A view of the dark triad and evil protagonist concepts from the audience perspective: Akis film

When we look at the past and present of cinema, in many productions that have adopted the classical narrative style, good people encounter some evil on the way, fight against these evils, and prevail against evil, even if they suffer some losses. Considering that the audience identifies with the protagonist, the audience also gains the pleasure of victory over evil in this way, but sometimes the protagonists, on the contrary, are pure evil with demonic features. In this case, viewers who are directed to experience catharsis through evil are dragged into a moral testing ground. This study focuses on the idea that it is not possible to talk about a universal evil in a theoretical sense, and that goodness or evil can ultimately find manifestation in the inner world of the individual, despite our existence having a complex structure and developing with external influences. Thus, a general overview of the theory of evil is presented, the permeability of good and evil is questioned, and evil is examined specifically in the context of the Dark Triad, a psychological theory. In addition, by emphasizing the differences in the concept of character-specific evil in cinema narratives, evil protagonist characters are discussed from the perspective of the audience's empathy and sympathy. By referring to films that will contribute theoretically to this study, each of the evil protagonist characters selected in the analysis section was discussed by pairing them with psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism, which constitute the subheadings of the Dark Triad. In the last part of the study, based on the idea that the most primitive point of creation of evil arises and reflects from ourselves, the narcissism corner of the Dark Triad is touched upon and the creation process and artistic view of the Akis short film are discussed in this context.