Entertainment

Oh, Hannibal, you big, lovable teddy bear, you. Come give us a hug!

Yes, we Americans do love our movie villains. And the nastier the better.

You wouldn't think that in a time of terrorism and uncertainty we'd cozy up to characters that represent the worst in human nature. But just look at all the bad guys who in recent years have gone home with an Oscar:

Forest Whitaker as dictator- cannibal Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. Sean Penn as a Boston mobster in Mystic River. Javier Bardem as a remorseless killing machine in No Country for Old Men.

And now we have the late Heath Ledger and his maniacal turn as the Joker in The Dark Knight.

"Mad-crazy brilliant," Rolling Stone wrote. "He's out-villained Hannibal Lecter," raved Gary Oldman, who plays Lt. Jim Gordon in the film.

Fifty years ago these characterizations of villains in film not only wouldn't have been honored, but they also wouldn't have made it to the screen.

For the first 40 years of the Oscars, the statuette almost never went to a villain. There were a couple of exceptions, such as Fredric March's win for 1931's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (although for half of his screen time he was playing a good guy). But the American ethos in the first half of the 20th century was firmly rooted in 19th-century ideas of heroism. That's what we aspired to, and that's what we honored with our awards.

And then Oscar, and America, began changing.

Critic Leonard Maltin thinks the shift might have begun in the 1950s with Marlon Brando and James Dean.

FILE 1991

Anthony Hopkins as serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs

"That was the flowering of the antihero, the young rebel," he said. "The traditional hero seemed too one-dimensional for the times."

Something like that happened in the 1930s, when America's shift from a rural to an urban society resulted in a fascination with the gangster film. But back then Oscars weren't given to actors for playing crooks.

"For the first half of the last century, movies saw everything in black and white," said Lynn Bartholome, president of the Popular Culture Association. "A female character was either a goody-two-shoes or an evil woman. Cowboys wore white hats or black hats. Film noir rarely offered characters who occupied a middle ground – you were either all good or all bad."

When 1972's The Godfather won multiple Oscars, including one for Marlon Brando's depiction of mob master Vito Corleone (two years later Robert De Niro won an Oscar for playing the same character as a young man in The Godfather Part II), it broke a tradition of giving the industry's highest honor to virtuous characters.

Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, notes that the novel The Godfather came out in 1969 – the same year moviegoers flocked to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Wild Bunch and Midnight Cowboy. In these films thieves, killers and hustlers were the protagonists.

"Before this, Hollywood was defined by and had a sense of cultural obligation that the good guys would win in the end," Mr. Thompson said. "In TV it was actually inscribed in the national code of broadcasting. For a long time there was an institutionalized system that limited how much ambiguity about good and bad you could present on the screen.

"But by the early '70s we were seeing a complete unraveling and restructuring of cultural expectations. All of a sudden you had audiences identifying with bad guys."

In recent years the public's fascination with evil has become obsessive. Documentaries about real-life serial killers inundate cable channels. Dexter, Showtime's series about a serial killer who works for the police, last season made the jump to CBS.

FILE 2006/Agence France-Presse

Forest Whitaker as dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland

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You can thank Anthony Hopkins' Oscar-winning portrayal of cannibal-serial killer Hannibal Lecter in 1991's The Silence of the Lambs, Ms. Bartholome said.

"After Hannibal we began to look at the dark side and started to see that maybe there's a goodness in the bad guy. We know Hannibal is a horrible being, but he attracts us, and in some ways we even feel sympathy for him. There's humanity even in bad guys. Maybe there's an explanation for his badness."

Mr. Ledger's Joker seems to represent pure evil and malevolence. Not everyone enjoys this almost elemental villainy.

"I just found him too sick and twisted," Mr. Maltin said. "I admire Ledger's performance, but I derive no pleasure from it. I found it hard to enjoy watching the antics of a terrorist in a post-9/11 world. I realize that the film is making a statement about all of that, but the truth is that I wasn't having much fun watching it."

But Mr. Maltin's is probably a minority opinion. Even when we're terrified by real-world events, Mr. Thompson said, we're still eager to be scared at the movies.

"We're seduced by the idea of looking into the heart of darkness. There is nothing more compelling or thrilling than messing around with the very limit of what the human animal is capable of."

Robert W. Butler, McClatchy Newspapers

Initially Oscars almost always went to heroic performances. But since the 1960s bad guys have been regularly taking home the statuette. Some recent examples:

2001: Denzel Washington, Training Day (corrupt LA police detective)

2003: Sean Penn, Mystic River (South Boston gangster)

2003: Charlize Theron, Monster (prostitute and serial killer)

2006: Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland (dictator and cannibal)

2007: Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood (misanthrope and murderer)

2007: Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men (conscienceless, unstoppable hit man)

2007: Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton (lawyer willing to murder for a client)