Nov 16, 2019 07:12 PM
The Cinema of Inadvertence, or Why I Like Bad Movies
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/eating...bad-movies
EXCERPT (Phil Christman): . . . We bad-movie watchers have our own anticriteria, the sorts of badness we prefer. Some of us use the term “bad movies” to mean, simply, films that emerge from a supposedly lowbrow genre, or films that are stylized in the manner we tend to label “camp.” (Road House from 1989 is this kind of bad movie, and is very good at being one.) Some of us prefer movies that are exploitative and tacky but, in a Nietzschean way, supposedly more alive than respectable ones. Renata Adler referred to the cult around such movies as “the angry trash claimers,”1 a term by which she probably intended to indict Pauline Kael, whose “Trash, Art, and the Movies” could serve as a manifesto for this sort of criticism. The rock critic Lester Bangs, in an endearing essay about Ray Dennis Steckler’s delirious 1963 horror film The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, practices Angry Trash Reclamation, arguing that the film’s apparent innocence of good taste gives it a kind of “lunar purity.”
Other bad films fascinate because they define an area of heroic obsession, horrifically misapplied. The heroism and the misapplication are inseparable. Anyone can commit himself body and soul to a clearly formulated project of obvious importance or quality, but to throw your last dollar, your last scrap of energy, into something ill-conceived and absurd from the beginning: That takes a human being. The comedian Patton Oswalt, riffing on the movie Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977), asks a question that has probably badgered every artist: What if films like Death Bed are as much the result of artistic passion and endurance as, say, Apocalypse Now? What if, in pushing past my self-doubt, being true to my vision, I only demonstrate the salience of that doubt, the tragic extent of my astigmatism?
Raising questions you don’t answer—and begging some of the ones you do—is the prerogative of anyone who discusses art of any kind in print. The same person will tell you, with no attempt to resolve the tensions, that the idea of “good” art is a construct foisted upon us by powerful people (or, if they’ve read Foucault, simply by “power”), and that Iron Man 2 is “objectively the worst” Marvel movie. We will say, if we have been to graduate school, that an artist’s intention and biography do not matter, while focusing obsessively on the personal lives, choices, and sociopolitical commitments of artists. Attempts to discipline the discussion by grounding aesthetics in science tend either toward a pleasing but vague mysticism (claims about the beauty of the Golden Ratio, followed by a chain of explanations that infinitely defer explanation) or a barbarous oversimplification (we appreciate the large muscles of Michelangelo’s David because baby chicks react to the color red). We use the conceptual vocabulary of several distinct and often-opposed aesthetics without thinking about it.
And so, as I pursued writing and higher education, as the choices I’d make in life began to make me more and more distant not just from the boy on the couch, but from the father sitting next to him, I kept watching bad movies, wondering how the satellite and the planet interacted. I drove across town to see a revival screening of King Kong Lives (1986), a film so bad that the distributors refused to allow Siskel and Ebert to show clips of it on their television program. I stayed up late finding and downloading the bits and pieces of a torrent file of the 1982 Turkish fantasy film Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (The Man Who Saved the World), known in Anglophone countries as “Turkish Star Wars” because of its unauthorized and awkward splicing-in of actual Star Wars footage. I lost my wallet, not inappropriately, at a showing of The Dragon Lives Again (1979), a surreal festival of copyright infringement in which an actor playing (though hardly resembling) a resurrected Bruce Lee fights characters named The Godfather, The Exorcist, Popeye, James Bond, and Dracula, among others. I came to love Twilight (2008), with its wholly original, indeed hermetic vision of human psychology and conversation, its endearingly transparent wish-fulfillment aspects, its inexplicable baseball game. After it left theaters, I marveled at Batman vs. Superman (2016), that filmic analogue of a moody teenager hilariously incapable of remembering or articulating why he’s moody.
“Bad” can also mean “morally coarsening”—which “trash film,” in the Bangs/Kael sense, often is. For that reason, I am not terribly interested in trash, as such, though I admire some films thus labeled. Nor do I care, except sociologically, about the values assigned to varying brow placements. When I think a film from a lowbrow genre is good, I simply categorize it as good. The particular kind of badness I like is the film that is childish or incompetent—what it does, it does inadvertently.
Some bad movies, for example, reveal through sheer lack of self-awareness the incoherencies and solecisms of the culture that produces them. These sorts of movies fascinate me in the way a too-honest idiot does, after he’s had three or four drinks. Red Dawn (1984) is notoriously enjoyable in this way. More recently, Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time exemplifies this sort of badness. (DuVernay has done excellent work before and after this film, particularly in her studies of the prison-industrial complex, 13th and When They See Us, so I attribute the rich and extravagant lousiness of A Wrinkle in Time to its screenwriters, and to its rumored short production schedule.) Like many memorably bad movies, A Wrinkle in Time is full of moments that, if done in a self-aware spirit, would constitute unanswerable satire. Passing this test are the scenes in which Oprah Winfrey, as magical Mrs. Which, stands two stories tall, shimmering like a hologram and smiling benignantly upon heroic young Meg Murray. What a brilliantly sly commentary this almost is on Oprah’s odd place in American life, how she patronizes us from her billionaire height while remaining trapped in the thankless, dehumanizing role of white femininity’s wise, bodiless, never-quite-real cosmic black friend. (More purely absurd is the moment when Reese Witherspoon transforms into a flying lettuce.)
Where the film does its greatest service, however—and where it provides a glimpse into American culture that is so dark, so total, that its badness lingers in the mind like greatness—is in the way it foregrounds the unconscious nihilism of the American worship of self-esteem.... (MORE - details)
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/eating...bad-movies
EXCERPT (Phil Christman): . . . We bad-movie watchers have our own anticriteria, the sorts of badness we prefer. Some of us use the term “bad movies” to mean, simply, films that emerge from a supposedly lowbrow genre, or films that are stylized in the manner we tend to label “camp.” (Road House from 1989 is this kind of bad movie, and is very good at being one.) Some of us prefer movies that are exploitative and tacky but, in a Nietzschean way, supposedly more alive than respectable ones. Renata Adler referred to the cult around such movies as “the angry trash claimers,”1 a term by which she probably intended to indict Pauline Kael, whose “Trash, Art, and the Movies” could serve as a manifesto for this sort of criticism. The rock critic Lester Bangs, in an endearing essay about Ray Dennis Steckler’s delirious 1963 horror film The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, practices Angry Trash Reclamation, arguing that the film’s apparent innocence of good taste gives it a kind of “lunar purity.”
Other bad films fascinate because they define an area of heroic obsession, horrifically misapplied. The heroism and the misapplication are inseparable. Anyone can commit himself body and soul to a clearly formulated project of obvious importance or quality, but to throw your last dollar, your last scrap of energy, into something ill-conceived and absurd from the beginning: That takes a human being. The comedian Patton Oswalt, riffing on the movie Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977), asks a question that has probably badgered every artist: What if films like Death Bed are as much the result of artistic passion and endurance as, say, Apocalypse Now? What if, in pushing past my self-doubt, being true to my vision, I only demonstrate the salience of that doubt, the tragic extent of my astigmatism?
Raising questions you don’t answer—and begging some of the ones you do—is the prerogative of anyone who discusses art of any kind in print. The same person will tell you, with no attempt to resolve the tensions, that the idea of “good” art is a construct foisted upon us by powerful people (or, if they’ve read Foucault, simply by “power”), and that Iron Man 2 is “objectively the worst” Marvel movie. We will say, if we have been to graduate school, that an artist’s intention and biography do not matter, while focusing obsessively on the personal lives, choices, and sociopolitical commitments of artists. Attempts to discipline the discussion by grounding aesthetics in science tend either toward a pleasing but vague mysticism (claims about the beauty of the Golden Ratio, followed by a chain of explanations that infinitely defer explanation) or a barbarous oversimplification (we appreciate the large muscles of Michelangelo’s David because baby chicks react to the color red). We use the conceptual vocabulary of several distinct and often-opposed aesthetics without thinking about it.
And so, as I pursued writing and higher education, as the choices I’d make in life began to make me more and more distant not just from the boy on the couch, but from the father sitting next to him, I kept watching bad movies, wondering how the satellite and the planet interacted. I drove across town to see a revival screening of King Kong Lives (1986), a film so bad that the distributors refused to allow Siskel and Ebert to show clips of it on their television program. I stayed up late finding and downloading the bits and pieces of a torrent file of the 1982 Turkish fantasy film Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (The Man Who Saved the World), known in Anglophone countries as “Turkish Star Wars” because of its unauthorized and awkward splicing-in of actual Star Wars footage. I lost my wallet, not inappropriately, at a showing of The Dragon Lives Again (1979), a surreal festival of copyright infringement in which an actor playing (though hardly resembling) a resurrected Bruce Lee fights characters named The Godfather, The Exorcist, Popeye, James Bond, and Dracula, among others. I came to love Twilight (2008), with its wholly original, indeed hermetic vision of human psychology and conversation, its endearingly transparent wish-fulfillment aspects, its inexplicable baseball game. After it left theaters, I marveled at Batman vs. Superman (2016), that filmic analogue of a moody teenager hilariously incapable of remembering or articulating why he’s moody.
“Bad” can also mean “morally coarsening”—which “trash film,” in the Bangs/Kael sense, often is. For that reason, I am not terribly interested in trash, as such, though I admire some films thus labeled. Nor do I care, except sociologically, about the values assigned to varying brow placements. When I think a film from a lowbrow genre is good, I simply categorize it as good. The particular kind of badness I like is the film that is childish or incompetent—what it does, it does inadvertently.
Some bad movies, for example, reveal through sheer lack of self-awareness the incoherencies and solecisms of the culture that produces them. These sorts of movies fascinate me in the way a too-honest idiot does, after he’s had three or four drinks. Red Dawn (1984) is notoriously enjoyable in this way. More recently, Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time exemplifies this sort of badness. (DuVernay has done excellent work before and after this film, particularly in her studies of the prison-industrial complex, 13th and When They See Us, so I attribute the rich and extravagant lousiness of A Wrinkle in Time to its screenwriters, and to its rumored short production schedule.) Like many memorably bad movies, A Wrinkle in Time is full of moments that, if done in a self-aware spirit, would constitute unanswerable satire. Passing this test are the scenes in which Oprah Winfrey, as magical Mrs. Which, stands two stories tall, shimmering like a hologram and smiling benignantly upon heroic young Meg Murray. What a brilliantly sly commentary this almost is on Oprah’s odd place in American life, how she patronizes us from her billionaire height while remaining trapped in the thankless, dehumanizing role of white femininity’s wise, bodiless, never-quite-real cosmic black friend. (More purely absurd is the moment when Reese Witherspoon transforms into a flying lettuce.)
Where the film does its greatest service, however—and where it provides a glimpse into American culture that is so dark, so total, that its badness lingers in the mind like greatness—is in the way it foregrounds the unconscious nihilism of the American worship of self-esteem.... (MORE - details)