Those Who Choose to Play the Game Are the Ones Who Win

And this world has no room left for the "losers."

Jason Robards as Murray Burns in A Thousand Clowns (1965)

“Nick, in a moment you’re going to see a horrible thing.”

“What’s that?”

“…People going to work.”

Those are some of the first lines from A Thousand Clowns, a 1965 film based on the Broadway play starring Jason Robards as Murray Burns, an off-kilter, “maladjusted” bachelor who’s fed up with the deathly rat race of American life and chooses instead to layabout and add bucketfuls of ironic masculine irreverence to every encounter he has. He shouts at the windows of his neighbors telling them to improve their refuse. “Now, by next week I want to see a better class of garbage. More empty champagne bottles and caviar cans!” The telephone rings and he answers, “Hello, is this someone with good news or money? No? Goodbye!” Murray shirks traditional responsibilities and their attendant material comforts in favor of some kind of alternative living he considers more authentic and vibrant. “You are not a person, Mr. Burns. You are an experience!” says a more well-adjusted character (played by William Daniels, who many know as Mr. Feeney from Boy Meets World. Daniels’ career seems to be made up entirely of playing fuddy-duddies, with one marvelous exception in the 1967 comedy The President’s Analyst as a gun-toting liberal who’s not afraid to shoot right-wing extremists and federal agents).

The story of A Thousand Clowns centers around Murray’s relationship with his (unofficially) adopted nephew, Nick, whose mother ran out on him and whose father is unknown. “You might call Nick a bastard,” Murray says, “Or a little bastard, depending on how whimsical you feel at the time.” The film’s inciting incident of social workers coming to Murray’s charmingly bedraggled one-room New York apartment to see about rehoming young Nick leads to the crisis of Murray having to put himself back into the grinding gears of corporate America to save Nick from an inevitably similar fate if he were to be raised by normies in the foster system. “If somebody doesn't watch out he'll start making lists of what he's gonna do next year and for the next ten years,” Murray says about the precocious kid. “Hey, suppose they put him in with a whole family of list makers. I didn't spend six years with him so he’d turn into a list maker. He'll learn to know everything before it happens. He'll learn how to plan. Learn how to be one of the nice dead people.” Murray later befriends (and beds) one of the social workers and confides in her his fears about his nephew being taken away from him:

I just want him to stay with me until I can be sure he won't turn into Norman Nothing. I want to be sure he knows when he's chickening out on himself. I want him to get to know the special thing he is or else he won't notice it when it starts to go. … I want him to know how to holler and put up an argument. I want a little guts to show before I can let him go. I want to be sure he sees all the wild possibilities. I want him to know it's worth all the trouble just to give the world a little goosing once you get the chance. And I want him to know the sneaky, subtle, important reason he was born a human being and not a chair.

The script is definitely a product of its time. It has a kind of watered-down Beat Generation sentimentality to it, which I nevertheless cut it some slack for because I think it largely succeeds in its emotional goals and its laughs. It sometimes feels like a non-musical dramedy version of How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, with the same mid-60s cultural trappings and corporate ennui. But what keeps A Thousand Clowns from being a simple relic is the film’s playful editing, with funny juxtaposition, emotive use of time hopping, and moving voiceover and diegetic singing by Robards’ character (mind you this was twelve years before Annie Hall went full-bore with this editing style); its street scenes of New York City, with real-world footage of busy business bees coming and going; and, chiefly, Robards’ performance. Those who are used to seeing Robards as the curmudgeonly Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee in All the President’s Men, or as the gritty gunslinger in Once Upon a Time in the West may be surprised to find him so playful and romantic here as Murray. He feels like a good mix between Jimmy Stewart’s dreamy rendition of Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey and Kramer from Seinfeld.

Another reason why A Thousand Clowns works so well is because, though it treats Murray with sympathy and understanding, it does not treat him and his worldview with simple credulity. Murray’s antagonists are not easy villains, they are human beings living in the same harsh world that Murray is. From the aforementioned social workers, to a severely annoying kids show personality who Murray writes jokes for, to Murray’s more responsible brother, these characters all test Murray’s philosophy and they challenge the audience to think about the implications of his way of life. Though Murray certainly brings joy to those he cares about, the film makes a point to show that he also brings no small amount of heartache and headache to the ones who have to cover for his ass. His constant whimsy cannot fix the things that it breaks. “I can see why Nick likes you,” Murray’s fed-up lover says after he’s run away from a series of much-needed job offers, “I’d like it too if I was twelve years old.” As Christopher Hitchens was fond of saying about some of Jesus’ more dubious preachings, casting away all your earthly possessions and giving no concern for the morrow because the lord will provide for you as he does the birds is a good recipe for ending up destitute and dead. Murray’s brother Arnold has the best rejoinder in the film where he patiently and kindly and with the upmost sympathy responds to Murray's charge that he sold out:

I’m willing to deal with the available world, I don’t choose to shake it up but to live with it. There’s the people who spill things and there’s the people who get spilled on and I don’t choose to notice the stains. I have a wife, and I have children. And business, like they say, is business. I’m not an exceptional man so its possible for me to stay with things the way they are. I’m lucky. I’m gifted. I have a talent for surrender. And I’m at peace, but you — oh, you’re cursed. And I like you, Murray. So it makes me sad you don’t have the gift. And I can see the torture of it. All I can do is worry for you, but I will not worry for myself. You can’t convince me that I’m one of the bad guys. I get up. I go. I lie a little. I peddle a little. I watch the rules. I talk the talk. We fellas have those offices high up there so that we can catch the wind and go with it however it blows. But — and I’m not gonna apologize for it — I take pride. I am the best possible Arnold Burns.

That last line is important. Does he mean it, simply? Is it a point of pride? Truly the best version of himself? Or is it another point of “surrender?” Accepting that he did only what was merely possible, the best he could do with a bad deal? There are many Murrays in the world, it’s true, spitting into the wind, running away from it all, but there are many more Arnold Burns’s, quotidian and comfortable. Realists, all of them, tragically so. And it is the realists, sympathetic and human though they may be, which serve as the chief force holding the whole rotten edifice together. “Capitalism is unbearable and yet, mostly, it’s borne. For lifetimes and by millions,” China Miéville writes in A Spectre, Haunting. “The strongest weapon against revolution, or any hankering for it, isn’t positive but negative: it’s not any claim that the world in which we live is good enough, but that capitalist-realist common sense that it’s impossible, even laughable, to struggle or hope for change.”

It is people like Murray, the misfits of our society, who I throw my lot in with. Our modern world is not kind to them. And though they ironically defy its vagaries at every turn, they’re mostly on the losing side. Murray would rather — like Mary Poppins told us all to do with utter earnestness and goodwill — go fly a kite (and he does so in the film). Dozens of kites aloft, everyone happy and smiling and singing as Mary Poppins flies away under her umbrella. That’s where Marry Poppins ends. But what happens the next day? There’s a world full of real Murray’s out there, flying kites every single day, and this world not only has no use for them, it hates them. It hates them with a hatred so profound and mean and real that it kills them. Death by internal despair or death by external wounds, it doesn’t matter. Both are a result of a human being who refuses to abide by the inhuman world they find themselves in.

It is the successful people who achieve things in life. And yes, I know that’s a tautology. But that’s the point I’m making. We live in a tautological system that rewards the already rewarded, those who have been endowed with a true belief in the system as it is. The amount of “success” someone achieves in our society tends to be related to the amount that someone actually buys into the dominant society. A lot of people in this world choose not to engage in the normative 9-5 job grind, not because they are lazy, not because they’ve given up, but because they’ve realized that giving your labor to meaningless projects leaves you with a mostly meaningless life. This is expressed beautifully by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings in their prophetic song “Everything is Free Now:”

I could get a straight job,

I done it before,

never minded workin’ hard,

it’s who I’m workin’ for.

And here’s the irony: those who succeed and rise to the upper echelons of the dominant society are the people who most believe in it, the ones who are most invested in it, and are therefore the most likely to legitimize and replicate its structures. Whereas the ones who are most likely to want to change the dominant society, the Murray’s of the world, are those who, either by choice or by force, have been locked out of any power within it. This is what Noam Chomsky means when he says that mainstream journalists do not need to censor themselves in order to propound mainstream narratives, they are already true believers in it. No censorship is required. “How can you know that I’m self-censoring?” one confused BBC journalist asked him. “I don’t say you’re self-censoring,” Chomsky responded, “I’m sure you believe everything that you’re saying. But what I am saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

This all sounds very banal, obvious, and plain to me when I lay it all out. But many people never think about such things. It is the water they swim in. (I say this because when I’ve talked about these things with some people, they look at me quite quizzically. So perhaps I’m the crazy one, but I think not.) What is most pernicious about all this though is that those who do not “succeed” in this current society are deemed losers, lazy, worthless, dim, shiftless, philistine, uncultured, take your pick what admonishment to use. These human “failures” are regarded as quite deserving of their lot in life because they did not play the game right, or they refused to play the game at all. But why play a rigged game? “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society” is a bit of an Instagram cliché at this point, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

In the same way that the rule of law in America has been totally denuded of meaning or legitimacy by a criminal justice and economic system that chiefly serves ruling class interests, the entire project of remaining gainfully employed and “contributing something to society” is undeserving of any faith in it when you’re working at a multinational corporation that dodges taxes while your own tax dollars are used to fund a byzantine state apparatus that oppresses you and your family. It’s all kind of a joke, isn’t it? “If things aren't funny then they're exactly what they are,” Murray says, “And then they're like a long dental appointment.”

Murray with his nephew Nick (played by Barry Gordon).

Though it may be fair to say that our modern world rewards those like Arnold Burns and hates his brother Murray, it isn’t fair to say that Murray hates the world in return. He loves the world and many of the people in it. He feels sorry for them and himself sometimes, he thinks he’s doing it better mostly. He’s does have a dark, self-defensive side, most acutely when he tries to apologize to his new lover by saying, “Aw, Sandy, that's the most you should expect from life, a really good apology for all the things you won't get.” But he’s not a misanthrope. The disdain he has for the world is against the conditions that force people to become the nasty things that they are. And that, reader, is where your hate should lie as well. Even in my most humanist and optimistic part of myself, I do not relinquish any ounce of hate whatsoever. I just place it properly. Do you understand? Part of what I find attractive about Murray’s philosophy is that he despises the society’s phony mania for positive thinking and cheerfulness. Do you understand that to witness a cheerful, hateless people in our modern abject condition is to either be witnessing collective psychosis, or to be suffering from the same individually? I could be wrong, but I don’t think it’s the latter (as far as I can tell I am not in a straightjacket in a padded cell — yet). As writer Sophie Lewis puts it in Full Surrogacy Now:

Hate is almost never talked about as appropriate, healthy, or necessary in liberal-democratic society. For conservatives, liberals, and socialists alike, hate itself is the thing to reject, uproot, defeat, and cast out of the soul. Yet anti-hate ideology doesn’t seem to involve targeting its root causes and points of production, nor does it address the inevitability of or the demand — the need — for hate in a class society.

I call this useful hate. And I call Murray’s way of going through life as happy-hate. It’s fun hate. It is a hate that opens up avenues of possibility which the dominant society would rather see closed off and sealed by ersatz happiness. If we hate the hateworthy conditions we find ourselves in, then we must be moved, some way or another, to change them. As Miéville writes, “Who would we be not to hate this system, and its partisans? If we don’t, the hate of those who hate on its behalf will not ebb…We should feel hate beyond words, and bring it to bear. This is a system that, whatever else, deserves implacable hatred for its countless and escalating cruelties.” He goes on, saying we “should hate this hateful and hating and hatemongering system of cruelty, that exhausts and withers and kills us, that stunts our care, makes it so embattled and constrained and local in its scale and effects, where we have the capacity to be greater.”

We have the capacity to be greater. We do. I’m not saying that the Murrays of the world are the great misunderstood sages of our time. What I’m saying is that they have a critique of this society which the society aims to crush, which tells you a lot about the limits of freedom. “Capitalism cannot exist without relentless punishment of those who transgress its often petty and heartless prohibitions,” Miéville writes, “and indeed of those the punishment of whom it deems functional to its survival, irrespective of their notional ‘transgression.’ It increasingly deploys not just bureaucratic repression but an invested, overt, supererogatory sadism.” I’m saying that these outcasts like Murray are of this world, just as you and me, and we should be fighting for a world that cares for all of its people, fighting to destroy our current one that grinds people like Murray — to say nothing of the rest of us — to dust. Because, as George Orwell wrote, those on the margins “exist in tens and hundreds of thousands; they are one of the characteristic by-products of the modern world. You cannot disregard them if you accept the civilization that produced them.”

Though Murray’s constitutional dropping out from society is not always the most adaptive quality, I appreciate it because it is borne of a realistic understanding of our broken society’s material affects upon him and those he cares about. Miéville puts it this way: “It’s no wonder that modern life is rubbish, generative of anxiety, deracination, a deep psychic as well as economic instability, not to say disempowerment and death, for millions.” Murray doesn’t use such rhetoric. He’s more prosaic about what sent him into blissful unemployment:

Five months ago I was on the subway on my way to work. I was sitting on the express, same as every morning, looking out the window watching the local stops go by in the dark with an empty head and my arms folded, not feeling great, not feeling rotten, just not feeling. And for a minute I couldn't remember, I didn't know, unless I really concentrated, whether it was a Tuesday or a Thursday or a... for a minute it could have been any day… I gotta know what day it is! I gotta know what's the name of the game and what the rules are without anyone else telling me. You gotta own your own days and name 'em! Each one of 'em! Every one of 'em! Or else the years go right by and none of them belong to you.

At its most fundamental level, socialism is the idea that your labor belongs to you. What you produce from that labor belongs to you. You own the means, you own the fruits. Your time is yours. You own your own days, you use them as you see fit, and no individual or system or structure or organization or manufactured deprivation can ever force you to sell yourself, your whole precious mind and your whole precious body, just to live for the benefit of someone else. All of socialism’s promises follow from that central, achievable conceit. It is the Murrays of the world, incorrigible and lovable fuck-ups that they are, who illuminate that promise.

Is this someone with good news or money? No? Goodbye!

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