“If you’re going to shoot, shoot, don’t talk!” — Tuco, from The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly.

By PJ Parrish

Man, I was this-close to loving the book. It was a bestselling thriller. It leapfrogged from Rio to Paris. It had a terrific manly-but-vulnerable reluctant hero. It had more plot twists than Père Lachaise.

I get to the climax. The hero is in jeopardy, trussed up like a turkey by the bad guy. All looks grim. This being a thriller, I know he will prevail but I was hooked because I had to find out how he was going to worm out of this. But then came…

The speech. The villain spent two and half pages telling the hero why he had to kill him.

Argh! Just kill me now.

Gawd, why do writers do this? Why do we have to get, in otherwise good books and movies, grandiose monologues where the villain tells how everything unfolded since their rotten childhood and ends with why they are hell-bent on detroying the good guy to get even.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I adore a well-rendered black hat. Directors love them because they light up the screen. Actors love to play them because it’s a chance to be remembered. James Cagney smashing a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face in Public Enemy. Robert Wagner pushing Joanne Woodward off the building in A Kiss Before Dying. Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber before he shoots the executive: “That’s A Very Nice Suit, Mr. Takagi. It Would Be A Shame To Ruin It.”

But a good villain is not an easy creation. We have many great posts on this subject in our archives, so I won’t belabor the usual how-to points here. I just want to make the case for why you shouldn’t let your bad guys flap their lips at the end. And forgive me for using so many movie references, but they tend to be more universal and easy to excerpt here.

Evil gloating is one of the worst tropes in fiction. It s a crutch to prop up a lack of solid character-building. All good villains, as we’ve said here often, have their own backstories and complex psychologies. It is your job as the writer-in-charge to lay this all out over the course of your story rather than depending on a tiresome monologue in the third act.

There are some variations on this trope:

Revealing the Evil Plan: This is where the villain lays out exactly why he had to A.. Invade Fort Knox. B. Find the Holy Grail to prove Mary Magdalene had a daughter living in the south of France. D. Put Hitler’s brain in a jar so he can be revived and take over the world.

Emotive motives. This shows up alot in mediocre TV cop shows. After the killer is caught, he whines about his past, usually in a long, self-pitying speech about why he had to do it. “My brother stole my girl and kilt my dog, so he had to die!”

I won’t quote it here because it’s way too long. But one speech that really irked me in both the book and the movie comes at the end of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The hero Mikael Blomkvist is being tortured by the murderer Martin Vanger. Vanger goes into a monologue that actually starts with, “Sit down, relax, have a drink. I like that part a lot. Having a chat when both of you know that one of you is going to die.”  Ugh. Well, it does give Lisbeth time to sneak up and whack Vanger with a nine iron.

Why you suck. This time it’s personal. In a speech, the bad guy just can’t help telling the good guy how pathetic he is. There’s a great site called The True Tropes Wiki (hat tip to them, by the way, for helping me research this.) They call this one The Hannibal Lecture after this great dialogue tidbit: “You’d like to quantify me, Officer Starling. You’re so ambitious, aren’t you? Do you know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube.” But in lesser hands, this trope is really tiresome.

Sometimes, as with Hannibal Lecter, a villain speech isn’t a bad thing. Inserted in the right moment, and kept short, it can illuminate character and propell plot. The “Greed is Good” monologue that Oliver Stone gives to Michael Douglas in Wall Street is a prime example.

And I love this bad guy speech from The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. It turns the trope on its head. Watch the very brief video. It’s worth it.

There’s also a wonderful villain monologue in Shane. Yeah, it’s a speech, but it works. The set-up: Shane, the gunfighter with a mysterious past, rides into town and is hired by hardscrabble rancher Joe Starrett. He tells Shane that a war of intimidation is being waged on the valley’s settlers, led by a ruthless cattle baron, Rufus Ryker. At one point, Ryker gives a long motive speech trying to justify his actions:

Look, Starrett, when I come to this country, you weren’t much older than your boy there. We had rough times, me and other men that are mostly dead now. I got a bad shoulder yet from a Cheyenne arrowhead. We made this country. Found it and we made it. With blood and empty bellies. The cattle we brought in were hazed off by Indians and rustlers. They don’t bother you much anymore because we handled ’em. We made a safe range out of this. Some of us died doin’ it but we made it. And then people move in who’ve never had to rawhide it through the old days. They fence off my range, and fence me off from water. Some of ’em like you plow ditches, take out irrigation water. And so the creek runs dry sometimes and I’ve got to move my stock because of it. And you say we have no right to the range. 

Boo-hoo, you might say. But it works here because it humanizes the black-hearted Ryker and gives the turf war context. You need to do this for your bad guys.

I can’t let this post go without one last thing. We have to talk about the evil laugh. It’s a very old trope, dating back to 17th century literature. But we think of Vincent Price, at the end of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video. Or the Wicked Witch of the West. Or Hedley Lamar in Blazing Saddles, just before he chokes on his candy. Sometimes, the evil laugh tapers off into the wicked chuckle. But at it’s finest, it’s just…

Muahahahahaha…Hahahahahahaha… AAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

And nobody does it better than Glenn Close. I leave you with Cruella: