Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

I enjoy art that is complex and ambitious. Intricacy, and daring in art are aesthetic categories that bring many things (both good and bad) along with them, and I love all of it! Crucially, I enjoy those things whether the art is successful or unsuccessful in achieving its ambition.

In fact, I think there's something deeply interesting and moving about trying something ambitious and failing. Making a film is a difficult undertaking. Even a small, low-budget film requires an immense amount of work. There's something hubristic about filmmaking. And when a film fails, that failure is compelling in a human way. Seeing ambition going wrong is in many ways more interesting than seeing it succeed.

And a film's reach exceeding its grasp is one of the main modes that bad films can fall into. Some films try something that's really quite artistically ambitious, but the director and crew are just not equal to the task. Zardoz is a great example that I think about all the time. The director of Zardoz was trying to say something, he had a vision. And he was making a lot of very strange film-making decisions in service of that vision. But anyone who has seen Zardoz will tell you: the film is a train wreck, a horrible mess. But it's a fascinating, human mess that bears repeated watching.

Now obviously not all of the bad films that I enjoy are artistically ambitious in the way that Zardoz was, but there's always that core ambition bound up in filmmaking. I am endlessly fascinated by seeing someone trying to tell a story that someone will want to experience, but ultimately making something that no one (but me) actually wants to watch.

Even when bad films aren't artistically ambitious, bad films still tend to have a certain excessiveness, an over the top transgressiveness, that I find compelling. Here, I'm thinking of grindhouse films. A lowest common denominator attempt at horror, horror that is just titillating, can often still manage a fascinating excessiveness. So while those films may not be ambitious in an experimental sense, there's still something gonzo about them, a savage sensory or emotional overload that you don't typically find in successful films. And in the same way that I enjoy ambition, I also enjoy things that are just a bit too much for conventional good taste, things that are a little beyond the pale.

And I think an important part of that particular aesthetic resonance is that when I was forming my taste in the last century the media environment was very carefully curated. Everything was carefully gatekept, and you had tons of studio folks involved in making feature films. As a result, the things that you would see in the theaters and on the television were all of a piece. They had a sameyness, a cultural continuity, a sanitized feel to them that's broken down a bit as the monoculture slowly fragmented.

But back then, seeing bizarre grindhouse films made by small crews would let you see strange irruptions of an alternate way of thinking, of alternate identities, or an alternate set of value feelings. Those films could show you things that were really not on display in the mainstream culture. To paraphrase Tolstoy, all good movies are alike, but every bad movie is bad in its own way, and that uniqueness is also compelling.

These films were strange cultural artifacts that would come to you through word of mouth, or someone would hand you a videotape, or you'd see it at three in the morning on cable. And the feeling was always, "What is this trash? And what are they trying to tell me?" So many bad films felt, and feel, like letters from another world.

And, of course, there's a third thing I love about bad movies, which is perhaps less highbrow than the first two: it's frankly amusing to watch a really bad movie. There's something funny about watching hubris come up short, about the kinds of weird decisions people make as they're failing. Obviously Mystery Science Theater 3000 is the cultural touchstone for this sort of enjoyment, and it was a really popular show for a reason. There's something delightful about riffing on bad films. When you're watching films with horrible continuity errors, with terrible camera work, where everything is just a mess, it's hard not to laugh a little. As discussed above, bad movies are often surprising, and that sense of surprise also feeds the humor.

That sort of dark schadenfreude, the joy of communally mocking something bizarre, is right there alongside those high-minded desires to see ambition succeed or fail and the interest in seeing a window into a different world.

And, at their best (worst?), a bad film will have all of these threads feeding together to make something unforgettably weird. An object lesson: Albert Pyun was a great trash cinema director, but one who often tried to engage themes that were beyond his reach (and budget). He's probably most famous for launching Jean Claude Van Damme's career with Cyborg.

Cyborg is a dystopian film about a post-apocalyptic future; it's trying to set up a few different allegories about the cold war era, nuclear technology, and also anxiety about where computer technology was going. It's a movie trying to explore how technology might make victims of us all, but also might save us. But the director and writer are just not really capable of fully realizing this inchoate vision they're reaching towards.

And there are these cross-cutting commercial imperatives, that were pushing the filmmakers in different directions. The budget was low, but they had this incredible kickboxer on tap. Somebody like Van Damme, who can do visually impressive stunts, is his own special effect, and, crucially, he's a special effect that's already been paid for. So the filmmakers shoehorned kick boxing and martial arts into the film every chance they got, even though the film is ostensibly about a post-apocalyptic future with advanced technology.

So you've got these two different themes uncomfortably pinging off each other, and Jean Claude Van Damme's character is this feet-of-fury post-apocalyptic hero, fighting his way through the wastes to protect technology that could save us all. But then, like in any good action movie, he has a set back, gets beaten up, temporarily defeated. And rather than just leaving him for dead, his enemies decide to literally crucify him to drive home his wasteland savior persona.

It's meant to be an intense, emotional scene. His life flashes before his eyes so we can see his regrets and dreams. But the whole thing comes off a bit sacrilegious, and maybe more than a bit hackneyed (Conan the Barbarian had done a similar scene just a few years before, which was equally ridiculous, but better executed).

But then, after the emotional turn, the writers refocus: because they have a kickboxer on the cross, all problems must be solved by kickboxing. So Van Damme starts kicking the stake of the cross over and over until it buckles and he falls to the ground. And just like that a scene that was a bit maudlin is transmuted into something truly bizarre. There is something absurd, hilarious, and magical about watching kickboxer Jesus kick his way down off the cross, and that scene will live in my memory forever.

In short, I love bad films because they provide experiences that good films can't or won't provide. Every bad film is different, and you can never be quite sure what you're going to see, but there's a good chance it will be ridiculous.