Why 2024 Became the Year of Smiling Movie Villains

This suspicion of happiness in Hollywood movies may only get worse because happiness is becoming right-wing coded

This is a guest post by Joseph Holmes.

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This October, three movies came out where a smile was a primary feature of the story’s villains: Joker: Folie à Deux, Terrifier 3, and Smile 2.

The Joker sequel was about the famous clown prince of crime who needs no explanation. Terrifier 3 was a threequel to a viral low-budget hyper-gory horror franchise about what’s essentially a supernatural killer mime. Smile 2 is about a demon who makes people see smiles everywhere when it possesses them, and then makes them smile when the possession is complete. After which it makes the person kill themselves to pass the demon along to the next person through the trauma.

But these aren’t the only major movies this year with villains built around the smiling theme. Dune: Part Two’s Feyd-Rautha is a sadistic killer whose cool smile is set in contrast to his brother Rabban’s constant rage. The villain of The Substance is Denis Quaid’s Harvey, who smiles all the time and pressures his stressed-out female employees to smile too. The titular Longlegs is a laughing villain who forces his victims to kill themselves and their loved ones.

Obviously, there have always been smiling villains. Grinning bad guys are scary because when a dangerous person is smiling, they believe things are going their way, which is bad for their victims or the heroes. Hence the smiling Wicked Witch of the West, Joker, or Hannibal Lecter

But also plenty of the biggest and most iconic villains are not built around their smiles, such as Darth Vader, Thanos, Agent Smith, Sauron (or Saruman), Hans Gruber, Voldemort or Commodus. These villains scare us because of their rage, their stoicism, or their arrogance. They sometimes smiled, but that was not their persona.

The second connection these smiling villains have is that so many of their plastered grins are built around falseness. Joker is a false fantasy persona that the depressed and mentally ill Arthur Fleck creates to feel better about himself. The smile demon possesses people to smile against their will. Harvey pressures his female TV stars to smile even when they’re not happy, forcing them to be false to themselves to keep their position.

This makes sense when you think about how our culture is experiencing a massive, consistent decline in mental health. Dr. Jean Twenge, author of the book Generations, has shown that Americans’ depression, anxiety, and suicidality have gotten worse with each generation since the silent generation. These symptoms are largely driven by the growing isolation and disconnectedness of people, not living with their families or in robust communities, and people having less experience going on confidence-building adventures when they’re kids while spending a lot more time on the extremely addictive and stressful online world (as Dr. Jonathan Haidt writes about in The Anxious Generation).

But this is not how the majority of depressed people interpret their depression. They interpret their depression as an accurate depiction of the world. The world is on fire, climate change is going to kill us, we’re about to enter World War III, the next president will end democracy, capitalism is exploiting us, etc.

This depression is so acute in younger generations that it’s affecting language. As TikTok’s “etymologynerd,” Adam Aleksic, points out:

I think one of the most defining features of Gen Z slang is our generally pessimistic attitude toward the future. There’s a lot of talk of “rotting” when we talk about “bedrotting” or “brainrot.” And then there’s the apocalyptic language when we talk about “doomers” or “doomscrolling.” This overall attitude of “it’s over” is echoed through the proliferation of dystopian or fatigued language: “I’m dissociating,” “I’m checking out,” “I’m spiraling.” But here’s the thing: this widespread perception that society is somehow declining or getting worse is very different from previous generational attitudes. If you look at flapper slang from the roaring 20s it was overwhelmingly positive. People were drinking “giggle juice” and talking about funny things like “the bees knees” or “the cat’s pajamas.” No one was saying things like “kms” or “everything sucks” or “I want to die.” They were excited because they felt optimistic about themselves and society was trending in a positive direction. Which, if you think about it, is pretty ironic. We have a much better standard of living today than we did in the 1920s. And it’s like we want to return to that era with our emphasis on “cottagecore” and nostalgia and tradwives.

Adam also points out one likely reason we’re so prone to pessimism about the future: lack of control.

I think a large part of this angst is the feeling that we don’t control our own narratives anymore. Everything’s run by big political or corporate forces. It’s out of our hands. We can’t do anything to stop global warming or the constant school shootings. So it’s no wonder we’re stuck in this pervasive sense of catastrophe fatigue.

This is born out by the data on Americans’ greatest fears. According to an annual study by Chapman University, in 2014, Americans’ top ten biggest fears were public speaking, heights, scary animals, drowning, blood/needles, claustrophobia, flying, strangers, zombies, and darkness. But by 2023, that had wildly shifted. Instead, it was corrupt government officials, economic/financial collapse, Russia using nuclear weapons, the US becoming involved in another World War, people I love becoming seriously ill, people I love dying, pollution of drinking water, biological warfare, cyber-terrorism, and not having enough money for the future.

What many of these have in common is the shift from being afraid of things you have some degree of control over (like public speaking) to things you have a lot less control over (like corrupt politicians, the economy, war, or loved ones dying). Christopher D. Bader, sociology professor at Chapman, argues this factor particularly drives the fear of government officials. “When it comes to the government, there’s great uncertainty because the average person doesn’t know how it operates but it has a huge effect over their lives.”

In such an environment, a happy person arouses suspicion. This was vividly expressed in Taylor Tomlinson’s bit on dating someone with no emotional baggage.

I didn’t know if was going to work out with my boyfriend when we started seeing each other because he’s… fine. He’s good. I don’t mean he’s perfect. … But he has no emotional baggage whatsoever. And I don’t know if I like that. You know those people who’ve never been through anything? He goes to bed at night and he’s like, ‘Oh, good night’. He’s not like ‘Oh, death.’ He has none of that. He wakes up in the morning and he’s like ‘Oh, it’s morning’ he’s not like ‘Why?!’ He’s got none of the stuff that I’m working through. He whistles, you guys. Recreationally! Just walks around whistling like everything’s great. I’m like, ‘Do you know who the president is? Like, this is disrespectful. And a little suspicious.’

If the world is a dark and evil place, then anyone who’s not evil or crazy is going to be depressed. A person who smiles has to either like the evil that’s going on or be disconnected from reality, either because they’re privileged or insane. Worse, when those people are in charge, they force the normal, good people to act like they’re happy as well or suffer reprisal or social isolation (such as Harvey in The Substance, the Joker mob in Joker: Folie à Deux or the demonic possession of the Smile demon in Smile 2) .

The problem with this is that it’s almost entirely the opposite of the truth. Most things that are out of our control in life are getting better, or their danger is deeply exaggerated. (As I’ve written about here, here, here, and here.) Violence is going down. Poverty is going down. Lifespans are increasing. Climate change will not destroy the world. Racism is going down. Government censorship is getting less severe. Women have never had more opportunities. Men have never had so many people raising awareness about their issues. And most of these good things are happening because of our society’s institutions like capitalism, free speech, democracy, and religion, rather than in spite of them.

Most of the things that are getting worse are things that are within our control. Things like loneliness and lack of meaning in life are the primary drivers of our mental health decline. And those can be solved by getting plugged into communities, becoming religious, regularly attending church, finding meaningful work within those frameworks, getting married, and starting families. In fact, simply changing your attitude towards suffering helps you overcome depression, if you have a “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” attitude rather than “my trauma defines me” attitude. Men specifically can overcome their depression by finding tangible way to work to make other people’s lives better.

Some of this year’s movies allude to relationships and community being a “way out” of the darkness. Smile 2’s heroine admits at the beginning of the film that the source of her past fall from grace was due to her pushing people around her away instead of getting help from them. The Substance also shows its heroine having a chance to get out of her situation through a real-life relationship, before she turns it down.

But these movies also reinforce general powerlessness to “my trauma defines me” thinking. In Smile 2 you are powerless to the demon’s influence once it’s forced you to witness the trauma that it infects you with. Longlegs likewise portrays anyone he encounters with his magic as completely under his control, so that their only choices are submission or death. Rejecting the Joker persona doesn’t work out very well for Arthur Fleck. And Paul Atrades is only able to defeat Feyd-Rautha by becoming evil himself.

This suspicion of happiness in Hollywood movies may only get worse because happiness is becoming right-wing coded. So many of the things which lead to happiness have become associated with conservatives: marriage, family, religion, mental-resilience thinking.

But there are two Hollywood films this year with smiling villains which gave a realistic picture of how to to deal with our internal darkness. Thankfully, they’re also two of the highest-grossing movies of this year: Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine.

Inside Out 2 takes place in the head of Riley Andersen, where her personified emotions try to work together to keep Riley happy and healthy. Joy (played by Amy Poehler) is the leader of the group but gets forced out by Anxiety (played by Maya Hawke) because she appears to be better at keeping Riley safe from danger.

Both Joy and Anxiety are depicted as smiling characters. Joy smiles because she pushes negative thoughts away. Anxiety also smiles, but her smile is just a nervous one that masks fear. It’s when Joy realizes that she’s been protecting Riley from fear by underestimating the dangers of the world, and is able to convince Anxiety that she’s protecting Riley by overestimating the dangers of life, that they’re able to work together to make Riley’s life better.

Likewise, in Deadpool & Wolverine, both heroes are at rock bottom in depression. Deadpool because he doesn’t feel like his life is important. Wolverine because of mistakes he’s made in his past. But when they are given the choice by their smiling villains to gain that purpose or relief from guilt at the expense of others, they choose to fight, and self-sacrifice for others instead. (Deadpool explicitly refers to this as being “Marvel Jesus”) At the end, both heroes are smiling again.

Our society makes it easy to see depression as realism and happiness as naiveté or wickedness. And sometimes that’s true. But believing that reflexively can also prevent us from seeing when happiness is a sign that people are doing something right, and therefore keep us from finding our way out of the darkness as well. The truth–if you’re willing to follow it–will ultimately put a smile on our face.

Cover image: Smile 2