What’s up guys?
Jared here.
As you all know, we spend a fair amount of time here at Wisecrack waxing poetic about
a lot of great cinema and TV.
But we also love stuff that some would consider “not great” like this:
“Garbage day!”
“No!”
“Ha ha ha ha!”
Or this:
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhh”
And of course, we wanted to know: WHY IS THIS SH*T SO GOOD?
Is it for the same same reason we can’t look away from a train wreck?
But, by the time we were done researching, we stumbled on some writers that made a pretty
convincing argument that bad films can actually be MORE profound than “good” films?
How?
Well let’s find out in this Wisecrack Vlog on bad movies.
First, what makes a certain form of bad film so compelling that you’ll go to the theater
to see it every month at midnight instead of watching an academy-award winning film
like Roma as you’re supposed to?
Film scholar Jeffrey Sconce dubbed cinema’s sleazy underbelly “Paracinema,” a term
meant to encompass all films that fall outside the of mainstream, from fake-blood-happy splatter
films to Trolls 2.
“Their eating him!”
“And then their gonna eat me!”
“Oh my God ahhhhhh!”
Sconce says that the “explicit manifesto of Paracinematic culture is to valorize all
forms of cinematic ‘trash’,” that is, cinema that’s been rejected or ignored by
those who know better than you.
If you’ve ever called a film ‘so bad it’s good,” congrats you might just be a budding
connoisseur of what Sconce calls the “badfilm.”
It’s one word.
Badfilm.
In appreciating badfilm, fans turn “the bad” into the “sublime”.
Pretty dope.
Now, let’s narrow down what exactly a badfilm is.
There’s actually some consistency across this genre besides “you just know it when
you see it.”
Is it money?
Not quite.
A low budget does not necessarily a badfilm make, just like a high budget doesn’t mean
your film is going to rock.
For example, the genuinely good 1999 film Blair Witch was made for 60 thousand dollars,
approximately 1/100th of The Room’s inexplicably-large 6 million dollar budget.
Film scholar Rebecca Bartlett waded through the cesspool of cinematic history and found
that these flicks frequently display “issues regarding post-production sound:
“ * Here they come!”
Excessive use of recycled footage,
Unconvincing acting,
“I’m glad to see you, Grandpa.
Did you see?
I managed to keep them from eating.”
“Now you have to convince them to leave here.”
And incoherent editing styles, while other researchers point to shoddy cinematography,
bad direction and lack of continuity.
Take this moment of The Room, famous for just how totally… off it feels.
“I did not hit her, it’s not true.
It’s bullshit, I did not hit her.
I did not.
Oh hi Mark.”
A good actor might keep his tone of voice consistent, rather than cheerfully saying:
“Oh hi Mark.”
while a good editor might cut to a shot of Mark BEFORE Wiseau addresses him so that the
audience isn’t so freaking confused.
For badfilms like The Room, the incompetence we love is the disingenuity, the “nope,
we don’t buy it” gut reaction that it elicits.
Badfilms also, in existing outside the realm of major studios, tend to be more unfiltered,
often expressive of a single person’s individual vision and quirky Originality.
As a result, badfilms are full of stylistic oddities, and excessive, failed attempts at
tragedy, or comedy, or shark-induced violence.
“Oh man!”
The same way a film scholar waxes poetic about Godard’s camera motions, a bad film fan
will delight in the corny character reactions or melodramatic transitions in Sharknado.
So how is it that these films can actually be smart?
Because they exist on the fringes of culture, badfilms are sometimes incredibly subversive
in ways traditional films can’t be.
Our love of them isn’t some newfound hipster ironicism either.
Rabid film lovers have long harbored weird obsessions with those bizzaro films trapped
in the basement of cinematic culture.
Take famous badfilm director Ed Wood’s most bewildering flick Glen or Glenda (1953), which
was both a remarkably progressive take on trans issues and a remarkably bad film.
Some of the earliest scholarly declarations of love for bad cinema came in tandem with
the cultural and cinematic revolutions of the late 60s, like in 1968 when critic Pauline
Kael declared the hippie exploitation film Wild in the Streets to be superior to to Stanley
Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey.
“Ever since the- the accident I…
I’ve been under the care of an LSD therapist.”
Now 2001 inarguably changed cinema, forever.
Wild in the Street, on the other hand, was a psychedelic satire about a teenage hippie
who becomes president, poisons D.C.’s water supply with acid, and forcibly moves every
American over the age of 35 to concentration camps, where they are forced to drop acid
on the reg, and it’s somehow 100% MORE bananas than it sounds.
Kael defended her provocative opinion by arguing that the entire purpose of cinema as an art
has never been to copy the pretensions of “European high culture” but instead, to
embrace the childish, the fun.
She points out that the earliest films took their cues not from James Joyce but from the
“peep show, the Wild West show, the music hall, the comic strip, from what was coarse
and common.”
Thus, Kael argues that high-art quote “sophisticated” films are less authentic than outsider art
seen in shitty films like Wild in the Streets, and indeed, The Room.
Para-cinematic movies like Wild in the Streets, Kael says, are also more far more interesting
because they “had, in some rudimentary way, some freshness, some hint of style, some trace
of beauty, some audacity, some craziness…”
While 2001 takes itself seriously, Kael says, films like Wild in the Streets have “the
joy of playfulness.”
In explicitly “good” “artful” films like 2001, we go to the movies and silently,
reverently consume the film and then say "WOW!" when we leave.
In contrast, Wild in the Streets is blatantly NOT a masterpiece of American filmmaking,
but you will have a fun, irreverent time watching it.
And there’s value in that.
In being completely bizarro, Kael contended, Wild in the Streets can actually tell us a
lot about its moment in time, in which youth rebellion was seen as the biggest threat to
the status quo and the boogeyman of hallucinogens loomed large.
No tasteful scene could have expressed those anxieties quite like the tacky absurdity of
old people screaming as their dose of acid kicks in.
Not even this:
But what’s actually going on when you watch a badfilm?
A lot, actually.
Recognizing a movie like The Room for what it is - so bad it’s mega-good - actually
requires some pretty sophisticated thinking.
“You're lying.
I never hit you.”
“You're tearing me apart, Lisa!”
That’s because deciphering a badfilm mandates extra-textual analysis, which means you’re
not merely deciding if you like the film’s storyline or camera angles, or relate to the
film’s characters- Instead, you’re addressing the creator’s intentions, judging if those
intentions were met, and lolling at the ways in which they weren’t.
Take this early love-scene in The Room.
Why do they keep hitting each other with pillows?
Why is Wiseau ripping rose petals?
Extra-textual analysis tells us that he was trying to mimic the romantic spirit of smoochy
love sequences, trying to make the scene both sexual and sensual.
Maybe he even was inspired by your other favorite creepy rose petal scene.
This process of reading the film necessarily “calls attention to the text as a cultural
and sociological document,” which allows for even more interesting analysis.
Ok, so what’s the value of The Room as a cultural artifact?
According to filmmaker and professor Ross Morin, “Through the complete excess in every
area of production, The Room reveals to us just how empty, preposterous and silly the
films and television programs we’ve watched over the past couple of decades have been.”
In attempting to mimic Hollywood, and failing, Wiseau’s film actually reveals the ridiculousness
of the tropes that have saturated much of mainstream commercial filmmaking.
While badfilm originated amongst film nerds, we’d argue that the growing sophistication
of audiences makes badfilm more relevant to the masses than ever.
As the line between audience and artmaker continues to disintegrate, we’re increasingly
primed to engage in the sophisticated analysis that is the appreciation of bad filmmaking.
Today, the cult of badfilm has increasingly moved online.
Indeed, just like grad students snickering wryly as they watch The Garbage Pail Kids
Movies on VHS in 1987, we’re all sharing and disseminating what can only be called…
internet Paracinema.
You can see this in everything from the overly-earnest pleas of Leave Britney Alone to the addictingly-bad
tunes of Rebecca Black to any one of those wedding aisle dance videos.
These specimens are on face badfilms- often shooting for a goal that’s way beyond their
reach.
And yet, they are often strangely compelling precisely because of their oddities, eccentricities,
or spectacular failures.
Like Morin’s analysis of the Room, one could argue that things like Rebekah Black inadvertently
reveal important truths.
In this case, economic inequality, or put more bluntly: the utter decadence of growing
up the daughter of parents who have way more money than brains.
At the end of the day, there are plenty of arguments as to why we should discount “good
taste” in cinema, and why this video of a corgi riding a pony is A. truer to cinema’s
roots, B. more fun and C. more reflective of our culture than Academy Award winning
film The English Patient.
But what do you think, Wisecrack tastemakers?
Is there a higher truth in art that’s so bad it’s good?
And is The Room a fascinating cultural artifact or a goofy-ass fluke?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
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And as always, thanks for watching guys, peace.