I really do wish we taught more of the downs of a legendary artist’s career. I understand why we don’t: there’s only so much time, only so long you can hold a student’s attention, and there is probably the most to learn from the works that were successful…but I’m experiencing just how much there is also to learn from the struggles, from the works—even by a great artist—that didn’t turn out so well.
It humanizes the legend. It turns them into a person, and it removes the illusion or expectation that everything this person did was great or amazing…and that they’re entirely different from the rest of us. ARE they, in the sense that they produced these amazing works of art? Sure. But in every case I’ve come across so far, that’s only a fraction of the total work they did. The rest of it is very normal—which is to say, they failed. A lot. LIKE THE REST OF US DO.
It shows the failure is a massive, massive part of the journey to greatness. We paper over that at our own peril, and it seems to me that the greatest danger to someone on their path the greatness is giving up. When we only see the greatness and we miss out on all the failure it took to get there, it can make us feel incredibly inferior. My work isn’t great, so I must be different. I must not have greatness in me. Except when I look at the full picture, and I see how these great artists failed in exactly the same way I fail…well, maybe they’re not so fundamentally different than I am after all. Maybe I should keep going, like they did. Keep trying to get better.
The movie Josh and watched tonight in our Hitchcock deep dive is what he called the “lowest ebb” of his career. And maaannn…you can sense it. He went from making as many as three movies a year, to two movies in the span of three years, and they were both terrible. This one was better than the last, but only slightly. Hitch is almost nowhere to be seen in either of them. He told Truffaut he only did either of them because he needed the work. I think he was close to giving up. Really, really close. And if he’d given up with Waltzes from Vienna, you and I would never have heard the name Alfred Hitchcock. He’d have faded into the oblivion of mediocrity. It’s a terrifying thought, not so much in that I feel so enormous an amount of empathy for Hitch or for history—I’m sure someone else would have taken his place in an alternate timeline—but it’s terrifying to me because I don’t want to fade into that oblivion. I don’t want to be forgotten, or to give up before I’ve fulfilled my ‘potential,’ said what I wanted to say. That is probably the thing I fear the absolute most, more than anything else.
That’s certainly my own emotional stuff to work through. It takes up an inordinate amount of my identity and self worth, my work does, my art…but it is true. I don’t want to be forgotten. I don’t want to be a minor artist, with nothing of note. And I’m not ‘there’ yet. That’s scary. But I can say tracking Hitchcock’s entire career HAS made me realize that even he was where I am right now, or have been in the recent past. Even he almost gave up, or at the very least was struggling, toiling in relative obscurity, looking for just what in the hell he wanted to say. And he didn’t give up. Thank god he didn’t.
His next movie is The Man Who Knew Too Much, which is considered to be a classic. I’ve never seen it, at least this original British version, but I know the name. It was a breakthrough for him. He found something with it, something that he latched onto for the rest of his career. He didn’t stop searching; he found his voice. His niche. The persistence paid off.
I wouldn’t know that without having watched the struggle that led up to it. He’d just be another success story. Another genius a step—or several steps—above me. Seeing the downs, I feel like he’s much closer. Within my reach, which makes me feel less alone.
Don’t give up. I won’t if you won’t.