A recently successful Hollywood director, said that his inspiration for writing a screenplay, later turned into a film, came from meeting his sister’s boyfriend. “We just hated him on the sight,” he said. The maligned couple lasted four years and then broke up. The sister was apparently relieved and the screenwriter later plowed his hate towards creative and financially rewarding career ends.
Hollywood is like that. You take a negative (abusive parents, bad marriage, a drug problem) and you create a TV series, or a film or a video game. In ten years, I have met many people here in Los Angeles and almost none of them are really true friends, except for one or maybe two. Meanwhile, every year I create another “enemy” or someone whom I mistake for a friend when they are merely a passing alliance at a studio or production company. Sometimes those enemies become my friend again when they are out of work, or the stupid joke I played on them is forgotten.
But hating and despising people even when it is justified, is a self-destructive act. It eats away at the fiber of our soul. There may be self-interest at work in heeding Christ’s call to “love thy neighbor as thyself”. But Christ himself is the star of a book with many tales of killing, betrayal and lying. It makes for some fantastic reading.
The problem is that mere love without revenge makes for very bad storytelling. Hate makes Hollywood run.
Here in Van Nuys 
To quote Conan the Barbarian (channeling Ghenghis Khan):
“Conan, what is best in life?”
“Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women.”
Having enemies is as human as having friends. The depths to which we will sink are part of the same human nature that allows us to soar to great heights.
I recommend Kurasawa’s “Rashomon” to get a feel for this aesthetic.
For many of us, adversity is our muse. Competition and conflict drive our imagination and our work.
Hating and despising is a fundamentally human act – and it can reinforce your identity and sense of purpose in life in a similar way that harmonius personal realtionships can.
I belive that it is important not pretend like humans are aberrent when they are aggressive, competitive, and cruel. An animal’s default state is typically one based on short term personal self-interest – and we are animals too.
Yet, what makes us human? I would argue that our ability to act collectively, to become selfless, to model our lives after a figure like Jesus – these are traits that make us definitively human.
It is no wonder story telling is based on what you call “hatred” – toeing that line between acting like a selfish animal or being caring, and cooperative, is perhaps a definition for the human condition. And the human condition – it sells.
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It is most fantastic that Jesus, who had never pursued stardom, instead were greeted with humiliation and betrayal followed by a nasty death. Then that book you mentioned laboriously attempted to restore him as a star, as if out of guilt at times.
There are good people too. And then, there are those who are just very lost and refused to find their way out. Leave them alone if you’d like. They need to first admit that they need help. And may God help Hollywood.
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