'Bad Boys'

'The baddest of the 'Bad Boys', the guy who goes all the way back to before the beginning,
has been called many things: the Prince of Darkness, the Tempter, the Bringer of Light. As
portrayed in John Milton's 'Paradise Lost', he was the most beautiful of the Angels before he
rebelled...also the most arrogant. "Better to reign in Hell," he taunts, "than serve in Heaven."
Charisma incarnate, he gets all the good lines and almost all the girls. This fallen Angel,
a primal archetype, is undying: whenever men misbehave we think of him. Robert Lovelace
in 'Clarissa', the Vicomte de Valmont in 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses', 'Don Juan' in print and
in opera, the Willoughbys and Wickhams, wily and wicked, of Jane Austen.
More recently, in real life, fabled Hollywood lady killers like Jack Nicholson and Warren
Beatty come to mind, along with hot tempers Steve McQueen and Sean Connery, and men
for whom 'moderation' is moot-though this is often a consequence of youth, as with Johnny
Depp, Sean Penn, and Colin Farrell. Let's just say there would be very little art without our
attractive little Devils, and centuries of stories would be boring.
The world has always loved its 'Bad Boys', but it wasn't until the movies that we got to
revel in them. Suddenly, in the 1930s, the libertine, gangster, outlaw, scofflaw, public
enemy, serial seducer, bank robber, and sexy barn burner had faces. And what faces!
James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart as bootleggers, the young Clark Gable as a meanie
in black leather, Paul Muni and George Raft as mobsters. Darkness, temptation, light the
black-and-white film of early Hollywood caught it all in deep shadows and grey velvet,
combinations of smoke and pearl. And then there was that gleam, which you cannot get
in Technicolor, those dangerous gleaming eyes with lashes you can count.
Odd how we so often root for the 'Bad Boy', wanting him to succeed, or at least to get
away. Why? Because he's the one with the energy. And though William Shakespeare
wrote that "ripeness is all"… energy is everything. It is light and therefore illumination;
it is movement and therefore change; it tests the boundaries of freedom.' ~ ©Finnegan Bond ± Taipan