You are tearing me apart, Lisa!

An exploration of badness in cinema

A publicity photo of Tommy Wiseau, the director/writer/producer/star of The Room (2003).

To celebrate and/or mock the March awards season, the Criterion Channel is currently devoting one of its monthly retrospectives to the winners of the industry’s least coveted award, the Golden Raspberry. The Razzies, according to the accompanying blurb,

have often inadvertently shed light on films so out-there, so uncompromising, so beyond the bounds of accepted “good” taste that they demand attention… In a topsy-turvy way, this program pays tribute to those divisive films that continue to fascinate and provoke debate, while calling into question the very line that separates high and low culture.

The films in question range from the Tom Cruise flair bartending drama Cocktail (1988) to the remade The Wicker Man (2006) starring a memetic Nicholas Cage to Prince’s directorial debut Under the Cherry Moon (1986) and at least one film that — in hindsight — has had a significant influence on subsequent filmmakers, The Blair Witch Project (1999).

It might sound strange to hear that I was disappointed by a film I knew would probably be bad going in, but that was my experience — repeatedly — while watching this retrospective.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll know from experience that there is a unique joy to be found in experiencing a truly great bad film, the kind of contagious joy you want to spread to other people, the kind of joy that gave Mystery Science Theater 3000 thirteen seasons of life and made The Room (2003) a true cult phenomenon. Too many of the films in this retrospective failed to live up — or down — to this standard, which made me ask myself the question of what makes a movie enjoyably bad, as opposed to merely bad.

The majority of this post will be an exploration of the multiple ways in which a film can be bad, in the hopes of identifying the specific kind of badness that leads to contagious, ironic enjoyment.

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At first glance, there are a few ways in which a film can be bad that would not be conducive to ironic enjoyment.

A film can be, to quote one of Merriam-Webster’s definitions of bad, “morally objectionable.” If a viewer finds the film truly offensive, truly disgusting, then that would seem to block most kinds of aesthetic pleasure; Mystery Science Theater 3000 did not feature snuff films, Nazi propaganda, or footage of war atrocities.

Another related definition is “disagreeable; unpleasant,” which is relevant to at least one previously mentioned film. Some people simply cannot sit through The Blair Witch Project and other found footage films, not because they find offensive or even because they find it overly frightening but simply because it gives them motion sickness.

To clarify, I am not discussing what the philosopher of film Noël Carroll calls the paradox of horror: our odd ability to vicariously enjoy fictional representations of horrific, gruesome events that would repulse us in real life. Film-induced motion sickness is something purely physiological that makes aesthetic judgment impossible. If you have to stop watching the movie because it makes you dizzy, or because you have to go throw up in the bathroom, then you cannot enjoy it either sincerely or ironically.

In addition to these two kinds of badness that would seem to absolutely inhibit enjoyment, I can think of a few ways in which a film’s badness can be orthogonal to our enjoyment.

Merriam-Webster also defines bad as “failing to reach an acceptable standard; poor.” In the case of filmmaking, a business as well as an art, one key test is that of profitability. And, indeed, films with this status often gain notorious reputations and show up on worst of all time lists. The aforementioned Criterion retrospective, for instance, includes multiple notorious flops: Heaven’s Gate (1980), Ishtar (1987), Gigli (2003).

However, the phenomenon of a an initially unsuccessful film eventually gaining classic status — or experiencing simultaneous critical acclaim and box office failure when first released — is so common that it’s inspired a lengthy TV Tropes page. Consider the following list of now-acclaimed films, all of which lost their investors money (sometimes very large amounts) when they were first released: Citizen Kane (1941), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Blade Runner (1982), The King of Comedy (1982), Mulholland Drive (2001), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007).

These films’ critical revivals might be somewhat influenced by the cachet of the once-misunderstood masterpiece, but they also make it clear that a truly great film might, for whatever reason, fail to connect with audiences at a certain time; the category of ‘flop,’ which includes both Citizen Kane and Gigli, is simply too broad to be useful for us here.

Another test a film could potentially pass or fail is the test of time. Orwell’s assertion that “there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion” seems equally relevant to cinema. Failure on this metric might seem to suggest a given film’s badness, or at least its mediocrity; it is undeniably true that thousands of films have been forgotten because they are unmemorable.

Again, however, there seem to be significant exceptions to this rule. Criterion itself collaborates with Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, an organization devoted to preserving, restoring and publishing often forgotten international films, films often at the risk of disappearing forever due to the degradation and flammability of the celluloid itself. In its own words, the World Cinema Project’s work reflects

a fierce commitment to preserving and presenting masterpieces from around the globe, with a growing roster of dozens of restorations that have introduced moviegoers to often overlooked areas of cinema history.

The use of the word ‘masterpieces’ here suggests that, at least for some, the preservation of obscure or endangered films is of more than historical interest, that at least some of these almost-lost films do offer compelling aesthetic experiences. And lost and rediscovered films have gained canonical status in the past, which strongly suggests that failing this test is a) sometimes temporary and b) often unreflective of the film’s actual quality.

Consider The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927), now considered one of the greatest classics of silent cinema. (Directors voted it the 30th greatest film of all time in the 2022 BFI Sight and Sound poll; it was the highest-ranking silent film on their list.) Due to a fire that destroyed the original negative, the original uncensored version of this film was lost for decades, until a usable copy surfaced in 1981 in, of all places, a Norwegian mental hospital. Had that mental hospital itself burned down at any point between the late twenties and 1981, a truly great film would have been lost forever, thus failing the test of time.

Other films, not at risk of literally disappearing, experienced decades of obscurity before being rediscovered. Due to its harsh initial reception by French critics, the Jean Pierre Melville French Resistance drama Amy of Shadows (1969) was not released in the United States and was mostly forgotten for 37 years until its rerelease and revival in 2006. In the words of Roger Ebert, who added it to his list of Great Movies, “this restored 35mm print, now in art theaters around the country, may be 37 years old, but it is the best foreign film of the year.”

Both a film’s financial failure and its descent into obscurity then, are simply external to any given viewer’s enjoyment, ironic or otherwise, of the film itself; excellent and terrible films have failed both tests. We must now of course turn to the films themselves, to the specific audiovisual experiences they offer, to see if we can find an aesthetic dividing line between the merely bad film and the so bad it’s good film.

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While a few films in the Criterion retrospective perhaps live up to the promise of being “so out-there, so uncompromising, so beyond the bounds of accepted ‘good’ taste that they demand attention,” Gigli is not one of them. Remembered primarily as the birthplace of the Ben Affleck-Jennifer Lopez romance that so fascinated early 2000s tabloids and their readers, the film made $7.2 million on a $75.6 million budget and won six Razzies, including Worst Picture.

The two most obvious lapses of good taste — Lopez’s lesbian hitwoman, who is of course willing to make an exception for Affleck’s protagonist, and Justin Bartha’s supporting role as a mentally challenged, obsessive Baywatch fan — are grating rather than ironically enjoyable, as is the dialogue in general.

The titular character’s repeated (and repeatedly unfunny) insistence that his last name is pronounced like ‘really’ rather than ‘giggly’ is only one example of clunky, repetitive and ultimately uninteresting dialogue that makes the true bad movie connoisseur pine for a Tommy Wiseau line reading. (For the true connoisseur, a sublimely bad screenplay can be as memorable as an excellent screenplay.)

Bartha’s character, for instance, repeatedly asks Larry Gigli to take him to “the Baywatch,” which he apparently thinks of as an actual, physical place, and Gigli repeatedly responds by pretending to call “the Baywatch” and to be informed that it is closed for the day. In confrontations, both Gigli and Lopez’ Ricki engage in inane, cliched mob tough guy posturing.

This disappointing, rather uninteresting film was the product of a team with strong track records and, in several cases, bright futures. The film’s two most memorable scenes, for instance, involve cameos from Christopher Walken and Al Pacino, with the former launching into a possibly unscripted soliloquy about his love of Marie Callender’s pies. Writer-director Martin Brest helmed two big commercial and critical successes in the eighties, Beverley Hills Cop (1984) and Midnight Run (1988). Editor Billy Weber began his filmmaking career as an associate editor on Badland (1973) and assistant editor on Taxi Driver (1976); his regular collaboration with Terence Malick lasted through The Tree of Life (2011). Cinematographer Robert Elswit has shot six Paul Thomas Anderson films, winning an Oscar for There Will Be Blood (2007).

The true failure of Gigli, in other words, is the failure of all these experienced, skilled, talented people to fail in an interesting way. The film is merely dull, lacking that spark that would make it a true bad taste cult classic. I use it to represent the kind of typical bad movie, the uninspired work of qualified professionals. It is kitsch, as famously described by Clement Greenberg:

Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money-not even their time.

A truly great bad movie is, in some sense, the exact opposite.

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The word ‘amateur’ ultimately descends from the Latin amare, to love, and its current connotations of incompetence or inexperience are a more recent addition to its original meaning: someone who does something for the sheer love of doing it, rather than for money.

My ultimate thesis is that amateurishness in both senses of the word defines a truly enjoyable bad movie. It should be a passion project realized in an exuberantly inept way.

When it reaches a certain magnitude, ineptitude can become a joyous spectacle, a compelling anti-virtuosity: the ensemble acting in Troll 2 (1990); the magnificently unconvincing special effects in Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010); Edward D. Wood, Jr’s unwillingness or inability to write a line of dialogue remotely resembling something one human being might say to another; the entirety of Tommy Wiseau’s work behind and in front of the camera.

This explains the perfect marriage between the Mystery Science Theater 3000 format and the low-budget B movies featured on the show: the latter’s awkward, inexperienced actors and actresses, shoddy special effects, cheap costumes and subpar scripts provides the perfect raw material for the show’s sarcastic commentary.

With both definitions of amateurism in mind, it should come as no surprise that so many of the truly great bad movies are the directorial debuts of people with little to no previous filmmaking experience: Robot Monster (1953), The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961), Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966), Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987), The Room (2003). I’ve never sat down to watch a Neil Breen movie from start to finish, but he certainly falls into this category, being a successful architect who self-funds his own films — films he writes, produces, directs and stars in — that express his own idiosyncratic worldview.

A truly great bad film thus requires a certain level of sincerity, as opposed to the cynicism of the toyetic Hollywood sequel or Uwe Boll’s blatant tax loophole exploitation. The great bad filmmakers, as misguided as they might be, must on some level truly believe in what they’re doing.

Consider Silicon Valley software salesman turned self-funded filmmaker James Nguyen, whose second film Birdemic: Shock and Terror was rejected by every festival he submitted it to. In what he would later call a “cinematic football Hail Mary,” Nguyen nonetheless drove to Sundance and spent eight days camping out in his van in sub-zero temperatures, networking with festival attendees and potential distributors. Nugyen’s Hail Mary effort — which included personally passing out flyers asking “WHY DID THE EAGLES AND VULTURES ATTACKED?” — paid off, as he attracted the interest of distributor Severin Films, whose limited theatrical release launched the film’s viral popularity.

In a way, then, filmmakers like Nguyen, Breen, Ed Wood and Tommy Wiseau are some of the truest auteurs in film history: independent filmmakers, not beholden to Hollywood studios and their marketing strategies, pursuing their unique artistic visions without tailoring them to mainstream tastes. These filmmakers’ lack of experience, industry connections or funding means that they also lack restraints, which in turn gives their films the room to develop in truly weird, truly memorable directions.

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The films I’ve been discussing are, at least in my experience, uniquely suited to a communal viewing experience, to a situation in which a group of friends — perhaps with alcoholic beverages in hand — engage in their own sarcastic Mystery Science Theater-style commentary. Why these films in particular, as opposed to, say, genuinely great ones?

Perhaps because, if you’re the kind of person fascinated by truly great bad movies, you’re probably also the kind of person who spent some formative days making movies with friends as a teenager or college student. These movies were also a shared experience, also involved jokes and what we would now call memes, and were of course also amateurish in both senses of the word.

The best bad movies, then, are generally the ones most like feature-length versions of our own youthful amateur movies, which gives them a unique and uniquely enjoyable relatability not found anywhere else.

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