THE BLACK WIDOW Our second villain is a less obvious one, but maybe the most dangerous; for it is the less obvious that sneak in when your guard is down. If you see Darth Vader on the street you are most likely going to run, or at least be very aware of the ominous music that accompanies him. It is the ones that approach in common clothing, or a Trojan Horse that catch you off guard and get you good. In The Natural there is a hero, maybe the greatest hero, and that man is named Roy Hobbs. On the surface this movie has a few villains. Maybe the Whammer early on, the judge for sure, his henchman Gus Sands, and a sort of passive villain in Max Mercy. To the casual viewer of this movie, these are your villains. To someone who has seen the movie so often that in high school he could recite any line in any scene, on command...these are just decoys. Decoys throwing you off the scent of the true villains.
Villain number 2 in TSSOI list of all time villains, with a bullet, is...the women of The Natural.
Lets start at the beginning. A young Roy Hobbs playing catch with his pops, throwing a baseball through a barn...an all american boy playing an all american game in what we can only assume is the heartland of our great country. He finds out that the Cubs want to take a look at him and in his last night in town he heads to the barn and knocks up Glen Closes character (Iris). This seemingly innocent bit of adolescent romping is the beginning of the end for poor Roy. You can't fault Iris (or Roy really)...her intentions are innocent enough...but the gods don't choose heroes and villains based on intentions...there is something more. (side note: Glen Close is not only a villain in this movie, but in the end one of the true heroes. Find another movie when this happens.)
Roy hops on a train, just having his first taste of sex and his mind is now in the proverbial "gutter". No longer is he thinking about his 90+ mph fastball whipping through his barn. Nor is he thinking about making it to the goddamn Big Leagues. He is thinking about where he is going to get his next piece of pussy.
Next...the black widow...Harriet Bird. The woman on the train, the woman at the carnival, the woman smoking a bullet into the stomach of Roy Hobbs, ending his dream of "I want to be the best to have ever played the game." (Roy are you going to be the greatest to ever play this game--Thats right. BOOM!) She jumps out the window and you think it can't get any worse....but it does.
Next...Memo Paris. Roy is back. After a 15 year hiatus Roy is peppering balls off of the upper deck, threatening to take over a league he was destined to redefine years earlier. Then, an elegant, beautiful, early version of Marilyn Monroe arrives on the scene. But this woman, this beautiful woman, cannot right away be seen for the evil that she is. The platinum blonde hair and stunning body and shinny dresses turns her into an obsession, not a villain. She holds in her arsenal of manipulation the one thing that has brought many a good man down to a pedestrian status...and that is showing up in your hotel room wearing only a fur coat. So he slumps...slumps big time. Slumps like a wiffle ball bat swinging 8 year old in a snow storm. She even tries to kill Roy by feeding him a poisonous hordeuvres (Sidenote 1: we had a girl like this when we were in school...not nearly as good looking, but just as damaging...I stayed away). (Sidenote 2:Don't think Bump Bailey's death was a coincidence. It certainly was NOT). Memo Paris is the devil.
Like any good American movie, the hero ends up victorious, but not without taking his lumps on the way. In the end the hero prevails, engulfed in sparks of fireworks, leaving the villainous Memo Paris in the shadows, the kamikaze pilot, black widow gun wielder in her coffin, and Iris, the unintentional villain is back in shining light of the heroes. If Roy would have stayed away from the women altogether he might have been "the greatest to ever play this game", but every hero has a mortal side. Every hero has his "cryptonite". For Roy, that cryptonite was a good piece of ass.
NEXT: BUTTERSCOTCH SUNDAE'S VILLAIN NUMBER 2
No comments:
Post a Comment