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Jack Halberstam, the author of The Queer Art of Failure, is someone I’ve wanted to talk to since I first started this podcast. As a professor and scholar, Jack has dedicated his career to dissecting the often-radical undertones of popular cultural media. Together, we look at how animated kids’ movies like Shrek, Finding Nemo, and Chicken Run offer critiques of a system that fails so many of us. We also talk about Jack’s experience as a queer child in England, since where we come from always informs where we go. It’s a wide-ranging conversation that calls into question the very essence of this podcast, as we examine what it means to be a failure in this world — and why Samuel Beckett’s phrase “fail better” isn’t all that inspiring when read in context.

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

David Duchovny, Jack Halberstam

David Duchovny  00:06

I’m David Duchovny, and this is Fail Better, a show where failure, not success, shapes who we are. Jack Halberstam is an author, scholar and professor at Columbia University. He’s the author of multiple books, including the queer art of failure, which is, of course, of interest to me and this podcast. Jack’s book has continued to be relevant since it was published in 2011 as It questions the values of traditional society and systems and advocates for a kind of failure as a rebellion, kind of alternative way forward. We get into that a lot, it’s for me, just a fascinating discussion, as well as fun, because we talk about kids movies a lot. Jack has traveled internationally to bring theory and ideas to lots of different audiences, from Brazil to Berlin, reminded me of my graduate school days in ways both good and bad, but not, not because of anything Jack talked about, just kind of rigorous thinking that my soft mind is not able to do anymore. Truly, though, I’m honored to be talking to Jack today and I had just the 90 minutes or 100 minutes that we talked just flew by. Here’s that conversation.

 

Jack Halberstam  01:24

Hi David.

 

David Duchovny  01:26

Hi Jack, nice to meet you.

 

Jack Halberstam  01:28

You too.

 

David Duchovny  01:29

What studio are you at Jack?

 

Jack Halberstam  01:32

I have no idea, but it’s a nice top floor studio with a little view of other top floor studios.

 

David Duchovny  01:40

Well, officially, thank you for for talking to me today, Jack, because it’s really special for me to get to talk to you, because your your your thoughts are so fascinating to me, and foreign in many ways. And and I want, I want to live in that world for a minute, or however long we can. And, you know, we kind of take this, this Becket quote, which is, fail again, fail better, and it becomes about resilience, or about, you know, picking yourself up after you fail and and going on to conquer the system. And what I want to interrogate with you, obviously, is the system, but you know, it sent me back talking to you, because you reference the the Becket in it, and I think you reference it in that way.

 

Jack Halberstam  02:33

Yeah, but that’s the problem, isn’t it? David, that that, that quote, which came from one of the bleakest writers of the 20th century from a text called worst would hoe. In other words, there’s worst to come. You know that quote, you know, fail again, fail better, has been interpreted as if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again, and those those things are not compatible.

 

David Duchovny  03:00

Exactly it was like when I I have been in 12 step rooms and they say the definition of insanity is, is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. And I would always say, well, that’s what they taught me, was perseverance when I was a kid. Not insanity, you know. But I would give you the I would share with our listeners the entire quote with some ellipses, but it was, ever tried, ever failed, no matter. Try again, fail again, fail better. Try again, fail again, better, again, or better, worse. And here’s where it turns to what you’re saying. Fail, worse, again, still, worse, again, till sick for good, throw up for good, go for good. So that’s the that’s the quote in its context, and I think it kind of sets us up in a good place to start a conversation with you. What I loved in your book in the queer art of failure, was your exegesis of kids movies. If you wouldn’t mind giving an example of one of these readings of a movie, because I think they’re aside from being deep as hell, they’re fun.

 

Jack Halberstam  04:10

Yeah, you know, a rom com is a deeply ideological text. It, it has to follow the convention set up for it, which is, imagine we don’t live in a world where heterosexuality is expected and demanded. What holds these two people apart, what crisis has forced them away from each other, what brings them back together? None of those rules apply to animation, even in terms of how the physical body reacts to violence or to catastrophe or whatever. So animation is like a magical realm, and many when animation and animated cells were invented at the beginning of the 20th century, people realized that. They realized, if we have a little rabbit, it doesn’t matter whether a boulder falls on the rabbit, it’s. The rabbit can get up again. We don’t have to have a funeral for the rabbit, right? So there’s all this potential there.

 

David Duchovny  05:06

I think also, what I was struck by, and what I’d like to lead with in this, in this discussion, is And correct me. I’m going to be paraphrasing you, and I’m going to be getting it wrong. So please feel free to correct me. But what I get is you’re you are writing at some point that failure is the domain of the child. Children do not have mastery. That’s exactly how we can define them. They are beginners, and they fail all the time. And so a kid’s movie has to, if it’s if it’s going to resonate for a child is going to have to create a world in which there’s a different conception of what it is to be a failure and what it is to fail. Can you speak on that a little bit?

 

Jack Halberstam  05:48

Yeah, that’s  exactly right. I mean, you could just take Shrek as an example. You know, instead of having a handsome prince and a beautiful princess, you have this green monster from the swamp, and, you know, a slightly Tubby princess. And that’s a better way to appeal to the child in many ways, because the child doesn’t experience themselves as a Greek god, hopefully, I mean the child who does Be very afraid of, right? So the child in their awkward embodiment doesn’t necessarily want to see an ideal. The ideal is going to exclude them, which is why fairy tales are always so creepy and scary. But Pixar in particular, kind of came up with a cool formula for addressing the child in their awkwardness, in their clumsiness, and exactly as you say, in their status as a beginner, and was able to weave these narratives through those experiences and still deliver a little bit of an inspirational outcome. But the thing that I noticed when I was started watching Pixar films, and Pixar, really, the big innovation, is to enter into a three dimensional world, instead of the two dimensional world of cell animation. What those films were able to do was make a world that was quite credible, even if that world was made up of grasshoppers or bees or fish. And notice, you know, they kept going for these sort of collective animal groups or chickens. And in order to make them credible, you had to be able to differentiate between each chicken, each fish, each B. And in cell animation, you can’t you just draw a B, and then you repeat the B. So once they had an algorithm for a multitude, that was compelling. Now you need stories about multitudes, and that delivers really like a set of very revolutionary texts.

 

David Duchovny  08:01

So you see technology as driving, as driving, story as driving. Philosophy. Do you think there was some kind of a mandate, or do you think this is something they just discovered unconsciously, on their own?

 

Jack Halberstam  08:13

I don’t think there was a mandate, but it’s available. It’s available as a reading. But these films are often built around a flawed subject, so the best example of that is Nemo, who is literally disabled. He He is the one survivor from a pod of clownfish where all of the fish have been eaten and the motherfish has been eaten by a shark, and he’s the only one left with his father, and he has a damaged fin, right? That that’s Shrek again. And then his sidekick, played by Ellen DeGeneres, known to everybody as a queer person, has memory loss. So these failings define the characters, and that then defines their trajectory in the script. And that’s really different from telling a story in which the prince fulfills all of the tasks he’s been giving and ones wins the hand of the fair maiden, right? These are really different stories.

 

David Duchovny  09:18

But what I was fascinated by in your interpretation of these movies was it wasn’t just the lesson of resilience or of overcoming your failure or of turning your disability into a superpower, which is kind of on the surface of these movies, but you saw, you’re looking more deeply. Can you speak to that a little bit?

 

Jack Halberstam  09:39

Well, I’m saying that, whether they know it or not, because they’ve made Pixar in those early days, made films about social insects and collective groups, which, by the way, corresponds well to the way that children live. Children aren’t coupled, and they often aren’t singular.

 

David Duchovny  09:57

They’re in groups, children you.

 

Jack Halberstam  10:00

No child, children. You go to school, children line up. Children do this. So this corresponds to the way that the child is actually experiencing the world, which is as part of a collective, a collective in which they are mostly equal, even as they can also be pretty, you know, brutal to each other. So in those films, once you’ve set in motion a narrative about collective struggle, you’re kind of on a socialist path, whether you want to be or not. And so in Finding Nemo, the climax of the story is not that we find Nemo, it’s that Nemo and Dory and Marlon tell all the fish that have just been swooped up into the fisherman’s net to swim down. And dory’s Silly little song, keep swimming is now the kind of socialist anthem for guys, get out of this net, and you can do it, but you can’t do it as one. You can only do it as many. So it’s practically like there is power in a union. It’s like a solidarity song, yeah. And that repeats across all of these films. There’s always an uprising. I mean, you’d be hard pressed to think of a single film made for an adult audience in the last 50 years that featured a revolution, a socialist revolution, moreover, at its climax. But kids films filled with it.

 

David Duchovny  11:23

That’s fascinating. And do you, do you come down on the side of well, this is, this is like a bloodletting. This is like a letting off of steam. This is a co opting of the insecurities and the dark feelings about living in a capitalist, freudianized society. Or is it a call to revolution of some kind?

 

Jack Halberstam  11:44

I think to the kids, it’s everything that appeals to them. Like children aren’t just quietly conforming.

 

David Duchovny  11:53

They’re anarchic.

 

Jack Halberstam  11:54

They’re anarchic. If children were quietly conforming, why are we parenting? Let them get on with it.

 

David Duchovny  11:59

Then why are we so strict? Why are we strict?

 

Jack Halberstam  12:01

Why do we have to train Why do we have to say, no, don’t do it that way. Right? So children are not quietly conforming. And so to watch film after film, Monsters, Inc, Robots.

 

David Duchovny  12:15

Can you go through monsters in because it’s just some I think it’s gonna be so much fun to for people to hear.

 

Jack Halberstam  12:22

Monsters Inc, is so cool, because the monsters are sort of like part of a corporate entity in which they have been commissioned to scare children at night, you know. And this is understood to be what the monster is for. And so once a child enters the facility, and a bond forms between child and monster. And really, within the culture, child and monster are actually closely aligned.

 

David Duchovny  12:49

They realize that they’re closely aligned. What do you mean by that?

 

Jack Halberstam  12:53

Because, again, the child is the untrained version of the human, and so when you’re looking at a little person having a tantrum you’re seeing, you know, the unrepressed version of how we might respond to the world. And we say, no, please stop doing that. This is monstrous. And so we tame our children, and we and especially in this era of like helicopter parenting, we really ascribe to them a code of conduct. The monster is precisely the figure that does not follow a code of conduct. And so what’s amazing about monsters? Inc, is it saying even the figures that are supposed to represent the anarchic outside of the culture, we can incorporate them, Monsters Inc, let’s put them in a in a company, and the uprising comes from within the company, through solidarity with the child. And that’s, I mean, it’s kind of amazing to have these films that are ratting on corporate culture, you know.

 

David Duchovny  13:57

Were you in the in the Audience screaming, aha. When you first saw that movie, or did it take my favorite?

 

Jack Halberstam  14:04

My favorite, really is chicken run. It really is all fantastic. Mr. Fox, both of those.

 

David Duchovny  14:10

Give us your Chicken Run.

 

Jack Halberstam  14:12

Chicken Run is very basic Marxism at the beginning, which is that you have farmers who are stealing the labor of the chickens and the fruits of their labor. So the chicken lay the eggs. The farmers come and steal them. They sell them, and now we enter a new mode of production, where Mrs. Tweedy says, I’ve got an idea. We’re not getting enough out of our chickens. Why stop at the eggs? Let’s turn them into chicken pot pies. So now they become the commodity, rather than the producers of the commodity. And ginger, who is the intellectual of the bunch, not Rocky, played by, you know, the horrible Mel Gibson. He comes to save them. He’s, in fact, booted out. Ginger realizes we have to assume. Escape. And hidden behind this is chickens. It’s a matriarchy. I mean, this is a feminist uprising. You know, there’s no guy, there’s the old soldier in this rocky and neither are viable models of masculinity. And the chickens realize we’re not going to have a natural Revolution by flying. We’re going to make a machine, and our.

 

David Duchovny  15:22

Which is the male domain, normally, right?

 

Jack Halberstam  15:24

Yes.

 

David Duchovny  15:25

Technology.

 

Jack Halberstam  15:26

We’re going to become a kind of cyborg figure, power the wooden airplane and fly off to this utopian zone, and you end up in a kind of Marxist utopia, where people are working, playing, thinking, reading, knitting, but their labor is not alienated. That’s Chicken Run. It’s a frigging feminist Marxist fable. And the kids are like, Oh, yay. This is amazing. It’s insane. It’s insane that they got away with it.

 

David Duchovny  15:55

Yeah, I wanted to pivot for a moment from failure to forgetting, because this is another thing that you expound on brilliantly in your exegesis of Dude, Where’s My Car? Which blew my mind. I’d never seen that film. I watched it two nights ago. I don’t know if I’d say it’s so good, but I what is so good is is the way you talk about it. Because I was sitting there going, Yeah, okay, I prefer Jack’s version of this movie. And apparently.

 

Jack Halberstam  16:28

You have to be stoned to watch it, and I’m not a stoner, so I watched it cold sober.

 

David Duchovny  16:34

I like my gummies, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t gummied up when I watched. Maybe I have to go back. But with Dude, Where’s My Car? You speak about forgetting and you talk about white male stupidity, two of my favorite subjects. So it’s all yours.

 

Jack Halberstam  16:50

Well, you know, I’m, I’m somebody who was trained probably in the same way that you would you were when you were an undergraduate or doing your PhD.

 

David Duchovny  17:03

To be clear.

 

Jack Halberstam  17:03

But you continued, yeah, but you began a PhD program. I believe ABD, ABD, ABD, that’s pretty far along. Yes. And you know, we were told that there were certain artifacts of our culture that were worthy of our contemplation. Beckett is a good one. You know, high art and avant garde literature, and having been a punk in the 1970s I just don’t buy it. I’m like, Yeah, I could get that from TSL, it’s a wasteland. Or I could watch, you know, fantastic, Mr. Fox, and get some of the same material. I really can. I don’t know why you need a high cultural text to get to angst or darkness or any of those things you want.

 

David Duchovny  17:52

To take seriously art that doesn’t take itself so seriously.

 

Jack Halberstam  17:56

I do because when you have a kind of anarchic text, like, Dude, Where’s My Car? It’s a, you know, something that can be exploited to rethink world, the world, because the world has been imagined and theorized and politicized from the perspective of a universal white man. When that perspective is loosened up. Lots of other things appear. And in that film alone, there is casual homoerotic kissing between the two male leads, both of whom, at least one of whom, Ashton Kutcher is known to be kind of a babe magnet at that time. You know very clearly heterosexual. There are drag kings in the film. There are, you know, Queens. There are powerful women with fallacies, etc. There are gay aliens from Uranus. I mean, that’s what happens when you loosen up the center of a white man who knows everything you know, whether it’s any Steven Spielberg film ever made, or just a rom com with a mansplainer at the center, once, I would rather watch a film with a stupid guy at the center, because his stupidity gives often, not always. Sometimes it’s just an avenue for more violence for everybody else, but often his relaxed relationship to knowing means that somebody else can know things.

 

David Duchovny  19:29

His relaxed relationship to knowing, which by what you mean, his in curiosity or his stupidity or his just forgetfulness.

 

Jack Halberstam  19:37

Just complete, Like in Dude, where’s My Car? These guys are as babies, right? Yeah, they don’t remember where the car is, and this sets them into a loop.

 

David Duchovny  19:49

They live in the moment, you know? They live in the moment.

 

Jack Halberstam  19:52

They’re in an internal present, yeah. There’s no past, there’s no future. They’re not controlling.

 

David Duchovny  19:59

There’s no. School.

 

Jack Halberstam  20:00

There’s no school. There’s no what. Where do they get their knowledge? They’re watching a nature program on TV, right? And where the ape picks up a stick.

 

David Duchovny  20:09

Animals, they’re watching animals, they’re animals.

 

Jack Halberstam  20:13

Yeah, so it’s a, I think it’s a really brilliant film. It’s up there for me with all the Austin Powers films and Wayne’s World, those are the kinds of films that I’m saying revel in, a kind of, you know, a masculinity that doesn’t want to rule.

 

David Duchovny  20:32

Doesn’t want to rule, it’s such forgetting is such a strange concept, right? Because we can’t actively forget something we can’t. We can’t force ourselves to forget. In fact, I think Nietzsche says we only remember things that give us pain. You know, so, right, that’s right how do we forget your and I think what you’re opening up in your in your work and in the space that we’re talking about is a different notion of forgetting than is what the person on the street might think of as forgetting. It’s more of it’s more of a revolutionary and and I think just to go back one more point on the kids movies, what I loved about your your discussion of that was you said we as a as a culture, and often as parents, we we designate rebellion as childish. We because children are rebellious, that’s we all accept that. But we also say you’ll grow out of it, you’ll grow out of it, you’ll learn, right? And you’ll grow out of it. And I think that that’s an incredible designation to make if you want to speak on that.

 

Jack Halberstam  21:41

Yeah, because what it it does more than that. It says revolutionary impulses are immature, yeah. And it says, yeah, you know, maybe when you’re 16, that sounded exciting to change the world.

 

David Duchovny  21:54

[…] Right.

 

Jack Halberstam  21:55

Now, you’re an adult.

 

David Duchovny  21:56

When you were 16, but now, but now, it’s time to listen to the Beatles and Bach.

 

Jack Halberstam  22:00

And grow up exactly right. Your tastes need to mature as well. But that category of maturity is a deeply disciplinary category. It really is, and the only people who have the privilege to not grow up are these kind of stupid dudes, like our dudes in Dude, Where’s My Car? Or, you know, an aging rock star or whatever, who we’re like, oh, boys will be boys, and he’s ever young, and that kind of thing. Apart from that, we have a very clear sense of what’s appropriate at what age, and we enforce it fairly restrictively. Now, in terms of forgetting you’re right. You can’t just say forget that, because forgetting is not necessarily something that we have agentic control over.

 

David Duchovny  22:50

Forgetting is another way of remembering for me anyway.

 

Jack Halberstam  22:53

Yeah, but we can selectively remember. And in fact, as a society, what we do with ideology is selective remembering where we say this great nation and this, you know, that has been built upon the hard work of Protestant Okay, slavery, you know, have we? How have we forgotten it to the point where we’re actually saying, and don’t teach any books that focus on slavery, because it’s detrimental to the way we think about this country, but that’s what this country is, right? This country with its wealth and its riches, and the way in which those riches are distributed across white populations is the result of slavery. So on the one hand, you know, forgetting can be an official task and can be mandated in the schools. On the other hand, we can also practice a certain kind of forgetting that says the script that I was given, I refuse it. I forget it. And as Dory does in Finding Nemo, you kind of are no longer restricted by this this time Oedipal time of the family and what has been passed on and what is now expected of you fall out of time when you enter into the loop of forgetfulness.

 

David Duchovny  24:34

Your interest in these matters, they come from a personal biography, and and clearly you have made transitions in your in your personal biography. And I’m wondering, how do we live with both like the quotidian Freudian just pain of growing up different, of dealing with failure within a system that young you must have gone through? And if you don’t mind talking a little about that your origin story, in a way, and how it obviously informs the way you think and what you say today?

 

Jack Halberstam  25:10

Yeah, that’s really nice, you know, when I’m probably about your age, David, and that means that, you know, I was coming of age in England in in the early 70s, which was a bit brutal for a queer kid, somebody who, like at that point, I already knew that I at least was interested in girls, not boys, and that my presentation was very consistently masculine and not feminine. And that was a brutal environment for that kind of self presentation or that kind of trajectory of desire. There was no room for it. I mean, when I went to a lesbian bar, you know, when I was like, maybe 16, it was like, Wow, what’s what happened to these people? You know, it was hidden down a back alley. Everybody in there was just drinking their sorrows away. And so it seemed as if to have my particular orientation meant I had already failed. I had failed to be a woman, I had failed to be heterosexual. I was going to fail to get married I was going to fail to have children. My life stretched out ahead of me as just a road of not living up and my answer to that and luck, this was lucky for me was that 1976 along came punk. And punk, yeah, Punk was a great hideout for me, because the punks were pretty asexual and they were also pretty non binary. We would say today, everyone wore everything, and it was a very angry scene. And so it was a great place to just, you know, really express my deep anger at this society that was telling me what you are is not permissible. And so by the time I’m writing this book, that’s kind of flowing through a little bit, and what I’m saying, which is about failure, which is a bit different from some of the folks you’ve spoken to, who are all, by the way, quite successful, including yourself, is moments of failure in an otherwise fairly successful life by every standard that the society has set. What I’m saying, and I’ve heard you say this in the podcast a couple of different ways, is that success failure is a logic. It’s not simply about moments of interruption to an otherwise smooth, flowing trajectory. Failure is the burden and the lot of people who do not conform to the social script they’ve been given. And you know, as an actor, that’s kind of recognizable, that there are all kinds of ways that a script can be performed, but there are ways that still are considered to be right and ways that are considered to be wrong, so some of us have already been assigned to the category of failure without even beginning our lives.

 

David Duchovny  28:13

How? Thank you for that. That’s beautifully put and that you mentioned, Punk is very interesting to me, because it’s one of the things that I’ve gone through on this podcast. I was not into punk. Oh, right. And, I mean, for many reasons I know now why. I mean, I mean, just I was kind of living an accepted identity and accepted life, and I I ingested the accepted rock and roll forms, right? So I was, I didn’t have the need for the outlet of punk. And I, in many ways, I was scared of the anger because I didn’t really understand it. And and I guess without dwelling too long on your childhood, I just want to dwell a moment longer on at 16 you go to a lesbian bar, but zero to 16, you know you’re you’re dealing with this, this sense, this overwhelming sense of failure, that you’re that you’re that you are overcoming in your philosophy and your life. But at five, at six, at seven, it’s not feeling that way, or you don’t have the mental capability to kind of pose those questions to the system and to yourself. And I’m just wondering if there’s anything you want to speak to there that can, I mean, I hesitate to say help, but I think that it’s very interesting to talk to people, because I would say you have found your successful identity, but it came at a great kind of emotional cost. I would imagine at some point it is instructive to watch people as they transform, and not as you say. I’m talking to successful people about moments of failure, but no, I want to get to that point before. Yeah, just for a moment. I don’t want to, you know, yeah, on the couch or anything.

 

Jack Halberstam  30:05

Yeah, you know, my therapist will thank you for this. But you know, I grew up as a little girl who was mistaken for a boy, well into my teens, like everywhere we went, oh, they’d say to my dad, lovely, two girls, two boys. And he’d say, three girls, one boy. And you know, that’s the thing. Your gender identity is coiled within you, but it’s also projected onto you by every interaction that you had, and every interaction I had said, You’re a boy, and I was not unhappy with that identity. And until I hit puberty, I could live that identity. And my mother, who died young, died when I was nine. She did her best to try to make me a girl, you know, and so that was that was difficult to remember, that she did that then through the experience of losing her, to think at the same time, like I have this terrible memory of losing her, but even before that, I have this memory of her trying to alter me that was also not good.

 

David Duchovny  31:14

Yeah, do you remember trying to fit in? It sounds to me like there was some deep knowledge in you that was just like, I am going to be what I’m going to be, or I am going to be what I am, no matter what’s going on right now. But were there moments of trying to fit in and feeling that failure?

 

Jack Halberstam  31:33

Yeah, oh, for sure. I mean, but to be honest, David, I was never going to give up the boy thing. I just wasn’t, like.

 

David Duchovny  31:42

How do you have that, that belief?

 

Jack Halberstam  31:45

I don’t know. It just was, I mean, it’s, it’s what we now call a kind of core trans identity. And I don’t identify as trans in an uncomplicated way, but it’s like, you know who you are, and just if someone had tried to script you as a girl in your childhood, you would no doubt if your core identity told you something different, you would defy that ascription. And I did that. I played soccer with boys and hung out with boys till I was 13 or 14, and at that point, when their testosterone kicked in, I couldn’t beat them up anymore, and I couldn’t play on the same level, and we had to go our separate ways. And that was hard for me, because My early childhood was spent with boys, and so actually being queer was a bit of a challenge, because actually, I really liked boys. I liked hanging out with them. I just didn’t want to be with them sexually, and so I’m always sort of looking for these straight guy friends who I miss from my childhood.

 

David Duchovny  32:51

That’s that’s kind of Dark and Lovely. I’ll say, do you know the book, Man Made Man by pagan Kennedy? Do you know this story? Yes, yeah, yeah. I tried to make a movie of that for for years, because this was the first.

 

Jack Halberstam  33:06

Oh, wow.

 

David Duchovny  33:07

The first female to male transsexual operation, and that we know of.

 

Jack Halberstam  33:13

Oh, that’s the one about Michael Dylan, isn’t it?

 

David Duchovny  33:16

Yes, Michael Dillon.

 

Jack Halberstam  33:17

Yes, it is, that’s exactly right. And Michael Dillon was, wow, an incredibly, uh, imaginative person to figure out how to get hormones and top surgery. It’s an amazing story.

 

David Duchovny  33:30

[…] nihilo, really, out of nothing. That’s right. No, no, there was no literature. There was nothing for this person to go off of. And this person said this, this person born a woman, said, I’m a man.

 

Jack Halberstam  33:44

Okay, but the truth is David that what he did know about was hormones, which was a big area of medical research at that time. So it wasn’t completely ex nihilo, but it was a huge leap. It was a huge leap that he began injecting himself with testosterone, and because there were army surgeons around doing plastic surgery […] men on men who had been wounded in World War One, he was able to get top surgery simply by saying, you can experiment on my chest. Take these breasts off. That’s an incredible story. It really is, but what comes through the story as well is loneliness. You know, yeah, ends up a monk. You know, very singular.

 

David Duchovny  34:33

It’s stranger than fiction. I mean, you can’t, you can’t believe that this happened. And not many people know, know this story, and I’ll still one day.

 

Jack Halberstam  34:43

But why can’t you make it, David?

 

David Duchovny  34:45

I don’t know. I wasn’t able to. I commissioned a script to be written. Maybe the script wasn’t good enough. Maybe it was 15 years ago. I was trying to make it. Maybe it was. Too soon, and maybe now it’s too late, you know maybe.

 

Jack Halberstam  35:03

Because there’s tons of these stories, including the story of Billy Tipton, who was a jazz musician in the 40s and was married and so on. They didn’t know that he was living in a female body until he died. There’s tons of these stories. No one’s made them. No one.

 

David Duchovny  35:18

All right, well, I’ll get back out there with it.

 

Jack Halberstam  35:21

All right.

 

David Duchovny  35:21

I’ll start walking the streets with my old script.

 

David Duchovny  35:51

I guess I wanted to ask, you’re a teacher, and yet you’re definitely in the Socratic mode of saying, Well, I don’t know anything, so that’s what I can teach you, in terms of forgetting, in terms of failure. That all lines up to me. But how do you navigate teaching? Because it is a hierarchical situation, and it is one where you are up in front of the class, and you you have knowledge that you’re supposed to impart to these kids, and you’re giving grades, I imagine, and stuff like that. So how is that suit feeling? And how do you circumvent those, those kind of.

 

Jack Halberstam  36:30

Thinking about that when I was listening to your podcast, because acting and teaching are they’re not the same, but they are related in that you you have to go into the classroom, or you have to go on the stage or on the set and perform, and you have to perform something that is not always you, and often is quite distant from you. So sometimes you do do just have to teach the thing that they need to know, but at other times, you’re teaching them the thing that they think they need to know, but you’re also teaching them about how it came to be that this is the thing we think we need to know, as opposed to everything else that’s ever been written. How was it that we came to think of this lineage from sort of Shakespeare to TS Eliot? Well, TS Eliot, for example, wrote an essay called the great tradition in which He placed himself at the end of this long lineage of white guys who were, in Matthew Arnold’s opinion, the best and the brightest, the best that had been said in the culture. But to get to that lineage, you’ve had to push aside so much material. You have had to clear the decks of anything that didn’t conform to that particular perspective. So when I’m teaching, I try to give them the tools that they need to deconstruct the tradition that will, anyway, no doubt, cover but I also teach Punk in the classroom and the critique of the culture that they’re living in.

 

David Duchovny  38:01

How do you feel about your success? You know, because that must be a bittersweet notion to you. I mean, you have a Guggenheim, am I right?

 

Jack Halberstam  38:11

I just got one, okay, but David, I honestly must have applied 20 times. It’s pathetic, really. I don’t know. I just kept going. And most people who get these things, they get them the first or second try if you and they tell you, if you don’t get one, but you’re not gonna get it. I got one, sheer bloody persistence, I guess it gave me one.

 

David Duchovny  38:31

Should I say congratulations or condolences in your.

 

Jack Halberstam  38:33

Definitely, congratulations. I may be a failure guy, but I’ll take that win. I really well.

 

David Duchovny  38:40

This is a question kind of a continuation of you at the head of the class being a pedagogical figure. Now you are at the head of the class with a with a Guggenheim. Are there any kind of checking over your shoulders, like, am I being co opted, or am I still doing what I want to be doing.

 

Jack Halberstam  39:01

That’s for sure, a question. We’re all co opted. Anyone who’s, you know, doing well in this system, in this economy, is CO opted, no question. And I think it’s more recognizing that the work that we want to do, and this is why I really appreciate your podcast. Actually, the work we want to do can often be done in the institutions that employ us. We have to go elsewhere. We have to make a classroom in the wild.

 

David Duchovny  39:32

Yeah, more of a village.

 

Jack Halberstam  39:36

Collective of some.

 

David Duchovny  39:37

Collective, yeah, I guess that’s, that’s what I what I would end on an impossible question. Because if we’re unmaking, if, if, if we’re if we agree that the system is flawed to an extent that is too painful for too many people, do you feel the need to offer? I. As an alternative, you know, aside from or are we just talking about creating a space where people who are mostly, most deeply injured by the system can can live? Or are we talking about no system at all? And what’s the alternative?

 

Jack Halberstam  40:16

I think I have been seduced by the idea of offering alternatives in work. I do that in the queer art of failure. Why do you say seduced? Well, because that’s a very masterful position anyway, to say, you know, this way of doing things is screwed. I can offer you another way. I mean, you can’t. You really can’t. We are in this system. We have consented to it, we participate in it, but there are hundreds of 1000s of people who are being actively screwed and Dispossessed by that same system that delivers goods and riches to you. So what I now believe is that we just have to work really hard to unmake this world that we live in, because it’s predicated on such brutal exploitation, and I don’t know what would then come after, because unmaking the world will reveal to us what a different formation could look like. And most of that work is being done by like, you know, black activist groups, by prison activists, by abolitionists. That’s abolitionists really believe you have to abolish a society that runs on the dispossession of large numbers of people on the one hand and the incarceration of large numbers of people of color on the other. So I’m sort of in the abolitionist camp. Let’s take this thing down, and then we’ll see.

 

David Duchovny  41:46

And you’re gonna run into always too big to fail, you know, there. You know that this system I’m not just talking about financially, I’m just talking about this system that we inherit, right? That’s true. It takes a hell of a lot of balls and guts to go out into the anarchy, you know?

 

Jack Halberstam  42:01

And, yeah, it does. But who does anyone really think the state, the elections, the you know, the system that we’re inhabiting, is doing a good job? I don’t think so. If you can elect someone like Trump, then are you in a democracy really, really. And if not, then the system of democracy is consistently delivering authoritarian leaders, which makes it suspect. And a lot of people are thinking about alternatives to the electoral system right now.

 

David Duchovny  42:37

Well, it’s the Electoral College which is really the hedge against just outright democracy, I guess you know. And that’s,

 

Jack Halberstam  42:42

Yeah, well, there are many hedges, including the Supreme Court. Supreme Court people being appointed for life, yeah.

 

David Duchovny  42:48

Each state, regardless of population, has two senators. There’s, there’s, there’s ways that are baked in that circumvent the actual will of the majority of the people. Exactly, we have this myth of ourselves as being the democratic beacon for the rest of the planet.

 

Jack Halberstam  43:05

We know that’s a joke. I mean, that’s part of the ideology we’re just like freaking soaking in.

 

David Duchovny  43:11

Yeah, it’s funny to think back on my own education, because, you know, I was educated as a kid in the in the 60s, and, you know, not yet did we have the 60s vision, even though it was on, you know, the news, but, you know, I I got, you know, the complete whitewash version of American history and all that, that, and yet, I had an inkling that it was bullshit. So the the kind of happenings the last 10 years have not been, they’ve not been so surprising to me yet, I’m on my heels, you know, trying to figure out, you know, I walk in every conversation. I don’t want to walk in every conversation apologizing for being a straight white man. I mean, I want to be able to publish a book without my name on it and just have it, have all books read as just texts, you know, and not to have identity be part of it. But that may not be a right that I’m entitled to at this point.

 

Jack Halberstam  44:07

I don’t think it’s not about being a straight white man. It’s about being part of a system that is constantly smoothing the way for straight white men that doesn’t have anything specific to do with you as an individual who is making all kinds of contributions. It’s more to say, what would a system look like that actually cared about people who are living in poverty, who this system has actively produced as a population living in poverty? You know, from years of exclusion, exploitation and lack of support. It’s more structural than that. Just then, Maya Culpa, you know […]

 

David Duchovny  44:48

I’m trying. I’m, you know, I’m.

 

Jack Halberstam  44:51

You’re doing your piece. Exactly, you’re doing your piece.

 

David Duchovny  44:54

Thank you.

 

Jack Halberstam  44:55

Failing well.

 

David Duchovny  44:58

When you said failing, I deserve my mother’s. Voice say miserably, but she was a Scottish woman, so you probably understand.

 

Jack Halberstam  45:05

Absolutely I do, and in many ways, we’re back to Beckett and the misery.

 

David Duchovny  45:11

Yeah, I’m being told. I got to wrap it up because, because your studio you see running out, yeah? But Jack, hey, I yeah, I don’t know how to thank you. This was such a wonderful conversation for me to have. And I know conversation is just conversation. It’s not action, but I thank you for what it is.

 

Jack Halberstam  45:32

I thank you, David, it was my complete pleasure.

 

David Duchovny  45:48

Okay, this is some post Jack Halberstam thoughts. I mean, my mind is spinning after that. It was so invigorating. Eye opening Jack’s point of view, questioning all the power structures that we are both born into and, for the most part, accept, certainly ones that I’ve accepted my entire life. You know, I’ve had pride in feeling like a self made man, self made person. You know, I grew up with parents who did not have a bank account. I mean, they had a bank account, but, you know, there was nothing. There were no savings. We didn’t own any real estate, renters. I was never hungry. I was never feeling like underprivileged but the fact that I made a bunch of money in my life, it was a source of pride to me, fact that I owned a home or two. So I came in kind of not questioning the setup, you know, what you call the liberal capitalist setup. Now in fact, that was the game. I didn’t mind playing it wasn’t about making money for me ever. But I certainly didn’t mind it that it came along and it’s and it gave me a sense of security, because my mother, having grown up in the depression in Scotland, had real fiscal insecurity her entire life, but I entered into a system of great wealth inequality, and I came out on a winning side of that, and I had always thought that it was testament to my character and talent, and I was loath to give up that self conception, and I still am. I want to believe in that, that story about myself, but speaking to somebody like Jack and realizing that you must question the system, and if you enter into that system and become a winner and don’t change the system, then you must question your own character.

 

CREDITS  48:41

There’s more Fail Better with Lemonada Premium. Subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content like more of my behind the scenes thoughts on this episode. Subscribe now and Apple podcasts. Fail Better as a production of Lemonada media in coordination with King Baby. It is produced by Kegan Zema, Aria Bracci, and Dani Matias, Paula Kaplan   . Our engineer is Brian Castillo. Our SVP of weekly is Steve Nelson. Our VP of new content is Rachel Neil. Special thanks to Carl Ackerman, Tom Karpinski and Brad Davidson, the show’s executive produced by Stephanie Wittels Wachs, Jessica Cordova, Kramer and me, David Duchovny. The music is also by me and my band. Lovely Colin Lee. Pat McCusker, Mitch Stewart, Davis Rowan and Sebastian […]. You can find us online at @LemonadaMedia and you can find me @DavidDuchovny. Follow Fail Better wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership.