The Klosterman Files : I Wear The Black Hat (2013)

I (like countless other white middle-aged dudes) feel an inexplicable kinship to Batman’s favorite foe Joker. It’s a gene that activates when you finish college. Folks get a job, suddenly realize there is a glass ceiling on their lives and start rooting for the crazy-ass anarchist who wants to tear down society instead of the billionaire who dedicated his life to order because social inequities most likely killed his parents. I know, that doesn’t make any sense.

That is why Joker has crossed the cultural Rubicon in 2019 and officially transcended his own villainy.

Which is insane, because of all villainous cultural figures, Joker seemed like the most self-explanatory. Before Todd Phillips shined a glimmer of humanity on him, every iteration of Joker portrayed a man who dedicated his life to being evil just because he could. But Phillips understood something: Joker is both a rock star with a constructed persona and a victim of consequences he subsequently decided to rebel against. This video explains it well:

There isn’t a single line about Joker, Chuck Klosterman’s I Wear The Black Hat: Grappling with VIllains (Real and Imagined), but it dedicates a whopping 230 pages to his trade. One thing I enjoy from Klosterman’s later collections is that they are more than the some of their parts. Not only he thoroughly explores precise pop culture phenomenon, but he also makes a greater point: in this case, the point is that villainy is something that happens to you.

In I Wear The Black Hat, Klosterman moves gradually from the general (establishing a definition of villainy) to the downright intimate (examining one’s own villainous shortcomings), which highlights an important point: few cultural villains were explicitly trying to hurt others. According to Klosterman, they were people who knew the most and cared the least in any given situation. But I think it’s more complicated than that.

Let’s examine some of his villains to better understand what they originally wanted:

Joe Paterno (wanted to win football games)

The Eagles (wanted to rock out)

D.B Cooper (wanted to become rich)

Muhammad Atta (wanted to kill people) *

Morris Day (wanted to make people dance)

Chris Brown (wanted to hurt Rihanna because she annoyed him) *

Walter White (wanted to assure the financial future of his family)

Muhammad Ali (wanted to beat up Joe Frazier, but only professionally)

Berhnard Goetz (wanted to kill black dudes) *

Kanye West (wanted to become the Michael Jordan of music)

LeBron James (wanted to become the Michael Jordan of basketball)

Andrew Dice Clay (wanted to be the comedy equivalent rock star) *

NWA (wanted to become successful recording artists by rejecting mainstream culture) *

Bill Clinton (wanted to have sex)

Perez Hilton (wanted to be famous)

Kim Dotcom (wanted access to free music)

Julian Assange (wanted the world to have access to classified information)

Hitler (wanted to kill people) *

I’m not going to systematically do them all, but you already see where I’m going with this. Out of eighteen cultural villains, only four were inherently evil. Goetz is technically debatable, but for the sake of the exercise let’s not give him the benefit of the doubt. That’s 22% The fourteen other became villains because of circumstances they more or less had nothing to do with and courses of action that were very much their own. But they all share one point.

They looked out for themselves.

They had power over a situation and chose to look out for themselves. Empathy and compassion were not part of their wiring, which made them successful, important and hated to a certain degree, given the circumstances. Penn State’s football coach Joe Paterno became a villain because he did not given a shit about kids he never saw. They were an abstraction to them. All that mattered to JoePa was winning football games and win football games he did.

What makes Paterno’s case even crazier is that taking some of his time to get his ex-assistant Jerry Sandusky prosecuted would’ve cost him very little. He had tremendous power over innocent kids and chose not to exert him. He technically never raped anyone, but kids were raped because he choose not to do anything. He’s one of the cases Klosterman examines where villainy just happened, but it was completely fucking warranted.

The most difficult case for villainy in I Wear The Black Hate is probably Kanye West. Although he clearly is more villainous in 2020 than he’s ever been, it’s not really clear what he’s doing that’s affecting other people and which situation he’s actually taking advantage of. That is because Kanye obviously suffers from mental illness and self-sabotages whenever he goes public with anything. I believe in this case, the villain is us.

We see the writing on the wall and don’t really care about his future.

Knowing the most, caring the least

Villains take advantage of a situation, which (unwittingly or not) inevitably hurt others. They most often know the most, but not always care the least. Some of them cared very, very much. Bernhard Goetz cared. Hilter cared. Julian Assange cared. The most villainous a person seems, but more they care about something. But usually it’s the wrong thing and ends up only serving them, like Joe Paterno and his cursed goddamn football games.

Villainy is something that happens to you. People take advantages of situations all the time and are praised for it. But there needs to be specifications: 1) The least other people know about the situation, the better. 2) If you take advantage of a situation, which makes victims, you need to acknowledge the shit out of it. Otherwise, you become a villain. You become the one who knew the most and cared the least about what that knowledge would create, like Joker.