My sister and I were talking the other week about beloved movies, and we were struck all over again by the number of creative people in the world who seem to have made one beautiful and interesting thing, only to follow it up with a parade of mediocre and boring things. There was the Star Wars trilogy, but then it was followed by... the other Star Wars trilogies. There were the Lord of the Rings movies; but then there was King Kong, and then the Hobbit trilogy that no one asked for. There were the Harry Potter books; but then there were a bunch of raunchy detective novels, yawn-inducing films, and transphobic screeds.
And as if we hadn't enough examples of this phenomenon already on our hands, the world threw another in my path just a few nights after our conversation. A friend and I logged onto HBO Max to watch the new Matrix sequel, which follows up with our main characters twenty years after the first movie. It... did not break the pattern we have established above.
Problem one: most of the film's two-hour run is relentless exposition; two: it seeks profundity through the hackneyed device of being self-referential and recursive; and three: in a society where tropes and images from the Matrix movies are best known now for being appropriated by the alt right and conspiracy theorists, the new movie does the opposite of trying to distance itself from these disturbing interpretations: a villainous character is dubbed "Chad"; believers in the Matrix are described as "sheeple," and so on.
And perhaps most troubling of all, the film is an extended rationalization of delusion. As a friend observed, it provides a kind of roadmap for anyone struggling with paranoid schizophrenia to resist treatment. The therapist in the movie is portrayed as just trying to keep our hero trapped in the Matrix. The richly symbolic blue pill of the first movie has been reduced to a one-to-one analogue to psychotropic medication. Neo is right, according to the movie's logic, to stop taking his pills and try to jump off the roof.
In short, we have yet another sequel that is little more than a significantly worse, more literal-minded, and less interesting film than the famous predecessor that gave rise to it.
Why does this keep happening? What's in the water? My sister proposed that the root of the problem is power. The creative person who has achieved fame and financial stability with one hit is granted—on the strength of that success—the power to do anything they want. Studios will throw money at all of their ideas; publishers will compete to offer the biggest advance on their next book, regardless of how absurd its premise.
But, far from being an opportunity, this total freedom and control proves ruinous. It removes the conditions of unfreedom that demanded creativity in the first place.
Why does unfreedom yield creativity? Because, as my sister observed, it quite literally requires it. The comfortable and free do not need to come up with innovative solutions to problems, because the status quo is already working for them. It is only those who, to use Howard Thurman's phrase, are "up against the wall," who are forced to exert their mental energies to the utmost (one thinks of the young Tennessee Williams, say, trying to write his way out of his job at the International Shoe Company). Once they have all the power to do what they always wanted to do, meanwhile, the incentive for true creativity dissolves.
This is, in essence, the same point Marshall Ganz was trying to make by applying the story of David and Goliath to the problem of creativity in an organizational setting. An established organization generally fights like Goliath. It is the biggest combatant on the field; it is used to winning; and therefore it is content to rely on the same tools it has always used in the past. David, however, as the weaker contestant, knows that if he fights in the way the others do, he too will fail. He therefore has the crucial ingredient of creativity: motivation. He has to innovative, on pain of death.
I was reminded of a line attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre's study of his contemporary, Jean Genet: "genius is not a gift but the way out that one invents in desperate cases." The book in which this appears, Saint Genet, had been sitting on my shelf for some time, so I decided to pick it up at last to hunt down this passage in context, and see how closely it parallels the themes we have developed above. This proved no small undertaking, since the line in question does not appear until the closing chapter of a 600-page treatise... but along the way we come to see Sartre's point.
The philosopher's analysis of Genet proceeds, perhaps unsurprisingly, as a three-stage dialectic. Genet's progress toward becoming a writer, in Sartre's telling, is an attempt to solve a problem. It is motivated by a desire to develop a coherent response that will allow him to survive the constraints of his situation: that of being a gay man and abandoned child in a homophobic and class-bound society. And whether true of the actual figure of Genet himself or not, Sartre derives a kind of logical necessity from the stages of this development:
First, Genet tries the solution of the saint and the mystic. If he has been cast in the role of one of society's pariahs and scapegoats, then he must accept it in the same way that Margaret Fuller declared that she accepts the universe: that is to say, not only to tolerate reality as he finds it, but actively to will that reality. A situation that has been imposed upon him without his consent can thereby be mastered. If he wills that situation, he regains his power over it.
He is like the saint who wills degradation, wills humiliation, in order to break their pride and reconcile themselves to the universe; except he does it in a manner, writes Sartre, that is in some ways more courageous, for he wills his reality without the "safety net" of divine intervention. He is a saint without God; a martyr without a church or cause.
But, Sartre proceeds, this solution—for all its promise—ultimately fails. Why? Because of its inherent contradictions (again, we see the dialectical method at work). Genet sought to will his own situation so as to reconcile himself to reality. But, Sartre argues, it is meaningless to will one's own circumstances, because those circumstances exist independently of one's will. When one says that one has "embraced" or "accepted" them, one changes nothing at all about one's objective situation; one has merely engaged in an imaginative enterprise.
Here one is reminded of the response to Margaret Fuller's eternal affirmation that William James attributes to Thomas Carlyle. Fuller had proclaimed, recall, that she "accepts the universe." To which Carlyle allegedly retorted: "Egad, she'd better!" (Though Carlyle is scarcely one to talk: he was himself the author of a substantially similar doctrine of ultimate acceptance: the "everlasting yea" of his Sartor Resartus)
Why is it a problem, though, for Genet to will his current reality, even if it be only an exercise of the imagination? Because, Sartre argues, by doing so he has undermined his own premises. What began as an attempt to reconcile himself to reality was transformed into its opposite: an escape into the purely ideal realm. He has not acted on reality to change his circumstances; he has merely come up with a new way of describing that reality to himself. He is thus play-acting, in Sartre's term. And so he proceeds to the second stage of the dialectic: that of the aesthete.
We thus have thesis and antithesis: reality vs. imagination; acting vs. play-acting. Two seemingly contrary and opposed terms that, as in the classic Hegelian dialectic, in fact depend upon one another, for, as Sartre has shown, the attempt to embrace reality leads to an imaginative exercise; to accept the necessity of acting in the world yields only play-acting. Since these two contradictory items in fact seem to need each other, is it possible to combine them into a third term? Can we, in short, arrive at a synthesis?
Yes, says Sartre: and the synthesis is art. To write is to fantasize. But it is also to act. To create a work of imaginative literature is to realize our fantasies. And thus, becoming a writer or any other creative person allows us finally the escape hatch we have been seeking. It lets us have our cake and eat it too. It means we can exit the constraints of our unfree condition through our fantasies, and exit it not merely by means of consciously re-framing it to ourselves, but truly, by means of an act that changes our objective circumstances and influences reality.
But, Sartre imagines a reader protesting: this is not enough; otherwise, anyone could do it. Surely, there is a mysterious further entity required: namely, talent. Yes, replies Sartre, but "[w]hat do you think talent is? Mildew of the brain? A supernumerary bone? I have shown that [... Genet's] genius is one with his unswerving will to live his condition to the very end. It was one and the same for him to will failure and to be a poet. He has never gone back on his pledges [...] and if he has won, it is because he has steadily played loser wins."*
But this in turn creates a further problem. If the secret of Genet's genius was his effort to escape an intolerable situation, then the very success of his genius deprives it of its material foundations. Once he has won the game, he no longer has an incentive to reconcile himself to reality. Reality has become tolerable, thus there is no further need for the whole dialectical progression we have followed above. Genet's "case" is no longer a "desperate" one; therefore, we have no need of genius, no need of innovation. Sartre puts it: "if he wins, then he loses [.... I]n winning the title of writer, Genet loses the need, desire, and occasion to write."
We are thus back in the company of the creators we described above. It may not always have been the case that they suffered the kind of acute societal oppression that Genet experienced. But, at the moments of their greatest output and luminosity at any rate, they were all biographically in a more or less tough spot. J.K. Rowling had lost her job and was taking care of a young child single-handedly. George Lucas had to cobble together A New Hope with limited funding and a short leash from the studios, facing chest pains and risk of cardiac arrest as a result while bicycling to and from his filming locations. The Wachowskis were obscure struggling writers in a transphobic society when they penned the screenplay for the first Matrix.
All of them succeeded through the works of creative genius that emerged from these dark periods; yet this very success removed the conditions for further creation. Like Genet, in Sartre's telling, they first had to lose in order to win; but by winning, they lost.
Does this mean that suffering and unfreedom and injustice are to be sought as intrinsic goods? Should we pursue them precisely in order to lay the groundwork for genius? Should we incline, like Thomas Mann's Aschenbach, toward the "wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty"**? Surely not! What then?
Merely that we recognize an empirical fact: creativity is as much a product of limits as it is of freedom, even if those limits be self-imposed. There is a reason why, as Proust once observed (and I owe the reference, I confess it, to a book by Bob Garfield), the rigors of poetic meter often inspire greater linguistic pyrotechnics than the open-ended fluidity of prose. This is why a contemporary artist (whom I've cited before) chose as his model Harry Houdini, the escape artist, whose chains represent the shackles of the artist's "self-discipline."
Genet, Lucas, Rowling, Wachowski... they are not names that are often placed side-by-side. But they share a trait in common. They are all, so to speak, escape artists. They all sought—and found—as Sartre puts it, a "way out" of their situation. And that was the source of their genius... while it lasted.
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*Frechtman translation throughout.
** Heim translation.
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