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Paul Rotha, the great filmmaker and critic, once said that a documentary film must, above all, reflect the problems and realities of its times. “It cannot regret the past,” he continued. “In no sense is documentary a historical reconstruction and attempts to make it so are destined to failure. Rather it is contemporary fact and event expressed in relation to human associations.”

Last year, according to the department of labor, U.S. employers teamed up to slash 2.6 million jobs, the largest one-year workforce gutting since the great grind-down of military-industrial might at the end of World War II in 1945. Almost no industry has remained unaffected; every stock index is plunging, every state and sector has been touched. Times are so tough, in fact, that even the VICEX fund — which invests in the supposedly recession-proof sin industries of booze, porn, gambling, and other vices — has nosedived.

These numbers are not surprising, at least not to me. In the local the arts economy, dozens of acquaintances and friends — good, talented, productive, and crucial people — fell into jobless abyss last year, and there seems little hope that they’ll bounce back any time soon. Considering Rotha, then, it should come as no surprise then that a recent spate of small, artistic documentary films have grappled with the troubled relationship that creative Americans have with work, with their desire for fame and fortune, and with the futility of the ever-present dream to stand out above the ordinary masses. Three melancholic documentaries from 2007 (out on DVD last year) — Minnesota-born Esther Robinson’s “A Walk Into the Sea,” Matt Ogen’s  “Confessions of a Superhero,” and Seth Gordon’s “King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters” — reveal something tragic about the lengths that real people will go to just to get their name in the record books, their work up on screen or gallery wall, or their pictures splashed on a wall during the 24-hour news cycle. Another film from 2008, James Marsh’s “Man on Wire,” looks at the struggle to make a mark from a near-opposite view.

Esther Robinson’s “A Walk into the Sea” is, if you haven’t had a chance to see it, a wonderful, multi-faceted, and revealing documentary. The film takes as its subject the filmmaker’s uncle, Danny Williams, who disappeared in Massachusetts in 1966 after he had spent some time at Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York. While the film offers no revelation about what could have happened to Williams, Robinson does explore the idea that some people — sensitive artists and vulnerable young people — are sometimes ill-equipped to handle the high pressure, backbiting and intrigue, and dangerous competition in an artist community (and, perhaps, by extension in a modern economy). The trouble seems to have emerged when Williams, a young Harvard grad who wanted to be a filmmaker and who was for a time a favored lover of Warhol’s (and thus able, Robinson discovered while filming, to use Warhol’s equipment to make his own films), fell out of favor with the artist and, facing abuse at the hands of other Factory denizens, spiraled into drug abuse and depression.

Andy Warhol’s Factory was known for many things — sexual leniency, fake drag weddings, rambling plays, free love, rampant drug abuse. As A.O. Scott points out in his NYT review of the film, the idea of Warhol as a “corrupter and destroyer of innocence” is not new in film. It was a theme in the film “Factory Girl,” which starred Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick, a young, well-born New Englander who appeared in some of Warhol’s films and died under similarly mysterious circumstances. “Robinson’s film,” writes Scott, “does a pretty good job of reconstructing the creative and psychological whirlwind around Warhol.” “A Walk Into the Sea” is well worth seeing, as not only do Robinson’s research and interviews of various luminaries from the Factory reveal the ways in which the artist community's cutthroat machinations and intrigues play upon the fragile egos and sensitive spirits of young artists like Williams, but the film enlightens anyone curious about the Darwinian struggle involved in making art. And in the current economy, this amounts to crucial information.

“Confessions of a Superhero,” meanwhile, is a beautifully filmed, and less hard-biting, look at people undergoing a similar struggle to Danny Williams’. The film starts with the following voice-over: “When we were kids, we all dreamt about what it would be like to be a superhero, to have superpowers like x-ray vision or superhuman strength… But we all grow up. And sometimes we turn out to be not that super. And maybe we’re just plain ordinary. [This film] is a look at what people will do to be famous. And what they’ll settle for when they’re not.” From there, "Confessions" proceeds to trace the life trajectories of four ordinary, essentially jobless, people who spend their days dressed up in superhero costumes to take pictures, for “tips,” with tourists on Hollywood Boulevard.

These performers dream of making it in the movie industry, and, to their credit, each have minor (very minor) screen credits. One in particular, Christopher Lloyd Dennis, who looks somewhat like Christopher Reeves and, of course, plays Superman, is described by the others as fairly nuts. “Yes, obsessed,” says a man who dresses at Batman, “he is very obsessed. That would be the one word for Superman.” “He’s suffocating in the world of Superman,” says a friend from the Boulevard who dresses as Wonder Woman. Dennis, tellingly, claims at one point that his apartment holds at least a “million dollars” worth of Superman memorabilia, and (dubiously) that he was driven to the “business” by the dying wish of his “mother,” actress Sandy Dennis (there’s no record of Dennis ever having a child). All four characters, though, are revealed over the film’s course as somewhat driven to distraction in one way or another. “I feel so much like a loser,” says a man who dresses up as the Hulk by day and sleeps on a mattress in a flop-house at night. “Because I didn’t come out here to get in a costume and stand on Hollywood Boulevard for chump change. I’m out here seriously to make a name for myself.” That “Confessions of a Superhero” peters out as a film, because the characters develop no “arc” during the story and end the film as hopeless they started, is only a minor flaw. Their dreams are never realized, but life happens in the meantime — as some of the characters get married, some divorced; one gets counseling, one lands a role in a kung fu spoof; one is arrested, another ends up on Jimmy Kimmel. Their dreams are never realized but are carried poignantly forward, although one wonders now, with the current economy, if they’re even still in their superhero costumes.

“The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters” tells the story of Steve Wiebe, an engineer who’s been laid off from his job at Boeing. Wiebe is revealed to be one of those almost-was sorts of people: A star pitcher in high school who loses the state championship game and then hurts his arm, a talented drummer who doesn’t care to perform for people, a good father and husband who seems not to recognize the blessings of his life. While out of work, Wiebe passes time by playing an old Donkey Kong arcade game in his garage, and, with his mathematical and athletic skills, he quickly masters the game and shatters the existing “sanctioned” record on the game, which is “officially” held by a cocky, mullet-wearing restaurateur named Billy Mitchell.

You can guess what happens next: After being celebrated in his local town for breaking the record, various intrigues among people associated with the classic arcade game sanctioning organization cause Wiebe to be stripped of the record. The rest of the film is spent following Wiebe’s ill-fated efforts to redeem his record and his reputation. There’s no need to recount all of the twists and turns that he encounters, it’s enough to know that in the end the wannabe Donkey Kong Champ is revealed as just another version of the rest of us: A person whose dreams are disappointed, mostly because the odds in this world are plainly stacked against the ordinary folk. 

It would be easy to find oneself depressed after seeing all of this thwarted ambition and all of these shattered dreams. But I actually love these three films, mainly because they are real. They reveal personal stories that gibe with what we all see experience every day in this unfair world. After all, this is a country in which rich bankers reward themselves billions after extorting money from taxpayers, while good and honest and talented people can’t find decent enough jobs to support their families. These films show the truth: That the vast majority of us will come to the end of our lives having failed, over and over, to achieve our dreams. But then, that’s okay. This story about our inability to achieve our dreams is a beautiful, if sad, part of the human condition.

The final film, “Man on Wire,” has been widely praised and has won awards, including a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and a BAFTA award for Outstanding British film (it’s nominated for this year's Oscar for Best Documentary). It is the story of a young French street performer and “wirewalker,” Philippe Petit, who becomes obsessed in the early 1970s with the idea of walking a wire between the then-incomplete two towers of the World Trade Center. Using vintage footage, interviews, and reenactments, the film traces the growth of Petit’s obsession and how he manages to inspire and co-opt multiple co-conspirators to help him achieve his dream.

This should have been a wonderful film, and inspiring. After all, Petit says what most of us might say when asked to rationalize our crazy dreams: “To me, it's really so simple, that life should be lived on the edge. You have to exercise rebellion. To refuse to tape yourself to the rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge. Then you will live your life on the tightrope.” Unfortunately, though, despite the fact that Petit’s words have just the right inspirational tone, I ended up disliking this film of triumph almost as much as I liked the other three about failure.

Two things in particular about this telling of Petit’s story rub me the wrong way. For one, there’s no suspense whatsoever throughout about whether or not the wirewalker will succeed. Even if you’re too young to recall the actual event, you know that Petit at least survives the attempt (since he’s interviewed in the film), and you can guess he probably did it (or else why even bother with a film?). All attempts, then, by the filmmaker to create a sense of suspense and tension simply fail, and we quickly grow impatient for the film to cut to the quick. This is unfortunate, because the technical details involved in pulling something like this off and the hazards of doing such a thing so high up (over 1,300 feet) in the air are fascinating. The filmmakers also err by not explaining more about Petit’s personal preparations for the feat. They instead seem content to dwell on the personal relationships of the conspirators.

The second thing bad note struck in “Man on Wire” is the fact that, unlike in the previous three films that explore real human pathos and failure, here the subject achieves his dream. This is, ironically enough, profoundly disappointing — mostly because Petit, instead of being as gracious and magnanimous in success as you and I imagine we would be, turns out to be a narcissistic prick. I won’t go into the multiple way this plays out, lest I ruin any surprise for you; just know that the way “Man on Wire” turns the “I have a dream” genre of documentary on its head left a real bad taste in my mouth.

In the end, while I would never begrudge someone their dreams, “Man on Wire” left me to wonder if maybe we really are not all better off just being ordinary — always doing our best, always dreaming of better things, but almost always failing.