Just as we are drawn to complex villains and heroes, so are the two drawn to one another. In fact, the truly epic hero/villain pairs often have as many similarities as they do differences. Sometimes, as Jennifer Crusie illustrates, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to determine which one is the good guy and which one is the bad guy. Just look at Glee’s diabolical cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester and glee club director Will Schuester.
SUE SYLVESTER IS an iconic figure, ranking with Iago, Hannibal Lecter, and Voldemort in her dominance and shaping of the story she’s in. Without her, Glee would just be a song list and Brittany and Santana discussing gay sharks. With Sue as antagonist, the stories rise to the level of Greek drama. Aristotle would have loved Sue Sylvester. As Aristotle knew, the core of classic storytelling is the agon, or struggle; the main actors in the story are therefore agonists. The central or first character is the protagonist because his or her search for a goal begins the story and pushes it forward. In Glee, that’s Will Schuester, a Spanish teacher at William McKinley High School in Lima, Ohio, who was once a member of the now-defunct glee club there. Will is lost, aimless, stuck in a marriage to a harpy, and half in love with the school guidance counselor but unwilling to admit it. His finest moments were when he was part of glee club; as he said in the pilot episode, “Being a part of that, I knew who I was in the world.” Searching for meaning in his adult life, in a rare moment of decision, he went to the principal and began the arduous process of resurrecting the club by assembling a collection of talented losers in a group he called New Directions because they, like him, so desperately needed one.
But Will alone can’t make a story. He needs somebody pushing back against him, somebody with a character equal to or stronger than his, an antagonist who will block him in such a distinctive way that she gives his story a new and surprising form. Will had miscellaneous problems along the way—an odd assortment of kids showed up, he had to fight for practice space, the principal told him he must win Regionals in order to keep the club after the first year—but he could have solved all of those easily if it weren’t for the opponent in his agon, his antagonist, the formidable cheerleader adviser of WMHS, Sue C. Sylvester.
Beginning with her opening rant at the Cheerios in the pilot episode (“You think this is hard? Try waterboarding, that’s hard!”), Sue is riveting, not only because she’s a fascinating character in her own right, but also because she embodies the Three Rules of Great Antagonists: (1) She is much stronger than the protagonist she sets out to destroy, (2) she will stop at nothing to achieve her goal, and (3) despite all that strength and implacability, she’s a vulnerable human being, not a cartoon.
The first rule, strength, can be shown in intelligence, skill, quickness of reaction, and individuality, that sense that the character is not only thinking outside the box, she doesn’t even know the box is there. Sue is smart: she outwits Will at every turn, stunning him, for example, when she got herself appointed as his glee club co-advisor, took the half of the group who could be considered minorities (“gay kid, Asian, other Asian” [“Throwdown,” 1-7]), and then created dissension by paying attention to them while Will concentrated on his lead singers. She’s so skilled that she’s nationally known as the country’s greatest cheerleader adviser (six national titles). But mostly Sue is off-the-wall different. Her threat to Will of what would happen if he was one minute late giving her the club’s playlist became an instant classic: “I will go to the animal shelter and get you a kitty cat, I will let you fall in love with that kitty cat, and then on some dark cold night, I will steal away into your house and punch you in the face” (“Mash-Up,” 1-8). A lesser antagonist would have just told him she was going to do something awful to the cat. An even lesser antagonist would merely have threatened to punch him. Diabolical Sue feints with the kitty and then punches Will when he’s off-guard, leaving him speechless, verbally unconscious. That ability to blindside an opponent, to constantly confound expectation, combined with her supreme indifference to everything but her own goals, gives her character all it needs to achieve antagonist greatness. The only other antagonist on television who has even approached Sue’s megalomaniac brilliance was the Mayor in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and he was an insane demon. Sue’s neither crazy nor demonic, but she is almost otherworldly in her intelligence and her skill at bringing down her enemies.
All that intelligence and skill is backed by absolute implacability: Sue’s goal is so important to her that she will stop at nothing—nothing—to achieve it. She’s ruthless enough to send her Cheerios to spy on the club, to lie to Will’s wife that he’s cheating on her, to blackmail the principal (twice), and to put the elderly school nurse in a coma; as Sue C’s it: “Never let anything distract you from winning. Ever” (“Hairography,” 1-11). She is without boundaries in her defense and promotion of the Cheerios, and her assaults often leave Will speechless in disbelief. Sue, however, is never speechless. Even at the end of the first half of the season when Will had gotten her suspended and saved glee club, she could still one-up him, telling him that although she’d underestimated him, she was going to get herself back into fighting shape and return: “Prepare to be crushed” (“Sectionals,” 1-13).
But Sue is not just supernaturally skilled at the evil nemesis game; she’s also a fully dimensional human being. In the beginning of the season, Sue veered close to cartoonish with her need to dominate everyone around her, but in later episodes, having established her über-antagonist cred, the writers made her vulnerable and therefore human. She has, as Buffy’s Cordelia Chase once claimed for herself, layers. And those layers were most on display in Sue’s interactions with her sister and Becky Johnson, in her short-lived relationship with promiscuous newscaster Rod Remington, and in her broken heart when Will seduced and abandoned her in order to destroy her. When she was forced to hold open auditions for the Cheerios, she chose Becky, who has Down syndrome, and then proceeded to harass her the same way she’d harassed every other miserable student on her team. When Will objected, Sue said, “You’re asking me to treat this girl differently because she has a disability, when it seems to me she just wants to be treated like everybody else” (“Wheels,” 1-9). Sue was absolutely right, and just as we viewers were wondering when Sue had gotten sensitivity training, she went to see her sister, who also has Down syndrome, and treated her with such immense love and kindness that she instantly morphed from Sue the Merciless into a vulnerable, caring woman. When she fell for shallow newscaster Remington and changed into a warm, delighted, dancing lover, viewers were as pained for her when he cheated as we were for Will when he discovered his wife’s big lie. In fact, Sue is more vulnerable than Will when it comes to her heart, which is why his seduction and betrayal in the second half of the first season was so harsh. Sue deserves almost anything he can throw at her, but not that. She is, after all, not a cartoon; she’s a human being. A deadly, devious, ruthless human being, but still a woman with a warm and loving—if well-hidden—heart, somebody viewers care about.
Not content with making Sue an icon of antagonism, the writers of Glee have given her even more resonance in the story by using the Doppelgänger Effect; that is, they have made Sue and Will essentially the same person, with the same fears, the same flaws, and the same strengths. Doppelgängers are shadow selves, literally “double walkers,” often the bright and dark sides of the same persona (think Jekyll and Hyde). In Glee, Sue and Will’s doppelgänger personalities, goals, and motivations make their fight even more vicious because they recognize themselves in each other, however subconsciously. Sue confronted Will with their mirror images when she told him in the second episode, “Face it, you want to be me” (“Showmance”). Will denied it, but it’s true. He wants New Directions to be the choral Cheerios, wants to empower his kids as cheerleading empowers the Cheerios, and to do so, he became as driven as Sue, repeatedly trying shady moves like bringing back an adult who’d never graduated to replace their missing star (“The Rhodes Not Taken,” 1-5). Sue blackmailed Principal Figgins into giving her anything she wanted, much as Will framed Finn Hudson, the school football hero, with a drug charge to force him to sing with New Directions in the first episode. In their mimed fight in “Throwdown” Sue and Will were practically mirror images, to the point that Will said, “I’m so ashamed of myself; she’s turned me into her.” But Sue hadn’t turned Will into her; he always was her. Her opposition just forced him to reveal himself as he truly is, something that’s essential both to his growth as a protagonist and to the success of the club and the students he loves. Will had to learn to cowboy up if he was ever going to be a hero, and Sue’s constant testing is what got him there.
The doppelgänger effect is also reflected in a similar vulnerability: their connections to the leaders of their groups. Sue sees herself in head cheerleader Quinn Fabray the same way Will sees himself in lead male singer Finn. It began with the last shot of the pilot episode, when Will and Finn beamed at each other, happy in their new club, while Sue and Quinn looked down at them from above in the darkened auditorium, eyes narrowed, identical determination on each face. Later, both Will and Sue acknowledged the connection: Will told Finn in “Mash-Up” that “Of all the students I’ve ever had, you remind me the most of me.” Sue told Quinn in “Showmance,” “I’m reminded of a young Sue Sylvester, although you don’t have my bone structure,” and then in “Mattress” (1-12), “You know, I’d forgotten how ruthless you really are. You’re like a young Sue Sylvester.” The fact that Finn has the survival skills of a lemming while gimlet-eyed Quinn can take on and defeat Sue may tell the viewer more about how Sue and Will see themselves than anything else. And the importance of those heirs was made manifest in the look of defeat on Will’s face when Finn told him he was giving up glee for football because of Sue’s manipulations, and on Sue’s when Quinn turned her back on the Cheerios for glee and Will’s support. Those were moments of for both adults: They need the kids more than the kids need them, and that need fires their battle to a new intensity. They’re not just fighting for the clubs that define them; they’re fighting for their own future selves.
And that battle between Will and Sue as good and evil twins led to the satisfying conclusion at the end of season one. At the end of the last episode, “Journey,” Sue did something that seemed out of character: she gave glee club a second chance and a second year. But it was really part and parcel of her excellence as an antagonist. Sue is strong: she’s not afraid to battle Will for another year, and confident she’ll win again. She’s implacable: she gave up her blackmail card with Figgins to get glee another year; whatever it takes, she’ll do it. But, most of all, she’s vulnerable, a feeling human being: she’d have to have a heart of stone to listen to the glee kids sing “To Sir With Love” and not be moved by their love and respect for Will and the club. As she told him, “I’ve proven that I can wipe you and your glee club off the face of this earth. But what kind of a world would that be, Will? A world where I couldn’t constantly ridicule your hair, a world where I couldn’t make fun of you for tearing up more than Michael Landon in a sweeps week episode of Little House on the Prairie? Sue Sylvester’s not sure she wants to live in that world.” Then she added the kicker: “You’re a good teacher, and I don’t like you much, but I admire the work you’re doing with your kids. I really do.” Sue knows that just as she shapes and shoves her Cheerios toward a better future, Will does the same for the kids in glee. And she also knows that she’s a better person—stronger, sharper, more successful—because Will and his glee club are there to push back: the doppelgänger effect at its antagonistic best.
Sue Sylvester is a multi-layered, multi-faceted, multi-motivated juggernaut of ego and need. In a cast of weird and wonderful players, she is the weirdest and most wonderful, the salt in Glee’s chocolate soufflé, the rocket engine that makes the show go, the architect of its form and friction. And because of that, she is one of the great antagonists of our time.
JENNIFER CRUSIE is a New York Times bestselling author whose novels include Bet Me, Faking It, and Don’t Look Down (with Bob Mayer). She is a frequent contributor to the Smart Pop series, and editor of Flirting with Pride and Prejudice and Totally Charmed. She holds an M.A. in women’s lit and an M.F.A. in fiction. For more information visit www.jennycrusie.com.