Every Hero Needs a Villain: Conflict as Dramatic and Mimetic

In 1968, psychologist Stephen Karpman introduced the “Drama Triangle.” Building on the work of his teacher Eric Berne, Karpman argued that people tend to frame interpersonal conflicts in terms of interactions between three shifting roles: the Persecutor, the Victim, and the Rescuer. This semi-conscious framework structures human interactions. We do not understand the dynamics of a prolonged familial struggle, for instance, until we understand how the participants are performing as an aggressor, as a helpless victim, or as a defender.

Karpman, who acted as an extra in several movies, chose the term “drama” to foreground that these conflicts involve acting. People involved in a conflict automatically take on roles, complete with characteristic lines (the persecutor says “it’s your fault,” the victim says “poor me,” the rescuer says “I’m here to help”). Thus, the boundary between cinematic or theatrical conflicts and real-world interpersonal conflicts is a porous one.

In this paper, I bring together Karpman’s ideas (and subsequent work in psychotherapy) with film studies and Mimetic Theory. The notion that, in order to be a hero (and thus emulate the models we lionize), we need to oppose a villain, is an idea that can be found in all three disciplines. Screenwriting teachers like John Yorke and John Truby argue that every hero needs an antagonist who provides the hero with opportunities to overcome their weaknesses and demonstrate their virtues. Some popular movies (including Megamind, Mission Impossible II, Wreck-It Ralph, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and The Incredibles) explicitly engage the idea that heroes and villains need one another, that opposition implies dependency. 

Stated this way, it is clear that this idea has connections with René Girard’s work on mimetic rivalry. By surfacing the connections between these three discourses, this paper sheds light on the ways mimetic theory can help us interpret film and vice versa (adding to the recent work in Girard and film, with at least four volumes in the last decade on that topic). Is the knight-dragon-damsel triad just a convenient storytelling device, or does it reveal something about desire? What does it tell us that even movies that try to subvert or expose this triangle nonetheless reproduce it?

In the second half of the paper, I examine alternatives to this way of narrating and performing conflict. In his book Conflict without Casualties, consultant Nate Rieger draws upon the Drama Triangle, explaining how conflict resolution often depends on dismantling people’s felt needs to play one of these dramatic roles. While we often equate being a Rescuer with being morally upright, for Rieger much of the energy of someone playing the Rescuer role is spent in self-justification. Thus, any effort to resolve the problem is obscured and co-opted by the effort to prove oneself right, good, or innocent. That is, to better address the problems that are plaguing a community, one may need to embrace a less heroic self-understanding. Escaping this dramatic tendency and living “a game free life” (the title of one of Karpman’s books) involves stepping from self-consciousness to self-awareness. In this newfound self-awareness, we do not need to overcome others or live up to others’ example in order to feel validated; we do not need to be the hero or see our group as “the good guys” in order to be moral.

Rieger does not dwell on the parallels between this psychological theory and the nonviolent witness of his own Mennonite tradition. But I argue that the effort to get beyond the Drama Triangle and out of the traps set by mimetic rivalry are instructive for Christian ethics. As Samuel Wells argues in Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics, Christianity involves eschewing the desire to be the hero of the story. Instead, Christians understand themselves as characters in a story in which God is the hero. In Christian soteriology, the categories of Victim, Rescuer, and Persecutor apply in some sense to every person, and this revelation relativizes some of the self-justifying and antagonistic tendencies that generate violence. (Of course, this does not negate the fact that some people are victimized by others and concrete interventions are needed to protect them.) The final section of the paper, thus, turns from the intersection between mimetic theory, film studies, and psychology toward religious ethics as a resource for a non-dramatic approach to conflict.

[This proposal is closely related to how I have taught Mimetic Theory to undergraduate students. If the Unit Chairs decide to assemble a pedagogy panel, the paper could be adjusted to suit the needs of that panel.]