Below is a version of the paper I delivered last week at SCMS 2013, on the panel 'So Bad It's Good' (alongside excellent talks by Richard McCulloch, Nessa Johnston, and Phil Oppenheim). It is based on a much longer, currently unpublished piece I have co-authored with James Zborowski.
Firstly, a word about ‘bad’. I won’t here be using ‘bad’ to mean media
that is simply ‘critically disreputable’ or offends ‘mainstream tastes’.
Instead, my focus is specifically aesthetic artifacts valued for their incompetence:
what in film studies is often called ‘badfilm’ (Sconce 1995). I will indeed
be largely focusing on film in what follows, though I hope my ideas might also
have broader application.
What I will suggest today is that media widely praised for being ‘so bad
it’s good’ is capable of prompting a revitalization of two very old, but vital,
questions for aesthetics – specifically, value and intention – and not
necessarily in the manner we might usually imagine.
Let’s start with intention…
Intention
Of course, artistic intention is a subject that has been granted short
shrift in the last 60 years or so of the humanities. In his introduction to a
recent special issue of the journal Nonsite,
Charles Palermo, for instance, recounts a familiar narrative of intention’s
conceptual sidelining. He
begins with Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s infamous ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ in
1946; proceeds through Barthes’s ‘The Death of the Author,’ and Michel
Foucault’s ‘What is an Author?’, via Derrida and de Man, going on to say that,
If one adds […] developments in structuralism, semiotics,
reader-response theory and hermeneutics, the effect is of something like a
broad and general effort to minimize or eliminate reference to authorial
intention in the practice of interpretation. (2012: 1)
Emerging during the last couple decades, scholarship on so-called ‘cult’
or ‘paracinematic’ texts – which includes those viewed as ‘so bad they’re good’
– has in some way epitomized this trend. And initially, this would seem to make
absolute sense. As Mathijs and Mendik put it in their book The Cult Cinema Reader:
‘while traditional fandom remains largely respectful to a film’s
interpretive integrity, [cult fandom will often] involve challenges to its
interpretation [by] imbuing it with meanings that may counter its intentions’
(2008: 5)
We can agree that the phenomenon of audiences enjoying, say, films for
their apparent badness demonstrates their ability to read texts in ‘unintended’
ways. Yet we should also acknowledge what this phenomenon makes equally clear:
how fundamental assumptions about intention are to this very process.
Indeed, mentions of intention tacitly haunt a number of canonical
discussions of cult. Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on “Camp”’, for instance, distinguishes
between naïve and deliberate Camp, arguing that ‘pure Camp is always naïve.
Camp which knows itself to be Camp (“camping”) is usually less satisfying’
(Sontag 1966: 282). In his important piece ‘Trashing the Academy’, Jeffrey
Sconce writes that badfilm viewers take pleasure in a ‘deviance born, more
often than not, from the systematic failure of a film aspiring to obey dominant codes of
cinematic representation’ (Sconce 1995: 385).
Having touched upon intention, however, such accounts tend not to make
it a central term in their debates. Yet, the reason it needs to be touched on
at all is that appreciating a cultural artifact as ‘So bad it’s good’
fundamentally requires the presumption that a text’s original intentions have
been discerned. As Allison Graham says, speaking of Ed Wood’s films: ‘It is the
appearance of Wood’s intentions that so engages cult audiences – the perceived
distance [...] between his desire to create compelling narratives and his
inability to do so’ (Graham 1991: 109).
Because it demands this kind of engagement, I claim that – far from
adding fuel to the theoretical sidelining of intention – ‘so bad it’s good’
culture requires us to revisit a fundamental aesthetic problem: how can we
presume to infer artistic intention, given that we necessarily do so
regularly? (See, for instance, Gibbs [1999] for an extended treatise on the
argument that ‘the
recovery of communicative intentions is an essential part of the cognitive
processes that operate when we understand human action of any sort’ [1999:
3-4]).
Before addressing that question, though, let’s first move on to value.
Value
Of course, the quest for objective evaluations of art has often been
dismissed as futile. In 1957 Northrop Frye wrote that ‘the demonstrable
value-judgement is the donkey’s carrot of literary criticism,’ and yet it
‘always turns out to be an illusion of the history of taste’ (1957: 20). Again,
as with intention, such conceptions of the ultimate instability of artistic
value have often accompanied cult studies. The phenomenon of ‘so bad it’s good’
appreciation is thus frequently viewed through just such relativist approaches
to value, and thus often accompanied by claims like Mathijis’ to the effect
that ‘when bad films are hailed – tongue in cheek or not – as masterpieces
[...], notions of what counts as “good” are problematized’ (Mathijs 2009: 366).
However, it’s my contention that, far from problematising ‘what counts
as “good”’, ‘so bad it’s good’ culture in fact has the potential to make
demonstrable (one version of) what counts as bad, and offers a challenge to the
proposition that we should conceptualise aesthetic evaluation as nothing but a
historical illusion of taste. Explaining why involves returning to an old, but
still vitally important, debate concerning the place where considerations of
intention and considerations of value may meet.
Value as achieved intention
Addressing the role of the reader in the evaluation of texts, Wayne C.
Booth has argued that there are different kinds of questions we may ask of a
text, including ‘those that the object seems to invite [...]; and those
that violate its own interests or effort to be a given kind of thing in
the world’ (Booth 1988: 90). ‘So bad it’s good’ appreciation specialises in
this last kind of relationship with a text. And yet (unlike a ‘misreading’) it also presupposes that
the reading which a text ‘invites’, will have already been discerned. But, if
we are wary of invoking the intentions of flesh-and-blood authors (as we tend
to be these days), who or what do we say extends this invitation to a reader?
Umberto Eco has argued that, ‘between the unattainable intention of the
author and the arguable intention of the reader there is the [...] intention of
the text’ (1992: 78). A
useful concept for aesthetics – similar to the notion of a text’s ‘preferred
reading’ (Brunsdon/Morley 1999) – the intention of the text is, in Eco’s
words, ‘the result of a conjecture on the part of the reader’ (1992: 64). It
seems obvious that making such a conjecture is essential for the viewer
undertaking to appreciate a film on the grounds of its incompetence. So, on
what basis might this be done?
Important here is what Booth called a text’s seeming ‘effort to be a
given kind of thing in the world’; Eco writes:
‘to recognize the [intention of the text] is to recognize a semiotic
strategy. Sometimes the semiotic strategy is detectable on the grounds of
established stylistic conventions. If a story starts with “Once upon a time”,
there is a good probability that it is a fairy tale.’ (ibid.: 64/5)
Or, we might say, that it intends to be a fairytale. Something
that will often guide our sense of the intention of the text, then, is the
existence of pre-existing cultural genres and categories, and their
accompanying conventions. One film
scholar who has argued that categorisation is fundamental not just to
interpretation, but also therefore to evaluation,
is Noël Carroll, who writes: [knowing] the category (or categories) to which
the artwork belongs […] provides us with a basis for determining whether the
work has succeeded or failed, at least on its own terms. (2009: 93-4)
It is my contention that ‘so bad it’s good’ appreciation necessarily
relies upon such a determination – resulting
in something like the following process: (1) identifying that a text has
certain intentions, before (2) evaluating it as ‘bad’ for failing to achieve
those intentions, and then (3) ironically recasting this badness as ‘so bad
it’s good’.
To help me expand on this, I’ll now turn briefly to a recently hugely
popular badfilm, the 2003 movie The Room.
The Room
The Room stars, and is both written and directed by,
Tommy Wiseau. Its broad intention as a text seems very much to be a convincing
and affecting melodrama - its plot revolving round Johnny (Wiseau), a San
Franciscan banker, whose life unravels when his fiancée, Lisa, begins an affair
with his best friend, Mark.
In order to succeed passably as a melodrama – the film would need to
deploy familiar generic conventions, which include – crucially – narrative
coherence and comprehensible emotional trajectories for its characters.
However, around its central premise, the film constructs an array of elliptical
sub-plots, and bafflingly superfluous scenes.
Indeed, baffling narrative superfluity is a major feature of The Room, and key to its failure to successfully
inhabit the category of coherent melodrama. In one early scene,
Lisa’s mother, Claudette, casually tells her daughter ‘I definitely have breast cancer’.
In almost any other melodrama this
would be a very alarming revelation; here, however, both characters airily
dismiss the illness (‘Don’t worry about it, everything will be fine…’), the
subject is changed, and Claudette’s cancer isn’t returned to again for the
remainder of the film.
At another moment, a major character, Denny, is suddenly threatened at
gunpoint by a drug dealer...
In the second half of this dramatic scene, after
Denny has been saved, we learn that he bought drugs from this dealer, and –
tantalisingly – that he ‘needed some money to pay off some stuff…’ However,
again, this scene is entirely self-contained - Neither the violent incident,
nor Denny’s money problems or possible drug habit, is ever mentioned again.
The Room’s narrative
coherence as melodrama is further compromised by its approach to
temporal organisation. One scene, for instance, ends with Lisa going upstairs
to ‘wash up and go to bed’, despite a preceding shot having established that it
is broad daylight outside.
In another scene, between Lisa and her best friend, many details
establish that an aforementioned surprise party for Johnny will be occurring
later today: while preparing the apartment, Lisa comments that ‘People are
going to be getting here soon’, and that ‘All I have to do is put on my party
dress’. However, after this scene there follows: a panning of the Golden Gate
Bridge; a sequence of Johnny and Mark jogging in a park; a brief night-time
shot of the city; a scene in the apartment in which Johnny kisses Lisa as he
heads out of the door, dressed for work; a sequence showing Johnny walking
through the city at dusk. Then, after this a digressive passage depicting a
miscellaneous set of moments from a dramatically inert 24 hours – we have the party scene.
Finally, there’s the issue of the affective inducements we expect from
melodrama. In perhaps The Room’s most famous moment: Johnny, distraught
by Lisa’s continued callous treatment of him, exclaims “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!’ (See
below, from 00:06 to 00:55).
I don’t have the time to demonstrate this in detail, however: to me, it
is clear that the playing of this moment, and its contexts, make it unavoidable
that we should conjecture that this outburst is intended to be a sincere and
moving expression of pained emotion. It is likely to fail in this, however, in
large part because by this point the film’s inept filmmaking (including
performance) has been forced so prominently into the viewer’s conscious
awareness that we are likely to be distanced from the diegetic reality of the
scene, and are rather paying attention to all the extra-diegetic aspects of the
moment – Wiseau’s mechanical yet laconic acting style, for instance, or the oddly
awkward framing.
This is what we often have on display in The Room: the
spectacle of a putative melodrama inviting yet failing to find a form capable
of soliciting an intended emotional response.
So, what can we take from all this?
Intention, convention, and evaluation
Though I’ve only begun the process here, I hope my brief discussion of
The Room has started demonstrating that we can indeed say that it fails to
achieve basic levels of coherence that thousands of examples of popular
narrative filmmaking have taught us to take for granted. And, until evidence is
provided that the intention of the
text is to abandon these conventions knowingly, our best conjecture must
be that the film’s failures are precisely that.
Using the intention of the text as our framework, then, we can indeed
agree – with the film’s many fans (for whom this point is crucial) – that The
Room is bad; and, furthermore,
that we can use this word without inverted commas. This evaluation,
furthermore, is not a matter of historically-contingent taste, nor does it
involve holding coherence up as an inherent good: it is simply a question of
judging a text against what we can most reasonably conjecture to have been its
intentions.
This raises the further question: should the phrase ‘so bad it’s good’
be taken literally? I suggest that to appreciate a badfilm for its failings is
to say: ‘It is in fact, demonstrably,
bad, but nevertheless...’ A
more accurate inflection might be, then: ‘so bad it’s pleasurable’.
This distinction does some justice to the
fact that no claim is being advanced for a text’s intrinsic value (that
is – its internal aesthetic properties), but rather its potential instrumental
value – that is: the experience it can provide for the viewer (see: Budd 1995,
Kieren 2001, etc.). Yet what, we need then to ask, might allow
us to value intrinsic aesthetic badness, instrumentally, as ‘so bad it’s
pleasurable’? I want to end by suggesting two
possibilities.
Instrumental pleasures: 1. Critique
First, there’s obviously the pleasure of ironic critique. We might say
that a potential appeal of The Room is simply the sheer number of times at which it fails to achieve
whatever it aims to achieve. One answer to why the film is ‘so bad it’s good’
thus lies in the word ‘so’. It can be thrilling simply to experience such an
overwhelming quantity of failed intentions. In one sense, this – ironic –
thrill can flatter the kind of viewer prepared to indulge it. A key outcome of extreme
and obvious ineptitude is that it virtually guarantees that any viewer
possessing even a passing familiarity with ‘mainstream’ cinematic conventions
becomes able to notice and critique elements of style, storytelling and
performance. We might say that in this way such a film provides something like
a democratisation of the pleasures involved in being a critic.
Still, there is something else pleasurable at stake in appreciating the
film as being ‘so bad it’s good’.
Instrumental pleasures: 2. ‘Closeness’
I would argue that another outcome of the fact that The Room pushes failures of style, storytelling and performance to
the forefront of the viewer’s awareness is that – at the same time as it’s
likely to create an affective ‘distance’ between us and the fiction – also
allows for an imagined closeness to
the extra-textual. More specifically,
it affords a sense of perverse closeness to the film’s ostensible auteur,
Wiseau. Let me give an example via my favourite line from the film.
Immediately after Johnny explodes with ‘You are tearing me apart, Lisa!’ (see above clip) he
demands desperately of his fiancé: ‘Do you understand
life? …Do you?!’
This line is one of many in The Room which seem to constitute not
simply a failure to embody a convention, but something more strange. Whereas a
failure to establish whether a scene takes place at day or night is a
conventional failures we can readily critique, this ‘failure’ is far more
mysterious. Rather than mere ineptitude, what seems important about this moment
that it is so idiosyncratic - at once bafflingly weighty, inappropriate to the
conversation at hand, and yet indicative of a kind of fraught emotional
logic. As such it permits the possibility of imagining that only this writer/director, Wiseau, would or
could write and deliver such an incomprehensible line in this way, and that it
might thus offer a small insight into the unusual way Tommy Wiseau’s mind
works.
The Room is thus often described by fans in terms of
its ‘misguided authorial honesty’ (Semley 2009: 7), the supposition being that
it offers an ‘exploration of life through the eyes of an incompetent mentor’
(‘Walmart’ 2011: 1), and thus ‘a tantalizing glimpse into Wiseau’s mind’
(‘Miss’ 2011: 1). The instrumental pleasure involved in this supposition, while
still ironic at base, is nonetheless supplemented by something other than
critique alone.
This seems to be another potential appeal offered by badfilm. The fact
that these films permit us to presume we can see filmmakers doing their jobs,
and doing them artlessly, can permit us to feel a greater sense of closeness to
the inner workings of filmmakers’ minds than might be afforded by a more
accomplished mode of cinema.
Conclusion
So, I want to leave you with two preliminary conclusions.
(1) Since the cult process of taking pleasure in a film like The Room relies upon the certainty that
it is indeed intrinsically bad, far from problematising regimes of aesthetic
value, ‘so bad it’s good’ culture rather seem to clarify them; any instrumental pronouncement of such a film as a
‘masterpiece’ by a cult viewer can, in this sense, only ever be ironic; see, for instance, ‘Walmart Goth’ writing on ‘Why The Room is a Masterpiece’ while also
acknowledging that its qualities stem from ‘blind drive and enthusiasm paired
with inconceivable incompetence and bad luck’ (2011: 1). As such, this ironic
appreciation is scarcely threatening to even the most traditional standards of
aesthetic evaluation
(2) In order for a viewer to feel that they’re taking pleasure from the
film’s failings s/he must first feel sure that the film’s original intentions
have been divined; in this sense this process poses no challenge to familiar
understandings of the ways inferences about intention govern our responses to
works of art.
Therefore, far from encouraging us to leave behind what might sometimes
seem old-fashioned critical concepts, one of the benefits of examining badfilm
is that it forces us to return with renewed vigor and evidence to still-vital
issues for aesthetics – intention, evaluation, and indeed, as I’ve suggested
towards the end, authorship – which we can sometimes be too quick to presume we
have moved beyond. Furthermore, if we can agree that we can indeed reasonably infer intention and make value judgments without quotation marks here, then perhaps these films have something to teach us about the place of intention and value in the interpretation of film, and art, more broadly.
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