At an Extraordinary Personal Cost

I was just looking at a promo for the movie about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.  It tells me that this film, and  I quote, “examines the personal voyage and ultimate salvation of the icon whose success came at extraordinary personal cost“.   In order to create great music like “Fun Fun Fun” and “Good Vibrations”, he had to suffer.

No, he didn’t.

For one thing, the Beach Boys’ songs were not remotely about suffering or personal struggle.  Unless you believe that “Help Me Rhonda/Help me get around in my heart” really nails some kind of existential angst.

This is the kind of blather studios routinely put out there about the subjects of their films but this one is more annoying than usual.  (“Walk the Line”, which made up tragedy out of whole cloth, is another).  The “personal cost” they are referring to was not the price Brian Wilson paid for being creative and clever and inventive.  It is not about the part of his life that involved talent.  It was the price of being emotionally immature and spineless and allowing himself to be bullied by a mean dad.  It is about a failure of character.

The promo would like you to believe– as per the standard Hollywood myth (see “Walk the Line”)– that suffering produces great art.  Think about a person beset by misfortune, the early death of a parent, poverty, war, or bad health.  Some people with awful lives have produced great art.  That doesn’t mean their awful lives caused them to produce great art.

Many creative people– like many uncreative people– are emotionally immature and irresponsible.  The difference is, we don’t hear much about the uncreative people with those problems, unless they end up being the subject of the art produced by the creative people.  But creative people love the concept because, for one thing, it gives them an excuse for behaviors people normally judge to be bad.  They want to be forgiven.

It’s not the “price you pay” though there’s something to the idea that good artists are able to express their dissatisfying moments in their art.   People who generally accept the status quo and find their lives reasonably pleasing and satisfying are not likely to want to spend a huge amount of time trying to express their feelings about it, to argue it, to describe it, to re-imagine it, than people who are extremely dissatisfied with life.  To write or paint or compose, you have to be able to imagine something that does not exist.  And by something, I mean more than just objects or things.  I mean mind-sets, feelings, relationships, politics, sounds and images, words.  Most people can’t do that.

Did Amy Winehouse pay a steep emotional price for her music?  No, she was a fabulous artist who just happened to have a weakness for alcohol and drugs.  She paid a steep emotional price for having steep emotions, for feeling things intensely, for allowing herself to be manipulated by people around her with a financial stake in her schedule.  But it wasn’t the suffering that made her music great: it was her talent.

I remember an interview with Paul McCartney in Musician Magazine in which he discussed the criticism of his post-Beatles work, which many thought was trivial and unimportant.  He recognized that it was Lennon’s darker, more cynical vision that gave the Beatles’ music gravitas, and complained that he didn’t want to go out and suffer just so he could produce better music.

And he was right.  And wrong.  He didn’t need to suffer to produce great music.  He just needed to use a talent he didn’t have, to come up with a line like “puts on a face that she keeps in a jar by the door/who is it for?”

[whohit]At Extraordinary Personal Cost[/whohit]