Hollywood sexism is more nuanced than we sometimes allow. It is not that there are no roles for older women – the movies need just as many grandmas as grizzled veterans – but that there is a gap beneath that age. Once the children leave home, and before they return with children of their own, there is only really “icy senior executive”. And Kristin Scott Thomas gets most of those.
Men, however, get a bridge – the character old enough to dispense wisdom, but still young enough to dispense violence. Take Sean Connery’s Malone in The Untouchables. He can tell Kevin Costner about “the Chicago Way” but also assault a mafioso, engage in a fist fight with a senior officer and experience the most baroque, “gimme an Oscar” death scene yet committed to celluloid.
Connery steps into the mentor role from his first appearance. Coming across the star in the aftermath of an embarrassing and public failure, after a bit of horn-locking to establish his continuing virility, he offers the First Rule of Law Enforcement: “make sure when your shift is over you can go home alive.”
Small beer perhaps (although in the context of thirties Chicago, not that small) but important. And true. For Costner’s Eliot Ness to bring down Al Capone (one of the first people ever treated with penicillin, in one of those charming by-ways of history), he has to make it to the end of the picture. He can only try again tomorrow if he makes it to the end of today.
Ness, of course, doesn’t initially see it that way. He has a conventional view of success and failure. He didn’t achieve his aim, therefore he has failed. Malone takes a different approach. He might not have got to where he wants to go, but equally he hasn’t done anything which means he will never get to where he wants to go.
Ness wants positive success – achieving his aim; Malone is happy with negative success – not messing up so badly as to put it out of reach.
However correct Malone may be, it is Ness who is in the mainstream. Success, we think, means moving forward, achieving what we want. And possibly showing it off on social media. If we’re not moving forwards, we’re moving backwards. And we can’t have that. Gotta hustle.
There is certainly a positive to this mindset. It is how progress occurs. But there is a negative too. If we have to keep advancing, what do we do on those occasions (and we all have them) when we don’t. Or, even worse, when we slip back a bit?
Do we not have to think that we are failing?
None of us likes to fail. None of us likes to be seen to fail. So we need to do something to restore our momentum. Something which will take us out of neutral or reverse and back into top gear.
People in this mindset find it easy to fall into the trap of thinking “I need to do something. This is something. Therefore I should do this.” Discipline weakens a bit. Ideas which would previously be rejected out of hand become strangely attractive. Maybe just this once?
But this way disaster lies. The first phase of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was an astounding success. Then winter came. Initially, the Emperor hunkered down. The soldiers made camp and concentrated on surviving the weather. But just staying in the same place began to grate on le petit caporal. He was a master of movement and he wasn’t going anywhere. Because he wasn’t winning battles and conquering territory, he was failing. So he decided to start up his campaign again. And we all know what happened next.
Had history’s greatest Corsican been able to expand his definition of success, had he been able to realise that not winning did not equal losing, he might have behaved differently. And history might have been different. Not, to be clear as a Brit, better. But different.
I am willing to bet large amounts of money that no-one reading this will be engaged in an invasion of Russia. But the rule that holds in the snows of Muscovy and the mean streets of Chicago holds more broadly.
The difference between a good and a great investor, an old boss told me, is that the latter never has a “torpedo”, the sort of trade that blows up spectacularly and ruins performance for the quarter. How to avoid them? Stay disciplined. Don’t just do things because you think you need to do them. By all means, feel good when you close a trade, but don’t open a trade just to feel good.
How many relationships have been ruined because someone, desperate to win an argument, says what may be felt but should never be said? And can never be unsaid.
There is wisdom in one of America’s most eloquent recent Presidents’ dictum, “Don’t do stupid sh*t,” but it is wisdom we struggle to grasp when there is only “stupid sh*t” to do and we feel the need to do something.
As always, there is a balance to be struck. If we never do anything which might go wrong, we will never do anything. Good sense can quickly become stasis. Greed trumped by fear. But there is a difference between losing and catastrophic losing. There is a video of a bear cub climbing a snowy mountain with his mother. Up he goes until down he slides. Up again. And down again. But he never gives up. And he never goes over the edge.
“Our wise man,” said Seneca, “wants friends but does not need friends.” Perhaps this is the equilibrium we need. We want to go forward, but we don’t need to go forward. If we stay where we are, that’s fine. The circumstances weren’t right. They might be tomorrow. We haven’t got to the top of the mountain but we haven’t fallen off the edge. Gordon Gekko looked at 80 trades a day. He picked one.
Perhaps we do best when we become comfortable with doing nothing.
Perhaps that is how the actresses cope. They know the opportunities will come again. They just have to be around to pick them up. They still win Oscars. And they don’t have to overact to do so.
So why shouldn’t staying in the game be enough?
The dead don’t win. Only the survivors do.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.
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(Photograph: Ben Schumin, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
