Loving Failure

[thehefner]

There are few things more intriguing in the world of art than failure.

I mean, there's the famous kinds of failure where something is ahead of its time, flops, and is later fully embraced by later generations who can look down upon the foolish plebeians in times past. But consider how many hundreds of works--many (most? all?) of which were the results of hard, painstaking work--flopped, and stayed flopped, drifting into obscurity without even so much as a cult fanbase keeping it alive with memory?

The question that might immediately arise is why it failed in the first place. Was it entirely the fault of the artist? Was it ahead of its time, a time which still has yet to arrive (a point I'd hold for AI: Artificial Intelligence and Ang Lee's Hulk)? Was it too dumb, too smart, too weird, too ambitious, too safe? Was it excessive or deficient?

It fascinates me, sometimes to the point of mild obsession. Maybe it's my own fears of that happening to my work. Or maybe it's that feeling of discovering something that no one else has, to show it off to the masses and yell, "Look at what I've found!"

Maybe, as I fear deep down, I just want to feel superior to others for appreciating something no one else does, a feeling that fuels many a cult work. Some fans become rabid converts and missionaries, smiting those they disagree with on the internet, and lord knows I've been one of them on more than one occasion.

But none of that answers the question of why the work failed in the first place. By asking these questions, I think one gains a much better understanding of what makes Great Art Great, either from a creative standpoint or from what provokes audience response.

Now, when it comes to novels, poetry, or music, I usually let those be. I have neither the time, patience, nor interest to sift through all those losers for one that deserves attention, if not love. I did that with plays for a little while, but even that proved too much of a slog.

Because at heart, I'm not quite attuned with the Great Works in those respects. Not in that what that I am with film and comics. Those formats, when Great, thrill me in ways that make me want to sing their praises on blogs and message boards, to thrust them upon friends with maniacal fervor, to dress up like characters that no one knows, and to quote lines that no one will get. I live to find those films and comics.

And yet, much of what I love isn't Great. Nor lower-case great. Nor even good. They are failures. And I think what draws me to them is that so many of them had ambitions they just couldn't attain. Some films are downright quixotic, which I think is much, much better than a film that takes little risks at all.

I'll take a noble failure (example: Gangs of New York) over a safe success (example: The Departed) any day of the week.

I have more thoughts, but they're specifically comic-related, so I'll give them their own post later.

Comments

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

The majority of modern Great Works are actually remarkably reductivist self-congratulatory bullshit that plays to a very narrow bandwidth of critics by treating their limited experiences as somehow profound — see also: The vast sea of literature that presents the anxieties of middle-class white heterosexual men who are either a) moving out of adolescence or b) moving into male menopause as The Most Important Things Ever. There's a reason why that Cracked.com parody-trailer for the perfect Oscar-bait film is so funny.

To that end, the most unforgivable sin that any work of art can commit is to treat itself as more intelligent and thought-provoking than it actually is. Even Ed Wood was propelled by a childish sense of enthusiasm, rather than a snobbish need to prove how clever he was.

[sharkbites.livejournal.com]

Explain to me how something like Idiocracy barely made noise and something like Titanic is hailed as a modern work of art.

[harper-knight.livejournal.com]

Possibly because Idiocracy.. clever as the concept may be.. makes me want to find the voiceover guy and whack him with a hammer until he shuts up?

[foxhack.livejournal.com]

Titanic was a success because of two reasons:

One, women flocked to see DiCaprio.
Two, men flocked to see DiCaprio die at the end.

(Exchange genders when required.)