"If Villain Bad, Then Why Hot?" How Consuming Modern Villain Narratives and Redemption arcs Obfuscates and Sanitizes Real-World Villainy

Cinema has always been a lens by which to explore the human condition. Often, movies are cited as a mirror with which to reflect human choice and fallibility. Rarer is the acknowledgment that film can be a framing device for the understanding of the world. Cinematic socialization, often generalized by “the socialization of the media”, allows for social learning from within the proscenium of the…