Arc de Failure

The appeal of stories about failed artists

I look at some of my favourite movies—Amadeus, Frances Ha, Inside Llewyn Davis—and have to wonder why a lot of them are about artistic failure. The first among those three was even the inspiration for this publication’s name. And yes, calling a man who was Emperor Joseph II’s court composer—not to mention a teacher of and collaborator with the likes of Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, and Schubert—a failure is ludicrous. But at least with the play/movie version of Salieri, he was someone who aspired to be an transcendental composer but fell short and was tormented by it, and died thinking he’d failed.

I was 27, the exact same age as the title character in Frances Ha, when I first watched that movie, which follows Frances (Greta Gerwig) as she simultaneously has to come to terms with the twin facts that (1) she and her best friend Sophie are drifting apart because Sophie is getting married (to an investment banker, no less!) and (2) she is not going to make it as a professional dancer. I don’t even like Noah Baumbach that much and find many of his movies annoying (Marriage Story is an unintentional comedy), but I do adore Frances Ha. It’s surely because at 27, I too was forced to re-imagine my future. Luckily, unlike Frances, it had nothing to do with having to give up my dreams since I was only worrying about graduating from law school without a long-term job. Still, I had definitely failed since almost everybody else in my class was planning out their well-compensated futures in the metropolitan location of their choice. Watching Frances fail and suffer and plunge to some truly cringeworthy depths, yet still emerge in the end with a new vision for her future, was heartening in a non-saccharine way.

Inside Llewyn Davis is a much darker film and it ends without any hint of a satisfying resolution (quite literally, as it starts and ends with the same scene). We can easily see a future for Llewyn where he dies sick, cold, bitter, and hated or forgotten by all, including (or especially) by those closest to him. But even if that happened, I felt that Llewyn could take satisfaction in that we, as the audience, had just gotten to hear his music, and it had been wonderful. And while most forgotten or failed artists will never get a film made about them by the Coen Brothers, they will all leave behind something that may one day be discovered by some kind of audience posthumously. That’s the last-ditch hope of all artists, that by leaving something behind that will outlast us, all the injustices and putrid luck we faced in our lifetimes may still be remedied.

There’s also an admiration I have for these characters in how they relentlessly pursued their dreams. In Amadeus, Salieri goes from some small unnamed Italian village to Vienna at teleport speed as a young boy, skipping merrily to his father’s opportune demise. Both Frances and Llewyn struggle with their day-to-day finances and shelter, though the New York City of Frances is a much kinder place than Llewyn’s New York City of the 60s. In Inside Llewyn Davis, the dominant feeling is exhaustion: Llewyn’s thin ratty coat can’t prevent the winter from sapping his strength, and he’s constantly having to crash on his friends’ couches, never able to fully relax in the comfort of his own home. In contrast, constant humiliation is the ever-present element in Frances Ha.

But why would we want to be always tired and humiliated? Last year, I read Emile Zola’s The Masterpiece, which follows the protagonist Claude as he arrives in Paris as a younger man in the late 19th century, determined to make it as a painter. There’s a quote in the novel in which Bongrand, the relatively successful artist and a big brother figure to Claude’s group, actually expresses his envy for Claude and his band of brash young nobodies:

“Haven’t I told you scores of times that you’re always beginners, and the greatest satisfaction was not in being at the top, but in getting there, in the enjoyment you get out of scaling the heights? That’s something you don’t understand, and can’t understand until you’ve gone through it yourself. You’re still at the stage of unlimited illusions, when a good, strong pair of legs make the hardest road look short, and you’ve such a mighty appetite for glory that the tiniest crumb of success tastes delightfully sweet. You’re prepared for a feast, and you’re going to satisfy your ambition at last, you feel it’s within reach and you don’t care if you give the skin off your back to get it! And then, the heights are scaled, the summit’s reached and you’ve got to stay there. That’s when the torture begins; you’ve drunk your excitement to the dregs and found it all too short and even rather bitter, and you wonder whether it was really worth the struggle. From that point there is no more unknown to explore, no new sensations to experience. Pride has had its brief portion of celebrity; you know that your best has been given and you’re surprised it hasn’t brought a keener sense of satisfaction. From that moment the horizon starts to empty of all the hopes that once attracted you towards it. There’s nothing to look forward to but death. But in spite of that you cling on, you don’t want to feel you’re played out, you persist in trying to produce something, like old men persist in trying to make love, with painful, humiliating results. . . . If only we could have the courage to hang ourselves in front of our last masterpiece!”

It’s both an inspiring and dispiriting passage. On one hand, success is not all that it’s cracked up to be, and the difficult journey there is actually the best part. On the other hand, success is not all that it’s cracked up to be and the difficult journey there is actually the best part.

What if you get neither, though? Recently, I went to a bachelor party of a law school friend of mine. Before going to law school, I’d heard nothing but horror stories of how cutthroat, cold, and crushing law school was, to the point where my expectations were so low that overall, it wasn’t a terrible time at all. But it also wasn’t a particularly great time. If those years turned out to be horrible, I at least would’ve had a memorable time. But unfortunately, I now fear that they might’ve been the worse: largely forgettable. At my friend’s party, I couldn’t help but notice I was the only law school friend. And if I were to ever have a bachelor party, he’d be my only law school invite too. Shouldn’t we both have more to show, in terms of close friends, from our mid-20s? Aren’t those important years?

What else might I have been doing if not for law school? My parents and I had frequently fought throughout my college and immediate post-graduation years over whether I should go. The deep flaw in my argument was that I had no alternative plan. One moment fills me with Millennial cringe, when at a post-graduation lunch, they demanded to know what I wanted to do instead if not law school, and all I could say was that I wanted a career that would let me “travel.” Truly moronic, yet in retrospect, what could I expect from my 22-year old self whose main work experience had been shifts at on-campus pizza parlors and tutoring gigs? My parents had always been suspicious of work experience, treating it like something that could distract me from the ideal path they imagined for me. A part-time job at a café or restaurant when I was in high school was dangerous exposure to drop-outs, drifters, and “hippies.”

 I like to imagine a what-if situation where a dumber, braver, and/or more selfish version of myself  had said “Fuck off” to my parents and did what I wanted at that time, which I think was probably something like move to NYC and write (whatever that meant). It’s what all the truly elite kids were doing, not being browbeaten into going into law. Just recently, Buzzfeed News shut down. Before that, it was new Gawker. Also, Bookforum, Mic, not to mention the constant layoffs at the places that are still carrying on, their flesh become carrion with each passing day. As if such professional insecurity wouldn’t have been bad enough, I also shudder to imagine what kind of writer I would’ve turned out to be had I been thrown into that environment as my early 20s self. 

Almost certainly, I would’ve become one of those Asian American writers whose work I cannot stand. In the Buzzfeed diversity era of the 2010s, I’m sure anything I wrote that was too honest about my thoughts and experiences as a 2nd generation straight Asian American guy would’ve been too unwelcome, too incongruent with the unfurling realization of a well-educated and urban and inclusive youth culture. Obama social liberalism was going to take us all to the moon, and there I’d be, being a killjoy with my complaints and observations. I’d best just shut up. I firmly believed I should too.

I never expected to love Tick, Tick… Boom!, but it was one of my favorite movies last year. At least one of its songs ended up being on my top 5 Spotify playlist at the end of 2022. One thing I’ll give myself credit for is that I’d genuinely thought Lin Manuel Miranda not only directed the movie, but also had written its music. I’d thought it was his original tribute musical to Jonathan Larson. Being a Miranda hater, I was ready to scoff at the movie, especially the music. But by the end, I conceded that I’d loved the movie, particularly the music. Then I realized why: Larson had written it, not Miranda. At least I’d proven to myself that I’m not just some unreasonable hater.

But I digress. Given the enduring success of Rent, nobody can call Larson a failure. But he did die before witnessing the extent of his triumph. Maybe he died with the fear that his lifelong achievement would open to bad reviews, public ridicule, and quickly become forgotten. Also, Tick, Tick… Boom! is more about his struggles leading up to Rent. The story opens with him lamenting turning 30 without much to show for it artistically. The way he goes about it, you’d think he was a professional athlete, feeling the effects of multiple torn ACLs and a bad back.

My 30th birthday was a non-event, in the best sense possible. I’d already had my breakdown birthday when I turned 21, so I thought I’d wisely gotten my aging angst out of the way, well ahead of schedule. But recently, I turned 35, and I think I’m feeling what a lot of people feel when they turn, which makes sense because I’ve always thought I’m about 5 years behind everyone else. Blame Asian American emotional stunting.

One of the things I think about is the trade-off I’ve made in pursuing writing as a side pursuit. What I’ve gained in avoiding the culture industry rat race, I’ve lost in finding a like-minded community with whom I’ve been able to grow older. My old college friends and I’ve drifted apart, many of them well-established married professionals with at least one child. I already said I didn’t make a lot of close friends in law school, not that I wanted to; I have dreadful memories of seeing law school couples emerge from constitutional law class, debating what they’d just learned. Maybe whether Justice Blackmun or Justice Brennan was the greater justice of their era. If that made them happy and excited, then all the joy to them. But I’d shudder to be them. I can hardly look down on them, though. They’d at least had the conviction to follow their true interests.

“Do what you love.” How true is that, though? What seemed like gospel when I was growing up now seems naïve at best, horribly entitled at worst. Between his Stanford commencement address and the iPhone, Steve Jobs may be more responsible for decimating an entire generation than polio. Clearly, we can’t all do what we love, unless we sincerely believe some people truly love tanning leather or cleaning bathrooms. So who gets to do what they love? Thousands upon thousands of college graduates each year were told they deserved to make a comfortable living making videos with their friends, posing prettily for pictures, or thinkpiecing about TV shows. The realization that there wasn’t nearly enough space for all of them explains much of so-called cancel culture and woke ideology today, but that’s a topic for another piece.

Speaking of that community, does it even exist? Freddie deBoer says it doesn’t, if it ever existed in the first place outside of the wishful thinking of social-climbing writer types. In Frances Ha, Frances ends up losing her soulmate of a best friend. Just like in Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends, where a similar gulf opens between two best friends. Llewyn Davis is disliked by most, even hated by those who once loved him, and presumably, nothing will change for the rest of his life. Salieri dies alone as an afterthought in a mental asylum. In The Masterpiece, Claude’s supposed brothers from his youthful days of artistic revelry all fade away and he too meets a lonely and miserable demise.

Even with one of my other favourite films, Whisper of the Heart, which is about the burgeoning dedication and dreams of an aspiring writer in her pre-high school days, I can’t help but think of that quote from The Masterpiece. For Shizuku and Seiji, their school-day dreams of her becoming a writer and him becoming a violin-maker may be their best days.

Recently, I’ve had discussions with friends over the untenability of the very concept of a professional writer in the wake of Buzzfeed News’ shutdown, and what seems like the inevitable collapse of Buzzfeed itself (unless it successfully becomes the AI-driven content generator that Jonah Perretti appears to have always wanted). A recent piece in The Culture We Deserve Substack noted how we have too many writers in America, specifically journalists. I’ve always heard we have too many lawyers, but too many writers? Never heard that said aloud like that.

If it hasn’t been readily apparent for a while, the culture-class Millennial dream is dead. There aren’t enough customers to warrant a merchant class that peddles pop culture takes or cute fiction pieces. Maybe there will be an onslaught of recently unemployed writers who’ll have to let go of the ideal of a creative’s lifestyle supported by corporate security, that such a thing simply cannot exist in this day and age. Maybe the extremely privileged can still give it a go, but most of us will have to accept reality and, I don’t know, become Patreon writers as a side hustle. It may even lead to an improvement in culture, with people’s creative expression no longer tied one-to-one with their livelihood. So Frances, Claude, Llewyn & Co., their days were always doomed from the start. But at least they will have had those days.