When Success Isn’t An Option
It occurred to me while watching Netflix’s Unorthodox (slight spoilers follow!) this week that something profound had happened at the end of the second episode: Esty, who we know has been an aspiring musician desperately passionate about music in a place where she could not be, was told that she was probably not good enough to get a accepted into the program at a prestigious academy in Berlin.
It was a harsh, almost seemingly unnecessary critique at a dinner party where I’m sure the last thing on everyone’s mind was derailing a struggling woman’s dreams. Her critic points out that most students at the school had been studying the craft for years, coming from all sorts of hard backgrounds, and suddenly this young woman thinks she can spend a few years learning piano, have a sob story, and waltz into the school on natural talent? Now I haven’t see the rest of the series yet so I’m not sure if Esty will ultimately get in, and being this is based on a true story, it seems unfair to critique it on grounds of a character study so I won’t.
But I do want to talk about how I think this scene touches upon something very important and rarely seen in popular cinema and literature: characters who, no matter how hard they try, may not be good enough to achieve their own dreams.
Everyone has a story. In their own way they’re all marked by tragedy. Maybe they’re orphaned, or fleeing a war zone, or subjected to the violence of abject poverty, or are the victim of violence in a different form. There are strata, however unfair, to struggle. When we see these stories we sometimes trick ourselves into thinking of them as outliers. When we watch movies of underdogs overcoming all odds against the backdrop of a terrible situation, we think that it’s a rarity of talent. But it’s more commonplace than that. People are born into places of unrest, of war, of hunger, of neglect, every day. Successfully escaping from a difficult past is a wonderful thing to see, but it also sets a bad precedent: that everyone, no matter how difficult their situation, is equipped with the ability to overcome it, and failing to do so is a personal shortcoming.
We all know the story the way it’s told in, well, stories. They’re a person who’s successes we can get behind. They have a singular dream: boxing, writing, art, music, a particular subject matter of expertise— something visual that relies, in a way, on old tropes of natural talent. They’re an underdog to root for. When they seek to further this dream they often come up against far more privileged and antagonistic peers. They conquer them or turn these “villains” into friends. They catch the attention of someone important who sees their affinity for the work they’re doing. This mentor wants to help them realize their dream. Maybe this journey is riddled with defeat. But it all comes down to a final line in the sand, a final competition where it all needs to be laid bare in a primal, tense test of faith and courage and grit. They win.
But what if they don’t?
I love Rocky. It’s a classic, sure, so a lot of people do, but it’s also a rather unorthodox movie and an absolutely astounding underdog story. And, in the end, Rocky actually loses. It’s a lesson not only in humility, as a man having gotten so far because he was determined enough, but in the fact that hard work does not necessarily mean you always win. But it doesn’t mean you don’t gain anything. Sports movies are an outlier in this sense because not often are they born of natural talent — sometimes it’s the opposite. Our ability to run far or to fight well are contingent, often, but not necessarily all the time, upon the ability to pursue the training required. We all know Cool Runnings (they lose too, actually).
In recently watching the English Game (which I highly recommend) this is illustrated even more clearly. Of course men without strenuous jobs on the daily have more time to practice football. Of course poorer communities don’t have the funds to send their teams to tournaments. Football is spoken of as this coveted thing that keeps the working class communicates together, something that they can gather around. It tells a class story, ultimately, but the implications of the innate unfairness of the sport’s old guard feature forefront in the story.
In this example the victory is won and it would be dissatisfying it if wasn’t. But I like that dissatisfaction. It subverts the old adage of hard work equaling success. Because in that there is a difficult truth: sometimes good people lose at things they believe desperately in. The circumstances of that loss may not be fair, and there’s validity in fighting against a system where oppression is reserved for the less powerful, but even outside of these systems, in the innate nature of the world there will be loss. And it will be by those who need victory the most.
So what do you do with a character that’s lost the core of their being? The one thing that they’ve spent their life striving towards — sacrificing hours, patience, time, and all manner of things? Well, maybe they learn to forgive themselves.
There’s a difference between working hard at something and glorifying the pursuit of a singular goal with no option for failure. I’ve listened to “Lose Yourself” enough times before track meets to get that sense of it all being on the line. But what do you do when the door slams before you even have a chance to open it? What do you do when reality hits and this dream you have, this belief that you can achieve everything you ever dreamed off, is snuffed out right in front of you? I see losing often enough but it’s often accompanied by a different victory: maybe the world now sees this person and they’ll have a chance at winning the next one. The ghost of a chance of some kind of future in their field is present. Sequels might result in a victory, even at the cost of death. The person becomes their dream and nothing more, a manifestation of want that people adore and admire and strive for.
But in those ideas there’s a distinct lack of seeing the unfairness in the world, of portraying characters who have to deal without defeat without any promise of reconciliatory prizes. Because sometimes we kill ourselves trying to achieve our goals, or we neglect people for the sake of them, or we forget all the lessons these movies try to teach us: hard work is it’s own reward.
We need characters who face their realities with bravery.
I talk a lot about Fullmetal Alchemist. It’s my favorite show and is impactful on me, to say the least. And what it illustrated, above other stories at the time, was that failure was foundational to these characters. We envision a very particular end game for each of them. And in the show’s first run, none of them achieve these goals in the happy way we want them to. But they continue living as best they can. Because when everything you based your future on is taken from you, do you go forward until you win or continue to live a good life even if you will never win? Do you become the dream, or do you find a purpose from the people that surround you now? Self, or the many? It’s about time we start seeing the latter as a good thing too.
For reference, I was supposed to be a famous author by now. I’ve spent enough time doing it. I’ve been writing since I was six years old, nearly everyday, so for more than two decades I have written countless pages of work, crafted multitudes of worlds. My parents have boxes of papers with my cursive and print stories, notebooks full of old fan fictions and original stories. My computer houses years of unfinished writings. I got called to the principal’s office for reading and writing in class too much. I spent my lunches in the library. Throughout college, that’s all I did in my spare time. I wrote at lecture. At work. At parties.
And so did a ton of other kids.
I had always been told I would be a great writer. I based my life on that understanding. I couldn’t be anything else. When young authors began to pop up in the market, I wanted to be one of them. I had to be one of them. My life was like one of those movies and I had always seen that even if you don’t always win the big prize, you win something. Writing isn’t a sport. But I treated it like one. I knew the world of sports well enough to thread competition into everything I did. I took losing as character building. But I ruptured at the seams when I realized that writing may be something I fail at. I did, technically, when I failed to publish young. And even if I pushed through to publish older that dream of youthful scholarly fame is long dead. I’ll be 30 in two years. Not old, but not a pioneer in my field of writing. I left my dream behind, as it were, and what did I have to gain for those years of guilting and anger and ripped pages?
I felt as if I’d wasted all those days I could have spent with friends or actually learning and applying myself to my studies to help make the world better. Not even my environmental work took precedence, and I cared a lot about it, because I had grown up believing in this narrative of absolute success at all costs. Because I was trying to escape from something inside of me, there was a hunger unmatched by other desires. I lost sleep. I didn’t eat. I had to do this because if I didn’t…I had no other options.
And then I realized that maybe I did. I couldn’t hurt myself to set up this idealized standard of what a hardworking artist/dreamer could be. We romanticize it in movies and books easily enough. We immortalize these tough, triumphant characters and put them on pedestals of what we should all be striving for. To be anything less is more than a failure for them — it’s death. It’s easy to sit back and watch Rocky run up those stairs and feel that stirring triumph but it’s entirely different when it’s 5:00 am and you’re the one wearing those old, beat-up sneakers.
Have you ever failed so spectacularly that you decided to never do that thing you failed at ever again? I’ve never had to, knock on wood, because I never tried anything I could potentially fail at. I was always an artsy kid so art seemed reasonable for me. But I was never anything more than mediocre. Even the best kids in our school, the most talented artists, are middling in the scope of other top talents. What makes them deserve success any more than others? Because their life is hard? At the risk of sounding dismissive of personal experiences, there are many people with horribly tough lives and backgrounds who do not become the heroes of their field we all imagine they’ll be. Because luck is a part of the game too. If you know someone who knows someone, if you’re able to hone talents in spare time, if you’re in the right place at the right time and, of course, if you’re willing to pay with enough effort. These are not bad things in and of themselves, but if we continue to believe that hard work and hard work alone can give us all the dreams we ever dreamed, we sell ourselves and others short. We begin to believe we’re not enough. Not talented enough. Not pretty enough. Not smart enough. Each thing layers on top of one another, and soon the heroes you held high become tidal waves of expectations that crash around you. It’s not that you can’t be them. It’s that you aren’t. And you never will be.
The end of Little Miss Sunshine is a reflective family story. They all come from different stages in life, riddled with their own problems and pasts. But Olive wants to enter a pageant, so off they go to help her realize this dream of hers. It’s all she wants. Surely she’ll get it.
But at the end of the movie, Olive is cast out of pageantry in California forever.
This child’s dream, this whole movie’s journey, was about endearing us to a failure. Being herself didn’t win her the day, it got her banned. Maybe she’ll participate elsewhere, sure, show them who’s boss. But the movie taught us something else far more vital than dreams and dictations of hard work: that even when you don’t get what you want, you’re going to be okay. Her family joins her on stage, effectively denouncing the entire circus-like affair of pageantry in the process, and showcasing that they will love her no matter who she is or what she achieves in life — and that’s just as important of a message.
I wish we could see more characters fail whole-heartedly. In playing through Final Fantasy VII right now (I’ll stop talking about it when it stops being a really, really ridiculously good-looking game), the protagonist who we embody, Cloud, realizes he never joined the elite military program he spent the entire first half of the game pretending he was a part of — he was just a foot soldier. Lowly, often carsick, and although he ultimately threw the big bad into a vat of weird goo to kill him as said foot solider, he remained ashamed of his failure. This was revolutionary for players. Here, the whole time, this badass lied about his badassery status? For shame. Cloud even admits his assumed persona. And, eventually, he overcomes it (sure, all right, he’s still exceptionally badass, but my point stands that he was a failure — both as a SOLIDER and, per Hojo’s words, as an experiment…actually no, he was unfortunately not a failure there, technically speaking). What makes him realize his worth is the people around him who don’t care who or what he was or is, only that he be himself.
It’s a great lesson in affirmation. I can confirm that having friends helps me realize that sure, I may not ever be a famous writer, but I matter to them. And I want my words to matter to them, more than anything. I’ve changed this small corner of the world and it’s changed me, and sometimes that’s enough. Instead of spending my days thinking about how I’ll never be a good enough writer or escape my listless job and small apartment with mold and leaky faucets, I can call my grandmother and send her letters. I can watch movies with friends, play games with them. I can run along the water and sit with my plants. I can craft on rainy days and help strangers reach items on high shelves. I can learn to bake. I can fall in love.
And while there are so many extenuating circumstances: would I do anything to escape a war-torn country or abject poverty? Yes. But it isn’t often due to an exceptional talent in art of music that people graft new lives onto their old ones. It’s often small things, harrowing journeys and moments of beauty where they’re found. I mean, even Grapes of Wrath taught us that. There is no Promised Land. Life is cruel and beautiful, and we have to try to find footholds wherever we can.
Not everyone has their dream job. Not everyone gets the chance to marry and have children. Not everyone lives by the thing that always drove them. And what choice can we make then? Why don’t you go get a new job that’s less strenuous? Why don’t you take up piano again? Why don’t you just run a little faster, a little farther, each day until you get to that goal? Why don’t you just go back to school? Because it isn’t simple. And sometimes our lives are small and lacking in granduer and resources. Sometimes there is just us and a newly planted garden on the balcony of our apartments, dreams of a life on stage shed like old skin. Sometimes people don’t even have the luxury of dreaming of anything more than a good, honest life.
There is love in failure. There is freedom in loss. Sometime we just have to forgive ourselves enough to find a new path. To see past a cage of expectations. And to become a part of a world outside of our own dreams.
