A new breed of bad guys

Don't we all kind of like the bad guy?

Some of the most appealing characters ever to grace the silver screen were villains. From the Joker in "Batman" to Kaiser Soze in "The Usual Suspects," entertainment has always thrived on the allure of evil.

Just look at the classic films of the Western genre and you'll see how deeply ingrained this is.

It seems like these films always tell a story of a new sheriff who comes riding into a lawless town with a pledge to clean things up. He jails the gunslingers, shutters the saloons and boards up the houses of ill repute.

In short, this man with a shiny badge is there to make life safe for the schoolmarms and the Sunday school crowd.

But even as the movie nominally supports the sheriff's cleanup, there is always that wink and a nod to the part of the viewer that revels in the lawlessness.

After all, if it wasn't for the outlaws, we'd just be watching a quiet town with people going about their business.

That's what entertainment is supposed to be; an outlet, a fantasy, a release valve for our prurient impulses.

But these days entertainment and news look a whole lot alike.

Just turn on the television. You might find yourself watching an episode of "CSI" followed by an in-depth investigation of some horrible murder on "48 Hours," followed swiftly by the nightly newscast. If your head isn't spinning after a while, you're not watching closely enough.

The newsy shows and showy news make separating fact from fiction and the upright from the depraved a real task.

That worries me. Because the bad guys in these dramas aren't just bad, they're sick.

These are not your father's rob-a-bank, gunfight-at-the-OK-Corral-style bad guys. The guys regularly profiled on these shows are lunatics, serial killers and pedophiles. And they seem to have taken center stage in America.

For example, John Mark Karr made a splash several weeks ago when he announced he was guilty of raping and murdering Jon Benet Ramsey in her Boulder, Colo., home in 1996. It didn't take long for the home movies, interviews with neighbors and lurid details of his life to blanket the news. Viewers seemed to have an endless appetite for information about Karr.

Through the whole ordeal, we were treated to images of Karr smirking like a Cheshire cat and basking in the limelight. He reminded me of the all-knowing murderer played by Kevin Spacey in the movie "Seven."

More recently, news of a Florida congressman trying to seduce a male teenage page in the halls of the Capitol Building grabbed headlines. News coverage has been breathless. Two recent school shooting sprees in Colorado and Pennsylvania have melded grisly murder with sexual perversion. Details on the twisted motives are streaming in.

Coverage of the perverts is now big business. I can't recall how many times I've seen the news magazine "Dateline" film a sting operation where pedophiles are lured to a rendezvous with a child. They're caught on hidden cameras while the host confronts them and the SWAT team hauls them away.

Exciting television, but let's be honest, the deviants are the stars.

In these dramatic shows when the well-coiffed anchor comes riding in on horseback, he's playing the same role of sheriff in the Old West. Those of us who have seen the movie know who'll win, but I shudder to think who some people may begin to root for.

TJ Greaney is a staff reporter for the Southeast Missourian.