The Vanished, Banished Beautiful American Loser

By Roger Rosenblatt

For one brief, miserable moment, Michael Douglas, the novelist-professor hero of the new movie Wonder Boys, has it all. His wife has left him. His girlfriend, the chancellor of his university, who is married to his department chairman, is pregnant with Douglas' child. His second, never-to-be-finished novel has thickened to page 2,611, single-spaced. His gay editor is in town, hungry both for the new book and for Douglas' best student, a boy who has gunned down the department chairman's dog, who bit Douglas on the leg. The wound has become infected. Douglas limps through the slush of a Pittsburgh winter, dressed in his former wife's pink chenille bathrobe. He hasn't shaved in three days. He drives around stoned, with the murdered dog in the trunk of a car, which he believes to be his but which was stolen from a man with a James Brown hairdo, who is out to get him.

A picture this lovely doesn't come along every day, but it used to. Until the greed-is-wonderful 1980s, the figure Douglas portrays was a regular in American culture--the beautiful loser, the shimmering failure, the mess who for all his stumbles in the slush still strove for something honorable and was honored by the greater world in which he gloriously flopped.

He exists no longer, principally because failure in modern, NASDAQ times has no redeeming social value. In its place sit rows and rows of gleaming successes. Last week, on the same day that I saw Wonder Boys, I watched a different bunch of wonder boys (and women) strut their stuff on a TV special called Summit in Silicon Valley. ("Bunch" is wrong for the collective noun. "Grin?") I watched a grin of high-tech billionaires sunning themselves in national adoration, bright models of achievement for every double-breasted hopeful yearning for a Lexus. No one mentioned beautiful losers. The last shall be last.

Who wants to be a millionaire? In the song the answer was, "I don't." But that was in another country. Gone these days is the character who practically defined American heroism, epic and tragic--Huck and Holden; Charlie Chaplin, Charlie Brown. Nearly all of Hemingway's heroes are defeated in Winner Take Nothing and in the novels. In To Have and Have Not, Harry Morgan had not. The dark, antiheroes of a time as recent as the 1970s have disappeared too--De Niro in Taxi Driver, Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon. Bruce Springsteen sang about his "town full of losers." In Rocky 28, our hero may finally knock out Adrian, but in his first fight (1976) he lost beautifully.

In some ways, it is easier to be an American winner than a loser, which had certain definite requirements:

1) The loser had to be blissfully out of things; he walked around in a sort of self-assured daze. "Don't blame me, Lady," said the extravagantly out-of-it Oscar Levant in a movie of the 1940s. "I didn't make the world. I barely live on it."

2) He had to serve as an affront to more purposeful lives. The most engaging character on the 1950s sitcom My Little Margie was the boyfriend, Freddie, whose job consisted of spending the day looking at construction sites. My favorite scene in Catcher in the Rye occurs when Holden is in his public-speaking class. The teacher orders the students to yell out the word digression! whenever a speech loses focus or direction. Holden is, of course, a living digression.

3) A loser's values had to be in the right place, but they also had to suggest that society's were in the wrong place. Muhammad Ali was stripped of his heavyweight title because he refused the draft, to protest the Vietnam War. He wasn't a hero to everyone, but people recognized the gesture.

4) He had no use for money(!). A hero in his character, if not in his cause, was Robert E. Lee, who after his considerable loss, was exhausted and without an income. An insurance company offered him $50,000 (easily a million today) to use his name. Lee said, "I cannot consent to receive pay for services I do not render," and eventually accepted the presidency of small and impoverished Washington College, which became Washington and Lee after his death. For what he told the insurance company, he could be put to death today.

The main requirement for the beautiful loser is that society must value him, must impute virtue for no reason other than that he fails in a sincerely believed-in, preferably noble cause. When was the last time one saw that? Before the 1980s, there was a public shame attached to too much success. That attitude was useless and irrational but also sweet-natured and not unhealthy. The underlying idea was that failure was something potentially good for you and for everyone, that rejection and loss were not only personally inuring but that losing was also a sign of high and admirable ambitions. To note how far the pendulum has swung, go see Wonder Boys and the Silicon Summit on the same day.

Even the makers of the Douglas movie could not bear to leave their hero a beautiful loser forever. At the end of the picture, there he is--clean-shaven, writing his new and tidy novel, his new wife and child emerging from his new car--all seen from a vast picture window in a new house so full of sunlight it makes one long for slush.

There is, sad to say, only one beautiful heroic mess of a man left in the land. It is Rodney Dangerfield, who claims to have received a sweepstakes letter that read, "You may already be a loser." Rodney also says that when he enters an elevator, the operator asks, "Down?" Looks like up to me.