Few truly evil people: How flawed men in movies let us examine the social origins of problematic behaviour
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Few truly evil people: How flawed men in movies let us examine the social origins of problematic behaviour
by Jen Davies, nerd
Dec 24, 2025
TW: A range of kinds of violence, including sexual violence
Note: Contains spoilers for Adam Driver’s films The Last Duel, Ferrari, and the Star Wars sequels
I’ve begun hosting monthly “watch parties” in support of #savethehuntforbensolo. The group of Star Wars fans I'm working with suggested that we alternate Steven Soderbergh and Adam Driver films, since we have already watched their collaboration Logan Lucky. So we will, and I've been thinking ahead to the next few months’ worth of films in case I continue to act as host. Films that earned or were nominated for Oscars is the theme I have started with, and both Steven and Adam have been involved in quite a few of those. As I ran through my mental list, I realized that quite a few of these films have featured men characters who do problematic things as necessary parts of the story to move them forward, and where Adam appeared he was usually the problematic person!
I had an epiphany as I began planning “watch parties”, and these two things (Oscar-nominated films featuring Adam Driver) crashed together in my head: One of the films I could include in the “watch party” series is The Last Duel, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Jodie Comer who was nominated for her central role. She was also in The Rise of Skywalker as Rey's mother, so there is a Star Wars connection. The Last Duel’s premise in case it's new to you is, in feudal France a noblewoman (and her nobleman husband, which was necessary because women were more or less property at the time) dared to persist through an accusation that another nobleman had raped her. The King of France agreed to trial by combat to let God decide the verdict since it was very much a he-said-she-said situation - there were no reliable witnesses. Hence, on (I believe) Dec 29, 1386, it became the last officially sanctuoned duel in feudal French legal history, and the title of the film.
The film tells the story three times before the duel commences, and shows us the incidents leading up to the violence and the rape itself three times, each time through a different perspective: the husband, the rapist, and the noblewoman herself. It was very uncomfortable to watch, not only because we had to experience the dread and the sexual assault three times, but because the perspective-taking was very effective. It was well-written and well-acted, with subtle shifts in language and behaviour that clearly showed how each person understood what happened quite differently even though overall there was agreement on what happened. I found myself with some uncomfortable empathy for the rapist’s perspective (though no empathy with his behaviour), because we see that he had been socialized to recognize the wrong signals as consent - more on that follows. All the main actors deserved recognition for their work because each of them played three slightly different people due to the three perspectives, and Jodie Comer absolutely deserved the awards she won that year.
And if I were to offer to host this film for a “watch party”... What do I do about psychological safety for the people who choose to attend? Should I start with a mini-lecture on how patriarchal values around power are harmful both to women and men? Would I also include some safety conversation, including teaching a grounding technique and asking everyone to Google search for a local crisis line before we start the film? Given all the things I’m thinking about I bet the Consent/Intimacy Coordinator worked hard for their paycheque on this movie! Also, at a “watch party” my face is on the screen the whole time (silently) so everyone feels like they are watching with other people (and we chat together via text box), what will I do with my face during the assault scenes?
Good films often have characters who drive the plot through their problematic behaviour. My favourite films include The Princess Bride (Prince Humperdinck forces Westley to return before he is ready, by setting a date to marry an uninterested Buttercup), Bladerunner (Roy Batty uses violence to try to save his own life, and when that fails, to teach Deckard a lesson), and Dune (in any version it's the Emperor's conniving, the Baron’s revenge, and finally the Doctor’s selfishness that push Paul into meeting his destiny in the desert). I could go on and on. And I notice these problematic people are the roles that Adam Driver tends to play - I assume he chooses them because I saw him once say in a recorded interview that his career so far has been made up of playing problematic people.
I don't blame him, the antagonist in any well-written story (even real stories) is usually way more interesting than the “good guy”. Steve Rogers/Captain America - the good-est of good guys - is a pretty boring person when the world is safe, but it's fun to watch him save the day over and over again. Occasionally we also get an interesting flawed protagonist like in Adam’s most recent films (House of Gucci, Ferrari and Megalopolis) which carried on this professional motif. Protagonists are our main character, but it doesn't mean they're “good guys”, and those don't always do as well at the box office as we would hope they would! I suspect that movies about flawed men just don't scratch the moviegoing “itch” the same way that a story about good guys and bad guys, and clear right and wrong, seem to do for most of us. Movies are escapes, so we are often more interested in imagining a simplified world.
Characters who make choices that the audience (and other characters) find problematic are interesting because they create the tension, and asking why they're creating the tension is insightful. For example Adam took a page from extremist beliefs for Star Wars’ Kylo Ren/Ben Solo and explained that Kylo believes what he's doing is the right thing to do - there's no intent to do evil, he's just doing what makes sense for accomplishing his goal, which is total control of the galaxy. Why does he want to have total control? The short version we see in the films is, the adults in his life abandoned him and even tried to murder him as a youth. He wants total control for safety. It's the lens of our perspective characters, the rebels, that makes his behaviour seem evil to us. And at the end of the sequels when he decides his ‘why’ has to be just standing with Rey (since she refused to buy into his empire-building), the shift in perspective gets us in the feels. His behaviour hasn’t changed, remember - he pauses to murder half-a-dozen former comrades before moving on to try to help Rey murder Darth Sidious - but now his reasoning is on “our side” so we accept his violence. And if Ben were to return to some kind of life, what kind of punishment for the crimes of his previous life would be appropriate? More than likely he and Rey would decide on some path to redemption (Bendemption, as some fans call it) and he would carry it out, like Hercules’ labours.
As another example, in the bio-pic Ferrari directed by Michael Mann, Enzo Ferrari is a pretty unlikeable man. Drivers are dying and he doesn’t seem to care. He just goes out and hires new drivers, and pushes them psychologically to drive dangerously. We learn that he has a young mistress and a son with her, and we don’t know at first who knows about it. We don’t like his choice - it seems like an abuse of power by an older man. His flawed behaviour creates tension for us, because we like his wife and business partner Lina, and we imagine (correctly) that it will hurt her when she finds out. He redeems himself to us for a moment when he chooses to become Lina’s proper business partner again by accepting her financial help to save the company, but it’s actually more flawed behaviour because to save the company (and win Lina back) he must refuse to legitimize his son until Lina is dead. Again he is using power in a distasteful way, and his priority is his ambition over relationships (and Lina knew that). His punishment is the metaphorical sword (the loan) hanging over his head that Lina could call in at any time and destroy the company (and thus destroy him).
And the more I have reflected, the more I have realized that putting flawed men (characters) in movies allows us to examine the impact of their behaviour in a way that we struggle to do IRL because the distance allows us to “touch” it. IRL, an incident of coercion, violence or sexual violence is just too close most of the time to examine it due to the hurt. The inequity of social clout applied as a blunt instrument of power (arguably coercion) might be normalized IRL but when we see it played out so clearly on the screen it hurts to realize we have condoned similar things - and wonder how to prevent it from reoccurring. When it's on film or TV, we can sometimes stand to observe the behaviour the way we need to do, if we want to examine its causes and sources.
So I bring my thoughts back to The Last Duel. Of course we need an antagonist to move the story forward - if there's no crime, there's no trial and no duel. But Ridley Scott and writing team made the decision to show us what happened from the rapist's perspective, and as noted it is uncomfortable to realize that while we cannot condone his behavior (he wasn’t really interested in what she wanted), we can understand somewhat why in the courtroom he was able to state with conviction that there was no rape, because he believed her behaviour had demonstrated her consent. We are shown his induction into the complicated sexual world of the French court, where noblewomen were expected to participate in wife-swapping and provide lewd entertainment for noblemen other than their husbands - and this entertainment required women to pretend their virtue was intact, which included making mild protests about getting sexy. The movie’s main character has no such induction to court culture because she married an outsider, so she doesn't know what messages her behaviour is unintentionally sending. Since the rapist-to-be learned that consent was given indirectly he believes finds her consent in clever wordplay (which the main character engages in with him simply to be sociable, not realizing the impression she is giving), looks and smiles across a distance (which she gives him because her noble husband is a boor and she's trying to smooth over some of his bad behaviour), and pretending to try to escape from sexual advances (so when she runs from him to try to barricade herself in a bedroom he thinks it's part of the game). If the movie is correct he was a real person named Jacques Le Gris, and coincidentally “Le Gris” is “the gray” or just “gray” in English, which is a helpful concept in our struggle to understand how he misunderstood Marguerite’s signals - French high society did not use black-and-white clarity in communication. By today’s standards would he deserve punishment? Certainly.
The parallel to our modern world is obvious. Young men are inducted into what women’s rights advocates accurately call “rape culture” which includes a set of inculcated beliefs about what men’s behaviour is “expected” - it's usually overly persistent and aggressive. The learning used to start young too, with boys being encouraged not to take “no” for an answer when it comes to asking a girl on a date. I like to think boys are taught differently today, but I don't know. And certainly I've met my share of men in my own age bracket (today in my 40s) who seemed not to recognize even as adults with lived experience that “no thanks” did not mean “not yet”, it really meant “go away”. Whatever a woman is or isn't wearing is about how *she* feels, and has exactly nothing to do with how anyone else around her feels. The same inculcation for boys incorrectly ascribes meaning to women’s behaviour regardless of the words women use, as I have noted, failing to correctly recognize that anything that looks like a “no thank you” really means that they should move on. There's no game to be played when a woman makes it clear with her words and body that she doesn't want to play.
How much of what we view from the outside is genuinely evil behaviour perpetrated by truly “bad” people? There aren't a lot of IRL cackling villains. I just finished teaching a course on supporting survivors of violence so I had reason to look recently at global statistics, and most violence including sexual violence is typically perpetrated by family, friends and neighbours - they are not cackling villains (99% of the time anyway). In The Last Duel the rapist seems to be aware that he can get past the main character’s locked front door because even though she is alone she will likely open it for someone she knows, and when he excuses his behaviour as driven by love (which seems unlikely because we do not see any further attempts to connect with her, even by letter and we have established that she can read). Perpetrators of all kinds of violence tell themselves all kinds of things to justify their behaviour, all of which minimize the harm.
Are Jacques Le Gris, Ben Solo/Kylo Ren and Enzo Ferrari evil? No although each of them acts in harmful ways, and without asking us to condone their behaviour each film gives us some understanding as to why they do what they do. By examining the social origins of their problematic behavioural choices “at a distance” from comparable behaviour in the real world, we gain the psychological space to reflect on our beliefs about what they did, so that when we are faced with problematic behaviour IRL we are already ready with some sense of how to handle the discomfort in order to be of the most help.
Am I going to do a watch party for The Last Duel now that I’ve had a chance to reflect on my feelings about the film’s contents? I’m probably going to put it to a vote. There’s no point in putting it on if nobody plans to attend.
#adamdriver #thelastduel #ferrari #starwars #savethehuntforbensolo #thehuntforbensolo
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