I've never been particularly tuned in to slang. When I was in high school, someone asked me why I was "cheesin'." I couldn't for the life of me figure out what she meant. "Maybe she wanted to know why you were smiling," my mother speculated when I told her. "You know, like smile and say cheese." According to Urban Dictionary, my classmate must have thought my smile was intense and a bit odd. If the kids in school liked something, it was "da bomb." I thought that was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard. What's so great about a bomb? It hadn't been so very long ago that a bomb in Oklahoma City killed over 150 people . . . and now "da bomb" had become the height of cool? I don't know . . . I just wasn't - how you say? - down with that.
Lately, though, there's a certain phrase that's been edging its way into my consciousness - and although it makes the grammarian in me cringe, and there's no absolute consensus as to what exactly it means, I've found myself growing fond of it. Although in some circles its overuse has caused it to lose its original geek cred and take on a certain air of lame loserdom, I for one would hate to see it go.
I'm talking about "epic fail."
As far as I can tell, the phrase came from the game Dungeons and Dragons, and was popularized through such avenues as the cable program Attack of the Show! and the notorious, hilarious Fail Blog. There are some who define "epic fail" as a funny failure, or a failed attempt to be funny. Others insist that epic fail requires the failure to be in a venture in which it should have been reasonably easy to succeed.
Most definitions, however, agree that "epic fail" is simply the highest - or should I say lowest? - degree of failure possible: the devastating, soul-crushing experience of putting your hand to the task before you, and seeing all your efforts prove completely, utterly, and forever futile. This is the definition I prefer. We all fail, often, and for the most part we get back up, dust ourselves off, learn what we can from the experience, and keep on muddling through life much as we did before. Epic fail allows no such luxury. Epic fail requires you to rebuild yourself, not from the ground up, but starting from the bottom of that hole you dug yourself into. You may learn what you can from your failure - to do so, in fact, may become a matter of survival, spiritually if not literally - but you can never go on again exactly as before. Something dies with every epic fail: a bond, a dream, a bit of our faith that the world will be kind to us and gentle with our hearts.
There's another aspect, though, reflected in numerous definitions of "epic fail," and this gets to the heart of why I love this phrase so very much. There's a kind of inherent irony to epic fail: something almost beautiful about devastation so complete, something purifying about having been stripped so bare. We've all heard, a thousand times, that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but how many of us have taken that thought through to its natural conclusion, incontestable under the rules of formal deductive logic (so long as we accept the premise to be true), that what doesn't make you stronger must perforce kill you? Epic fail is just that moment of truth. There's something about seeing your world lie in ruins around you that makes you think, I don't know how the hell I'm going to live this down, face other people again, repair my reputation, regain what I've lost, make up for the harm I've done, get over this hurt. Maybe I won't. Maybe it really is as bad as it feels. But if I somehow manage to make it through this, I have nothing left to fear. Not because of anything we've done, but simply because the mean business of living hasn't killed us yet, epic fail ends up feeling strangely like a victory. A hollow victory, a Cadmean victory perhaps, but - in the words of the geek subculture that spawned "epic fail" - nevertheless a win.
The ancients understood epic fail, certainly. So did Shakespeare. Great writers always have. Think of Oedipus, a favorite subject of ancient Greek playwrights. He's the king of Thebes - not a bad gig if you can get it, and all he had to do to get it was show up shortly after the last king disappeared. He didn't exactly marry for love, and his wife, a good twenty or so years his senior, is hardly the stuff that fantasies are made of, but they've had four children together, so it seems they're getting along, at the very least. Then he consults an oracle about ending a plague, and before he knows what's hit him his whole life unravels. Turns out he was adopted and some old guy he killed (pure self-defense, mind you) on the road to Thebes was his biological father, and that woman he's married to now was . . . well, you know. His mother/wife kills herself, he blinds himself and goes into voluntary exile, his sons fight for control of the kingdom and both end up dead (along with who knows how many of their followers), one of his daughters also commits suicide after being sentenced to be buried alive, the daughter's fiance kills himself out of love for her, and the fiance's mother (Oedipus's sister-in-law/aunt by marriage) kills herself out of grief for her son. How many people had to die because Oedipus got into a tussle on the road all those years ago without stopping to notice that the guy he was getting the best of looked an awful lot like him? Epic fail.
How about Hamlet? The last scene's a bloodbath. Everyone dies. Hamlet's father is dead before the play even begins. (So is Yorick, of course.) After that, all the loss of life that follows is, directly or indirectly, Hamlet's fault. By the time the grand finale comes around, the hero has already driven his girlfriend to suicide, perhaps because he killed her father. Even a couple of courtiers, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are done away with for no particular reason, and the play ends with four dead bodies littering the stage. It would be five; Hamlet's best friend nearly commits suicide - for no better reason, apparently, than that he feels something of an anachronism in modern Denmark - but Hamlet talks him out of it on the grounds that somebody who knows what happened needs to be left behind to explain this massive scene of epic fail.
Hamlet is only trying to do the right thing, of course. He isn't about to go into the throne room and stab his stepfather/uncle (who happens to be the king) on the word of some ghost - after all, it could have been a demon trying to make a murderer of him, couldn't it? It's probably wise not to take the word of a ghost at face value. You never know with otherworldly beings. It's reasonable to want confirmation of some kind. Of course, after he gets the confirmation he needs, Hamlet has the perfect chance to take a (literal) stab at Claudius when he catches him off-guard, at his prayers - but then again, it really isn't so perfect, because killing a man in prayer is a pretty sure way to send him to heaven, and that's not exactly the destination most of us have in mind for the murderers of our loved ones. He may have a perfectly good reason for his hesitation, but unfortunately, the longer he waits and worries, the more time Claudius has to grow suspicious of his unusual behavior and plot to get him out of the way - so by the time Hamlet is ready to act, he has the other people drawn into Claudius's schemes to reckon with, as well as the others around him who have been hurt or misled by his own actions as he prepares to do what he must.
The harder Hamlet tries to get it right, the more tangled the whole situation becomes, until finally there's no way out at all. I've never been in line for the throne of Denmark, never seen a ghost, never had to watch my mother warming my uncle's bed before my father was cold in his grave - but all of a sudden I get the feeling I've been there.
Of course, Shakespeare, the ancient Greeks, and your eleventh-grade literature teacher had a more proper name for this sort of thing: tragedy. Strictly defined, tragedy is the story of the downfall of a great man or woman, as the result of his or her own actions, resulting in far more painful a consequence than those actions would seem to deserve. The Greek word for the action on which the tragedy hinges is hamartia. In the Bible, this is the word rendered in English as "sin"; in discussion of the classic literary tragedies, it's often described as the "fatal flaw," or the one defect in an otherwise noble character that brings about tragic consequences. In Greek, the word simply refers to an act of missing the mark, as in archery. It has been suggested that a better interpretation of hamartia, in the tragic context, is simply "mistake." The tragic action may arise out of some defect of character, or even from a positive trait, but in a true tragedy, the action is wholly in line with the character of the individual who does it, and, once it begins, the course of the tragedy is inevitable and irreversible. Not every epic fail is a tragedy in this classical sense, but every tragedy is the story of epic fail. I don't suppose many literature teachers or Greek scholars would be amused to see "epic fail" replace "fatal flaw" as the standard translation of hamartia, but somehow it seems to me . . . well, not too far off the mark.
More than ever (if such a thing be possible), we in the Western world live in a culture of success. Children grow up hearing that they can become whatever they want to be, regardless of gender, disability, or family background. The nonfiction bestseller lists are full of helpful guides promising the ambitious reader the secrets of success: financial success, romantic success, social success - the quicker and easier the better. On TV we have American Idol, America's Next Top Model, The Apprentice, and their ilk; we can't seem to get enough of those ordinary folk whose talent and/or cleverness open the doors for them into fame, fortune, and glamour.
Yet even our most cherished success stories are inseparably bound up with failure. The catchphrases of our reality competition shows are taglines of shattered dreams: "The tribe has spoken." "You're fired." "You are the weakest link - goodbye." How many of these shows would be as successful if there were no vote, no boardroom, no tribal council - if there weren't a dozen stories of failure behind every tale of rags to riches? We love to watch people fail. We need to watch people fail, and spectacularly. It's reassuring. It's entertaining. It's brutal, and it's honest. Like pornography or a train wreck, you know it's a damn shame, but for some reason you just can't tear yourself away.
Now more than ever, we need epic fail. In a culture of success, we need to be reminded of our limits, our humanity, our frailty. Just as every death calls our attention to the inexorable ticking away of our own mortal hours, every failure forces us face to face with our own weakness and vulnerability. In a culture obsessed with success, failure is as great a taboo as death. We wish to distance ourselves from our own failures, to justify or explain them into something more innocuous; we look away uncomfortably from our uneducated or unemployed or unhappily-single friends, muttering under our breath that's it's okay, when we both know really it isn't, that it does make a difference, whether it ought to or not. We all say it's okay to fail, but we know in our heart of hearts that it's simply not socially acceptable. Like death, failure makes us intensely uncomfortable, even as it utterly captivates us.
There's a word in German, "schadenfreude," that refers specifically to the satisfaction we feel in the sufferings of others - not a keen, sadistic kind of pleasure, but rather a primitive, cheerless sort. Jane Kenyon wrote of "the cheerless satisfaction we sometimes feel when others fail." The offspring of schadenfreude and empathy is what the ancient dramatists called "catharsis": a powerful emotional purge, an intense swell of feeling that breaks the tensions building up under our civilized facades and reduces us to our most primitive reactions of laughter and tears. Catharsis leaves us emptied, cleansed, and new, refreshed in spirit just as we feel queasily, tentatively refreshed in body after vomiting. It's the same feeling that comes in the end to those who have failed mightily, and lived to struggle on.
The word "epic" was associated first with stories of fundamental human struggles: the struggle for love, the struggle for greatness, the struggle of good against evil. In recent years, it has come to encompass any story vast in scale, broad in scope, and touching upon universal human experience, yet transcending it: not merely heroism, but heroism above and beyond the call of duty; not merely love, but love in the face of opposition, cruelty, and death; not merely effort, but utter absorption and devotion to a cause; not merely failure, but utter devastation and loss. We may never experience a threat so dire, a love so profound, a cause so moving, but we need these stories nevertheless, the stories that remind us what we, as humans, are capable of, for good and for ill. We need epic love, epic heroism, epic struggle, and yes, epic fail. That which is epic speaks of and to a thousand human experiences of less staggering import.
What would Elvis Presley mean to us if he were (indisputably) still alive today, a stately gentleman in his mid-seventies, living comfortably off his old royalties? As talented a musician as he was, our fascination with his life is less about his art than about the story of a young man who had the world at his fingertips and ended up dead on his bathroom floor at the age of forty-two. Would the stories of Oedipus and Hamlet resonate so strongly over hundreds, even thousands, of years if the Theban king and the Danish prince had been able to muddle through the hard times, sort out their troubles, and restore order without recourse to the utter devastation of themselves and everyone around them? Oedipus is the successful CEO whose accountants are found out cooking the books and whose lovely wife of twenty years leaves him the day he files for bankruptcy. The high school valedictorian who drops out of college to raise a baby she didn't plan for is Oedipus too. Anyone who ever set out into the world with the best of intentions, only to be misjudged, thwarted, and ultimately dismissed, is Hamlet in spirit. When Scarlett O'Hara runs through the mist in Gone with the Wind, having just discovered herself to have been passionately in love all along with the husband who has adored her for years, only to get home and find him packing his bags to leave her, she stands for the soul of all of us who have ever given our best efforts, only to find them too little, too late.
Ultimately, though, we need epic fail because without the potential for disaster, there can be no great triumph, no "epic win." Experienced investors know that the riskier the stock, the greater the potential payout. No one ever went broke playing penny-ante, but no one ever made his fortune either. We need to embrace the challenges, make intelligent decisions even when the answers are uncertain, preparing ourselves to hit the ground even as we set our sights on the heavens. It's better to fail at something worth doing than to succeed at nothing worth mentioning.
My friend, I wish you the greatest success on the road ahead, whatever form that may take for you. But I wish you something more. I wish you to know the rebirth that comes in the wake of devastation. I wish you to understand how empty the human soul can be, and to discover the fresh green tendrils that sprout up from the ashes of the human heart.
My friend, I wish you epic fail.
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