Framed Roger Rabbit so we watched that instead. This proved to be a great choice. I have seen a lot of this movie when I was young, but I only exclusively remembered Jessica Rabbit, so it was delightful to find that the whole thing is a great satire of Hollywood and the West Coast, and that most of it aged really well. This is Robert Zemeckis film so it has a lot of the camp-and-cringe that Back to the Future and Death Becomes Her also have and it is also as clever as those movies at times are and definitely worthy of being as iconic.
I am really enjoying my Star Wars fanboy era, but the Obi-Wan Kenobi series did not anger or disappoint me as much as the more true, long-term fans of the franchise. The show made some really odd character choices and a lot of the plot felt almost unnecessary, but Ewan McGregor’s masterfully emotional performance as the titular legendary jedi dove-tailed so nicely with the fact that I’m still really into Star Wars: Clone Wars that I was willing to forgive a lot just to get a chance to spend more time with him. It is tricky to even think about critiquing a show that is so constrained by existing content and lore that it’s hard to a priori believe that it was made for any sort of pure artistic reason rather than a cash grab. Given that, I was happy to just latch onto the serotonin and adrenaline fixes I got from iconic characters doing iconic things and not think too much about the next new property or the next retcon that will certainly try to reframe whatever these six episodes were meant to be.
I was pretty in on the first three episodes of FX’s The Old Man, the Jeff Bridges old-spy’s-still-got-it show where John Lithgow plays the main antagonist. There was something minimal about them, despite trying to tell a pretty complicated story, that felt very appropriate for the kind of thriller I may have found in one of my dad’s poorly translated comic books from the 1980s (I am, I think, thinking specifically of the first few issues of Largo Winch). The fight scenes were long and raw, the cinematography was dark and silences long. It didn’t occur to me, until I heard a podcaster say it, that there are so many phone conversations in this show because it was a pandemic production, because they were very craftily leveraged for suspense and anxiety. The fourth episode lost me a little because it felt more busy with story wrinkles and interpersonal drama between characters and less streamlined. Since this was past the show’s halfway mark and the show did get renewed for another season already, I do understand that the story now calls for that sort of widening, but I hope the rest of the series will not veer much further from its initial gritinnes.
The grand finale of a friend’s small birthday party was a late night screening of Minions 2: The Rise of Gru so now I have actually seen one of these marketing triumph properties and got to chuckle at it in an empty movie theater in Queens. That is also all the thinking the experience has inspired in me - the whole thing was cute and endearing, but didn’t really make sense nor did it really include any heartwarming messages that I felt I really needed to take seriously. The filmmakers did try on the plot and the emotional impact fronts, but most of what I have to recommend is the Minionese version of Simon and Garfunkel’s Cecilia.
EATING
Chocolate chunk and pretzel cookies fashioned after the recipe from my genius friend Lin’s zine Shelf Life. A baked vegan cheesecake roughly following this recipe but with a cookie crumb base and a lot more salt and tang than the recipe suggests. Similarly: something sort of like these peach Danishes, but mostly I just riffed on the custard.
A vegan version of these stuffed gluten balls because I make a lot of impulsive trips to HMart and, to tie up that particular meal, peanut mua chee from Sasha Gill’s cookbook.
A peach and ginger pie loosely based on this recipe inspired by a coworker who just randomly handed me a bag of farmer’s market peaches in-between an editorial meeting and calling up a climate researcher.