I don’t usually write about books whose authors I interview, but this one raises a few particularly rich issues. One is that, despite having been written by a (young) Gen-Xer, it’s not necessarily about bad movies. It’s about movies that without critical, commercial, or cult success; they might be bad, or they might not. The goal is not to find reasons to ironically appreciate, but to just appreciate.Another is that it exhumed my onetime fascination with box-office duds. I racked up many hours flipping through the slightly-out-of-date Leonard Maltin guides laying around my childhood home, reading every entry headed with not merely two asterisks, not merely one asterisk, but nothing short of the sweet and terrible “BOMB”. How much early-onset schadenfreude drove this curiosity I can’t determine, but don’t we all feel some sort of primal need to deconstruct failures of any kind and identify their causes? When the failures are movies, couldn’t it be a modern repurposing of our need to figure out exactly how our late cave neighbor pissed off the ibex that ate him?
The applicability, of course, is not quite there; we’re not all about to shoot our own $100 million vanity projects. I might have recently begun my own filmmaking “career,” but I don’t see myself helming an Ishtar anytime soon. (Ishtar, by the way, being one of the flops Rabin considers a “secret success”; I haven’t seen it, but his argument is persuasive.) But the lessons to be drawn from cinematic flops apply to whatever you’re into creating — at least, the lessons as I interpret them.
1. At least flops are interesting. If it ever comes down to making — or writing or broadcasting or whatever — a fascinating trainwreck or an unremarkable success, I pray I’ll be able to summon the moral courage to choose the former. The deathbed test comes into play: would you rather look back on a life of Heaven’s Gates and Southland Taleses or a string of moderately profitable Keanu Reeves movies? The way of the competent journeyman strongly appeals to some; it does not appeal to me.
2. The higher the stakes, the more interesting the flop. One observation Rabin brings up in the book and the interview is that flops, especially those that pass into filmmaking legend, have grand ambitions. Often they carry those ambitions with the utmost earnestness. These are the flops I value, the ones I think about hundreds of times for each time I think about the average hit. What’s more, these are the flops don’t damage their creators’ reputations so much as make their creators exist more. Envy may just have wasted Barry Levinson’s time; the likes of Dune and that shot-for-shot Psycho remake may have made David Lynch and Gus Van Sant immortal. Is this just an elaborate validation of “go big or go home”? So be it. It’s that or a day job.
3. The real enemy isn’t suckage, but mediocrity. I guess you wouldn’t have to look far beyond this blog’s subtitle to know I’d jump on board with this. Even now, the dark forces of mediocrity prepare hundreds upon hundreds of motion pictures for general release, each of which will make our world a little bit more complacent. (Above my heavy heart, my mind returns to the least discriminating moments of my peak moviegoing years: Behind Enemy Lines, Romeo Must Die, The Art of War, The Sixth Day. Can you even name their directors offhand?) The relevant scale here, I suspect, doesn’t run between success and failure; it’s, rather, a scale of somethingness. “Pretty good” movies aren’t things. Blockbusting successes and abject disasters are certainly both things, though I’ve come to believe that the megaflops are, all else being equal, even more things than megahits.
Yet I’m also forced to admit that there’s something important to learn from mediocrity — i.e., how and why mediocrities become mediocre — since it’s the worst possible fate. But The Big Book of Cinematic Mediocrity wouldn’t sell as well. My Year of Flops makes me wonder how much of the critical enterprise is, at heart, answering the questions “What went right?” and/or “What went wrong?” as clearly, honestly, and humorously as possible. I operate on the assumption that each and every work of art, no matter how successful, unsuccessful, or mediocre, contains a lesson about what makes its art form tick; the trick is finding that lesson. Didn’t T.S Eliot say something about how the only real critical method is being very intelligent?
Comments