Film Courage: Do you think the notion of the anti-hero has become stronger in our culture now?
Dr. Ken Atchity, Author/Producer: Yeah I think that you know the anti-hero has been around for a hundred years or
more maybe longer than that actually maybe all the way back to the Odyssey
because maybe Ulysses is kind of a an antihero he's most of the time he's
lying and he'll avoid a fight by telling the
story that disarms the fight although he gets in a few fights but nonetheless
most of the time he's kind of an antihero that way because his purpose is
his mission you know is to get home and it's not to just defeat this person and
defeat this person so he chooses his battles and I think an antihero has been
with us forever and it will be I mean characters and you know in a lot of TV
series like Breaking Bad you know definitely an antihero right in Ozark so
I mean that I think that anti heroes are all around us and one of the things that
kind of we don't notice is that over the years the audience starts preferring
anti-heroes on what you know one part of the audience anyway prefers them to
heroes and they are there for I'm so familiar to us that we we don't even
notice that they're anti heroes anymore the other part of the audience I guess
the younger part that's interesting too because it is I think a younger need
prefers heroes over overt heroes Iron Man and you know Spider Man and all of
that but I think as people get older and more experienced of the complications of
life they start realizing that what's more interesting to them is an ordinary
woman you know working at the post office becomes a hero against her will
because she she doesn't have a better choice and that a lot of people can
relate to you know I think the older you get the more you can relate to that
it's easier to relate to heroes when you're younger and
think you can conquer the world so I think there's you know ample room for
both and one of the things that people don't think about is the fact that oh we
have so many channels now so many ways in which stories get to us in today's
world that we are hugely sensitive to little story cues that make us instantly
decide whether we want to see a story or not you know take take the remote that
allows you to fast-forward you know you might catch the beginning of a
commercial by mistake because you didn't fast-forward through it but if even a
second of it catches your attention you might watch the whole commercial which
is a story right but or you might fast-forward because you didn't get your
attention and just the fist occation it takes for a person to do that indicates
how tuned into we are two stories you know like you turn on your you're
surfing the channels and you run across the news bit and you hear a couple of
words and you go to the next channel because I don't hear that story again
I've heard it I heard it enough or I I can't stand this guy's story you know I
always thought the most typical human question most characters to human
question is what is your story and if we if we face people from another planet
that would be our first question it would be their first question unless
they already knew our story but in our case we'd want to know what is your
story and first question on a date right like you're going you finally agree to
go on a date because you want to know like what is your story and after the
day you go you know I didn't like her story just didn't like her didn't like
her story didn't get it what happens with the jury you know the two attorneys
telling stories the journey is to decide which which of the two stories till they
by which they they don't by so the fact that we're just surrounded by stories I
think means that storytelling is probably the number one human science
that everyone needs to learn and know and the more you know it the better you
are I mean you can tell a story and you know in a couple of lines like one of
the the shortest stories in American
literature is Richard Ratigan's I think it was called the scarlatti tilt and it
goes like this have you tried living in a one-room
apartment with a man who's just learning to play the viola that's what she asked
the police when she handed them the empty revolver you know the whole story
is they are right and one of my favorite jokes is I want to die peacefully in my
sleep like my grandfather and not like the passengers in his car in the car he
was driving you know so there's a three-act story in one sentence and you
know you get it you don't have to tell a 20-minute joke to get the point across
and jokes are jokes or stories commercials or stories songs or stories
and songs become hugely popular because they tell a story that millions of
people are relating to at that moment in time so it's very exciting to be you
know in this world of storytelling and and seeing masters of it you know coming
along what about the artist is the antihero whether it's the writer the
musician the filmmaker where their own backstory and makes them the antihero
and so maybe people gravitate toward their work more if they knew they had
more of a cookie cutter existence and they write this great thing well okay
yeah he had a charm life it was easy for him but if somebody has more of an
antihero sort of arc to their own life and they're putting out work do you
think people gravitate toward them more you know I really don't get your
question okay it's very esoteric and it feels like
you're in a graduate seminar and and I'm gonna fail because I didn't even get it
oh okay I like I think of it as portrait of the artist as a young man but yeah
try it again okay sorry I think it's my San Francisco influences is seeping out
sorry someone like a John Lennon okay we know
he had his own troubles you know his troubles with the
government you had different things going on turbulent love affairs
different things what it made him more interesting would
we have been as drawn to him absolutely I don't think I mean that's
really his kind of post story in a sense because we didn't know who the Beatles
were at the beginning right we didn't have any idea who they were we just fell
in love with their music and did did it make them more interesting when we
started finding out that they had lives and crazy girlfriends and you know
feelings about the government no actually it made them more human and
which is not necessarily a good thing for an artist you know the the in the
tradition of the Catholic Church artists could say they were divinely inspired
and that was cool I mean that was really good PR that was
like very good spin to have but when you found out that they really weren't
divinely inspired or that they were inspired by the devil and that could be
a good spin to but it what happens is that when a piece of art catches you it
catches you I think completely separate from its maker because it's it's like a
living thing that suddenly you know exists I mean I'll never forget my first
reaction to yesterday you know that amazing song by Paul McCarthy I think
right it's like the minute you finish hearing the song you go that song always
existed I've never heard it before and they say it was just release but that is
an eternal song and and that's the power of a work of art because it's it is now
part of you know it's live it will go on living for some time we don't know how
long but sometime and that when you think about it I don't has very little
to do with the artists very little to do with your knowledge of the artist and
when you start knowing things about the artist
it starts a bit deflating your view of the art it's funny because I used to run
a poetry series at Occidental College and I could invite all my favorite poets
like Bukowski to my series and I learned that there was a two-edged
sword in some cases I loved it like pukowski but in other cases I won't
mention when I discovered that the guy is just a drunken miserable egocentric
guy who who has all these pre-madonna needs and so on he's just a poet you
know coming to read it at college I couldn't read his poetry the same way
anymore and I thought you know thank God I
didn't invite you know some really favorite poets of mine that I hadn't
invited yet because I don't want to find out what they're like and that's kind of
the way I feel about it it's like the artist and his work are two separate
things if you create a great work it goes its own route and knowing about him
is you know maybe it's a plus maybe it's a minus but in any case if I had to
choose I'd rather not I'd rather not and I don't believe it all in a kind of
academic approach that says you have to understand the artist in order to
understand the art I don't really think that's true I think you have to
understand the society that the art appears in before you can understand the
art but I don't think you can understand you know you need to understand the
artist and I also have a real hard time dealing with
okay let's revise the past and say that all of Woody Allen's films are forbidden
because he's a creep you know I I just have a real problem with that because
those films live on their own in my opinion and have nothing to do with with
Woody Allen anymore he created them and I think that's true all the way back to
the beginning of time is that we don't have to know who Homer is in order to
understand the power of the Iliad or the Odyssey you know as some professor said
years ago the Iliad the Odyssey were not written by Homer but by someone else
with the same name you know or the Shakespeare controversy like who cares
who who Shakespeare was his plays are amazing and yeah it's curious to know
more about him but nothing I could learn about Shakespeare would change my mind
about his plays I might change my mad about his plays based on something else
but not on what I knew about the artist so that's how I feel about you know
learning about the artist I don't think we need to you don't think it romantic
romantic sizes who they are let's take someone like a Marvin Gaye and you and
you hear his stories and he was on top for a while he wasn't he went away I
guess to Europe or forget where he went but he came back and we're starting to
get his career back and then tragedy ensues so does that make us more
attracted to his work not me no no I mean it might make me curious enough to
look at it but then when I do let's say I've never heard his work before right
and I I then go listen to it because I heard something
I hit by a vault into it objectively and therefore I kind of resent that this is
the way I came to him you know and and let's say you know Rainer Maria Rilke as
a poet I love like I learned something about him and I go read his poems and I
read it now through the lens of what I learned about him and I don't like that
way I like to look at the work of art itself and I used to teach a course in
which I showed you know examples of works of art and asked the class what
they thought they were worth and I showed old Babylonian statues along with
electrical circuitry and along with you know strange mix of images and a
slideshow and it was very interesting to see what the class reactions were to
something they knew nothing about nothing because then during the rest of
the course it was about learning about these different things which one was
ancient which one was now which was a work of art on purpose which one is just
interesting looking and artists it really comes down to artists what people
agree is art and the purity of that is why I think create create creative
people are superior in a strange way to the media because that's just a pure
thing like you created this is it is it something people embrace or not if
they do then you know it's very very interesting you know it's it's a
successful work of art I'm not saying a work of art has to be successful because
some works of art are not yet successful like Moby Dick didn't sell more than I
think 12 copies during Melville's life and then 20 years after he died it
became a best-seller and that's because the world of 1906 when it became a
best-seller was ready for it you know it was right in that world and it wasn't
ready yet for it in Melville's world but it was the work of art even before that
some people recognized that and saw it that way
so I mean I all we could go on about this forever but I I don't like the what
I call the biographical fallacy of having to know about the artists I think
in fact I think it's a deterrent and therefore it makes it very clear to me
that when people are trying to reject a person's art you know career of art
because he did something bad that just seems nonsense to me links to
me artists are kind of sacred and even priests do bad things right but they're
still supposedly sacred and we're just living in this post truth world where
everything you say is fraught with difficulty because you're going to
offend somebody no matter what and I think we need to get vibe at so we can
keep talking because otherwise we're all going to lapse into kind of terminal
silence well today is Esquire or today's Twitter sort of brouhaha was about the
Esquire cover which and I'm butchering what it was about but the life of sort
of the white middle-class male team in the age of social media it shows a young
boy in a room that you know looks like a middle-class home or whatever okay
that's fine but I guess then yes we're leaving out many people women included
whatever I'm not totally offended by it if we figure out a certain group of
people's thoughts motivations whatever I then maybe we can figure out other
things and have a dialogue about it but I mean
people were very upset over it and and so we were in this new age where
somebody's upset about something every day and as god here's the thing that
everybody you know people are upset all the time but the reason it feels that
way to us is because of social media and communications you know this I mean sure
it's always been that way from the beginning of time people are a set all
the time about everything but we didn't know that you know it took letters
months and months to get across the oceans right before that there weren't
even letters how and how much upset can you show in a smoke signal right but in
today's world every little upset gets tweeted you know gets emailed gets
texted and people are upset all the time so we are in a very challenging frontier
of communication where we have to learn how to continue talking given the fact
that every single word you choose can be objected to by somebody you know
somebody one of my apprentices read a screenplay the other day and said she
absolutely loved it but you must take out the word raping on page 96 because
when raping is used in a non-sexual way to say the raping of Inca civilization
for example you are going to terribly hurt somebody in the audience who has
experienced it on a personal level and truthfully you know the screenplay was
written ten years ago before the me to move I didn't that particular
sensitivity came to the fore and we're at the point where there isn't a word
anyone could say that wouldn't upset somebody somewhere and thank God for
comedians because they they have a way of turning that into fun you know for us
all thank God but we all need to deal with that because otherwise we will
lapse into silence or we will lapse into diatribes which is what what's going on
now we're all we do is yell at each other and we don't really listen because
we know we can't actually talk you know three people can't talk to people can
possibly talk I find with you know my friends like you go with three people
kind of be kind of careful for people for sure two people can actually talk
even if they're violently opposed to each other but we're losing the ability
to communicate because you know people say I was really offended by the tone of
your email what the tone of my email a cow it's so ingenious that I put a tone
into my email it was just like typing letters and
there were just six words and you thought there was a tone well this is
the world we're living in and it's why it's so challenging
you