G.O.A.T. Villains. No.25 - Bohdi (Point Break)

100% Pure Adrenalin

I’ve been looking forward to this. It’s not just that I love a villain (who doesn’t?) but that most of the top villain lists I’ve seen by the likes of Empire & the AFI, frankly, leave me cold.

For a start, they always contain so-called villains like the Alien. In my book, the Alien, or the Xenomorph, beautifully conceived by Hans Giger & brought to life by Ridley Scott & later, James Cameron, is a monster not a villain.

And if you’re going to start including monsters, then how do the likes of Jaws & the Jurassic Park T-Rex not make your list? (Top 25 G.O.A.T Monsters will be coming soon. Heroes & Anti-heroes, too).

So I’ve decided to do things my way, based on the primary dictionary definitions of villains & monsters.

villain:

noun

1. a cruelly malicious person who is involved in or devoted to wickedness or crime; scoundrel.

monster:

noun

1. a nonhuman creature so ugly or monstrous as to frighten people.

That means everyone on this list will be a person (Ok, there are a couple of grey areas still, as you’ll see, but trust me when I say I can argue the case for them). And yes, the likes of Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Sauron, given they have risen from the dead, are extraordinary & unnatural, belong on the monster list.

The other thing that bothers me about most countdowns I’ve seen, is that every entry gets barely a perfunctory paragraph written about them. That’s all you have to say about an iconic villain? Five lines?

It’s clickbait. Pure & simple.

So starting from now (& don’t worry, these will be drip-fed rather than comprise the only content I’m posting for the next 25 weeks) I bring you my take on the Top 25 Greatest Of All Time villains from across the narrative arts.

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Just look at him. Peak Patrick Swayze (RIP) taking on the role of Bohdi AKA Bodhisattva - in a foreshadowing of the insidious allure of modern guru figures - as the primary antagonist to Keanu Reeves’ Johnny Utah in Katheryn Bigelow’s Point Break (1991). Executive Produced by her husband, James Cameron.

Despite a career spent avoiding any roles that might pidgeonhole him as a teen idol (Patrick turned down a multi-picture deal at Colombia when he was young & broke, knowing he might become a flash in the pan) Swayze - according to his personal assistant Rosemary Hygate - worried whether being a villain would sit well with his fans.

Not only was he fresh off blockbuster success with Demi Moore & Oscar-winning Whoopi Goldberg in 1990’s Ghost, but he’d never played a bad guy before.

But the character, according to those who knew him best, was very close to his heart. In I Am Patrick Swayze, Lori Petty, who played Tyler Ann in the movie says:

Bohdi and Patrick both led with their heart. But they want the world to be not what the world is, but what they want it to be.

Swayze was a gymnast, world class cowboy ropist, & ballet dancer of incredible talent, who only gave up his place as a principal in the Eliot Feld Ballet Company after years of excruciating pain from a major knee reconstruction following a football injury when he was 18, made him reasses his life.

But that wasn’t the end. Just the beginning.

Athlete, martial artist, broadway dancer… he would do something,‘whatever the stakes’. Or, as his Road House co-star Sam Neill put it: “He was willing to pay the price.”

Bohdi is a surfing, sky-diving, bank-robbing, adrenalin junkie. And Patrick, finally given an excuse to try sky-diving when Point Break was green-lit, was so taken with it that he got up at 4am every morning before work to jump out of a plane.

Cue the studio lawyers sending him cease & desist letters. But ironically, sky-diving wasn’t the biggest threat to his health. Swayze said:

It’s very funny because I had to battle insurance companies to get to do the skydiving in the movie, and I never came close to dying once, but they never said one word about me getting my brains pounded in by the biggest surf on this planet. I almost died six to ten times. I thought I was outta here.

His long-time friend Rob Lowe - who he met on the set of the Outsiders - added that Swayze once taught him & some of the other cast how to hop on freight trains in L.A. “He wanted to be the bad ass” says Lowe “today, they call it Big Dick Energy.”

Those cease & desist letters from the studio? He ignored them.

In fact, his brother Don also reveals in I Am Patrick Swayze that after principal photography had finished, Patrick went back & duplicated all the stunt shots Jake Lombard had performed.

And guess whose scenes ended up in the final cut? Utterly unheard of in the industry. As Lowe says:

This was before Tom Cruise was doing his halo jumps. And for my money, it’s a better shot. And if you don’t think Tom has remembered all these years that Patrick did it, then you are mistaken.

Swayze was the OG - fixated on authenticity, & it shows in the film.

Bohdi is a villain so good he almost has you rooting for him. A villain so good, that you probably do love him. After all, who’s he fighting against?

This was never about money for us, this was about us against the system. The system that kills the human spirit. To those dead souls inching along the freeway in their metal coffins, we showed them that the human spirit is still alive.

Johnny Utah is certainly enchanted. In fact, the whole film plays upon the seduction of Keanu Reeve’s Agent Utah by the wild side of Bohdi’s existence. There’s a clear through line of escalation from surfing, to skydiving, to the bank heist he forces him to be a part of at the film’s climax.

Bodhi genuinely believes his cause is a noble one. That’s part of what makes him so seductive. “He’ll take you to the edge” says Tyler “then past it.”

He exists at the demarcation line between lived experience & selfish indulgence. There’s something about his cajoling of Utah that we’ve all felt the lure of in our lives, between the twin extremes of daring & danger.

But he doesn’t kill. In fact, up until the final robbery, he’s never killed.

The humanity in Bodhi speaks to the depth of Swayze’s portrayal & the vulnerability he brought to every character he played, even with his machismo.

Bohdi is not a murderer, a sadist, or a sociopath (He’d likely be eaten alive by some of the villains lurking higher up this list) & he seems to genuinely care about the Ex-Presidents, all of whom are powerless to resist him, but he is a villain, even if he doesn’t believe it himself.

His morality & words about fighting the system are really a noble toga he drapes over his will to experience the ultimate rush.

And he goes to villainous lengths to get there. After showing Johnny a video of Tyler trussed up with a knife at her throat he uses to coerce him, he says:

I hate violence. I could never do that to Tyler man. That’s why I need Rosie.

Like all true villains, his cardinal sin is egotism. It’s his selfishness & hubris that leads to the death of his crew & his ultimate undoing.

Going for the vault in the final heist - breaking the group’s rules of engagement for a final thrill - costs him. His blind spot, & every egotistic villain falls foul of one, is the armed cop who fights back.

Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation causes your worst fears to come true.

Bohdi duly hesitates before he shoots the police officer, but by killing him thereby completes his journey to the dark side of criminality.

Here is Christopher Booker in The Seven Basic Plots:

Researchers have found that violence and cruelty has four general causes: greed and ambition; sadism; high self-esteem and moral idealism. Popular belief and cliched stories tend to have it that greed and sadism are dominant. In fact they’re vanishingly small. It’s actually high self-esteem and moral idealism - convictions of personal and moral superiority - that drives most acts of evil.

Bodhi’s sense of rightness & moral superiority is what makes him so dangerous. Everyone falls under his spell.

Yet his words ultimately ring hollow. Even when he’s lost his band of Ex-Presidents & returned Tyler, he’s still seen riding off in a jeep with the money he claims was never their goal whilst Utah writhes on the ground, tangled up in his strings & Roach’s bloody carcass is dragged to & fro on the desert floor by his ‘chute.

There is usually always what John Yorke, in his book on story structure, Into The Woods, refers to as a ‘hidden symmetry’ in narrative, whereby protagonists & antagonists are in a mirrored waltz with each other; their fortunes dovetailing amidst the Nietzschean idea that what you fight, you become. Bohdi represents the darker side of Johnny Utah’s flaw for recklesness.

Both of them pass up opportunities to take the other man out, even going so far as stopping their partners from shooting mid-aim. Reeve’s Utah, like everyone else, is simply unable to resist the magentic pull of Bohdi’s personality; the potent mix of indomitable energy, iron will, seductive reasoning & fanatical faith befitting the most dangerous charismatics.

Utah: The ride is over.

Bohdi: Oh no no I say when it’s over.

Gurus always lure you in. They aim precisely at your weakness & insecurites, offering excitement, & radical shifts in perspectives & habit.

True to form, even when Johnny Utah ends a two-year chase by catching up with his nemesis on Australia’s Bells Beach amidst the 50-year storm, & even after he bests him in a fight by slipping handcuffs on him whilst underwater, Bodhi still seduces him one last time.

And vanishes into the waves.

100% pure adrenalin.