Are we the baddies? Pop culture’s grand reckoning with good and evil

As film and TV deal with a rapidly changing world, it’s becoming harder to tell who the real villains areIf pop culture is any guide, we tend to be more honest with ourselves through our villains than our heroes. In crimefighters and caped crusaders, writers invest humanity’s most aspirational qualities, creating an ideal against which we can measure our own efforts to be and do good. In their antagonists, however, we see the flawed shadow-selves that we can’t help being. Jealo