Mirroring Heroes and Villains; Will it Work for You?

The best villains are mirror images of the hero. There but for the grace of God, go I.  That’s one of the pieces of story wisdom that you see time and again. But is it true? Lots of excellent stories don’t  practice it. Lots of stories don’t even have villains. Where is the villain in stories that pit the hero against nature?

Remember M. Night Shyamalan’s movie Unbreakable? Maybe not. It didn’t do nearly as well as The Sixth Sense. 


The premise revolved around two men, one of whom (Bruce Willis’ character) was invulnerable, literally the sole survivor of a nasty train wreck. The other (Samuel L. Jackson's character) a man whose bones broke if he blinked wrong. Hero and villain, set up as mirror images of each other. The villain even says as much near the end. But it obviously didn’t work because the movie basically bombed. The question is why? I think it had to do with choices. Bruce’s character was wishy-washy about his abilities in the beginning. When he takes on a superhero persona, he does so reluctantly and only to be a hero in his son’s eyes. I don’t think that’s a strong enough reason. The villain seems to choose villainy for even weaker reasons. And at the core, neither of them chose to be invulnerable or fragile. That was a genetic crapshoot. So nothing here resonated.

Does that negate the mirror theory?

Or does execution make a difference?

Remember Raiders of the Lost Ark? Indy and the French archeologist Belloq? This is another one where the villain points out that there’s not much difference between himself and the hero, and Indy snarls at him for daring to say such a thing. Except Belloq really isn’t the big villain in the story. He’s more of a convenience for getting the characters into the position the screenwriter needed them to be in. The villains are the Nazis. I can’t really get behind making a case that the Nazis mirror anything about Indy.

So another place where the wisdom bombs.

Let’s try again.

One has to ask why Darth Vader is such an enduring villain because through most of the Star Wars trilogy, he’s pretty one dimensional. Okay, yes, there’s something terrifying on a primal level about that constant asthmatic breathing. That’s the kind of thing that can haunt your nightmares without even needing to see who’s stalking you. But character-wise, he’s an obstacle, a personification of the Empire, until the big reveal that he’s Luke’s father. Then he gets interesting. There’s a touch of that mirroring thing here. Will Luke become his father? And that’s interesting because it’s based on choices. Vader’s as well as Luke’s. 


There’s a lot we learn in the prequels that mark differences between the two, but we didn’t know all that when it was just the original trilogy, so I feel justified in ignoring it. The original movies are where Vader earned the status of immortal villain, and there’s mirroring in those. So yes, mirroring the hero and villain can be effective when it’s done well.

In the movie Crimson Tide, Gene Hackman’s character plays an old-school submarine commander who believes his primary duty is to follow orders. Denzel Washington, his XO, is less rigid. When they receive orders to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against Russia which is then followed by a secondary transmission that is cut off, Hackman intends to follow his last standing order. Washington believes they must wait to get the order verified because the lost transmission could have rescinded the previous order (an excellent example of high stakes if ever I saw one.) The conflict between these two becomes the crux of the story. On a basic level, the two men mirror each other. Old school vs. new school. Follow the orders given or take the initiative to question?


Because audiences demand a winner and a loser, the story resolution gives us one, and Washington’s position is validated, although at the end of the movie, the military board determines that they were both right. And it would have been easy to write an alternate ending that validated the commander’s position, which also makes this movie an interesting example of the principle that the most interesting conflicts are good vs. good--but that’s another post. Although it provokes the thought that mirroring might be most effective in good vs. good conflicts. Hm. A thought worth exploring. But again, that’s another post. The point of this post is whether mirroring is a valid story tool, and this example clearly shows that it adds layers of depth that would be hard to achieve without it.

In fact, mirroring works even when you’re not talking about villains and heroes. P.S. I Love You doesn’t have a villain per se. Holly’s journey back to living after the devastating loss of her husband is the main story line. The mirroring between Holly and her mother, whose husband walked out and never came back when Holly was fourteen, is an important part of the story. Her father’s desertion makes Holly’s loss more poignant because on an emotional level the loss of father and husband mirror each other, but even more important to the story is the mirroring of Holly and her mother. Though the mirroring between the two is there through most of the movie, the screenwriter states it plainly when Holly’s mother says that the worst feeling a mother can have is watching her daughter head for the exact same life the mother led and feeling helpless to stop it. 

Wow.

Powerful stuff that mirroring.

Do you use mirroring in your stories? If so, are you aware when you do?