Our sense of story is almost like an extrasensory organ. It enables us to pick up on subtle signals in tone and intent and this allows us to interpret how we should respond when we encounter violence in fiction. These signals are more important than the actual act we are reading about or viewing.

This is why the same beat—someone shoots someone else—can produce varied responses. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, we laugh when Indy shoots the swordsman. But in Gandhi, when the Mahatma is assassinated, we cry.

Emotion does not come from content but from context.

In the Raiders scene, Indy doesn’t even blink: he shoots, turns around before the guy falls, and is back to the problem at hand of finding Marion. The dichotomy in the context, between expectation (tough opponent) and result (dismissiveness), produces the humor in the scene.

In Gandhi, the great old man is greeting well-wishers when the assailant suddenly produces a gun and shoots. What follows is literal minutes of grief: the funeral parade, faces of deep sorrow, the soundtrack solemn.

Our response to all of this is unconscious; we’ve read and heard and seen thousands of stories. We are able to delineate between what could be called “significant” and “insignificant” violence. The random swordsman, appearing out of nowhere, we realize is insignificant. This helps us laugh at his fate—he is unimportant, disposable. Contrast that with Gandhi, with whom we’ve just spent three hours. His death is significant.

The Benefits of Humanizing Characters

Every bit of unnecessary violence on screen has the potential to lessen the impact of “significant” violence. There are but a mere handful of significant characters in any story which means most violence we might see would be insignificant. And insignificant violence can distance us from the story; it can make us in a sense sociopathic, in that we lack empathy for the violence we have seen. As such, it should be used cautiously, since audience identification with a character is the greatest strength the storyteller has.

In the climax to Star Wars, George Lucas makes us identify with the heretofore unknown Rebel pilots as he shows them trying and failing to blow up the Death Star and then mostly dying. The tone is that of ratcheting tension with low expectation of success. It’s designed to signal the impossible odds the protagonist Luke Skywalker faces but it is also hugely important as it humanizes the Rebel fighters; we feel the weight of their sacrifice.

However, it is not just good guys who need to be humanized, but bad guys as well. They need to be thicker than cardboard so they don’t collapse when confronted. And it doesn’t take much. For example, there’s a scene early in Star Wars in which we see Darth Vader get irritated by a fellow officer so he Force-chokes him. I submit to you: who among us cannot identify with that scene?

Probably the most important thing to realize is that, as goes the suffering, so goes the audience identification. Is Darth Vader ever depicted suffering in the original trilogy? Why yes—right after he turns on the Emperor and saves his son. Now a fully restored good guy, Darth can struggle to breathe as he gazes one last time on Luke and slowly succumbs to his wounds. In Joker, Arthur’s suffering humanizes him without making excuses for, say, the way he blithely murders.

Complicating the Narrative With Suffering

When asked when civilization began, Margaret Mead pointed to a 15,000-year-old skeleton with a healed femur. For this large bone to have healed in such primitive times meant someone had to care for this person, temporarily useless to the tribe, for weeks or even months. For the tribe to do this and increase their hardships for little to no external reward speaks to the power of human connection.

To suffer is, of course, to be human. From identifying suffering in our friends to doing the same in our enemies is not an unbridgeable gulf. In Unforgiven, as he confronts his demise, Little Bill Daggett is given a full speech. “I don’t deserve this, to die like this. I was building a house.”

Now just before this speech, Daggett had attempted to shoot William Munny in the back, so Little Bill isn’t redeemed. But this line complicates what is otherwise a straightforward scene: his final moments cry out for a recognition of shared humanity, and when it fails, he curses, “I’ll see you in hell, William Munny.”

Munny agrees and sends Daggett on his way. In Unforgiven every character is a bad guy. The film is concerned with making peace with the darkness in our souls in the aftermath of violence, and it suggests what justice there is to be had will not come from this world.

The complication of narrative equals the humanization of the antagonist equals more realistic outcomes from violence. No Country For Old Men is not a simple tale. The film opens with Anton Chigurh, the implacable psychopathic force of nature who is revealed to be the main antagonist. And quick as a wink, Chigurh is viciously murdering a deputy and sustaining grievous wounds on his wrists. The pain on Chigurh’s face as he kills the deputy is plainly visible. In fact, Chigurh is shown suffering multiple times; his injuries demonstrate he is just as human as the protagonist Moss.

Complicating the narrative serves to humanize Chigurh and add shading to Moss, who is completely in the wrong but who nonetheless we root for to succeed in keeping his ill-gotten gains. It also serves to deepen the impact of the story. On a subconscious level at least, humanizing Chigurh forces us to consider his viewpoint, because he isn’t wrong when he asks, “If the rule that you followed has led you to this place [about to be murdered by a psychopath], of what use was the rule?” Humanizing him allows us to see that he is subject to the same inexorable logic; it is in following his own rule that he becomes seriously injured in a violent car crash.

The Bad Guy Is a Point of View

If every antagonist is the protagonist of their own story, then two things follow from that: every story features two “good” guys, diametrically opposed to each other—and your protagonist is the “bad” guy in this other story.

All of us have moments we aren’t proud of, times we didn’t do the right thing, times we were the bad guy. But we learned from our mistakes; we grew as people and did the right thing eventually. The constraints of story are such that we can’t follow the antagonists past the ending; we can’t see them learn and grow from their mistakes. But if we deny them the capacity for that humanity in our story, in a sense we are denying our own capacity to grow.

But the bad guys always gets theirs in the end, you may be thinking, and you’d of course be correct. The secret is to make audiences feel the tragedy in the loss: the passing of a human being, both beautiful and flawed, wrong in this story, wrong in this fateful choice, yet but for the lack of time, capable of growth, reflection and ultimately, in a different story, being the good guy.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What considerations do you weigh in using violence in fiction and particularly in relation to your antagonists? Tell me in the comments!