Joe Gould's secret, for me, regardless of what it was for the real-life or the movie JG, is this: nobody wants to be a nobody. We want our banal conversations and interactions--the stuff of our lives---to mean something, we want there to be a connection between ourselves and what's labeled "history", the big picture.
In this film from a real life story, everyone wants Gould's oral history of the little people to exist--to thrive, to be published. What a grand idea! The nobodies will be somebodies and their words will form a picture of their times from the street level, rather than the lofty perspective of the usual published histories.
The poignancy in the film is double-barrelled. When Joe Mitchell's character confronts Joe Gould about his self-deluding ways, questioning whether his oral history is a fabrication, he punctures the man and his entire mode of existence, calling cap in hand on any and all sympathetic souls for contributions to his "fund." The capper, however, is that once Mitchell himself finally reveals Gould's secret, writing about him years after his death, he himself is silenced as a writer.
The suggestion from scenes in the film is that Mitchell may have found too much in common between himself and the madman/would-be artist whose grandiosity he documented. In the film, Gould says to Mitchell, in his sadly sane time in a mental hospital, "it was never a question of laziness", trying to refute Mitchell's harshest accusation. He needs to assert that even if he has failed, it's not for want of trying. In a sense, every artist has to be a little mad, to hold onto a vision of their work and a sense of self-importance stronger than the barriers the conventional world erects to creative endeavour. The possibility of failure has to be thrust aside, a kind of delusion has to be maintained, that denies the possibility of failure.
The fact that Mitchell was silenced by recording Gould's colourful and memorable failure is a shocking footnote in the closing moments of the film. Gould's laughable claiming of Mitchell as his biographer early on not only becomes the truth, but the biographer appears to be brought to ground by the subject of his biography. Gould's secret becomes Mitchell's denouement, "nobody wants to be a nobody, but everyone actually is a nobody, and what can I say to you about anything, as a nobody?" Joe's secret is everybody's secret, his history is ours, it's Mitchell's, and it's an everyman tragicomedy.
In this film from a real life story, everyone wants Gould's oral history of the little people to exist--to thrive, to be published. What a grand idea! The nobodies will be somebodies and their words will form a picture of their times from the street level, rather than the lofty perspective of the usual published histories.
The poignancy in the film is double-barrelled. When Joe Mitchell's character confronts Joe Gould about his self-deluding ways, questioning whether his oral history is a fabrication, he punctures the man and his entire mode of existence, calling cap in hand on any and all sympathetic souls for contributions to his "fund." The capper, however, is that once Mitchell himself finally reveals Gould's secret, writing about him years after his death, he himself is silenced as a writer.
The suggestion from scenes in the film is that Mitchell may have found too much in common between himself and the madman/would-be artist whose grandiosity he documented. In the film, Gould says to Mitchell, in his sadly sane time in a mental hospital, "it was never a question of laziness", trying to refute Mitchell's harshest accusation. He needs to assert that even if he has failed, it's not for want of trying. In a sense, every artist has to be a little mad, to hold onto a vision of their work and a sense of self-importance stronger than the barriers the conventional world erects to creative endeavour. The possibility of failure has to be thrust aside, a kind of delusion has to be maintained, that denies the possibility of failure.
The fact that Mitchell was silenced by recording Gould's colourful and memorable failure is a shocking footnote in the closing moments of the film. Gould's laughable claiming of Mitchell as his biographer early on not only becomes the truth, but the biographer appears to be brought to ground by the subject of his biography. Gould's secret becomes Mitchell's denouement, "nobody wants to be a nobody, but everyone actually is a nobody, and what can I say to you about anything, as a nobody?" Joe's secret is everybody's secret, his history is ours, it's Mitchell's, and it's an everyman tragicomedy.