8 1/2

My favorite movie has long been Fellini’s 8 1/2. It’s a movie which seems designed to appeal to a computer programmer: it’s self-referential and recursive, a movie about the making of itself. It’s also about the difficulties of the creative process, and that is where it resonates most strongly with me. The director in the movie, Guido, is struggling to create something beautiful, and is winding up with a mish-mash of scenes, some of which mostly succeed and some of which mostly fail. Fellini, the real director, is struggling with the same thing, with the same results.

It’s the same thing I feel when I write a computer program. I start out thinking that this program will be beautiful, will do what it needs to do cleanly and elegantly. In the end there are a few successes and many failures, and the whole thing is deeply compromised and unsatisfactory. I never really like revisiting my old programs, because although there is the occasional moment of appreciation for how smart I was for a short bit, there is mostly the recollection of how the whole thing never really pulled together the way I wanted.

Fellini, of course, does pull together 8 1/2 at the end, and the movie becomes something beautiful, if not perhaps quite what he or Guido set out to make. But then Fellini is a great artist, and I am not.