Definition of 'Happy Accident'

 

Artists who know enough about what they’re doing to actually do it often talk about the central role of happy accidents in producing work that’s satisfying to all concerned. A happy accident is when something happens that you didn’t foresee and then it works good or even better than good. I think writers mostly have happy accidents at the neurochemical and submolecular levels. Or maybe, like, with housing, romance, and what have you. If you are an abstract expressionist painter like hellbent boozehound Jackson Pollock, then you can have your happy scandalous accidents all over the goddamn place until you lose consciousness or the cows come home, but if you’re in Buckingham Palace with an hour left to complete your portrait of King Charles…you probably can’t afford to have any. The Philharmonic cannot afford to have more than one or two very small happy accidents. (Happy accidents with the tympany are my personal favourite.) I’m a retired film scholar, and I can tell you with basis in measurable fact that moving pictures have all the best happy accidents going. So what if some spectral hobo comes drifitng into frame while the camera’s rolling? Consider it production values! Do you know the story of how hard-drinking one-man-demolition-derby Buster Keaton broke his neck? Buster discovered that he had broken his neck and fractured his skull about a decade after the incident initially occurred. Pondering briefly, he was able to trace the injury back to a stunt from Sherlock Jr.—included in the complete film!—where all the water in a water tower comes down on him hard. Ah, Buster. Harry Houdini sure did call it. And whether your stomach can take it or not: yup, that was actually a happy accident. The way I see it, if Jean-Luc Godard and Hong Sang-soo write their dialogue in the cab on the way to the set then you should be able to do any damn thing you choose when they call action. Alas, the greatest miracle of all is rolling out of your mother like a little soccer ball. When I grow up I want to be a bowling ball. In honour of Marcel Carné and his pivotal 1933 essay “When Will the Cinema Go Down onto the Street?,” shouldn’t it be ‘round 'bout that time we found ourselves collectively asking: when will a thousand cinemas finally go down into the street and trip all over each other to much public merriment and boisterous laughter? 

Yo La Tengo, "Two Trains"