The Spirituality of Storytelling: The Art of a Good Antagonist

A talk given on January 12, 2025, for the Unitarian Universalist Church of Pensacola

Click here to watch a recording of this talk

Once, in an early draft of a story I was writing, I was writing a scene about Jesus and a Pharisee debating with one another. The scene was pretty straightforward—Jesus would say something, and the Pharisee would get all angry and call him a blasphemer or false teacher or any of those mean Pharisee-words you get used to reading the gospels. Then Jesus would say something else edgy, and the Pharisee would quote the law and call him a name again, and it’d go back and forth until I felt like Jesus had made his point. It moved the plot forward enough. It made an interesting spiritual argument. There was a problem, though. The scene was awful. Every time I read it, I kind of wanted to fall asleep.

I tried rearranging the dialogue, restructuring the progression… adding more adjectives about how mad the Pharisee was or how loudly he spoke… but try as I might, he just stayed boring, grumbling about this and preaching about that. I think I could have kept rewriting until I had him jumping up and down, screaming his head off from the first moment, and the scene would have been just as boring as it was at the beginning, and after banging my head against the desk long enough, it made me start to ask: Just what is it that makes for a good antagonist? What is it that makes an antagonist compelling and satisfying? Granted, not every story has an antagonist like this—some have more of a faceless antagonistic force—but in the kind of stories that do have a villain, whether a person, institution, or a monster, what is it that makes for a “good” bad guy? What I discovered as I read and researched was a section of narrative theory describing the rules of the character (or set of characters) that I’ve come to think of as “The Adversary.”

The Adversary has deep roots. Stories thousands of years old from every spiritual tradition have some sort of Adversary character (or characters). In fact, the word Satan in Hebrew isn’t a proper noun—it doesn’t refer to a spiritual entity—but literally translates to “the Adversary” or “the Accuser.” It’s a role that can be stepped into by anyone as long as they meet certain criteria. And here’s what I learned as I read about Adversary—the Adversary is as essential in writing a good fictional story as it is in living a healthy spiritual story. Your main antagonistic force is that which forces your protagonist forward, bringing to the surface what your story is actually about, whether fictionally or spiritually.

So, this morning, I want to look at three main pieces of theory I found about imagining good antagonists—about crafting an Adversary in our heads that can actually be helpful rather than flat or harmful. Hopefully, in learning to imagine better stories for the page, we can also imagine better stories for ourselves.

Okay, so here is piece number one: The Adversary, whatever form it takes, embodies the antithesis of whatever the protagonist values. Whatever the protagonist stands for, the Adversary stands for the opposite.

When a story is coming together, if it’s going to be a story that resonates, it’s crucial that the story be about something. Now, what it’s about can be as complicated as you want, but generally the story needs to be about some central value(s): Justice, Responsibility, Growing Up, and so on. If you look at the whole arc of a story—how the protagonist grows, what the climax is—it should be pretty clear what central value(s) the story is about. For example, look at the climax of The Dark Knight, and you see that the story is about justice. Look at the climax of To Kill a Mockingbird, and you see the story is about non-judgment and facing bias. Look at the climax of the gospel stories, and you see that the story is about nonviolent love and truth. Once you have that value, generally speaking, the protagonist is going to embody it in some way—or at least struggle to embody it. Your antagonist, then, is going to be someone who embodies the antithesis of that value. K.M. Weiland writes:

Thematically pertinent antagonists are the linchpin to any successful story. You can write delicious protagonists, snappy dialogue, riveting conflict, and deep themes—and still, your story can fail simply because the antagonist was taken for granted as a leering, two-dimensional bad guy. Somewhat non-intuitively, the character who provides the entire foundation for a successful story is not the protagonist but the antagonist. This is so because the antagonist is the one who connects the conflict to the theme.

In other words, if your main character is striving to embody justice, then your Adversaries are going to embody either injustice, apathy towards justice, or injustice masquerading as justice, or probably all three at different points. Each Adversary acts towards that anti-value, functioning to help the protagonist clarify and refine that value in themselves. In The Dark Knight, since Bruce Wayne is struggling to embody justice, the Adversary, the Joker, has to embody an antithesis to that justice—violent, meaningless chaos. In To Kill a Mockingbird, since the protagonists, Atticus and Scout, struggle to embody non-judgment, the Adversaries, Bob Ewell and the legal system, have to embody bias and self-justifying fear. In the gospel stories, since Jesus struggles to embody nonviolent love and truth, the Adversaries—the devil, the religious elite, and the Empire—have to embody violent power and half-truths. The Adversary in each story serves to help refine the protagonist’s relationship to the value and draw them forward into greater creativity and efficacy in embodying it. At the end of the day, that’s the Adversary’s main job.

Now, spiritually, here's what I found particularly interesting about the Adversary’s main job. If both the protagonist and the Adversary have to be dancing around this same central value, it means the protagonist and the antagonist, in a way, have to co-create one another. One cannot exist without the other, because if only one existed and not the other, it wouldn’t be a story at all. Discovering both is a process of what Thich Nhat Hanh would call “inter-dependent co-arising.”

Noticing this, I couldn’t help but wonder—is this not also true of real life?

If we’re projecting our inner stories onto a more or less neutral, objective reality, don’t the people or forces we see as antagonists really say more about us than what is objectively good or bad? Think about it. Call to mind an Adversary in a story you’re living right now. They can be a co-worker, a family member, an institution, a politician… anyone giving you a hard time. They aren’t everyone’s Adversary, are they? They’re yours. Why is that? Instead of labeling them as a mustache-twirling, objectively evil villain, might it be more productive to ask: What value is important to me that is in some way threatened by this Adversary? Do they threaten your boundaries? Do they cause suffering to vulnerable people? What does that say, then, about what this story is really about for you? What is your central value or values? Clarify that, and you find yourself with more agency and more options than you did before. The Adversary, whatever form it takes, embodies the antithesis of whatever the protagonist values.

And that brings us to the next theory: The Adversary clarifies both external action and internal growth.

So, let’s say at this point your story has started coming together, and you have a protagonist facing off against an Adversary, and now it’s time for them to do something. The question is… what? Maybe the protagonist starts off by doing something stupid. Courageous, but utterly ineffective. They fail. Now it’s time for something else to happen. What? This may seem like a basic question, but can you imagine if the character just went out and did the same thing again and again until they either got lucky or died trying? That’s the format of episodic stories like Coyote and Roadrunner or Transformers, but neither of those really qualifies for the kind of “good” story we’re talking about here. No, instead of doing the same thing over and over, the protagonist has to learn. They have to try again based on what they’ve learned. Whatever value the story is about, the protagonist's action against the Adversary should lead them to clarify something about that value—either a misunderstanding about its nature, a more effective way to embody it, or even just a stronger commitment to it—and in some way, this, too, is the responsibility of the Adversary. In his textbook on storytelling, Robert McKee writes, “A protagonist and [their] story can only be as intellectually fascinating and emotionally compelling as the forces of antagonism make them.”

In The Dark Knight, the Joker is the reason Bruce Wayne has to leave his Batcave, and by the end, he’s the reason Bruce Wayne has to develop a more robust, higher-stakes understanding of what justice even means in a place like Gotham. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Bob Ewell and the legal system are the reasons Atticus puts on his suit to go to court, and they’re the only reasons Scout really understands non-judgment and kindness by the end, having been forced to confront her own biases against Boo Radley. In the gospels, Satan is the reason Jesus is able to articulate his values of nonviolent love and truth to begin with, and the religious elite and the Empire are the reasons he has to go out and embody them publicly.

The Adversary, it seems, is able to best do their job when they are seen as coaches and teachers, motivating the protagonists to look inward and outward to figure out what needs to happen next, and again, how much more true is this in spirituality? Teacher Ram Dass often tells a story about setting up his puja table—the altar he sits at every morning to pray. On the puja table, he has a statue of the Buddha, a painting of Christ, a photo of his beloved guru, and, next to them, a photograph of Casper Weinberger—Ronald Reagan’s secretary of defense. He said he starts every morning by sitting down and saying, “Good morning, Buddha… hello Christ… greetings Maharaj Ji…” then giving Weinberger the side eye and saying, “hey Casper.” When asked about it, Ram Dass taught that he kept that photo there because, of all of the Adversaries in his life, he harbored the most hatred towards Weinberger, who deeply offended his values of peace and humanity. In the midst of that, though, Ram Dass never wanted to miss what Caspar was trying to teach him and coach him to do. He didn’t want to forget the fact that his Adversary didn’t just exist to make him bad, but to invite him to clarify his values, work through whatever stood between him and those values, and hone his strategies towards embodying those values effectively. “Our relationships are the vehicles for our awakening,” Ram Dass said. “They teach us how to open our hearts when we least want to.” The Adversary clarifies both external action and internal growth.

And that brings us to the last, crucial piece of theory I kept finding. This, also, may seem obvious, but it’s often not. The Adversary has got to be interesting.

Think of a good villain. Book or film, or TV show. I can guarantee you that the villain is not a two-dimensional mustache-twirling façade I described earlier. No, there has to be something about them that makes them particularly compelling. It’s popular right now to say that the best way to do that is to make your antagonist relatable—human and empathetic. Steven Pressfield writes, “…to make the villain a pure monster is a cheat. [They] must be recognizably and relatably human. If our story is to achieve its maximum power, we, the writers, must deliver to the audience the blood-freezing realization that a part of them, too, believes that greed is good, and that they, too, under a certain set of circumstances, would be capable of performing the unspeakable.” Maybe. I think there’s a lot of truth to that, and it does explain the success of several great and multifaceted villains. I don’t think that’s the whole truth, though, because it fails to account for the real over-the-top monsters like Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs, Pennywise from It, or even the shark from Jaws. Call me callous, but I don’t have much empathy for them, yet I simultaneously can’t look away and very much need to see them defeated. They’re interesting.

A good example of this? Darth Vader. 1977. The original Star Wars trilogy had audiences literally lined up around the block to get into theaters to see the films, and the movies’ main Adversary had a lot to do with that. He’s powerful. Visually mysterious. (I mean, what’s behind the mask??) He has an incrementally revealed backstory that misdirects and keeps you on the edge of your seat. (I won’t spoil it in case you haven’t seen it yet.) Now, fast-forward to 1999. Someone had the great idea to go back and give Vader his own origin story trilogy, but this meant choosing a new villain, and in Episode One, The Phantom Menace, that meant the wholly forgettable Darth Maul. Say what you will about the expanded universe, but in that first movie, Darth Maul is the oatmeal of all villains. He’s visually sort of interesting, I guess—I mean, he has horns and a two-sided lightsaber, so that’s cool. Other than that, though, he has zero backstory, zero motivation, and literally three lines in the whole movie. You could argue the real villain of that movie is bureaucracy, but I would argue back that’s equally as un-compelling. The Adversary wasn’t really an Adversary at all, and audiences noticed.

In stories, we have little patience for an uninteresting Adversary. They strike us as false. We lose interest. In the stories we tell about the world, however, do you ever notice that our standards are way lower? We’re not satisfied with a two-dimensional mustache twirler on the page, but we’re totally fine with one in real life.

Think again about an Adversary in a story you’re living right now. Imagine them in their natural habitat, surrounded by their little Adversary friends and trinkets and whatnot. Now, let me ask you this: Are they interesting? Really? Are you curious about their backstory—what Adversaries in their own lives brought them to be so insufferable? Are you curious about what they may really need that might be leading them to act the way they act, and how they’re not getting it? Do you consider them in the fullness of the messy, complicated circumstances that brought them to where they are now?

Or do you imagine a Darth Maul?

Flat. Basic. Just… bad.

I have a feeling that if we imagined the Adversary in our stories with the same standards we had for Adversary in fiction, our conflicts might take on a very different texture. We might start to ask different questions about how we can show up in that story to embody our central values—what it might take to act effectively against such a dynamic Adversary. We might be able to muster up more understanding or even some level of empathy and respect, and as Thích Nhất Hạnh once wrote, “When you understand, you cannot help but love…” which is the real transformer of all conflict.

And it all goes back to this one narrative foundation: The Adversary has got to be interesting. Use that standard, and your whole story changes.

I think there are too many underdeveloped antagonists, both in our fiction and in our world. There are too many flat characters out there, leaving us blindly flailing in resentment and discontent, leading to wandering stories that stall out and never go anywhere we want them to go. These aren’t really The Adversary. Worst-case scenarios, these half-Adversaries win—no protagonist ever taking the story seriously enough to step up and do anything. In the best-case scenarios, the half-Adversaries hit a stalemate, running around in an ineffective and episodic cycle of Roadrunner and Coyote madness with no end in sight. If we took the task of imagining good antagonists seriously enough—if we really held them to the standards of The Adversary—it would change everything.

So, whether it’s about clarifying the value (or anti-value) the Adversary embodies… letting them effectively draw us into external and internal work… or doing the work of finding out what actually makes them interesting… The Adversary can make all the difference. They can empower us and give us clarity. They can catalyze us towards becoming who we really are. They can remind us what we’re fighting for, and give us what we need to move forward into victory.

Whatever that looks like for you, may you be a good enough writer of your own story to really embrace the role of the Antagonist.

There’s not much of a story without one.