It’s always easy to celebrate the heroes our movies, TV shows and comics foist upon us. We like people who set themselves a part from the rest and show us a better way.
It’s even easy to celebrate the villains.
Who doesn’t like the fantasize about being Darth Vader standing on the bride of The Executor, or cooking up some meth out in the desert a la Walter White (just me?).
But do you know who doesn’t get their due in pop culture?
The dickhead.
Dickheads sit in that weird space between hero and villain. They’re not evil, per se and they’re very clearly not good either. As a kid, I learned very quickly that dickheads, though, were just as vital to genre storytelling as the heroes and the villains. Movies had them, TV shows had them and even cartoons like The Transformers had them (looking at you, Starscream)
However, when it comes to dickheads, there was always one actor who I knew, even at an early age, was the greatest of all, the alpha and the omega.
Of course, I’m talking about Mr. William Atherton.
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| * (Well, that’s what I heard) |
While Atherton has been in a good many movies and has a pretty diverse resume, when most people think of him, they immediately go to three movies; Ghostbusters, Real Genius and Die Hard. The reason for that is in those three movies, Atherton became to alpha dickhead, the dickhead all other dickheads thereafter are measured by.
Let’s start with Walter Peck. Remember him? Of course you do. He was the EPA stooge who seems to have it out for the Ghostbusters the moment he sits down in Peter Venkman’s office. Sure he sites concerns about hazardous materials being illegally stored in a major metropolitan area, but you also kind of get the impression he just woke up that morning and wanted to fuck with someone.
Even when I was a kid watching Ghostbusters, I was absolutely amazed by the way Atherton played Walter Peck. There’s a realness to the way he plays the EPA pencil pusher with an ax to grind, which actually makes the character that much more of a dickhead. We’ve all meet people like Walter Peck. Hell, some days, we are Walter Peck.
It’s always been my contention that Ghostbusters 2 failed to capture the hearts of fans not because it was somehow lesser than the first, but because it lacked one Walter Peck.
Atherton played Prof. Jerry Hathaway in Real Genius. People tend to credit Val Kilmer credit for making it more memorable than it probably had any right to be. Those people, however, are wrong. That distinction goes to Mr. William Atherton.
While I didn’t realize it at the time (because I was 6 and wouldn’t go off to college for another 12 years) Prof. Jerry Hathaway is not only an asshole college professor, he’s EVERY asshole college professor. I think to prepare for this role, Atherton traveled to every single university and community college in the country and had sit down meetings with the least popular professors on campus. Then, he spent months melding those personalities into one, giant, jack-off. Seriously, think back to your own college experience and I promise you’ll come up with at least five Prof. Jerry Hathaway’s. In the Georgia Southern University Comm Arts program alone, I can think of four off the top of my head, and that’s just one department!
And then there’s Die Hard.
In 1988, Atherton brought his dickery skills to a new, yet strangely familiar character. While John McLain was saving to good recreational cocaine using yuppies of Nakotomi Towers, intrepid reporter and dickhead with an audience Richard Thornburg was on the scene. This movie is actually a milestone for Atherton’s characters as the character is actually named “Dick”. Before, the title was left to the audience to bestow upon Atherton’s characters. But here, the filmmakers took a more active role. I guess they realized that we’d seen Atherton play this character before, so why not make things a little fun?
So how big a dickhead was Atherton in Die Hard? Well, he did manage to out McClain’s identity on national TV, putting not only McClain in danger, but his wife and the recreational cocaine using yuppies being held hostage by Hans Gruber. All in the name of getting a scoop on the shitty local news station.
It makes me sad that Atherton doesn’t get the cinematic respect that he seemed to enjoy in the 80s and early 90s.
Oh, he’s still around, I know. But not like he was.
Personally, I think we’re all worse for his lesser presence.
