When I was younger, with youthful, grandiose artistic ambitions but not a lot of actual experience making things, the idea of “genius” had a petrifying effect on me. Genius was Orson Welles being the sole auteur of Citizen Kane at 25 years old. When I was 25 and making my own independent feature-length film, I barely knew that you were supposed to use a whole variety of lenses, not just the one that came pre-packaged with the camera.
The cover of a book lists an author. It’s “A Spike Lee Joint” first and foremost. Even a band—in theory a collective undertaking—tends to have a principal songwriter who gets attributed most of the credit (see below).
Genius overwhelmed me because… how do I put this. I’m not a genius? In fact, I’m kind of stupid in many (most) regards.
But, ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to be an artist. This presented a dilemma. How could I reconcile the fact that to be an artist—nay, a great artist—one also needed to be a genius, something I was decidedly not?
The idea of creative genius—and my (hopefully) evolved perspective on what it truly is, how it actually happens—was on my mind this last weekend when I went to go see A24’s re-release of the seminal Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense.
Stop Making Sense was one of the first DVD’s we ever owned. I say “we” because I can’t remember whose it was, my brother’s or mine (I do remember the other movies in my nascent collection: Being John Malkovich, π, Three Kings, Run Lola Run; I’m a cinephile of the “1999 is the best year ever for movies” generation for sure).
It doesn’t actually matter who bought it: all that matters is, after its purchase, we watched Stop Making Sense every day for what seems like (to the best of my memory) several months straight.
The performance captured on that disc (now remastered in 4k for IMAX) has always held a totemic place in my mind. It is so good, so well-realized, so complete. It’s impossible to fathom that the concept didn’t just exit David Byrne’s weird-ass brain and appear on stage fully-formed, lamp shade and all.
The thing is though… it didn’t.
There are a few names you might notice in the credits. Jonathan Demme. Bernie Worrell. Pablo Ferro. Jordan Cronenweth. Beverly Emmons.
Or, if you don’t recognize them by name, you might be familiar with some of their other work:
The director of Silence of the Lambs. One of the founders of Parliament-Funkadelic. The graphic designer who worked with Stanley Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove. The cinematographer of Blade Runner. The lighting director of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach.
I didn’t know any of these names (save maybe Demme) when I first experienced the movie. As far as I was concerned, the thing on stage—the funky, blissfully strange panoply of sounds—was expressing itself naturally, with no rough drafts, no planning, no craft involved. Just unadulterated “genius.”
In his (fantastic) book How Music Works, David Byrne talks about how the iconic big suit idea came from a dinner conversation he had with the fashion designer Jurgen Lehl in Tokyo (“everything on stage needs to be bigger,” he was told). The dance choreographer Toni Basil recommended visiting Bali to observe gamelan orchestras and their shadow-puppet stage shows. After a Talking Heads concert in Los Angeles, Byrne sought the advice of William Chow, a Beijing Opera actor, to give him notes on his performance. And lest we forget, Brian Eno is hovering in the background of all this (as he always seems to be), sharing his collection of Fela Kuti records.
Genius isn’t singular. It’s a constellation.
Orson Welles didn’t make Citizen Kane. Not on his own, at least. Gregg Toland shot it. Herman Mankiewicz co-authored it. Bernard Herrmann scored it. And those are just the big, historical names.
The romance of genius can’t happen without someone doing the boring stuff: transporting equipment, taking out the trash, or crunching a budget.
What about even further behind the scenes?
Genius can’t flourish or sustain itself without the emotional (and practical) support systems of friends, family, or partners. Who is at home taking care of basic chores, not to mention—at the other end of the responsibility spectrum—raising kids, when the “genius” is devoting themselves entirely to their art?
(The movie explicitly demonstrates this: the body parts being projected behind the band during “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)” belong to Byrne’s then-girlfriend Adelle Lutz, an artist in her own right.)
Genius isn’t the flawless flowing of a crystalized, perfect idea into artistic reality. Genius is craft. Each seemingly-spontaneous dance move was in fact codified out of a series of rehearsals. You can even see the taped marks on the floor in the opening shot.
That lamp shade—a moment of sublime, surreal visual poetry; my favorite part of the movie—only appeared on stage because of years of thinking, years of practice, years of listening, years of learning, years of patience, and years of failure (and I suppose years of watching Fred Astaire movies.)
True genius sometimes simply comes down to having good taste. You have to be open to everything, inviting collaboration and experience from every possible angle, and then you separate out the good ideas from the bad. But also:
The less we say about it, the better
We'll make it up as we go along
I still consider Stop Making Sense a monolithic work of genius. But it’s the genius of a group, not any one individual (what the aforementioned Eno has dubbed “scenius,” the creativity of a community). It’s a group that is multi-cultural (just off the top of my head: Scotland, Nigeria, Japan, Cuba, America, Indonesia are all represented), that stretches across decades, artistic mediums, genres, and just about every other boundary, imagined or otherwise.