Deescalation with Dad... and Kevin Costner
You Are Good
Alex Steed
4.8 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 16 September 2020
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What if dads taught their kids to deescalate rather than to retaliate? To prioritize love over conflict? What if men learned from their trauma, and shared their lessons with their families?
The War is an under-appreciated classic — a kids movie that tries to show the destructive nature of cycles of violence. It is hokey and fantastic, but it dares imagine another way for dads to be. You don’t have to have seen this 1995 Kevin Costner and Elijah Wood vehicle about addressing post-Vietnam trauma to appreciate our conversation about this movie, which has a little something for everyone. And we are joined by friend of the show Kasai Richardson, a writer and educator who knows this movie well because it was a staple in his family. The War helped Kasai to better understand his own father’s struggles with trauma and post traumatic stress.
This one was a joy.
Transcript
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| 0:15.4 | The war is about a wonderful dad who comes home from Vietnam with PTSD and it's about a summer when he is trying to take care of his family and his two kids are trying to make sense of what he's been through and they're |
| 0:22.2 | having a big feud with some other kids in town. |
| 0:27.0 | Whose names will cover at the beginning of this episode and people will learn that it is impossible for me to know more than two names at any given time. |
| 0:36.5 | But those two that you do know, you are, you know the heck out of them. |
| 0:41.5 | To be fair. |
| 0:42.1 | And I do want to apologize to one of my |
| 0:44.4 | favorite actresses whose name that I've been saying wrong this entire time, which |
| 0:49.3 | is like for your whole life. My whole life. Whoa! And I'm referring to Christine Baranski. |
| 0:56.7 | That is her name? Yes. Baranski. I've been calling as you will hear in this episode, |
| 1:01.8 | Christine Brizanski. |
| 1:04.1 | Which is a great name also. |
| 1:08.7 | We were joined by Cossai Richardson who is someone years and years ago I worked in New York at a trace |
| 1:17.1 | magazine and it was a magazine about quote transculturalism which today I think we would associate with a different thing, but this was kind of like a |
| 1:26.4 | global black fashion and culture magazine. And Gassai and I were both unpaid interns who sat across from each other. |
| 1:35.0 | That's great. I didn't know that. |
| 1:38.0 | Yeah, and he's a writer still and also an educator. and when we were talking about guests to be on the show I thought |
| 1:46.2 | Kossi would be great and he is the one who suggested the war and we learn a lot about |
| 1:51.6 | why Kossi suggested that. |
| 1:53.3 | I feel like this is the most that we have talked about someone's actual dad in discussing a movie |
| 2:00.4 | so far. |
| 2:01.6 | The most we have talked directly about movies as a way of processing |
| 2:08.5 | trauma and emotions and what we have been through and and we've kind of been talking about that from the beginning in bits and pieces but it's just very fully a theme here and yeah I guess love that that we talked about that I feel like |
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