The Vanished, Banished Beautiful American Loser

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.