MT White
The Artist’s Fortitude
Fame pt II

David Lynch was well-known enough before 1990 but that’s the year his fame peaked with Twin Peaks on television, Wild at Heart in theaters and his directing the commercials for the campaign promoting Michael Jackson’s Dangerous album.

But Twin Peaks was soon cancelled, and by 1992 Lynch’s popularity seemed to have completely reversed. The critics panned his film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, calling him and his American style of surrealism old hat and even his comic strip The Angriest Dog in the World was cancelled. “It was a bad year,” Lynch said. But he kept painting, kept doing photography, and kept making movies in his compulsive obstinance. He just continued what he did before 1990. Retrospectively, did he just spend those years painting, the four years struggling to make Eraserhead while delivering newspapers, followed by ups and downs making films, just to get one year of peak fame? I don’t think so.

BUT!

I also don’t think Lynch wants to be the anonymous guy painting in his studio since he’s embraced the online world of self-promotion more than others. Before ever making films, he traveled to Austria to apprentice under famed expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka (only to come home quickly). He applied to the AFI film program—the premier film school in the US—before ever making Eraserhead (shot in the barn at the AFI premises) and took work at major studios for films like The Elephant Man and Dune. He’s admittedly obsessed with old Hollywood icons like Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth. He played the Hollywood game. None of this happened accidentally. There was at least some intent behind it. To Lynch’s credit, he did retain most of his artistic integrity through the process, refusing major offers (like directing Return of the Jedi) over more personal work.

With Lynch’s example and others, I’d contend that fame is rarely accidental. As poet Czelaw Milosz wrote, “Life rarely takes care of itself unless human beings decide to take care of themselves.” Someone like Solzhenitsyn intended to win a Nobel Prize. He intended it before he ever wrote one word: “I had heard of them (the Nobel ceremonies) from someone, I forget who it was, in the camps. And at once drew a conclusion in the spirit of our country…that this was just what I needed to make my great breakthrough when the time came,” reasoning, “No one, of course, wants to be the author only of ‘posthumous works’; live just long enough to see yourself in print and you can die happy.” It was the same Solzhenitsyn who walked into the offices of Novy Mir, the premiere literature publication in the USSR, to submit his manuscript for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He claimed to be nervous—he probably was!—reluctant—probably was!—even noted he thought he’d never see his work published in his lifetime—probably true! Frustration, and even resignation, mix in the sediment of our goals—especially as we get older and they seem more distant on the horizon. But no matter how much the sun has set, the sun—the prize—is still in our line of sight. The desire for fame or recognition, and the barriers life presents in the way, can lead to frustration and resignation, producing an overwhelming cacophony, and you don’t know where one thing starts and the other begins.

“You know how good CONTENT is, don’t you?” a friend asked me when he read an early manuscript.

Of course I knew. As I wrote it, I thought I had something special. I wanted everyone to know. But there were doubts along the way. It hasn’t sold many copies, so the doubts are even greater after the fact. But I trust my friend’s assessment because he has good literary taste. His praise should be satisfying enough, I suppose. But it isn’t. I want others to know, and at the very least living authors I admire to read and respect it. But that isn’t for me to determine. I can’t control when or what they read. Maybe people aren’t ready for CONTENT. Maybe they never will be.

Remember, fame and everything downstream of it is temporal and however much we intend, like 1990 for Lynch, it’s not so much fame that is fickle but the determinants of said fame, re: the “audience”, something we have little control over. Twin Peaks was a popular show for one year but its ratings fell and the taste for the show waned. Why? Bad writing? The fact it was scheduled on a different night? Audiences found something better to watch? Probably all three.

Audiences lose their taste for something for a variety of reasons. When I was a kid, I recorded the cover of Cat’s in the Cradle by Ugly Kid Joe off the radio. When my cousin visited, he played it over and over again. Listen. Rewind tape. Listen again.  

Rewind tape. Over and over. After that moment, I never listened to Ugly Kid Joe again—and I’m sure my cousin will say the same. The band had no control over it. Another song I recorded: Under the Bridge by Red Hot Chili Peppers. I listened to it daily, over and over. But then I stopped listening…until my little brother bought me the band’s greatest hits album years later. And I listened to them again…for about a month. Thinking about all this 15 years later, I downloaded the same album off Apple Music. Red Hot Chili Peppers had no control over my fickle mood. The only control they had was just consistently playing music, so they can have compilation albums or new material for me and others to discover once we are in the mood to listen and explore. But pop bands have a small window. Their young audiences “grow up” and then head for a new music that is more “adult” and don’t want the artists of their youth to grow up with them. Duran Duran had a more “mature” sound with their 1987 Notorious album, but their now adult fans wanted to listen to the more youthful music of Rio or Seven & the Ragged Tiger of 1983. They wanted to listen to the music of their youth to feel youthful, an audio fountain of youth. It’s only when a younger generation can revisit and appreciate the entire catalogue of a respective artist in perspective, that they get a worthy assessment and possibly greater accolades. In my case, I was a little young for Duran Duran’s prime, but my older brother liked them (in a way, the slightly younger initializing the first comprehensive retrospectives of their elder sibling’s favorite acts is a form of “little brother syndrome”). Sometimes the youth in older age start feeling a nostalgia now that they have some more disposable income, and if the musical act is still around, they can benefit with higher ticket sales and touring. But I digress, a little.

The same happens in all creative spheres, even among intellectual appreciation. I remember a college professor saying “Henry James was really popular when I was in college”, 100 years removed from his death but he was no longer “hot”. The Abstract Expressionists were a popular artistic movement until they weren’t. The Western was a popular film genre until it wasn’t. Trends, moods and concerns change. As they change, people who claimed to be admirers also change their assessment of their admiration. Walter Kirn, whose review of Infinite Jest helped jumpstart its fame, now thinks he overpraised it. Steppling related a story how he talked with others about Abstract Expressionism and they replied “I don’t think I ever liked it.” Titanic was the top film of all time…but now falls on top of lists like “The Worst Films Ever Made”. It’s akin to someone telling their lover, “I don’t love you anymore. I don’t know if I ever did.” In a way, they’re ashamed they got caught up in the tide of emotion and passion that accompanies love and are now trying to distance from it at low ebb. Or maybe they’ve discovered a new fact: “You’re not the man I thought you were”. When Solzhenitsyn started exploring historical literature, expanding beyond anti-Stalinism, he lost support among those closest to him. At other times, accolades turning to jeers is also a form of trying to justify a new love. Solzhenitsyn’s influence in post-Soviet Russia, after his return there, was minimized due to a Russian public, that formerly logocentric culture, had stopped reading literature. As Solomon Volkov noted, “The public writers were no longer writers and poets but pop musicians, film actors, and television celebrities, as it is everywhere else.”

No wonder artists like to easily portray themselves as martyrs. Tarkovsky enjoyed fame with his first feature film, Ivan’s Childhood, winning the top prize at the Venice Film Festival (having a giant like Jean-Paul Sartre championing his film!), only to meet frustrations with the films proceeding. He called his diary Martyrology, even though he had the full support of Mosfilm to helm his films and eventually European financing. Echoing the Hagiographies chapter, many artists have a tendency to participate and lead their own mythmaking, martyrdom being a recurring feature. But many knew what they were getting into. But, with fickle crowds and patrons, it’s easy to feel like a martyr to circumstance. So, it helps to use said story to propagate your fame. People love a sympathetic hero.

And those who claim to never want fame? Upon some more reflection, it’s more than just a statement of moral superiority. If they didn’t want fame, they’d probably never think about it. “How do you like my chairs?” the barista, also a professional upholsterer, asked me as I sat in a chair at the café. Obviously, she wanted some recognition along with some conversation. The anonymous designers and builders of Chartres Cathedral? Maybe it never entered their mind. Maybe. The lack of authorship adds to its greatness. We never question its authenticity or its stature. Its very existence sits as a testament to it. The one who claims to not want fame? Maybe it’s a fear of fame. A premeditated egotistic statement of avoidance to avert disappointment, like a man who swears fealty to bachelorhood because he doesn’t “need” women or love. Maybe he’s just scared of failure or has been hurt enough. Ego and fear exist together. They originate in fragility, and fame is certainly dangerous for the fragile. Fear dominates the ego, because there’s always the chance you could be revealed as a fraud, not good enough. Failure could damage the fragile ego the most.

I would certainly know.