For as long as there have been great heroines there have been terrible dudes trying to win their hands in marriage, and this week’s release of Why Him? – where James Franco plays the prospective husband to Bryan Cranston’s disapproving father-in-law – brings to mind ghosts of bad boyfriends past. Whether he thinks it’s OK to keep his wife in the attic or he’s murdered a bunch of kids, if you met these characters in real life, you’d hopefully think twice before considering them husband material. These guys, and the tropes they represent, are the most nightmarish suitors in cinematic history. Be warned.
The mercurial manipulator – Mr Rochester, Jane Eyre
What was it about the Brontë sisters and their thing for brutes and brooders? If Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska) was your friend, you’d need to have a talk with her about this guy who keeps his mentally ill wife in the attic and didn’t tell her about it. She’s humiliated on her wedding day when the truth about Bertha Mason – AKA Mrs Rochester – is revealed, forcing Jane to flee and nearly die on a stranger’s doorstep. She’s been through enough. She doesn’t need that shit. But there’s something sympathetic about chronically ill-humored Mr Edward Fairfax Rochester (Michael Fassbender) – he’s a broken man, a self-described “defrauded wretch”, who recognizes his mistakes, albeit a little too late.
Honorable mentions: George Wickham, Pride and Prejudice; Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights
The commitment-phobic babyman – Rob Gordon, High Fidelity
Remember when we were young and saw High Fidelity for the first time and thought Rob Gordon was cool? We couldn’t have been more wrong. John Cusack’s character is so self-involved he organized his record collection autobiographically. He had an affair while his girlfriend Laura was pregnant, which led her to terminate the pregnancy, and then he asked to borrow money from her. He shows up at his exes’ apartment to scream outside their windows, or to call them from the payphone on the street. He believes he’s better than other people, and defines himself by his favorite records presumably because he’s dead inside. And if all that’s not bad enough, he’s a DJ. His big epiphany is that he should make his girlfriend a tape with songs that she’ll like. Wow. What a breakthrough, Rob. This movie is frequently labeled a “romantic comedy”, but it’s really a horror. Laura would be better off with Ian, the tantric Steven Seagal-looking ponytail who knows kung fu.
Honorable mentions: Ben Stone, Knocked Up; Jeff from Rear Window
The rich priss – Caledon ‘Cal’ Hockley, Titanic
Billy Zane was actually the worst thing to happen to the Titanic. When his character Cal Hockley stepped on board, he transformed the ship of dreams into the ship of waking nightmares. He’s controlling, he sends his creepy man-servant to follow his fiancee Rose (Kate Winslet). He calls Rose a slut, throws her breakfast on the floor, he orders dinner for her. When the Titanic begins to sink, he tries using someone else’s crying child as a ploy to get on a lifeboat. Once he’s on the boat, he starts pushing people off, claiming they’ll “swamp it”. In a true Looney Tunes moment, he chases Jack and Rose around the ship with a gun. We discover later that he’ll turn the gun on himself in the market crash of 1929 when he loses everything. Titanic’s most important message: don’t marry the rich guy, marry the guy who’ll screw you in the rich guy’s car.
Honorable mentions: Ashley Wilkes, Gone With the Wind; Prince Humperdinck, The Princess Bride
The good guy disfigured by love – Anakin Skywalker, Star Wars
“I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere.” With conversations like this, maybe Queen Padmé Amidala should’ve sensed early on that she was dealing with a lunatic. Apparently, Anakin’s tiny Jedi braid and the way he thought dictatorship sounded like a pretty good idea weren’t red enough flags. Somehow Padmé shrugs off the biggest red flag of all: Anakin murdering the Tusken Raiders. She actually comforts him, saying, “to be angry is to be human”. I get that you’d want to stand by your man if he needs to avenge his mother’s death, but he also killed women and children. It’s almost romantic that he turns to the dark side to try save Padmé’s life, but he’s beyond redemption when he goes on another killing spree. At least she never had to see him create the Death Star or float around in his bacta tank looking like a cave-dweller.
Honorable mention: Sir Thomas Sharpe, Crimson Peak
The monstrous stalker – Dracula, Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Dracula is a dark, mysterious dude, and some women dig that. He’s got a cool castle and sick armor, he can give you eternal life. He’s rich, he’s royalty, he’s a romantic. He believes in destiny and lighting a shitload of candles on a date. But the thing is, he also kills people and he’s still pretty hung up on his dead wife. He made Tom Waits go crazy and eat bugs. When he’s in vampire mode he stops looking like young Gary Oldman and more like Big Foot or a huge bat or a bunch of rats in human form. His hair looks like a butt, and sometimes he whips out a sword at dinner. If you’re freaky enough to want to get with Dracula, you’ll have to become a vampire, which sucks, and you’d have to compete with three other devil’s concubines. Even before he was undead, he impaled people and roasted them, boiled their heads in a kettle, skinned them alive and hacked them to pieces and then drank their blood. Maybe that works for Elisabeta or Mina Harker, but you don’t need that guy scuttling around your castle walls in the middle of the night. You’re better off with Swamp Thing.
Honorable mentions: Creature from the Black Lagoon, King Kong
