Movies/scenes that make you sympathise with the bad guy

[metalhank]

Speaking of Jack made me think of The Witches Of Eastwick, I have to sympathize with him, his balls must of been aching by the end.

[TheDenizen]

God Bless America

[matGuy3]

Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The older you get, the more Ferris comes off as an arrogant little douche, the more the principal becomes sympathetic.

[iconogassed]

You can see why the giant rock in In the Tall Grass has a crazed hayface cult.

Sure, a few eggs might get broke. But it gets results. Like Dirty Harry.

[iconogassed]

Uhh I've been binging The Sinner and a giant cult rock just showed up in a commune in season 2. Lookin pretty friggin like the Tall Grass rock. Listen I kid around but not about giant cult rocks. I didn't stage this.

[ShogunRua]

Speaking of Jack made me think of The Witches Of Eastwick, I have to sympathize with him, his balls must of been aching by the end.

I certainly found him more sympathetic than the witches themselves. In the movie, they are complicit in Nicholson's character's crimes, including murder, and happily use his demonic powers. They suffer absolutely no comeuppance, end up much better and happier than before they chose evil, and also banish and enslave Nicholson by the end, while they each raise the son they had with him, with Nicholson watching helplessly on a television screen, a demented matriarchal society.

It's a sick feminist power fantasy.

Apparently, the book's plot is significantly more interesting, balanced, and rightly presents the witches as the villains that they truly are; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witches_of_Eastwick

Amusingly, the author John Updike claimed the novel was an attempt to "make things right with my, what shall we call them, feminist detractors".

Well, the movie adaptation multiplied that factor by an order of magnitude or two.

[iconogassed]

I certainly found him more sympathetic than the witches themselves. In the movie, they are complicit in Nicholson's character's crimes, including murder, and happily use his demonic powers. They suffer absolutely no comeuppance, end up much better and happier than before they chose evil, and also banish and enslave Nicholson by the end, while they each raise the son they had with him, with Nicholson watching helplessly on a television screen, a demented matriarchal society.

This reads like a list of Hays Code grievances. You sound positively scandalized.

I can respect the posturing, but not in the service of insisting that characters be moralistically punished. Notably, you don't hold masculine fantasies to the same standard.

[ShogunRua]

I certainly found him more sympathetic than the witches themselves. In the movie, they are complicit in Nicholson's character's crimes, including murder, and happily use his demonic powers. They suffer absolutely no comeuppance, end up much better and happier than before they chose evil, and also banish and enslave Nicholson by the end, while they each raise the son they had with him, with Nicholson watching helplessly on a television screen, a demented matriarchal society.

This reads like a list of Hays Code grievances. You sound positively scandalized.

I can respect the posturing, but not in the service of insisting that characters be moralistically punished.

I'm not insisting on anything. Rather, it's very telling on what characters get moralistically punished in stories and which ones don't. Movies have messages and ideas. You just have to watch and pay attention.

Notably, you don't hold masculine fantasies to the same standard.

Care to provide examples?

[iconogassed]

I'm not insisting on anything. Rather, it's very telling on what characters get moralistically punished in stories and which ones don't. Movies have messages and ideas. You just have to watch and pay attention.

This is disingenuous. You are not merely providing a reading, but also a strong value judgment ("sick feminist power fantasy") based on that reading and the ideology articulated by it, and indicate that if the film hewed closer to what you presume is the source material's more moralistic approach to the characters, making sure their villainy was abundantly clear, you would have approved.

Taxi Driver is in your 97th percentile (and my 95th). By any reasonable definition, Travis Bickle commits numerous homicides that he believes are fully justified. He is not prosecuted. He is lauded by the press, the public, and the family of the girl he saved from sexual violation and possible death (by placing her at a far more acute risk of death). He even regains the approval of a woman who sexually rejected him, and is then able to reject her.

That is a male power fantasy if there ever was one. It seems to me, though, that in the case of both films, the application of "sick" should depend on to what extent, and how sincerely, the filmmakers intended the trajectories of their respective films as endorsements of the events therein. I think we can agree that Scorsese is not proposing that Travis Bickle is a model for manhood (no comment on Schrader).

Since I wrote the above, I have viewed The Witches of Eastwick, and I can say your characterization of it bears even less resemblance to the actual nature of the film than mine above to Taxi Driver. Particularly silly is the witches' supposed culpability in the "murder". They very clearly did not know what they were actually doing, and are horrified to discover it, and immediately cut off contact with Nicholson's character, who then besieges them with plagues. How can you possibly begrudge them protecting themselves and their children from a man who made them complicit in murder without their knowledge, and then tormented them for the crime of not fucking him after he did so?

Oh, right. That's how.

[ShogunRua]

I'm not insisting on anything. Rather, it's very telling on what characters get moralistically punished in stories and which ones don't. Movies have messages and ideas. You just have to watch and pay attention.

This is disingenuous. You are not merely providing a reading, but also a strong value judgment ("sick feminist power fantasy") based on that reading and the ideology articulated by it, and indicate that if the film hewed closer to what you presume is the source material's more moralistic approach to the characters, making sure their villainy was abundantly clear, you would have approved.

Taxi Driver is in your 97th percentile (and my 95th). By any reasonable definition, Travis Bickle commits numerous homicides that he believes are fully justified. He is not prosecuted. He is lauded by the press, the public, and the family of the girl he saved from sexual violation and possible death (by placing her at a far more acute risk of death). He even regains the approval of a woman who sexually rejected him, and is then able to reject her.

Travis Bickle is depicted as a disturbed psychopath living in his own personal hell. A hell that he is still locked in at the end of the movie. There's also the whole issue of him being shot full of bullets as comeuppance.

If you think that is in any way similar to The Witches of Eastwick, how positively it portrays its protagonists, and the happy ending they all achieve, you might want to cut back on pontificating about movies. You clearly don't understand what you're watching.

That is a male power fantasy if there ever was one.

Wow. I'm not saying this to win any Internet arguments, but if you think Travis Bickle is a "male power fantasy", I would enroll in therapy. Only a deeply troubled individual would look at Bickle's story and say "yep, that's totally something I want to do!"

Get help.