Lifecentric

The anti-hero is pervasive in our culture today and that is the story that is a reaction or can be considered a backlash against a hero based culture.  It seems people are not buying that kind of storyline anymore, so I took a 4 minute review of a Game of Thrones fan to see what attracted her to this kind of storyline, where I can only see sex, violence and the unpredictable.

Then there is the show Breaking Bad which has run its course but built a huge fan base

If the anti-hero thing is coming to an end, it isn't with the Deadpool movie, which is now filming Deadpool 2.  Such is the demand for this kind of deathcentric culture, a female stunt driver has already lost her life as Hollywood seek to give audience watchers what it is they want.

Then there are many seasons of House of Cards though who would thought that the arrival of Donald Trump would make it feel more normal rather than absurd.

Both Deadpool and House of Cards use the Fourth Wall technique where the anti-hero character knows that there is an audience.  In the comic version of Deadpool, Deadpool would turn to the speaker and complain about the comic, and in the House of Cards there are many Fourth Wall moments including this one:

The idea of the golden age is probably itself a mythology but it is a lifecentric mythos and it is something that like the "learning organization" is a great idea that so far has not found itself in our society.   Joseph Campbell described mythology as a part of human psyche and founded in our natural unconsciousness and drawn from that.

This myth making will continue and it is a big part of human storytelling.  While the idea of the golden age is an idealism, the reality of dark ages is real and has found among it low moments of human experience and the 20th Century with its two awful World Wars was not free of that.  The big difference today is that storytelling is not passed from one to the other, or have a set pattern of good rising from evil.  Today storytelling is a many-to-many environment where the story can come from any point and emerge in a web of relationships.  Maybe that is why the anti-hero rather than heroic story that repeats itself during our lives. 

The nature of that story will change fundamentally with the arrival of virtual reality, where we will encounter our ancestors as they are captured by virtual reality, we will go into these 3D spaces and meet personal stories that are not global in nature but a collection of stories that emanate from our own families and homes.  From this kind of connection coupled with lives being recorded from beginning to end changes the fundamental construct of story.  If we are rejecting the hero in this day and age and fascinated more by a deathcentric culture, it probably fortells a change in the way story works in the nature of 21st Century relationships.  That we go outwards for these stories simply makes us more focused on exploring chaos. 

Lifecentric stories will be our own stories because unlike any other time in history, the way we keep records of our lives provides too much data to draw lessons from an attention draining entertainment world, for then there will be way too much essential information about the lives we are a part of and the stories of real people who are part of our lives.  That itself opens us up to more rather than less anti-hero or non-heroic stories, because the amount of abuse that is still hidden inside homes is a pandora's box if it is opened up now, but which through more personal and home centered stories will first offer the darkness before we get to the light. 

It is no different to how Nelson Mandela saw the future of South Africa as he took power, that its society needed a truth and reconciliation moment.  As our lives begin to open up, the shadow and secret world of personal life that people do not talk about is going to be subject of far more awareness.  In this awareness somehow we will have to find a way of continuing to hold privacy together as respect of personal life, but with less dark corners to abuse people, it is inevitable that the future journey of the human race is towards lifecentric culture.  We don't have that culture at present.