Antkind

by Charlie Kaufman

function of art, would be appropriated by business, by government, by opportunists in order to control, to limit, to malign the human spirit. Now I have, through my own carelessness and perhaps my own ambition, destroyed this last great hope of civilization—a singular work by a man both completely outside and completely inside this travesty we call popular culture, a man who, because of his own struggles, his own alienation, his race maybe, was able to show us ourselves from outside of ourselves: the de Tocqueville of our collective unconscious. The thing Jung wrote about has been commandeered by corporations. Yes, we all have the same dreams now, but that is because we all watch Grey’s Anatomy. We all live in Shondaland, for the love of God. Now we dream of Tide and Buick. We long to be Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie. Our shadow self is Scar from The Lion King, and rather than struggle to incorporate even that anemic animated cartoon darkness into our being, we attempt to eradicate it, because Disney has taught us that Scar is evil and must be destroyed. But in this wasteland in which we find ourselves wandering, in which our faith is continuously tested, in which