My Million Dollar Year
So in December 2004 I was broke. Really, really broke, and so were most of my friends. I was out of school, underemployed, and was looking forward to another winter with no heat in the apartment (the rates for electricity in Ontario have skyrocketed in the past few years thanks to privatization, and therefore heat in poorly insulated apartments when it's -20C outside is kind of a luxury). I was walking home feeling sorry for myself and mulling over society's money craziness when I was overcome by what I think was either divine intervention or a mild stroke: what would happen if I declared that I was dedicating the next year to making a million dollars by any means possible, and filming everything that happened and presenting it for consumption by an audience? Duration performance at its finest!
Three weeks later it was 2005 and I had a website, a press release and a vague idea of what the hell I was doing. I spent the next 365 days doing everything I could think of, from grand attempts at luck to drudge work to pure unbridled experimentation. I auditioned for Jeopardy!. I accepted contributions. I flogged tshirts, original artifacts, and roused as much rabble as I was able, all while maintaining a full time job because I was still, at the end of the day, broke. I also faithfully documented everything on camera and online, in a blog on the website.
I discovered early on that I had unwittingly stomped on a hornets' nest. Money is more than a means of exchange; it's a symbol of success, fear, security, status, and has more control over what we do and how we perceive ourselves than I ever realized. I was flooded with mail, most of it positive and encouraging, and some with a confessional tone of "I totally agree and I'm writing this from my desk where I make over 100k a year and I'm totally miserable and I don't know what else to do". I also, fascinatingly, got a significant and persistent clutch of hate mail, accusing me of everything from being spoiled, fat, lazy, ugly, stupid, and single-handedly trying to bring down the economic system of the Western world.
The reaction was polarized at the very least. I noticed several themes emerging: a) anyone who refuses their current position and strives for more is often perceived as a threat and demonized; b) if art makes money or deals with money directly it is illegitimized, art is supposed to be above all that; c) there's huge pressure to make money look easy, because if it's not easy you're doing something wrong. The last one I bumped up against quite a lot while documenting. It's exceedingly difficult - and most essential - to admit to a camera and to an audience what the real situation is. It's far more tempting to look at the camera and put a shine on everything and pretend that everything is going exactly how you intended it to, but for this project that wasn't allowed.
Something else I found fascinating was the concept of "deserving". Hundreds of people told me that I didn't "deserve" anything because obviously I was some kind of trust fund kid without a job (ha! they wish), that all I "deserved" was a McJob and a painful end, that I should be giving everything to someone more "deserving". This gave me pause - so we can be fine, as a culture, with someone standing on a pole longer than anyone else and winning a million dollars on Survivor, because hey, they earned it, but this project, which came out of left field, had no major backing and no TV deal, was less legitimate?
In the summer, spurned on by positive press coming out of the States (the most scathing press and hate mail, interestingly, came from Canada) I embarked on a month-long road trip around the perimeter of the USA to investigate what money was doing in other locations. Locale and social context is a huge part of money's meaning - the concept of "enough" means something totally different in, say, New York than it does in New Orleans. Through a network of strangers and near-strangers and benevolent friends a cameraman and I spent 32 days on the road in 27 states, doing press appearances and talking to everyone we could find.
At the end of 2005 I ended up a scant $994,000 away from my goal, and with 200 hours of footage. I took six months away from the project entirely because, at the end of the 365 days, I was starting to wish with all my might that I had never heard of My Million Dollar Year. In June 2006 I attempted sorting through the footage, and the process is ... well, it's still happening. It's a convoluted, multi-faceted story, and there's about ten stories in there I could be telling - it was a smashing success, a grand failure, a documentary, a performance, media jamming, audience baiting, and a year of intensive, hands-on research in which I discovered so much about how fucked up everyone is about money, and how much power is weilded by little inanimate bits of paper.
The site that started it all is still there at www.mymilliondollaryear.net, exactly how it ended. I have thought about taking it down and putting up a status report, but it somehow feels wrong. It also feels weird for it to be some kind of creepy shrine but it's the closest I can come to knowing what to do with it.
I'm going to be putting some essays up in this space on subjects related to money and this project, and clips from the documentary as they're finished. It's been a year and a half since it ended and it's still not over.