Movies so bad, they're good

I’m something of a bad-movie connoisseur. In the past few months, a friend and I have laughed our way through “The Wicker Man,” featuring Nicolas Cage as a cop who hates women almost as much as he hates wearing helmets filled with bees; “Gigli,” which was so awful that even I found it difficult to sit through; and my personal favorite, “The Number 23,” in which Jim Carrey gradually learns to fear the titular digits. “Showgirls” might have been next on our list, but I’ve already seen it so many times that I can quote nearly the entire thing from memory. (The movie’s best lines probably can’t be printed in a family newspaper like Spec, but here’s one of my favorite semiclean quotes: “What is he? A pimp? Only people I know got pimp cars are pimps.”)

There are some people who might wonder why I bother wasting my time watching shitty movies. What I don’t understand, though, is their puzzlement itself.

Every so often, a newspaper, magazine, or website will publish an article that first marvels at the fact that people enjoy watching bad movies, then takes a stab at explaining this apparently mysterious phenomenon. Take “The Worst Movies Ever Made,” for example, which ran in Slate last Tuesday. (Full disclosure: I’m interning at Slate this semester.)

The article is mostly about a stinker called “Birdemic: Shock and Terror,” which dramatizes what happens when killer hawks stop being polite and start terrorizing a once peaceful little town in Northern California. The film—which I obviously must see for myself as soon as possible—has been making waves since it premiered in Los Angeles in February, becoming a cult hit almost overnight. Jonah Weiner, the author of the Slate article, notes that the New York Times has also ran an article focusing on the swift rise of “Birdemic.”

But Weiner does more than just describe the latest late-night movie craze. He uses “Birdemic” as a lens to examine why awful cinema is so attractive to people like me. His take? The best bad movies “drop us into a murky vortex of authorial intent, sabotage some of our most basic notions about character and narrative, and remind us of film’s power to disturb, disorient, and discombobulate us.”

I mean, yeah, okay. Or, how about this: Bad movies are funny. It’s as simple and obvious as that.

Weiner and his ilk love to overanalyze cultural garbage and project an inflated significance onto it. His article reminds me of the rash of tone-deaf pieces that were published in highbrow media outlets like the Times when “Jersey Shore” blew up last winter.

Most of these articles were written by out-of-touch critics who were somehow totally dumbfounded by the way that a low-budget reality show about a bunch of horrible stereotypes had utterly captivated American society. “Why,” they asked, clutching their pearls and softly clucking in astonishment, “do people love this crap so much?”

Well, guys, I have an easy, belated answer for you: “Jersey Shore” was hilarious, at least in its first few episodes. That is the only reason anybody cared about it.

It’s no secret that those forms of culture which fall under the general umbrella of “trash”—bad movies like “The Butterfly Effect,” terrible reality shows like “Flavor of Love,” romance novels published by Harlequin, and so on—have a shameful stigma attached to them. Admitting that one actually enjoys consuming culture like this is intellectual suicide. That’s why it seems necessary to these writers to explain why some might find such media enjoyable.

In reality, though, those explanations aren’t necessary. Show me a person who can sit through the first 10 minutes of “Battlefield Earth” without cracking a smile and I will be amazed, because you’ve just shown me a person that does not exist. Anyone who is flabbergasted by those who revel in unintentional hilarity just doesn’t understand very much about how most people work.

Yes, I know that instead of laughing at YouTube clips of Mark Wahlberg mangling his lines in “The Happening,” I could be getting familiar with the works of Ingmar Bergman, or reading “Our Mutual Friend” for my Dickens seminar, or taking in a lovely violin concerto at Miller Theater. Obviously, doing any of those things would be intellectually stimulating and personally fulfilling or whatever.

But doing any of those things would also be boring. And while a score of adjectives could accurately describe “The Happening”—overwrought, ludicrous, inept—“boring” is not one of them. I know this. You probably know this. Deep down, the writers who pen pieces like Weiner’s must also know this. So please, media types, for everyone’s sake, stop writing these silly articles. Bad movies are much better if you just sit back and enjoy them without wondering why.

Hillary Busis is a Columbia College senior majoring in English and history. She is the former managing arts editor of the Eye. And Another Thing runs alternate Thursdays.