Here’s the thing about Saul Bass’s little twenty-five minute head-fuck Why Man Creates from 1968: it’s the kind of film that makes you realize how completely we’ve commodified and neutered the whole goddamn concept of “being creative” in the decades since.
We’re talking about a guy who made his bones designing title sequences, basically the opening credits that most people use now to check their phones, and he’s out here asking questions that should make every MFA-credentialed content creator want to crawl under their Herman Miller chair and weep. The film concludes that humans create to say “I Am”, a declaration of existence, a middle finger to mortality.
And Bass doesn’t soft-pedal it with inspirational Facebook bullshit. There’s a segment where scientists talk about working for seven years on projects that went absolutely nowhere. Seven years. Not seven weeks of “iterating” or “pivoting” or whatever MBA death-speak we use now to avoid saying “I failed.” These scientists expected results in a few years; decades later, the problems remained unsolved. And Bass doesn’t turn away from that. He leans into it, the failure IS the point, the failure is where the actual human beings live.
The animation sequence at the beginning, this compressed history of human achievement from cave paintings to the atomic age, it moves like thought itself, like the way your brain works at 5:28 AM when you’re chasing something real and either the wine or the coffee are just starting to wear off. It’s got this manic energy that understands creativity isn’t this precious, delicate flower that needs the right “creative space” and a fucking vision board. It’s brutal. It’s chaotic. Socrates drank hemlock. Galileo got tortured. The Wright Brothers could have died face-first in the sand.
And then, and this is where Bass proves he’s not just some starry-eyed romantic, he shows you the conformity. He literally draws people at parties with their skull-tops flipping open to reveal nothing inside. The empty heads of the crowd. The way success calcifies into institution, the way the radical becomes the establishment, the way we take the flag and slap it on everything to make it palatable, make it safe, make it sell.
What kills me, is how prescient Why Man Creates was about our current moment. I mean right fucking now. Bass made this in ’68, when the counterculture still thought it could win, and he’s already showing you the trapdoors, the ways we betray the impulse. The way “creativity” becomes another brand, another department, another thing with metrics and KPIs.
Saul Bass himself admitted he didn’t know what it all meant. That’s the most honest thing anyone’s ever said about making art. You don’t know. You’re not supposed to know. You’re supposed to dive in and flail around and maybe, maybe, if you’re lucky and you don’t give up when it gets hard, and it will get hard, it will get impossible, you’ll pull something out that says to whoever finds it later: I was here. I mattered. I was.