Against Striving
American Movies, American Dreams
Back in the late 1990s, a scrappy filmmaker went out into the woods to film a no-budget horror movie. Trouble beset the production at every turn. Yet the filmmaker solidered on, even though setbacks appeared on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Finally, the movie was completed, and a legend was born.
If it sounds like I’m describing The Blair Witch Project, the 2000 movie that cemented the found footage film as a vital subgenre of horror—psych! You’re wrong! Gotcha! This is a different filmmaker, one whose dreams exceeded his grasp.
Mark Borchardt is a filmmaker from Wisconsin, born to a working-class family in the 1960s. He became obsessed with horror movies of the 70s—Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, grimy hymns to American violence. He attempted to make his own movies in that vein, corralling his friends into Super 8 adventures. And then, like a child who doesn’t know the party’s over, he continues making films well into adulthood, begging for money from relatives, sleeping in his parents’ basement, avoiding child support payments.
And then—his movie comes out. Well, not his movie, but a movie about him.
American Movie, a documentary film directed by Chris Smith and produced by Sarah Price, comes out in 1999. The film chronicles Borchardt’s attempt to make a movie called Northwestern, a coming-of-age story about Midwestern teenagers drinking beer and getting into trouble. But that falls through due to lack of money and, well, lack of script, and so Borchardt redirects his energies to completing an earlier film, called Coven. The short films premiere in his hometown movie theater, and then the credits roll.
But if Borchardt is a filmmaker, an artist, Coven is not his masterwork. His true work of art is himself. The filmmaker as fast talker, as hustler, as American dreamer who refuses to wake up, even when he should. Speech is his true medium, talking his friends and family into helping him follow his dreams, which lead him straight off a cliff.
Coven, then, is not The Blair Witch Project. It is not a masterpiece of meager means. Nor is Borchardt a kind of Midwestern Tommy Wiseau, an auteur of the unintentional. He is a striver in the purest sense, for his striving never brings him to the goal he longs for.
And in this, he is heroic in a way that looks more and more necessary.
Are YOU strive-maxing??
Are you numbers-JUICING???
ARE YOU MAKING PEACE WITH THE MACHINE??
Are you glow-upping??
Are you self-hacking?
Are you success-manifesting in your sleep??
Are you winning?
Are others losing?
Are you a winner??
Are you a not-loser??
Here is the problem with striving, the fundamental misunderstanding of our moment: people want the end result when what they really need is the process.
Striving can be a valuable pursuit, yes, but only when you accept that it might not take you where you want to go.
Borchardt wanted to be a horror auteur, in the vein of George A. Romero or John Carpenter, but he never made it there. He lacked the resources and, perhaps, the talent.1 He tried—he strove—his damnedest to become that version of himself, but was never successful.
He did succeed in becoming something else, though. An embodiment of the American will-to-strive, even when—especially when—it does not bring you where you hoped to end up.
So yeah, the title up top is a bit of a misnomer. This is not a screed against striving per se. It is a screed against the expectation that success is the only worthwhile outcome of striving, that any other result is deficient. Let yourself be formed by your striving, rather than demand that striving make you who you think you should be.
Watch Coven and you will see that Borchardt does possess kill as a filmmaker. His images have a certain crisp menace, and he has an eye for blocking. But he desperately needed a writer, someone who could shape his freewheeling ideas into a script that others could consume, the better to produce his vision with their talents. It takes a real artist to know what his shortcomings are. Stanley Kubrick always had a co-writer.
One of the best moments in the history of American filmmaking is when their car breaks down in the Wisconsin cold and Borchardt’s good-natured best friend (name escapes me) says to the camera, ‘Sometimes I wish I was in the AC/DC.’ When the cameraman asks him why, he says, ‘Because then I wouldn’t have to stand here in the cold like this. Fuck, you know?’