The Final Nail:

There’s one last nail within the coffin of this theory of projection (*not* as it was formulated by the Jungian psychologists, but rather as it has been bastardized in service of a “moral ambiguity” in fiction).

 

As I have established, it’s ridiculous to try to say of every villain, in all situations, that he’s “nothing more than” a projection of the audience, and this is given the most obvious: that villains always must be based on real-life evils, and the Real World always has abounded with their sins and crimes.

 

Since such atrocities are not a universal human habit, only an extreme, it is sufficient that one has to witness them in Actuality to write them into fiction. There, the writing is informative; whatever biases the writer has, the audience can witness what is written with a moral objectivity instead of private bias. Any indignation would arise from the awareness of the wrong depicted, not some latent tendency within the viewer, since the knowledge of morality precedes all personal neuroses, since it’s founded on the primal, tribal level which itself precedes all individuality.

 

Yet, all this being said, one can’t deny that many do project. The characters whom I find most compelling are the ones that others find the most disturbing. Yet I’d never stop at letting others offer insult to the ones I love; I would defend their honour and their cause, of course, (regarding those I love, of course, and *not* those who offend) and by so doing I would find an objectivity, a *living* objectivity, not one subservient to rules and regulations (such as the demands of the offender to an “equal” value) but a passionate appraisal of another’s cause, though it be fictional and controversial.

 

It’s against the backdrop of this objectivity that I can judge of others’ failures to appreciate this character, his moral function, and the underlying meanings to his actions. I can even go so far as to evaluate the various projections he receives, to speculate upon their underlying causes, and to make some blanket statements of mine own. In doing all this, I can utterly reduce the *tendency to vilify him* to a clinical evaluation.

 

Yet it does not stop there. Knowing that his critics are deluded, I forego delusion of this kind. I will not vilify him, since I know that what I vilify is not the character but rather the neuroses of the audience, personified. Projection is not binding on the character himself, nor upon me, nor other viewers. It can be transcended, and the knowledge of it has implied the obligation *to* transcend it.

 

Having done so, I perceive this character not as a villain but as (often tragic) hero. Taking back mine own projections, I refuse to label him as villainous. Yet this does not at all deprive me of the obligation to identify a villainy in someone else, especially in characters who, like those critics, wrongfully oppose him. So, the knowledge of projection, coupled with the remedy to this projection, only makes me more aware of “who the villain *really* is”. The knowledge of an underlying subjectivity behind a false assessment only paves the road to higher objectivity in just assessment.

 

This, therefore, must be the final nail within the coffin of the modern theory of “projection”: No, not every villain is a mirror for the dark parts of my Soul, for then he’s not a villain, and, if I *can* sympathize with a repulsive character, with reason, in good faith, then I can’t vilify him, so he ceases to be classified as “villain”, and my sympathy has nothing any more to do with Villains as a category.

 

Nor can I apply this universally and so reduce the truly vile villains to mine own projections. Evil does exist within the World, and it’s revealed through the transcendence of projection. Those who would deny the nature of *true* Evil have not yet completed their own homework.

 

**[({R.G.)}]** 

   
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