I’m away from home, at an academic conference “after party” in a too-brightly lit hotel bar, when I meet in person for the first time a much younger but already fairly successful artist-filmmaker. She asks about my recent recognition in the form of a small but prestigious award in our field: “What was it like?” I grope for an answer to such an odd question; she confesses that she has applied for the same award this year. Perhaps she reveals this tidbit because she thinks I am a juror? She is not asking for advice (which might be fine under different circumstances). She can’t possibly be older than 30. On the inside, my bitchface freezes, stone cold. “I am almost fucking 50!” I want to howl. On the outside, my lips form a plausible smile, “That’s great, good luck!” I glide away.
A diary entry from around the same time: Seemingly successful women in their forties are smoking in their bathrooms with the windows open, according to researchers. They are flirting with ex-lovers or compulsively shopping online. “They are driving too fast, drinking too much, or they’re popping Xanax,” one alarmist writes. Guilty as charged, except for the driving since as a (former, born-n-bred) New Yorker I hate to fucking drive. I tell myself that a designer handbag is better than plant toxins injected into my face. It is a “professional necessity.” Why is it this or that? Really, it is an ego “necessity.” A small, discreet portable billboard that says: I am successful, if only to myself, because I need reminding. I want to “win,” but what is the prize? Glory is fleeting. I thought about “power” a lot in my 20s, but it was all tangled up with erotic power, muddling my way through sex and love and relationships. Harder to find my own values and voice when the grounds of approval are shifting under my feet.
When I was in graduate school for film, there was a movie slate from the university equipment pool on the verso of which someone had scrawled in indelible ink: “Orson Welles made Citizen Kane when he was 25. What are YOU doing?” A reminder to all aspirants that the pressure to succeed while still young is enormous and the definition of success – Citizen Kane – nominated for Academy Awards in nine categories, believed by many to be the “greatest film of all time” and more than three-quarters of a century old – is the presumed goal. It’s almost a joke, except that it isn’t. Were we really supposed to be motivated and inspired by a movie that thematizes the height of ambition as self-destruction and raging loneliness?
Halfway into the thicket of this writing, a very different kind of wilderness appears – a park late at night. While I contend with midlife and the definition of success, another artist-filmmaker and professional acquaintance of 15 years has gone missing. He is around my age and two days later he is dead. I am bewildered and aggrieved and feel suddenly stupid and shallow for my hand-wringing musings on the self. I receive a text message – “The search is over” – while removing lice from my daughter’s hair. It is Saturday afternoon and I want to reach out to friends, to process this loss in some way. Instead, I load the dishwasher and beat a dozen eggs into submission for an angel food cake for my other daughter’s birthday. I feed the cat her “special diet” food and postpone my own emotions for the mundane tasks of living and caretaking before me.
One of those mundane tasks is finalizing my syllabus for a class that I am teaching this fall on Biography and Myth. “In the most recent past, people have been forced to experience their own insignificance all too persistently for them to still believe in the sovereign power of any one individual.” This is cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer writing in Germany in 1930. He is perhaps best known for arguing that realism is the most important function of cinema, and indeed here he could be writing about our current societal fears of total irrelevance in the face of the tidal wave of impersonal and depersonalizing new technologies. But the larger point of his essay is to denounce the mass popularity of biography as a genre. “In the midst of a world which has become blurred and ungraspable …” he writes, “history becomes condensed in the lives of its highly visible heroes.”
The Individual is under siege now (or still) – fearful of replacement by robots or sexbots or just bot-bots – and in search of archetypes of authenticity. Because I am a filmmaker, I see our search for heroes in the recent boom of popular documentary biopics, which propose the Good Father (Mr. Rogers) and the Protective Mother (Ruth Bader Ginsburg) as role models; which serve as the sentries of personality and moral choice between which we navigate the ships of ourselves, warning against excess and addiction (Whitney Houston), as well as sudden fame and suicide (Alexander McQueen). Biography on screen tells us what success and failure should look and feel like; it invites us to imagine life as a single, lived story, whole and worthwhile.
“There are more paths to success now, but then there is also this sense that you are competing with everyone in the whole world as opposed to competing with five artists that you know on your block,” observes utterly fantastic writer Chris Kraus in a 2018 interview. We inhabit a culture with visible, often publicly performed (or mediated), yet nearly impossible expectations around achievement and its timeline. That 30-ish artist-filmmaker who I met in a hotel bar did win the award. When I learn of her triumph, instead of feeling like old Wicked Queen Grimhilde of the Disney Snow White franchise, I am unexpectedly and genuinely delighted. The world is so much bigger than prizes or movies or a city park where you should not be alone with despair. I am still smoking in my bathroom and maybe or maybe not being or feeling like a late bloomer. But I mean, late for fucking what? At the end of the day, we’re lucky to be alive.
