ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the other great un-American sin: failure. Just as poverty mirrors a culture of wealth, failure then is the outcome of a culture of success that generates unreasonable and superfluous expectations that inevitably lead to failure. Three different types of failure inhabit the stories of Jarmusch, Waits and Auster: the careless, the destitute wanderers and the middle-class dropouts. That is, the filmmaker’s failure characters are simply too distracted to worry about their social status; the musician sings of people who live with failure in every step of their life; and the writer observes the breakdown of the children of well-off families. Ambitionlessness is what links all these characters, making them almost morally unacceptable in the eye of mainstream America. Society’s shameful losers are turned into democratic heroes. This is the transformative effect of a process of revaluation of failure in fictions that ignore norms and values of the marketplace that assign a stigma on the notion of failure. The redeeming power of failure in Auster, Jarmusch and Waits leads to new ways of living reminiscent of Thoreau’s heroic simplicity. This becomes especially important in times of economic, political and cultural decline, when the number of unsuccessful stories inevitably multiplies.
