Elliot Mandel and James Furbush surveyed the last 60 years in American movie villain history. Here’s what they found.

This post originally appeared  on HyperVocal.

Early in Chasing Amy, Kevin Smith’s ode to comic books, there’s a scene where a black writer named Hooper X is discussing the blackness of Darth Vader as a cultural reflection. It’s hilarious because it’s so over the top and absurd. What? You mean George Lucas was really saying that all black people wanted to be white deep down inside?

As ridiculous as that scene was, the larger truth is that America’s collective unconscious has always been reflected and amplified by the portrayal of Hollywood villains. If you want to understand the big picture broad strokes of America, there’s no better place to look than Hollywood’s action genre fare.

That’s the case starting with Birth of Nation, which is considered by many to be the first modern cinematic masterpiece. That 1915 movie by D.W. Griffith, also known as The Clansman, featured an uncontrollable ex-slave, who’s essentially portrayed as an animal on the prowl for a piece of white female flesh.

Strangely, it is the Ku Klux Klan that are the heroes of that picture. But culturally speaking, was there ever a group of people who scared the country in 1915 more than the sons and grandkids of ex-slaves? As much as America has progressed in the last 100 years, it hasn’t always been the most accepting place to live if you were an African-American or foreigner, obviously. But making the Ku Klux Klan the heroes of a movie is a worse sin than Al Jolsen going blackface in The Jazz Singer.

So our research team took a look at more than 100 popular action films from the past 60+ years in an attempt to figure out what kind of person is suited to be a great bad guy and what that villain represents. The results are interesting: America went Superhero after 9/11, so Arab/Middle Eastern villains are few and far between; maybe Jews really do run Hollywood, as evidenced by the lack of Bar Mitzvah’d Bad Guys; and Soviets and Germans really knew how to scare the crap out of a post-World War II America heading straight into the Cold War. Our findings, along with a detailed spreadsheet, follow…

The Rise of the Russians (and Germans)

Skipping ahead to the 1950s film noir genre, which coincides with the beginning of the Cold War and McCarthy-era paranoia in America, films shifted away from the fanciful adventures of Errol Flynn or the slaptick comedy of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin and began to tackle series themes like the failings of government and the dangers of Communism. There was an element of realism to Hollywood productions, digging down into the seedy, dark side of life.

And with that, came the rise of Hollywood’s longstanding fixation with a certain country as the ultimate bad guy.

Russians, and even Germans, get the nod for most used ethnic backgrounds in action movies, since most movies need a dastardly clever villain who possesses legions of unnamed henchmen.

Need a mastermind criminal? Go with a Soviet evil scientist — he’ll give your protagonist a run for his money. Literally for five decades, the go-to baddie has essentially been a Soviet, Russian or German criminal who could be inserted into a movie in a pinch.

That’s not entirely surprising, given America’s fascination with their frenemy from the end of World War II until the early 1990s. No other country loomed as large a fear in America’s psyche as Russia did.

This didn’t change much throughout the 1960s even as James Bond’s Dr. No ushered in an era of fantastical spy films routed in gadgets and beautiful women. The bad guys were a combination of Russian or Germans due to the remnants of World War II, but also because that decade was crouched in the fears of nuclear war abroad and domestic upheaval at home.

There are still lingering fears about Nazism and what it means to be German. This leads into the first Bond movie, Dr. No, where the main baddie is a man with the name, surprise surprise, Dr. No. He is half-German half-Chinese with an unmatched scientific brilliance. Oh, and metallic hands.

But as the U.S.’s confrontation with Russia escalated during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Hollywood took note and escalated the use of Russians as the main evil-doers. You see this mostly play out in the James Bond movies, where Germans were reduced to the sidekick role and Russian Ernst Blofeld, the leader of SPECTRE, stepped in as the iconic spy’s nemesis.

Russians featured heavily in the Bond-parody Our Man Flint and the thriller Ice Station Zebra, which featured Boris Vaslov as the turncoat traitor who claims to have defected while still being a double agent for the U.S.S.R.

The underlying theme: What would happen if the Soviet Union got the best of America. What if they pulled another Sputnik in the space race, what if they spread Communism to the rest of the world?

The decade in movies, however, leaned heavily on psychological horror — notably from Alfred Hitchcock — or movies like The Manchurian Candidate, where Russia would secretly invade America. Perhaps no movie encapsulated the decade like the dark satire from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Still, the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, and the classic Hollywood sword and sandal pictures, were also en vogue. It was, in short, a decade of transition for Hollywood from the old studio system that built the industry to the one where directors and actors essentially call the shots.

It was the 1970s that changed everything.

The Fear of Urban Decay

In the 1970s, movies largely tapped into the American fear of urban decay and governmental agency corruption, which was a big social issue of the time. The change in villains — migrating from shadowy Russian/German international baddies to the gritty realism of corrupt cops, faulty government institutions and urban gangs — is best exemplified in the difference between James Bond’s Dr. No and Live and Let Die. In Live and Let Die, the baddie was African-American Dr. Kananga in NYC. Sure, he was of Haitian descent, but still, watching Live and Let Die seems like an anachronistic Bond film because of the changes made to the series structure — notably that the villain was a diabolically brilliant heroin dealer.

Though it would later become the butt of a Leslie Nielson joke, Airport kicked off the decade by featuring a complex bomb plot at a fictional Chicago airport and a Generic White Guy villain. He also happened to be a disturbed, bankrupted building contractor who was unhappy with the way things were going.

The trend of domestic criminals that local police have to deal with continued throughout the decade in films like Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, The French Connection, Bullitt, White Lightening, and Taxi Driver. Hell, even The Godfather films were about villains exploiting failing urban institutions on a certain level.

The ’70s were the golden age of the cop drama.

In 1973, both White Lightning and Magnum Force were action movies where the bad guy was actually a member of the police, secretly being the antagonist while still pretending to be “good.”

Steve McQueen’s definitive movie, Bullitt, was the quintessential ’70s movie. He played a cop trying to protect a federal witness about to testify against the mob. But, the witness ends up on death’s door as a result of some corrupt cops. Frank Bullitt has to then protect the witness for trial and track down the people responsible for the attempted assassination. Throw in cinema’s greatest car chase scene, corrupt politicians and police, and well, yeah this is easily one of the best movies of all-time. It has everything you’d want in a great genre flick. Granted, Bullitt came out in 1968, and as such, it’s more of a precursor to what the decade of ’70s movies would entail.

The Return of the Russians and the War on Drugs

When movies progressed into the 1980s, the decade can largely been seen in two halves — what we’d call the return to normalcy in the first half (Russians, vague ethnic baddies), and then there was an overwhelming preoccupation with the famed War on Drugs, made popular by Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

The election of Reagan in 1980 seemed to return a semblance of pride and comfort to American citizens burned out by a decade of rising gas prices, hostage crisis situations, a tarnished presidency and failing urban institutions capped by white flight to the suburbs.

Early 1980s were a grab-bag of villain ethnicity, thanks to the introduction of the Indiana Jones and Rambo movie franchises. The Bond franchise featured the return of Blofeld and introduced both Greek and Afghan villains, too. The movies here alternate between the return of the Russians primarily, with a sprinkling of other ethnicities and a hodgepodge of motivations.

But in 1985, things started to get interesting. This was when America started churning out action movie franchises like a butter mill churns out…butter. There seems to be some sort of consensus that this half of the 1980s was to only be reserved for certain ethnicities. Russian/Soviet, German, and American. It’s like Hollywood felt bad for the satellite Soviet nations and Germans who hadn’t gotten enough screen time as bad guys.

Look at the villains in films such as Lethal Weapon 1 & 2, Tango & Cash, Red Heat, To Live & Die in L.A., Beverly Hills Cop and Raw Deal. Most of those films were big hits at the time, and drug dealers were the main antagonists. The buddy cop formula became deeply entrenched at this time, and more often than not, the duo was charged with stopping an urban drug dealer with profit as his main motivation.

Given how Reagan amped up the War on Drugs, and how crack cocaine was billed as the greatest threat to culture in history, this is entirely apropos.

Sometimes it’s not just who the villain is, but what their motivation is, as well. Sure, lots of bad guys were still vaguely Russian, like in the Rambo franchise, but many more of them were preoccupied with getting drugs into the mouths of American citizens.

Even James Bond got in on the drug dealing action, with 1988′s Timothy Dalton entry, License to Kill, which featured Franz Sanchez, a South American drug lord, as the main villain.

After the end of the Cold War, when Reagan implored Gorbachev to tear down that wall, it would seem that Hollywood would be freed from the over-use of Russian communists as the metaphor for the country’s overwhelming collective fears. That, well, sorta happened.

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—Photo lord enfield/Flickr

Generic White Guys and Domestic Terrorism

The 1990s were an interesting decade for villains. There were still remnants of ethnic baddies, but it seems the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the fascination with the Unabomber and the bombing in Oklahoma City led to a decade of movies focusing on domestic terrorists of the Generic White Guy variety.

American ex-military men however, are very nicely suited for that role. Angry and unemployed, these generic white guys are perfect for a reusable Hollywood stereotype. Action movies are big on the white guy who is or used to be associated with some sort of military or police role but turns his back on the American way to go rogue.

Die Hard 2 & 3, Speed, On Deadly Ground (really any flick with Steven Segal), The Getaway, Arlington Road, Cliffhanger, Blown Away, Under Siege, The Rock, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Face/Off, and Con Air were all about domestic terrorists or bombers looking to hold people hostage for money.

Most of those movies are so ridiculous, they wouldn’t work in any decade outside of the ’90s. It just wouldn’t happen. Could you imagine Face/Off as an ’80s action movie?

The quintessential action movie of the decade, however, belongs to Michael Bay’s 1996 opus, The Rock. American ex-military antagonist, Brigadier General Francis Humme, played by Ed Harris, was an American rogue reconnaissance Marine who leads his unit to steal deadly toxic gas missiles and take Alcatraz as their base.

He doesn’t want glory or fame or deaths — he only wants ransom and reparations to the families of Recon Marines who died on illegal missions under his command and whose deaths were not honored.

Around this same time, vague Middle East terrorists began to creep into the Hollywood proceedings.

The 1990s featured two action movies that starred Arabic bad guys as the main antagonist, which seems a bit shocking. It feels like perhaps we’re missing a movie or two.

One of them, True Lies, was an absurd action-comedy starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis with a brilliant deus ex machina at the end. But still! An Arabic terrorist threatening to destroy the world with a nuclear device! That’s progress right there!

The other one, The Siege, was a serious and realistic look at how people could react to an Arabic terrorist threat and was apparently so good … that Hollywood didn’t make any other films with bad guys of Middle Eastern descent. Mind you this is three years before 9/11.

Running from 9/11

After 9/11 happened, Hollywood took an abrupt left turn from their usual way of doing things. No longer would the movies in the next decade reflect current events or the deepest fears of the population.

Instead of embracing the cultural fear of terrorism, natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina or man-made ones like the BP oil spill, religious fanaticism, a horrible recession and subprime mortgages run amok, Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, climate change and a looming government defaulting on its debt, Hollywood ran from its obligation to amplify the country’s fears and instead turned to remakes, prequels, sequels and cartoonish comic book movies in the last decade.

Given the downward spiral of American life this past decade (just look at that list above! Was 2001-2010 the worst American decade?), what should have been a decade of creativity the likes that Hollywood hasn’t seen since the auteur days of the 1970s turned into the equivalent of a crass cash grab.

Perhaps this is do to any number of factors — like television supplanting movies for complex narratives.

What’s also interesting about the past decade in action films, and the genre in general, is the absence of the Chinese as villains. Given that China has supplanted Russia as “the shadowy country we know little about but are always told they are our direct competitor,” one would think there would be a few movies now with China as the bad guys.

Even the Red Dawn remake that is slated to come out this year was originally going to feature the Chinese Army as the invading force, but that was scuttled at the last minute in favor of the North Koreans. The movie title Red Dawn doesn’t really work in the context of the North Koreans, but that’s beside the point. Perhaps, Hollywood understands that the Chinese market is too valuable to alienate, unlike the North Korean one.

It’s as if Hollywood saw 9/11 and transitioned right into superhero movies and bad guys who in no way could be related to Arabic terrorists or impugn their entrance into the Chinese market. It’s Hollywood’s right to go for the cash grab. But it’s also our right to call them out on that and say we deserve better villains, goddammit. We deserve villains fitting for our times and cultural fears.

Still, this last decade did produce Team America, the South Park duo’s hilarious send-up of action movies and American-jingoism. That movie, however, features bad guys ranging from Kim Jong Ill of North Korea to documentary film director Michael Moore. It’s an equal-opportunity destroyer.

Then there was the little seen comedy Four Lions by Chris Morris about four incompetent British jihadists who set out to train for and commit an act of terror. That movie was more of a would-be fantasy than it was one that reflected America’s fear of jihadists.

Even in 2005 with Batman Begins and Ra’s al Ghul as the bad guy, the technically Arabic enemy is played by Liam Neeson, a very clear Generic White Guy. Action movies became the Harry Houdini of films; escaping the real world and shielding audiences with superheroes and CGI action plots.

To drive this point home further, in 2008’s Iron Man, despite being held captive by Afghan terrorists, it ends up being the generic white guy corporate raider who is the true villain to Tony Stark’s hero.

And Where the Hell are the Women?

Um, nowhere, really. That’ll be the subject of our next villain piece!

Still Here? Okay, We’ll Wrap It Up

We won’t pretend that any essay could adequately tackle a history of cinema villainy, but we hope this little exercise serves as a jumping-off point, a cinema Cliffs Notes if you will, for a conversation you can start at a party or a bar with your friends. That’s how we got started.

The truth is, there are too many movies, too many villains, too many genres to account for the breadth of cinema out there. But when you look at the cultural events of various decades and match them up to some of cinemas biggest genre hits (or at least the memorable movies), whether they be action movies or other popular genre fare, some interesting trends begin to develop between the villains in the movie and the social circumstances of America at the time.

That is at least until 9/11, when everything turned into panoply of superheroes, Harry Potter and bad action movies like XXX or Fast and Furious.

You can take a look at the spreadsheet we put together that formed the basis for this post.

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This post was written by Elliot Mandel and James Furbush. It originally appeared on HyperVocal on August 3.

—Photo Newtown grafitti/Flickr