In Praise of Failure
Something is being lost, and I'm not sure we have the language for it yet.
Look at what has happened to faces. Not just on screen — in life. Social media filters don't announce themselves the way they used to. They don't give you dog ears or rainbow vomit. They work subtly, pixel by pixel, smoothing and lifting and symmetrising in ways that are almost impossible to detect. The alteration has become invisible. And because it's invisible, it has quietly become the norm.
I am a woman in my forties. Right now I happen to be pregnant, which seems to mean eschewing all the beauty procedures and products that actually work. And I feel bereft, because the standard of what a face like mine is supposed to look like feels different now. Not because of anything dramatic, but because of the quiet recalibration that happens when alteration becomes possible, then normal, then expected. Now tweakments exist, my unaltered face begins to read differently. Not as a face, simply, but as a kind of slovenliness. A sad surrender. When imperfection stops being the default, it starts being a position you have to justify. The baseline has shifted without anyone announcing it.
What strikes me is not the extremity but the ordinariness of it. The way possibility has become obligation. The way we have stopped expecting to sit with what time does to a face, because we no longer have to. Because there is something that only the unsmoothed version can give us. A recognition. A sense of being seen rather than corrected. And we are giving that up, quietly, across multiple domains at once. Not just in how we look at faces, but in how we look at films, at stories, at the whole question of what we are willing to witness in cultural life.
I don't think this is simply vanity, or not only that. It feels like a symptom of something broader. A quiet intolerance for the unresolved that has become one of the defining features of how we live now. A discomfort with the rough edge, the not-quite-right, the still-becoming. We seem to have developed, across multiple domains at once, a difficulty sitting with imperfection. And I wonder what we're losing in the process. What we're losing that we won't notice we've lost until much later, if at all.
The screen industries, I think, are making a version of the same mistake.
At precisely the moment AI can generate competent, generic, algorithmically palatable content at speed and negligible cost, the industry seems to be retreating further from the strange, the difficult, the formally adventurous. From the work that couldn't be generated because it hadn't existed yet. Fewer bets on singular visions. More reliance on tools that smooth the edges. The interesting failure gets squeezed from both ends: by an industry too frightened to back it, and by tools too sophisticated to produce it.
I want to be careful here, because this isn't primarily an argument about jobs or economics, though those matter immensely. It's about something harder to legislate. AI content optimises toward the aggregated mean of what has already worked. It recombines what already exists. The result is a kind of competency: smooth, adequate, recognisable. And I find myself wondering whether competency, at this scale and this speed, might be its own kind of problem.
Because the films that have stayed with me were rarely just competent. Watching Mike Leigh’s NAKED didn’t feel familiar, or predictable. Ruben Östlund’s FORCE MAJEURE exploded synapses in my brain. Ira Sach’s LOVE IS STRANGE broke my heart when I least expected it. And Joachim Trier’s THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD felt like a funhouse mirror for my soul. Many of them were unexpected, commercially uncertain, not working along conventional measures. They failed at being smooth. And something in that failure felt generative. It fed me, it asked something, it opened up possibilities I hadn't known I wanted. I'm not sure you can commission that safely. I'm not sure you can find your way there by optimising.
There is a long spiritual tradition that understands difficulty and imperfection not as problems to be solved but as the actual conditions of growth. That you cannot become by only encountering the perfected. That friction, failure, the thing that doesn't resolve cleanly, is where something real happens. Failure, in this sense, is a kind of spiritual vegetable: ignored by many, but absolutely essential. Good for us in many ways we understand and many we're just getting to grips with. And across so many parts of life right now, we seem to be pushing failure to the side of the plate. As a lifelong vegetarian — both literally and spiritually — I feel I am coming adrift from my culture.
What worries me most is that the smoothing compounds itself. The digital beauty template doesn't just change how people look. It shifts what people think faces are supposed to look like. AI content doesn't just steal space. It slowly recalibrates what audiences expect, what registers as normal, how roughness or strangeness land. Each iteration of the perfected surface makes the imperfect a little harder to tolerate. The capacity to sit with difficulty, I suspect, atrophies if it isn't regularly asked of us.
Cinema has been, at its best, one of the places where that capacity gets practised. Where we follow a character into failure and stay. Where something is left unresolved and we find, slowly, that the irresolution is the point. That's a cultural capacity as much as an artistic one. It has to be cultivated, in audiences as well as filmmakers. And if the work that cultivates it stops being made, or stops being backed, something in the audience changes too. Not immediately. Gradually. In ways that are hard to trace and harder to reverse.
I work with filmmakers on the question of creative voice. On what it means to make work that is genuinely yours, specific enough to be strange, resilient enough to survive the pressures that want to make it safer and more legible. That work has always felt important to me. Lately it feels important in a different way. Not just because AI is coming for our creativity, but because the cultural conditions that allow singular, risky, personal work to exist seem to be quietly narrowing.
I don't have an answer to any of this. I still look in the mirror most days and despair. But I think we need to at least be honest about what's happening. About what we're choosing when we choose the smooth over the difficult, the competent over the strange, the guaranteed over the possible. About what kind of failure we're willing to make room for, and what we lose when we aren't.
The room for noble, interesting failure is getting smaller. Defending it isn't nostalgia, or a preference for difficulty for its own sake. It's an argument about what growth requires: in a filmmaker, in an audience, in a culture. We are, in some sense, what we are willing to sit with.
And right now, across so many fronts, we are running away from our own reflection.
