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Bob Fosse believed he was unhappy because he wasn't a star, yet he may have devalued himself if he was.

Whether success is or isn't meaningful, and how much if it is, depends on the person perceiving it.

We can learn to deplatform our inner critic, instead of wasting time arguing against it.

The 2019 miniseries on FX, Fosse/Verdon, about the eternally linked lives of director Bob Fosse and actress Gwen Verdon, highlights the pursuit and acquisition of perfection. Engulfed by success, Bob continues to struggle to extract any meaning or joy from it. There’s aways a place that he can’t seem to get to, thus he’s always left reaching.

At the beginning of the series, we learn of his dream to be the next Fred Astaire. With all of Fred’s talent, Bob appears bereft of a quality repeatedly noted but never fleshed out, that thing that makes someone a star. Whether it’s agreeableness, charisma, some combination, or something else altogether, Bob can’t grab hold of what lies beyond himself. So, he’s forever left settling—for Oscars, Tonys, and Golden Globes. In conjunction, they reflect back to him the person he’ll never be. While his unhappiness simply appears to stem from that reality, we later learn about his other struggles and general beliefs.

Bob is revealed to suffer from bipolar disorder, which chronically leaves him feeling suicidal. We learn about his addictions and constant need for validation and worship. And we learn about his mindset, his insistence on fixating on the negative aspects of anything good. It’s as though Bob spends his life searching for an achievement he can’t easily kill, one worthy of defeating his intellectually superior inner devil. Yet, like the devil, Bob’s mind is littered with tricks, which render impossible a fair assessment of his success.

After a stint in the psychiatric unit of a hospital, Bob’s life is inundated with wins. And in a pivotal scene, he’s confronted after an awards show by his best friend, the famed screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who gifts him an amateur therapy session in their limousine. Paddy tells him he can’t enjoy success because he realized at an early age that it’s bullsh*t, like everything else people obsess over. Implied is the wisdom that success doesn’t necessarily engender self-love or even self-like. His point is that, ultimately, Bob defines success based on whether or not it’s his. If it is, then it’s a mere reflection of him and his possibilities, all of which are innately (and likely irredeemably) worthless. If not, then it must be valuable.

Whether a thing, either love or success, is meaningful, depends on its availability to him. Therefore, nothing can vanquish the devil, because it always wins. We realize it doesn’t matter whether Bob became Fred Astaire or not; his longing symbolized just another rung on a ladder leading to nowhere. There was no way for anything in the world to save him, so completely, from himself. So, he continued to produce with the hope of redemption (paradoxically, since he also believed it to be impossible), which actually came in an unexpected moment, at least from the perspective of an outsider looking in.

Several scenes before it, to motivate him to take better care of himself, Bob promises Paddy to tap dance at his funeral if Paddy dies first. Paddy responds, saying he would deliver a boring eulogy to punish Bob if Paddy outlives him. As promised, Bob tap danced in front of the coffin as a tribute to his friend. It was more compelling and even more impressive than any of his shows. The gesture was more indicative of his spirit, of his uniqueness, than any of his awards. It was more magical than anything else he’d done before or after.

But, it would have ultimately been up to Bob to see that. In the wider culture, there’s a meaningful debate about which ideas to platform. Some argue that every belief should be highlighted and given the opportunity for defense, believing the marketplace of ideas will invariably root out the bad ones. Others argue that some ideas are so absurd and flawed that the only way to argue on their behalf is with equal absurdity. This perspective holds that absurd ideas, and I don’t mean ones that you just happen to disagree with, are spread only through deception. I take this latter position in arguing against unhealthy, or absolute perfectionism, the belief that we must be perfect all of the time, everywhere, and to everywhere—that we must achieve perfect success.

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Like the devil, this form of perfectionism sustains itself through deception and fallacious thinking. If it continues to devalue everything you have, as it did with Bob, just because you have it (in large part, for the sake of greed), then nothing outside of it can kill it. You would need to deplatform it, at least in large part, keeping watch to make sure it doesn't expand without your consent. When therapists tell their patients that a thought is an OCD thought, this is what they mean—it doesn’t deserve your attention.

But reaching that conclusion is going to have to be up to you. Bob had an entire network of people helping him like himself, not the least of which was his friend Paddy. But, in the end, Bob would have had to decide to stop chasing, or at least reorient his relationship to striving. What could his purpose have been otherwise, that thing that fundamentally defined him? To me, that tap dance on a dark day told me everything I needed to know about his intellect, talent, and heart. To me, Bob was saved.

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