It’s not very often that an Oscar-worthy movie successfully makes the case for embracing creative failure, but “Little Miss Sunshine,” released in 2006, definitely does. Nominated for Academy Awards in four categories, including Best Picture, and winning two Oscars for Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Alan Arkin), the movie doesn’t just shine as an example of a well-written script and fine ensemble acting—it provides one of the most honest takes on the role of failure in the creative life that I’ve ever seen.
A quick synopsis of the plot: Sheryl and Richard Hoover, an Albuquerque couple, seem to lead a family packed with members who have missed the bus to success in life. Sheryl’s gay brother, Frank, is living with the family after a failed suicide attempt, the final humiliation after his ex-boyfriend left him for another scholar in Frank’s academic field—someone who just happened to recently win a MacArthur “genius” grant. Richard is struggling to establish himself as a life coach, drawing meager handfuls of clients to his “reject rejection” self-help seminars. Sheryl’s son from a previous marriage, Dwyane, has taken a vow of silence as he prepares to be an Air Force test pilot, and fills his days with an idiosyncratic regimen of calisthenics and Nietzsche. Richard’s dad, Edwin, is also living with the family, after being booted from his retirement home for snorting heroin. The couple’s 7-year-old daughter, Olive, a pudgy, plain-looking girl, tirelessly practices her dance routine for the beauty pageants she aspires to enter.
When Olive qualifies (by default) for the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in California, the entire family crams themselves into a Volkswagen Microbus and drives to the event to cheer Olive on. Needless to say, with that set-up, the journey to the pageant offers each family member a chance to encounter their own feelings about where they don’t measure up in life.
“Little Miss Sunshine” offers four lessons related to embracing creative failure.
Trying to avoid failure makes it more devastating
Richard spends most of the movie driving everyone crazy with his nine-step coaching “system” and his non-stop emphasis on being a “winner.” As might be expected, when he fails to land a book contract, he handles the situation poorly, riding off on a borrowed moped to a hotel in the middle of the night to hassle his would-be agent when he learns the man’s not interested in his work. Positive thinking can be a useful ally for artists and innovators, but obsessing on what it takes to be a winner or despising the thought of losing amplifies the inevitable set-backs that we all face as we try to achieve our creative goals.
Life is one big beauty pageant after another (if you let it be)
Frank, Richard and Dwayne suffer mightily at different points in the movie when they realize they’ve landed on the losing side of the win-lose framework they set up for gauging progress toward their ultimate goals. In contrast, Olive approaches the Little Miss Sunshine pageant with a certain amount of naïveté, her body language betraying shock when she sees how sculpted, rehearsed and primped her fellow contestants are. Despite this, she approaches her talent presentation—a dance choreographed by her grandfather to Rick James’ “Super Freak”—with joyous abandon. She may or may not realize she isn’t going to win the pageant title with this approach, but her example leads her family to realize there are other things just as important as winning when striving for a goal.
Being supported is more valuable than being understood
One of the most magical parts of the movie is the way that the family members stick up for each other, even when they don’t understand the other person’s goals. One of the most crucial ingredients for creating an environment where artistic risk-taking is possible is finding support, whether that’s drawn from within one’s self or from a loving friend or family member. Feeling supported often cushions the impact of an otherwise shattering failure experience.
Ken Robert, creator of the magnificent Mildly Creative blog, has written about the main benefit of allowing others to support you without demanding they understand you or your art, which is a reduction in one’s level of self-absorption:
“What you’re really doing when you give up your pleas to be understood is freeing yourself to take a real interest in others. ... When you stop clamoring for others to understand you, you’re free to invest your energy in better understanding yourself and those around you. And this is a much better, far more fruitful, unbelievably more rewarding way to spend your time.”
Don’t discard an imperfect vehicle—it might just take you all the way to your goal
Olive and her family have to use their aging, rickety VW Microbus to drive 800 miles to the pageant. The clutch gets stripped, the horn breaks and sounds continuously, and by the end, the vehicle can only be started by having all the adults (except Richard, who’s driving) push it until it gets up to 15 mph, and then pull each other, one by one, into the bus while it’s moving.
Ironically, the bus breaking down is one of the best things to happen to the family. It bonds them. It forces them to work together. It becomes a valuable storage space when a family tragedy occurs that requires quick thinking. And, perhaps most importantly, it does get them all the way to the pageant, even if it isn’t in the way they might have imagined.
In creative work, it’s often necessary to start on a project and aim to get things half-right—something known as rapid iteration. First drafts, preliminary sketches and prototypes are by their very nature imperfect, but they may very well contain the seeds of excellence that blossom by the time the work is completed.
Sure, “Little Miss Sunshine” is a feel-good movie, but the good feelings shelter a greater purpose. The film encourages a positive embrace of risk, asserting with the film’s grandfather character that, “A loser is someone so afraid of not winning that they don’t try.”
