The Success of Failure

version

Well-known member
Those recapitulation theories are brilliant. Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection is what won out, but there were loads of variations for a good span of time.

All the also rans are important so you understand there were other options. Things could've turned other ways.
There's also the imaginative aspect. These theories can become sources of artistic inspiration once cleaved from the world of facts. Something like Burroughs' concept of language as virus is just a really convincing way of thinking about language too. I don't know how well it holds up under academic scrutiny, but it makes sense to me and seems like a helpful way of picturing the thing as a whole.
 

catalog

Well-known member
yeah deffo - that michel tournier book "friday, or the other island" is a really good read for that sort of alternative "what if" stuff. he's in the same boat as ballard, pkd, burroughs.
 

boxedjoy

Well-known member
The Room's a good example of the success of failure; so terrible it's become a sensation with a book and a film about it.
This is a really odd one to me. I love things that are bad. I loved Footballers Wives and Sunset Beach, I bought Gigli and Birdemic on DVD, my favourite film is Leprechaun In The Hood, I've laughed at so much trash in my life. But I didn't think The Room was so terrible as to deserve its status as the cult bad movie. It's dreadful, but I've seen worse acting, worse plotting, worse cinematography and more, in plenty other things. I don't understand why it and not something worse than it became such a meme.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Eddie the Eagle not so much

Burroughs had the Ugly Spirit chasing him, then it turns up as a Richard H Kirk work. The Ugly Spirit is like Jung’s shadow roided right up. Exorcism in a sweat ritual has an almost Lynch (Judy) vibe. Can you begin to imagine it? It seems insane not to at least investigate these presences for a period during our very short time on this rock, even as an anthropology

How do we even define success as failure? Force the hand of chance etc? Everyone fails in life, it’s how you learn. Success as failure seems the foundation for cult-status a lot - fore-gotten, occluded and/or hidden in plain sight
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
The Room's a good example of the success of failure; so terrible it's become a sensation with a book and a film about it.
It's a canonical example of something "so bad it's good", which unfortunately has become a bit of a genre in its own right - Sharknado and all that garbage. I suppose Snakes On A Plane bears some blame for this, although that film was at least fairly entertaining.

I think something can only ever be SBIG by accident, in the same way you can't deliberately make outsider art.
 

wild greens

Well-known member
Have any of you ever played Deadly Premonition? A deeply broken Twin Peaks style murder mystery, physics all over the place, NPCs with no logic. But at the heart of it an amazingly mad story, mostly put together by a lunatic lead director. Really compulsive if you can look past the faults (or embrace them).

The second one isn't as good really

 

version

Well-known member
Those recapitulation theories are brilliant. Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection is what won out, but there were loads of variations for a good span of time.
Spinal Catastrophism
Melville gets into this territory,

"But if from the comparative dimensions of the whale's proper brain, you deem it incapable of being adequately charted, then I have another idea for you. If you attentively regard almost any quadruped's spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the skull proper. It is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are absolutely undeveloped skulls. But the curious external resemblance, I take it the Germans were not the first men to perceive. A foreign friend once pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with the vertebrae of which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso-relieve, the beaked prow of his canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have omitted an important thing in not pushing their investigations from the cerebellum through the spinal canal. For I believe that much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world."
 
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