MCU’s Best Villain To Date
Warning: This post contains spoilers…
The MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) has really stepped its game up over the past few years with respect to building complicated villains and/or antagonists. They’ve given us Killmonger, Thanos, Loki, and others…
However, I think the best antagonist I’ve seen come out of the MCU recently is Gregory Salinger, from the latest and last season of Jessica Jones, on Netflix.
Unlike Killmonger and Thanos, I think Salinger best embodies what a true villain actually is, by way of motive and outlook…
You see, Salinger is the quintessential cowardly ideologue.
Narcissistic… Entitled… Vengeful and relentless…
(Within the context of the story)
This guy’s a serial killer who preys upon those he perceives to be “cheaters” in life — that is, individuals with talents, superpowers or aesthetic attributes that he himself does not possess…
Salinger is a shell of a man. He’s very accomplished academically, and a decent athlete to boot. The problem is, there’s nothing fundamentally special about him, and he knows it…
Accomplishment after accomplishment, achievement after achievement, and he still couldn’t look himself in the mirror when all was said and done…
His motives for killing were very simple. Envy, insecurity, uncertainty and a fundamentally *unfulfilled competitive spirit.
Through sheer will and determination, he became a doctor, a lawyer and picked up a few other degrees along the way. He’s fairly intelligent, however, it seems he realized there was a cap to his potential; which sort of caused him to hate people who surpassed him effortlessly, through (what he would call) sheer luck.
Let’s talk about his intelligence real quick though…
Even though dude was well-studied and an avid learner and what not, all of his intellect was limited to convention and/or parasitic thinking. By this I mean, his intellect never performed on levels that surpassed ways to entrap and/or ensnare others, or injure and destroy people, or ways to avoid being detected by others. Short of knowing how to exploit knowledge, the law and medical discovery (situationally), he never demonstrated any original thoughts pertaining to anything.
All his little self-righteous diatribes amounted to were platitudes, which could be easily neutralized with the right questions.
Again, he was an empty shell of a man, who served as nothing more than a vessel for competition, righteous indignation, jealousy, deflection and blame, contempt, self-loathing, judgment and injury…
He was a coward — that is, a person who barricades themselves in their internal narrative, because they’re too chicken shit to face reality head on, and adapt to reality in real time.
He loved killing people (as serial killers do), and using torture and terror as devices to extort facial expressions from them that basically served to verify and/or confirm the story he’d spun in his mind about who they were, and why they deserved to die…
But see, no matter how hard he tried to prove that he was special through accomplishment, in his heart, he knew that he wasn’t…
He could tell by the fact that he hated people who actually were…
He was the perfect representation of the cowardly ideologue — the “slave” in Nietzsche’s Herd-Mind model…
And instead of confronting and dealing with his feelings of insecurity and uncertainty, he became an aggressor against others. Instead of facing the darkness within himself, he searched for darkness in other people — particularly people who had attributes he felt they didn’t deserve, so that he could find license to aggress against and punish them, because he was too much of a pussy to deal with his own shit…
Instead of being grateful for being intelligent enough to capture multiple degrees and earn an honest living, he let his *identity — that is, his internal narrative, which consisted of victimhood, feelings of ineptness, jealousy and righteous indignation, turn him into a weapon against other people…
His outlook is/was the archetype for the quintessential Trump supporter. The racist and nationalist. The hater and/or backstabber. The Judas. The aggressive conspiracy theorist. The sabotager. The sexist. The mass shooter. The serial rapist. The religious fundamentalist. The aggressive liberal or conservative. The hyper-aggressive philosopher/academic/atheist/secularist/science worshipper. The serial predator and competitor — the person who lives to aggress against and subdue others, so as to quell feelings of insecurity and uncertainty they experience within themselves…
This guy embodied them all.
Fueled by status beliefs and illusions of superiority, as captured through his social merits and/or by his abilities to regurgitate and implement third-party discovery, determinations and perspectives, he became a formidable weapon against all those he perceived to be beneath him. His status beliefs morally sanitized his reprehensible attitude, and subsequent actions, outlook and behaviors.
He was the perfect example of what a true villain is… an aggressor parasite… a being who believes others should live (and die) for their benefit and amusement.
The MCU finally captured a fitting portrait of the most dangerous aggressor — their only fully realistic villain to date…