Larger than Life

At the screening of Marty Supreme that I went to before Christmas, Timothée Chalamet said that his performance was in part inspired by The Last Dance, the 2020 documentary series about Michael Jordan and the Championship Bulls teams of the Nineties. No one ever talks about Jordan as a good person; in fact he is known to be as petty and vindictive as they come, on and off the court. Yet rather than being off-putting, this is one of the reasons that people like him so much; his stylistic successor Kobe Bryant went on to mimic this antisocial way of being in his own career to great effect. Right or wrong, we make excuses for “bad” people when it comes to sports, the arts and many other fields, if they chase and achieve the highest levels of greatness. Some would even argue that being an asshole is a requirement.