I was just settling into the whole Khan versus Enterprise plot of Star Trek Into Darkness when something started to seem overly familiar to me about the way the story was developing. And I don’t mean familiar in that “Hey, they’re ripping off the Wrath Of Khan” way that began the moment Cumberbatch revealed his true age and identity. No, I mean the familiarly that began when the crew started to speculate that perhaps Khan had wanted to be captured. After all, it had all been so easy…
Why was this familiar to me? Maybe it was because I’d just seen the same thing in Skyfall. Ah ha, mystery solved. There again, we have a master criminal who goes out of his way to get caught. It’s all part of a master plan, you see. He wants to get caught so he can do even more damage from the inside.
Hollywood being Hollywood, if something works they do over and over until the audience begs them to stop. Maybe it’s time for us to beg for the Villain Who Wants To Get Caught plot to be retired.
Consider:
Star Trek Into Darkness (2013): Khan wants to get caught so he can highjack the Enterprise and free his people.
Skyfall (2012): Silva wants to get caught so he can break out of prison and assassinate M.
The Avengers (2012): Loki wants to get caught so he can get to Bruce Banner.
The Dark Knight Rises (2012): Bane wants to get caught by the CIA so he can kidnap a scientist.
The Dark Knight (2008): The Joker wants to get caught so he can blow up police HQ and kidnap a crooked banker.
There are probably more examples, but I think the point has been made.
I’m not knocking this plot. Hell, I like this plot. There’s a clear appeal here. For one thing, it establishes the villain as smarter (for the time being, anyway) than the hero. If you think about it, in each of the storylines above the hero or heroes far outnumber, outgun, and/or outmatch the villain. Khan is a superman, sure, but he’s just one dude against all of Star Fleet. Silva is just a guy with dentures and a bad dye job who’s trying to take on the British government. Loki is a goofball with an army of instantly destroyable galactic bugs that make the Trade Federation’s droid army look tough. Bane has, you know, respiratory issues. And the Joker is just a guy with some crap on his face.
But—and this is the point—they’re all smarter than whatever military or law enforcement operation is placing them into custody. Each villain has a scheme. He’s a master chess player who has planned several moves in advance. This leads directly into the second appeal of the plot which is that the villain is a badass. He’s such a stone cold criminal that he can turn himself over to the authorities and trust that everything will go according to plan. There’s something scary about that level of confidence. Watching these bad guys effortlessly brush away all the security and defenses meant to bind them, we’re led to ask how our hero will contend with—to lift a phrase from Khan—such a superior intellect.
In most cases, the Villain Who Wants To Get Caught plot comes in the middle of the film. It’s a nice middle act. After the set up in which the villain is established as a serious threat, there’s a big battle to capture the villain, followed by the stand off between hero and villain. Then the villain escapes, accomplishes whatever goal his fake capture was supposed to accomplish, at which point the third act begins and the hero fights his way back to victory.
The best example of this comes, of course, from The Dark Knight. You can feel The Joker’s presence hovering like a specter over nearly every other plot that’s followed him. The almost casual exercise of his power and intellect, the disregard for his own safety, the sheer damage that he inflicts—all this comes from that middle section of Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece. In some ways, maybe it all really just comes down to Batman and The Joker in the interrogation room. Their back and forth, the way it starts out as banter, moves into a philosophical debate, and culminates in horror when it turns out that Joker has had the upper hand all along. “You have nothing, nothing to threaten me with,” he tells Batman after taking several punches to the face. “Nothing to do with all your strength.” And he’s right.
Filmmakers have been trying to recapture that dark magic ever since, but it’s now turned into a cliché. All things considered, it has worked well enough. It was good for laughs in The Avengers. It allowed for some good Cumberbatching in Star Trek Into Darkness. But it’s never had the spark or snap of The Dark Knight. Maybe the lamest example was in Skyfall. I say it’s the lamest because, in fact, Silva’s plan doesn’t work. He goes through the trouble of getting caught, blowing up virtually all of London, and walks into the place where M is at…and misses. What an asshole. That is some kind of cut rate performance from a super villain. Understand, I’m not saying I wanted M to die and for Bond to go on a revenge quest; I’m just saying that the villain’s master plan here turns out to have been a gigantic waste of time and resources.
If all these movies are lifting from The Dark Knight, then it’s only fair to point out that The Dark Knight is lifting from David Fincher’s Se7en. That neo-noir gave us a villain whose ultimate plan was not only to get caught by the heroes but to be executed by them. The brilliance of the script by Andrew Kevin Walker is that John Doe is, in fact, successful. Of course, Se7en was a relatively low budget movie made in those halcyon days of 1995, and what we’re discussing here are heavyweight mega-franchises. The Dark Knight is the closest approximation to Se7en’s bleak worldview (for all intents and purposes, in fact, The Dark Knight is the Se7en of comic book movies), but each iteration of the Villain Who Wants To Get Caught dilutes the effect of the plot. By the time we get to Star Trek Into Darkness and Skyfall, it’s really just a gimmick.
Here’s hoping we don’t see Lex Luthor in handcuffs next year.
Jake Hinkson is the author of the books Hell On Church Street, The Posthumous Man, and Saint Homicide. Read more about him at JakeHinkson.com. He also blogs at The Night Editor.
The other problem is that all of those plans depend on being able to predict their jailers every move to the last detail.
Why didn’t the CIA remove Bane’s mask? Or what if somebody decided that such a high-level prisoner required a fighter escort? What if, given the threat of terrorist attack, the higher-ups decided the Joker should be held at a different facility from his mooks? I think Silva’s escape in Skyfall was the worst for a different reason – what if instead of that super-high tech cell, they just chained him up in a 10×10 concrete hole?
The real problem with the villain who wants to get caught plot is that it relies on all kinds of things that are or should be totally out of the villains control. Like knowing which cell he’ll be tossed into or who the prisoner in the next cell will be. Or it relies not on the villain being that much smarter than the heroes, but that the heroes be actively dumb or incompetent.
I think the only time this was done right was in The Dark Knight. The Joker has an excuse for doing this: he’s insane and he’s doing all he does just for the laughs. He says so himself: he doesn’t have a plan. He’s a dog trying to catch a car. If it turned out the Batman had less scruples, or the GCPD did, and someone killed him the first time he was captured (like Batman in the bat-bike running him over), then it would still all be OK to the Joker. He had his laugh while he lived. The same does not apply to the other villains, that aren’t that insane and supposedly have other motives (like killing M, leading an alien invasion to Earth, etc).
I agree that the most terrible execution of this was Skyfall. Really, there was no need for Silva to get captured (not to mention plant bombs in the subway) if all he wanted was to try to shoot M or have a chat with her as he does later in the movie. The movie itself establishes that M has shitty security in her own home (Bond invades it after he’s declared dead or MIA), so Silva could’ve invaded and had his chat with her at that time. Also, since he seemed to have cheated the Chinese government and somehow owned an island in the Chinese coast, my guess would be that the PRC would be very pissed with him and would like to get some kind of revenge if possible. All it would take is for the helicopters that captured him to somehow drop him in the middle of PRC then his plan would’ve meant nothing. He’d be executed and the bill of a bullet would be sent to whatever family he still had.
What I want to see is some kind of GRRM inversion of tropes and clichés using this cliché. Like a villain making all the fuss of trying to elaborate a plan to get himself captured only to be summarily executed by another character in the middle of the film. The movie would then go on to be about the repercussions of this. It’d be like Psycho, with the audience expecting one thing and events leading to another kind of movie.
I think one of the most important reasons we see this gimmick used again and again is that it gives the filmmakers an opportunity to put the hero and the villain on screen face to face. It’s usually really hard to do this. Unless the hero and villain are in direct conflict, they’re not going to run into each other–and if they don’t run into each other, we don’t get the banter, the philosophical discussions, the humor. And of course every scene in the movie can’t be a fight scene. (Well, unless you’re MAN OF STEEL, I guess.) So it’s an easy writing trick: need your hero and villain to share some screen time, but not go toe-to-toe in battle AGAIN? Put one of them behind a plexiglass cage.
And I really never liked that Batman/Joker scene in the interrogation room. Batman’s really going to go into a well-lit room in a police station with video cameras and interrogate a prisoner? Do we really think someone watching that video couldn’t figure out who he is? And what kind of cops allow a masked vigilante to go into an interrogation room and beat the crap out of their prisoner, even if he IS the Joker? I thought that scene was pretty preposterous–and written entirely to get the two of them together on-screen in a “non-fighting” situation.
The only hero turning himself over to the villain I can think of off hand is Luke going to Vader and the Emperor in Jedi, though I’m sure there are lots more examples of that too.
At least Loki, by having brain swarmed Hawkeye, had enough insider knowledge to be fairly confident in his plan.
I still haven’t seen all of STID yet, but I don’t see that Khan wanted to be captured, IIRC, he was fighting and winning, until he learned his fellows were in the bombs, because he specifically asks how many of the new missiles.
Thanks so much for this article. I’ve also become tired of this cliche (can we retire the “villain in glass prison” cliche while we’re at it?). As others have mentioned, this kind of stuff often relies on villains being able to predict their captors’ behavior to an incredible degree of detail.
I’m completely alright with TDK’s use of it, though, and agree it was the best done-example of it. How was Joker able to predict it all? BECAUSE HE’S THE JOKER!
Rymanno, that’s a great idea for a plot. I’d love to see it. I think the closest we get are moments like the one in Firefly (SPOILERS AHEAD)
where a captured thug promises threatens Mal and Mal kicks him into an engine.
TV Tropes covers it in an article — Play-Along Prisoner.
Actually, TV Tropes covers a lot of tropes. Arguably all of them.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has a lot of this, actually. Loki in Avengers. Black Widow’s introduction in Avengers. The elves in Thor: The Dark World. It works for me for Loki because he’s based on the trickster god. Having the kind of omniscience required to pull something like that off is what trickster gods do. It’s also why Joker works, because he’s also a trickster god, only from a newer mythology (in which Superman is the sun god and Batman is the god of darkness or fear, and the Flash is Hermes, and Green Lantern is a djinn, and so on).
But it doesn’t work otherwise, because it’s a trope that controls the narrative, and not the other way around. What do I mean by that? Let me answer @1’s question: “Why didn’t the CIA remove Bane’s mask? Or what if somebody decided that such a high-level prisoner required a fighter escort?”
Here’s the answer: Because if any of those things happened, they would have turned out to have been part of the villains plan all along.
The trope controls the narrative. ANYTHING that can happen in the narrative must necessarily serve the trope. And that takes narrative agency away from the actual characters, even the villain.
Ryamano@3:I think the only time this was done right was in The Dark Knight. The Joker has an excuse for doing this: he’s insane and he’s doing all he does just for the laughs. He says so himself: he doesn’t have a plan.
Considering how meticulously most of what he does in the film seems to need to be set up, I am inclined to read the Joker claiming to be an agent of chaos as just another attempt to mess with everyone else’s heads.
Not sure where on the spectrum this fits, but I keep thinking of Samuel L. Jackson giving a pep talk to the scientists in Deep Blue Sea, and at the climax of the cheerleading, the giant hyperintelligent shark leaps out of the tank behind him and eats him. But the shark was already captured… scientists trapped in underwater lab… hmm… gonna have to analyze this one more.
The one thing about the Dark Knight, is not that Joker wanted to get caught, but that he had 2 aces in the hole when he was. The first being that he kidnaped the DA and his assistant, the second the plant with the bomb inside of him. I point this out, because it didn’t mean he planned on getting captured then escaping , but that he exploited his other plans in order to escape. It is a subtle difference, but probably the reason it plays so much better than so any other attempts.
For another interesting example, see Law Abiding Citizen.
Personally, I think the best example was Naraku’s plot in InuYasha Movie 2: Castle Beyond the Looking Glass. Though in that case he’s not captured, but killed –knowing that events will play out in such a way as to lead to his resurrection (and the destruction of his real target).
It works because the series that the movie is based on works so hard to establish that Naraku’s real gift is his ability to read people. He knows exactly what all his enemies (and servants, and rivals) will do as soon as they realize he’s dead, and all he needs to do is knock over that first domino by letting InuYasha and his gang kill him. By the time any of them realize they’re being played, it’s too late, and Naraku has just become the most powerful demon lord in Japan (leaving the heroes right back where they started).
Lex Luthor himself couldn’t have done it better.
@5: I think you’re right about Into Darkness. Though I haven’t seen it in a while, so I’m not entirely sure about the details of Khan’s plans and goals.
But more generally, in response to the article: No, just using Khan does not in itself constitute ripping off TWOK, because TWOK was the second Khan story. They didn’t create the guy for the movie, they brought him back from “Space Seed,” where he was a much saner, more cunning, more interesting character. In fact, aside from the few minutes in the warp core where STID blatantly copies TWOK, the movie is actually extremely different from — and IMHO superior to — TWOK in its treatment of Khan. This Khan is sane and rational rather than a scenery-chewing madman. He’s driven primarily to protect his people rather than just to kill Kirk; in fact, he doesn’t have anything against Kirk at all, with Admiral Marcus being his prime target, and even teams up with Kirk for part of the story. Heck, just actually physically being in the same place with Kirk, the two actors exchanging dialogue directly rather than shooting their scenes months apart, is a major difference. Aside from those obnoxious few minutes in the warp core, and the tacked-on vengeance moment at the end, STID could not be less of a copy of TWOK. It’s a new story about the same character, and is closer to the Khan of “Space Seed.”
Yes, please retire this trope, or at least let it rest for a very long time.
I would comment on Khan’s motivations in Into Dorkness, but I’m still trying to figure out what that movie was about. I think he had a family and he wanted revenge on a standard Starfleet Badmiral. Though how we get from point A to point B to bad third act is still a mystery. Just as how the writers of that movie still get work is a mystery.
It’s not the the idea, it’s the implementation that sucks.
@@.-@ agratz
And I really never liked that Batman/Joker scene in the interrogation room. Batman’s really going to go into a well-lit room in a police station with video cameras and interrogate a prisoner? Do we really think someone watching that video couldn’t figure out who he is? And what kind of cops allow a masked vigilante to go into an interrogation room and beat the crap out of their prisoner, even if he IS the Joker? I thought that scene was pretty preposterous–and written entirely to get the two of them together on-screen in a “non-fighting” situation.
Uh, did you miss how all Gotham cops have been practically hero worshipping Batman ever since Batman Begins? It had been set up way back then that the situation in Gotham was so bad, the entire justice system so corrupt that the cops were just happy anyone was making progress even if it was a masked vigilante, because no one else could.
And taking that into account, do you really think that the cameras wouldn’t suddenly “malfunction” by crazy random happenstance just as Batman is about to arrive? In a precinct run by Commissioner Gordon and full of Gordon’s personally selected staff? Really? He’s been getting away with claiming the Batsignal to be faulty lighting equipment, for crying out loud, because even the higher-ups weren’t really interested in taking any steps against Batman and all like “just give me the flimsiest of excuses so we can get on with it”…
ChristopherLBennett @14
I think the biggest miss of ST:ID was that they came this close –> t a Federation/Klingon war.
Real-life heroic equivalent: Witold Pilecki, the Polish soldier and resistance fighter who volunteered to be captured by the Germans and sent to Auschwitz. He spent the next three years there as a prisoner organising resistance networks and gathering intelligence for a possible rescue attempt by the AK, then escaped.
Being Polish, of course, this story has a sad ending; after the war he was executed by the Communists.
I’ll go with The Usual Suspects, except that rather than being a plan it was all extemporaneous.
For the benefit of people who haven’t seen it yet — and why the HECK not — I’ll just leave the rest of this comment blank.
Agree with the sentiment in this article. The trope has really been played to its fullest hilt.
However, in a slight defense of Star Trek Into Darkness, Khan actually didn’t have a master plan filled with coincidences and convoluted long-term planning. He lets himself get captured by the Enterprise immediately after realizing his people are in the missiles, and is at the full mercy of the crew until they release him. Yes, he ends up getting the chance to speechify for a bit, which results in the Enterprise letting him travel to Marcus’ ship, where he takes control. But… they just as easily could have let him rot in the jail, and he wouldn’t have been able to do anything after that. It takes a conscious effort on the part of the heroes to push the rest of his plan forward. He had no back-up to that.
Contrast that with Javier Bardem in Skyfall, who seems to outwit the heroes and escapes captivity thanks to knowing the layout of both Bond’s HQ and London in general, all while timing things well enough so that a subway train falls into Bond’s path and impedes his progress.
I’m not saying that STiD is a perfect movie, and it may have even been thinking of this trope in the scripting process, but the way they dealt with their captured prisoner’s escape was a lot less convoluted than I was expecting.
Sherlock used it too, with Moriarty, but it worked for me there because of the immense influence he had.
I don’t think The Dark Knight should get a free pass here. I realize that many people worship this movie, but really, Joker’s plan was just so preposterous and dependent on things mostly out of his control. Joker migt have been smart, but in the prison scene he was just lucky. His plan was only minimally less preposterous than Raul Silva’s and could so easily have gone wrong if not for sloppy procedure from the cops and some frankly amazing coincidences.
Flip it around – this is the premise of nearly every Bond movie. Bond walks into the casino, announces his actual identity, embarrasses the bad guy at cards, then steps outside for a cigarette and waits to be kidnapped…
@23 paivi
TDK doesn’t get a free pass, it doesn’t need to. The Joker is the self-proclaimed “dog chasing a car” who is just in it for the fun and chaos. He goes in with the most convoluted, ridiculous plans because he enjoys it and doesn’t care if he succeeds or not.
It just happened to work this time.
@25: I don’t really buy that. If you read between the lines, the Joker is clearly a meticulous planner who must surely have combat experience. His claim to serve chaos is just a pretense masking a set of extremely careful and calculated gambits that must be planned weeks in advance and are executed with clockwork precision.
After all, the Joker is clearly a liar. Every story he offers about his past is different, so it stands to reason that everything he says about himself and his motives is a lie. The anarchic Joker is a mask, a symbolic persona he’s constructed for himself in service to his goal, just as Batman is a symbolic persona that Bruce Wayne has constructed. They’re both putting on elaborate public performances that hide who they really are.
Well written article, Jake. Yeah, I had started to notice this trend myself and agree it’s time to retire it.
I read a good piece on Slate last year about a book called Save the Cat which defined this and a slew of other plot beats that Hollywood’s been repeating ever since:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollywood_and_blake_snyder_s_screenwriting_book_save_the_cat.html
It’s a good read and recommended.
Analyzing formulas isn’t a bad idea. Slavishly reproducing them, on the other hand, really misses the point.