1This special issue examines failure, not as narrative conceit or as aesthetic concern (the latter being the main focus of the 2024 special issue of Captures, entitled “Esthétiques du ratage”), but as a cultural phenomenon. What happens when a work fails to reach its profitability goals, to find its audience, or, more simply, to be understood?

2When it comes to cultural industries, the most readily available definition of failure might be the economic one: failure to engage readers, and to generate profit. Conversely, then, mainstream successes are sometimes defined on a purely commercial basis. As Ursula Le Guin lamented in 1989 regarding the science-fiction genre, “Now that it’s possible to ‘be a success’, that is, to make real money, as a science-fiction writer, there's a temptation to make [commercial] success the criterion of excellence—and to regard quality, literary excellence, as something foreign and possibly subversive” (4). By contrasting economic failure with aesthetic failure, Le Guin points at the diversity of criteria that come into play. She also underlines how context-dependent failure and success seem to be: a success according to 1980s SF readers can very well be a failure for other audiences.

3In a 2003 article on failure in contemporary art, Yves Citton concludes that it is precisely at the level of collective norms and shared social structures that failure can be understood: “As we stated, the only failure is a collective one. Now we can now narrow it down further: all failures are failures in modes of regulation” (41). These modes of regulation, together with technological and contractual boundaries, shape, define, and even constitute intellectual and cultural categories. By reflecting on failures, we hope to understand these categories, contemporary media culture, the canon, and the implicit expectations encoded within these structures.

4It is not uncommon to see failure romanticized as a low point that reveals one’s true self—confer J. K. Rowling, who in a 2008 speech at Harvard, stated: “Rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” In such cases, failure plays a role in the construction of the author’s posture (Meizoz)—it is a narrative conceit, the Campbellian ordeal before the final triumph that is the book itself. Yet what of the real failures? Those come in various forms, from the doomed projects that never find their audience to the supremely boring trash, amounting to nothing but “a total waste of paper” (Rokk), footage or pixels. In the case of J. K. Rowling, of course, failure can also be seen in the author’s inability to shield her creation from her widely criticized public statements and persona. We are interested in those books, comics, magazines, videogames, films, or series that form the uncanonical, illegitimate refuse of modern culture.

5Failure, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and in some cases, failure is made spectacular or even created by the intensity of the expectations surrounding the works. In 1963 Cleopatra’s shooting made headlines for all the wrong reasons: from the scandalous love affair between Taylor and Burton to a change in directors and cast members, the movie turned out to be the most expensive production at the time and nearly bankrupted 20^th Century Fox. Not only were viewers’ expectations misled and reviews mixed, but it resulted in studios shying away from high-budget epics for a very long time. Of course, Cleopatra is now widely understood as a “classic”—though perhaps not a masterpiece—, a critical condition that seems to bypass critical examination entirely, but acknowledges the scope, craft, and lasting star power of the film.

6Some commercial failures are not due to the contents of the work itself, but to the context within which it was published. As a consequence, commercial failure does not necessarily prevent works from becoming critically successful in the long run. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) attracted very small audiences and prompted bad reviews before becoming a cult performance and the longest-running release in film history. Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) went relatively unnoticed before being labelled the “worst film ever made” by Harry and Michael Medved and being acclaimed as best worst movie. Tim Burton’s tribute to its director, Ed Wood (1994) contributed to the movie’s fame by ironically becoming a critical success.

7In a culture where ratings are everywhere, there is something touching about outstanding failures which often derive from or result in an affective response; when a book, magazine or comic leaves the tepid realm of the mediocre in order to enter the select circle of absolute trash. In cinema, such works have come to form a subcultural canon of their own, from Z-movies to films so-bad-they’re-good, and are celebrated, among others, by the Razzie Awards. Similar trends exist in print culture, one prime example being the Bad Sex Awards, which celebrate resounding failures of good taste in erotic scenes. By accepting and embracing these awards, some of their recipients have highlighted not only the value of failure in making it possible to define genuine success, but also the interplay between their individual agency and the constraints of the modes of regulation they have to contend with. Sandra Bullock famously accepted a Razzie award in 2010, cheerfully thanking the audience for “ruining [her] career” before winning an Academy Award (for a different role) the following night.

8Additionally, when challenging the boundaries of good taste and established social norms, failure may open up “unbounded forms of speculation, modes of thinking that ally not with rigor and order but with inspiration and unpredictability” (Halberstam 10). In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam indeed makes the case for recognizing the value of failure as he contends that “failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development” (3).

9Failure then acquires a playful quality, which may even become an expected feature in more niche media. Discussing videogame streamers on Twitch, Fanny Barnabé notes: “Even the most obvious failed actions can be valued as spectacular content and, in this way, presented not as obstacles to be overcome, but as satisfying outcomes for the performance.” (n.p.) Again, social context matters, for failure is “an integral element of the overall experience of playing a game” (Juul 9). Failure, in other words, can be a source of pleasure, both in contexts in which it serves a teaching mechanism—“a clear proof that we have improved when we finally overcome it” (Juul 9)—and in circumstances in which we serve merely as witnesses, encompassing genuine empathy, Schadenfreude, and a demythifying gaze on the usually unquestioned valuation of success in social and cultural norms.

10The articles in this special issue attempt to tackle failure by showcasing some recurrent phenomena leading to this perception, with a resolute focus on film history. They examine the interplay of media, technology, and performance and their role in the identification of memorable failures. They further point to the increasing importance of reappraisal and shifting contexts, in an era of ubiquitous media where every cultural object simultaneously seems to be accessible by everyone at all times, yet removed from its historical context of production and reception. Finally, they look to the fragmented consumption of media and the proliferation of critical discourses, which encourage positions running counter to previous appraisals and reward contrarian takes on acknowledged failures for increasingly niche audiences.

11This media landscape implies that failures are constantly reclaimed, sometimes canonised, and can of course be confirmed, calling attention to agency and cultural authority—or cultural “regulation”—in the very definition of the phenomenon, as demonstrated by the six articles in this issue.

12Jan Baetens, in his introductory essay, considers failure as a central value in contemporary culture. He studies the notion, insisting that failure cannot be understood as the mechanical opposite of success, but as a fundamentally relative category, reliant on history and subject to production and reception contexts. Drawing from the modernist aesthetics of Samuel Beckett, who envisioned failure as a serious matter and prompted artists to “fail better,” Baetens identifies three major tropes in the contemporary aesthetics of failure. The narrative, which showcases stories of loss and losers; the formal, where style is visibly raw and borrows from art brut or primitivism; and the metatextual, where social presence and discourse on works overshadow technical and artistic concerns. Those tropes are then applied to the study of graphic novelist Daniel Clowes, whose satiric outlook on his protagonists and refusal to take up new drawing trends point to a willingness to remain in the counterculture and ceaselessly walk this path. “Failing better” would then mean relentlessly sticking to one’s vision and developing it.

13Sarah Hucy addresses the critical and commercial failure of Disney’s The Black Cauldron (1985) in view of the industrial, cultural and artistic context of the decade. Designed to appeal to a teenage audience with a darker and more violent aesthetic than the Disney classics, The Black Cauldron flopped because of the very gap between dark fantasy codes and the studio’s traditional identity, a “mode of regulation” maintained by both the audience and the studio’s heads. The film’s initial negative reception was partly due to its chaotic production and the many cut scenes, which prevented narrative continuity. Referring to the film’s subsequent reevaluation as cult by online fan communities, Hucy toys with the idea of a potential “dark masterpiece”—not considering the film as it exists but rather as it could have been.

14Patrick Adamson questions the resounding failure of Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail (1930). Because silent historical Westerns had been very successful in the twenties, Fox decided to capitalize on the genre and bring it to a new scale using sound and widescreen formats. Despite an extraordinary $1.7m budget, Walsh as the director, John Wayne in his first leading role, countless extras to document the travels of settlers from Missouri to Oregon, and an impressive array of technicians following the shooting across five states, the film fell short of the studio’s expectations (and investment). The Big Trail epitomizes untimely failure. Because of the Great Depression, spectators turned away from stories of a mythic, unified West and became fascinated by the ambiguous figure of the gangster. Fox’s “Grandeur 70mm widescreen,” which was indeed spectacular and required different filmic choices, was barely used in cinemas which couldn’t afford the relevant infrastructure. The pioneering aesthetic and technical qualities of the film, now widely acknowledged, were precisely those that limited its initial reception.

15Thomas Britt proceeds to a critical re-reading of Mark Region's film After Last Season (2009). Prior to the movie’s (very modest) release in four theaters came a trailer that left viewers confused, critical, and at best doubtful: what was the film’s genre, narrative, or argument? Was it a prank? A curious few saw the movie which was deemed a paragon of failure where everything was amiss—storyline, settings, visuals, and editing technique. Britt argues that this disastrous reputation obscures the film's radical formal experiments, which deliberately break with narrative and stylistic Hollywood conventions. Region’s ambition was to question norms, hence his focus on schizophrenia, ghosts, the virtual, and the real. After Last Season’s artistic value lies in its treatment of indexicality and image fabrication, but also in the extreme freedom of interpretation given to the viewers. It stands as a marginal work opening up onto unexplored spaces, a borderline case that allows us to rethink the very criteria of cinematic failure.

16Jason Meredith, for his part, contends that if Ed Wood was alternately derided as the “worst director of all time” or celebrated as a symbol of artistic incompetence, it is because his productions were fundamentally misunderstood as his critics conveniently overlooked a central element in his works—that of queer representation and dissemination. A minute examination of Ed Wood’s movies, scripts, and books allows Meredith to unveil their subversive and innovative scope. At a time when heterosexuality was the almighty norm in mainstream cinema, Ed Wood delved into exploitation and sexploitation cinema to express and depict queer experiences. If those depictions were somewhat tentative in the early 50s (with a final return to heteronormativity and even criticism of homosexuality) they grew bolder in the late 70s (when gender-fluid experiences were clearly represented on screen and claimed as identity). Wood’s critical and commercial failure must be reinterpreted as political and cultural courage, where he occupied the only space possible for challenging normative systems.

17Broadening the scope of the issue from cinema to the history of periodicals, Yohann Lucas traces the history of the African American literary magazine Fire!!, published in 1926 and designed to grant total artistic freedom to writers. From production to reception, the magazine was a disaster. The editors’ ambitions were quickly hindered by money issues which led to distribution and sales problems, the scandalous themes addressed were violently criticized by most African American cultural institutions of the time, and finally the unsold copies were burnt in a fire. However, the magazine gradually resurfaced over time. The editors’ subsequent fame as well as the growing academic interest in Harlem Renaissance drew attention to Fire!!—an object all the more valuable as it was very rare—which led to a facsimile reprint in 1982. Since then, the magazine has been reclaimed by African American and LGBTQ+ studies. Lucas contends that transgression might well be the key element bridging the gap between failure and canonicity.