Writing the villain requires knowing how to write complex characters. One essential ingredient in writing fiction is to create compelling three-dimensional characters that go deep into their emotions and evoke emotional reactions in the reader. In order to do this, the writer needs to really know the characters, get inside their heads, to understand the way they think, act, and react, in order to make them consistent and emotionally engaging for the reader. This does not involve just telling what the character experiences as much as understanding the ‘why—how the character makes sense of and processes what they experience, and what might be driving them unconsciously.
It can be helpful, when writing the villain, to apply some principles from depth psychology, particularly the theory of complexes developed by C. G. Jung, who founded analytical psychiatry and comparing them to the work of Graham Greene. Greene, in his autobiography, A Sort of Life, talks about his history of depression and anxiety and being sent to London for psychoanalysis. When Greene was fifteen, following several suicide attempts, he was sent to live with Kenneth Richmond, a psychoanalyst, for six months. According to Greene’s biographer Norman Sherry, Richmond was a Jungian psychologist, so Greene would probably have been familiar with his theories.
In doing so, one way to write more emotionally engaging characters is to understand and show in what way a character might be possessed by a complex, a theory developed by Jung. Applying this concept to one’s writing can not only help deepen the story and the character being portrayed, but also evoke greater emotion in both the character and the reader. This is particularly true when writing the villain, antagonist or anti-hero, as is the case of Pinkie Brown, the central character of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. Pinkie is considered to be one of the most villainous villains in literature. His double nature is indicated in his name, and he will be the focus of this paper. This novel reflects how complexes can affect a character in a tragic way, particularly when they are ingrained and seem to be driving the behavior of the main character, Brown.
Applying Jung’s complex theory is similar to what Lisa Cron says that the “heart of the story is buried” in the past or the backstory. This leads to what she calls the ‘misbelief,’ something that can be traced to usually childhood where the character’s worldview shifted. When we are developing character sketches and doing backstory, we can start by looking to identify the complexes that are operative in a character’s life. From there, we can project their reactions that might have been triggered by the complex, whether in dialogue, actions and reactions. These might include over-reactions, defensiveness, losing one’s temper and, most importantly, actions and reactions that lead to conflict.
When writing the villain, Greene does not give us a lot of information about the psychic wound or the origin of his pathology and complexes. He only hints at that Pinkie has an unnatural aversion to love and sex, apparently as a result of witnessing his parents having sex as a child. The character’s complex also has some Freudian undertones that differ from Jung’s. Freud believed complexes originated from unresolved repressed sexual desire for the parent.
While we feel empathetic to Pinkie, he is also the villain. Tom Laughlin, both a writer and producer who followed Jungian psychology and his co-writer Robin Hutton said that having a villain or antagonist in an ‘essential ingredient’ to a well-told story, as it helps not only to create tension and conflict, and what he called ‘undeserved misfortune’ for other characters. This evokes an emotional response in the reader for the need for justice, moral and ethical righteousness. We want to see the villain get their ‘comeuppance,’ the fate they deserve. All of this creates tension in the story.
In the case of writing a villain, or anti-hero; there is no character arc, as was the case with Pinkie Brown in Brighton Rock. If it is the villain, that would be the comeuppance, but for an anti-hero, it is a tragedy. Understanding complexes and how they might grip and play out in a character can be a useful tool for the writer to show emotional reactivity and root the story in the ‘why,’ which can be emotionally satisfying for the reader.
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