Anyhoo, tangential connections don't rear their heads from nothing, so here's the narrative background: I decided to go running this morning and, against my better thoughts, to attempt my usual out and back approach to running along the Greenbelt. I figured a max of 6 miles for my run would be decent and I would decide where to turn around whenever I got there. That was stupid; I should be banned from designing my running routes. Because I have one convenient stopping point at about 2.75 miles (total = 5.5) and another at 3.3 (6.6). And nothing in between. So I passed the 2.75 mile point and felt great, thinking I would go up to 6... but at about the 3 mile point my hamstring twinged and blah blah blah, I decided I wasn't really
up for a full 6 after all. But I didn't want to stop at 3 so - I kept going. Progressively furthering myself along a path that would require me to loop back. Argh. Dumb, but I had nothing but the oft-cited button punching job search at the apartment waiting for me, and I had pretty much sent off every résumé possible in the past couple of days, so - what the hell. I ran all the way past another golf course that took me out to about 4.7 miles.
HA! You were banking on the inevitable 8 mile total, weren't you?!?! Sucka. I took a short-cut back and ended up totaling 8.7 miles. FTR. Anyhoo, with sweat-soaked shirt (and if you know me, that is not an exaggeration), I walked four miles home, which makes for a lot of music over the ol' Shuffle. And somewhere in the soft instrumental start blended into the chugging power chords of "Lose Yourself," everyone's favorite song including something of a run-on sentence. (do not miss your chance or blow this opportunity comes once in a lifetime). In fact, check some lyrics if you lack familiarity. Or read this quick summary: dude in an abject state of poverty is attempting rap as his egress and feels that not only is this his only way out, but he will be unfixably ruined if he fails. He further feels that his own skill, prowess and hard work will inevitably push him through so long as he achieves some Zen state with regard to the moment. And he caps this off with the aphorism that "you can do anything if you set your mind to it" as an epilogue. Don't forget this is all set to the chuggachug and accented with some pretty hefty downbeats, so you do get a little bit of an adrenaline-based confidence boost going, even if you're pulling off a wet-rat look while walking down hayden.
And this is where David Cross steps in: he has a bit on "The Delusion parade" where he talks about the fact that there's
"...a million people in Hollywood who know they're gonna make it - because they're so good, they're so talented ... they're gonna be the next that guy or that girl, but you know how many are gonna make it? Maybe, 13 will make it. Maybe 14 if you count the girl who goes on Blind Date and poses in Playboy, if that's your idea of making it then let's call it 14... but they know man, they know, they come from all over the world, they come from Winnipeg, Portland, Maine, Pensacola, Florida, they come from Norman, Oklahoma, they all know they're gonna make it - I've got so much talent, because I was so good in my high school production of Brigadoon and Annie..."He then goes on to describe the travesty that these people become as they eventually get parts in movies *playing delusional people in Hollywood*. And then he let's their tragic-tale take a turn into things that I can't retype here, lest we violate all kinds of family-value-oriented norms thoroughly established in the Nyetverse.
The connection being, of course, that the hard-willed determination spat forth by Eminem (admittedly convincing coming from one of the actual "made-its") serves as an incredible basis for naive, self-delusional thinking cited by Cross. And as much fun as it is to celebrate the few and far betweens as well as the comedy fodder that becomes the mass majority, David Cross's ultimate comment is that it leaves places like LA with a service industry full of disgruntled, cynical, embittered folks who by sheer force of reality simply did not "make it." They are the off-shoot, the unfortunate consequence of a concept (anyone can work their way to stardom with enough hard work) that entails its unfortunate correlation, that in order for the special to be special there must be a background for them to stand out against. And all those unemployed actors and writers and their shattered dreams become something of an inevitable consequence, a necessity for the machine to thrive. And the beat goes on. La ta da ta di.
I pondered this same idea recently while walking along First Night in Phoenix about a month ago, when I felt that I was seeing the fall-out fodder first hand. For me, it conjures the idea of the American dream, go west young man success meme, and how the entire industry depends upon its continued pursuit by legions of the naive. The take-a-step-back effect is that the million people who trek off to Hollywood form a bell-curve, and in theory only the very tippy top - say, the top 13 - of the curve are going to fulfill the hard-work = success myth. (That is actually probably giving the system too much credit - in reality, those 13 are probably grabbed from roughly around the top of the curve, with a whole lot of luck, timing and arbitrary circumstance accounting for the success - this makes the result even further removed from the work that gets put in). And those 13 do make it, get put on the proverbial pedestal and go on to write their auto-bios rife with the "I just knew I could make it, you can, too" framework that propagates the myth. This is classic post-facto reasoning that, by tapping into an already thoroughly ingrained success-story archetype, convinces another mass of people that if they just try hard enough, they can make it, too. The post-facto comes from the selective filter of only listening to the successful and misappropriating their success to their plan; if any kind of big-picture, statistical take on the whole thing was attempted, you'd find that you're attributing success to the plan after the success has already been achieved, and that plan in actuality has about a 0.00013% success rate.
All of this is some pretty pessimistic lip (finger) flapping, natch, because everybody and their dog knows that Hollywood careers are a decidedly non-pragmatic venture; this is what causes moms to try to get their sons to take math courses instead of just majoring in drama. I am more interested in the massive effect of the myth-propagation and the purpose it ultimately serves than the clichéd self-delusion achieved my wannabes. It may be more of a thought on what kind of structural purpose optimism and hope play in our continued existence - so maybe this does not pertain particularly to the "hard work -> success -> chase your dreams" paradigm as much as it pertains to the general human habit of eschewing rational consideration in favor of vague notions of happy endings.
In this particular example (the entertainment machine), I mean this: humans, at least American humans in a modern, relatively carefree and copious-leisure-time filled life, need entertainment. Without too much high-handed elitism dripping from my open mouth, I think it's fair to say that we do not need GREAT entertainment, but we need something resembling mediocre plus entertainment, and because of a bevy of different tastes (or probably more exactly, our evolutionary need for variety) we need it in a large number of forms. This entertainment, in a lot of instances, does not need to be meaningful and in fact would often be better suited to intentionally lack meaning and serve only as a dopamine-releasing, pleasure-pushing diversion exercise. That is not exactly a ringing endorsement for the inherent value of the craft of film-making or acting or what have you, but in a general sense it should ring at least partially true - we need the entertainment as aesthetic highlights to our daily lives and something to keep us going.
That is not exactly a gigantic selling point for the entertainment industry - "come fulfill this basic purpose that keeps us all from offing ourselves at the next cataclysmic existential moment" - so the entertainment machinery better have some better mechanism for recruiting than that (or really, it would not have ever come to exist in the first place). Fair enough, there are those who may just act for its own sake or create art for their own love of the process, just as there are doctors who would practice medicine at no charge and lawyers who would litigate just for fun - but I am not talking about the marginally insane who are so tuned into their dopamine receptors as to have absolute direction in life, I am talking about the majority who are susceptible to the carrot-dangling acts any particular profession might entail. SO the entertainment industry has this particular mechanism, the dream chase, which on face value is a brilliant narrative to supply life-giving hope to people far and wide, but when examined deeper must be admitted to at least have the properties of a pragmatic inevitability of a massive-effect process. The follow-your-dream narrative gets the ball rolling and brings in the hundreds of recruits, all of them putting their best efforts forward. And then the entertainment industry functions as a callous sift, separating wheat from chaff. The top tier (however it is determined - again, I conjecture that it probably has a solid correlation with effort and talent but certainly not any kind of 1:1 relationship; there has to be a slew of mitigating factors that lend themselves to being labeled luck, good timing or "boinking the director") settles into its place, as do the other tiers and other actors settle into other spots, whether it be in stand-in roles or caterers for the industry. Voila, functioning machine. ANd plenty of mediocre-plus entertainment created in the process.
The thing that often gets left out of this is "machine." Entertainment does not care about individuals or even groups; it cares about its own functions and that they are served. The remainder is details. Since the modern mechanization of entertainment, there have always been stars and underlings, successes and failures. The particular people sitting on celebrity pedestals is, in grand scheme terms, completely unimportant. If there were no Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, there would be other hot male leads to quickly step into their shoes. I have often contemplated the idea that "Tom Cruise" has very little to do with Tom Cruise, and based on our treatment of him / attendance of his movies (wack Scientology claims not-withstanding), substituting a completely different human for him and maintaining the trappings of the celebrity persona would have a questionable effect, if any at all.
I recognize that this big picture (ha!) view of the machinery is fairly heartless, pessimistic and cold; please recognize that I throw it forth with a lot of tongue and cheek; I don't actually think you can completely discount individually unique contributions to the world (if I did, I would be hard-pressed to explain spending my time writing any ideas, since they would just be inevitable conclusions, no different if arrived at by someone other than me). But I would put forth that it is very easy to over-emphasize the contributions of the individual without recognizing that they do so within a machine, and because of the inevitability of the machine and some of its high-powered myths that continue to propel its function - something that I would say speaks of the very "cog in the machine" role that we fulfill - we should put a mental check on those individual contributions and question which values tend to more serve the machine than the untold millions who fail and suffer at their pursuit.
It is very possible to put forth an extraordinary amount of hard work and not succeed. The myth has a nasty inverse, that if you did not succeed you did not try hard enough. The failures are inevitable and in fact give success its meaning - if everything were blue, what would we call the sky? I know from personal experience that diligent work and that entire ethic are at best odds improvers, but entail guarantees of nothing. I waste a lot of time lamenting lost and fruitless effort, and I may be biased in wanting to investigate the "work hard" value and its possible function to the system instead of the individual. We are, by some framings, all pellets in a shotgun blast or a carpet bomb exercise: some of us will hit, and some us won't. This is not the whole story but always part of it.
Postscript: I am pointing to a notion that we "need entertainment" because we need something to relieve daily drudgery and the (debatable) notion that we are just biological machines pushing forward toward no real end other than the pushing forward. In other words, one price of our sentience and ability to contemplate our existence is the nagging question of why. Squirrels, for example, can trudge along collecting and hiding nuts with no question as to the purpose (and even if they did have a question, it would have an obvious answer - to survive, you dolt squirrel). People, especially those of us far removed from the survival process, ask these questions and, removing aesthetic plusses achieved on a daily basis via the aforementioned dopamine surges, are sometimes hard-pressed to find answers. This whole thing is expandable to age-old questions and that of finding meaning, but I am trying to frame this in light of an evolutionary question: Are our traditional answers to existential dilemmas a sort of evolutionary behavior? In other words, a completely rationally developed and ubersophisticated, world-aware mind might draw heinous conclusions about the point of existence and be driven to inevitable suicide. Is our attribution of meaning to life an evolutionary adaptation , something necessary given our conscious awareness that helps us achieve so much but enlightens us as to our fragile happenstance being?
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Now playing: David Cross - Phone Call from a Cranky Terrorist
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