Dumb movies (19 June 2009)

I don't know if it takes any special kind of refined irony to appreciate dumb movies, like the ones compiled on this "50 Films You Can Wait to See After You're Dead" list from Kottke. I've seen many on the list with relish -- Basic Instinct 2, From Justin to Kelly, Glitter, Catwoman to name a few -- and Freddy Got Fingered is one of my favorite films ever, if only for the disturbing dinner-date sequence, which seems as though it was shot while the director was on PCP. In fact, I think this kind of film is far more dependably entertaining than middlebrow "quality" films along the lines of The Reader or biopic tripe like A Beautiful Mind or Ray. That could just be because I like "campy" movies -- but it seems insufficient and maybe inaccurate to dismiss these as mere camp. The standard definition of camp is an earnestly made work that's terrible; in laughing at such a work we are showing our appreciation for that quintessentially human ability to persevere without talent. Camp, theoretically, is for those who especially relish the frisson of being in that no man's land between laughing at and laughing with someone. The Room fits that bill -- director Tommy Wiseau is ambitious and incompetent in equal measures, and his film leaves you with a weird respect for his stubbornness, for his evident refusal to listen to anyone who knows better. Few of us have that strength of character.

But the films on Kottke's list are different. These are not films made by incompetents, but schlock made with a measure of cynicism at least at some level -- whether the producers, the director, the studios, or the cast (if not all of the above). There, the overt and inevitable failure tends to be humanizing for all parties involved, reminding us that the hegemony of the culture industry is not quite complete and that its ability to manipulate us in the ways it seeks to is not infallible, not even close. The workaday actors in such films secure our sympathy, palpably muddling through, working on something they must know is garbage but doing what they can to remain professional. And in the best of these dumb movies, the stars themselves are the only people who are entirely clueless, lost in a hubristic haze that makes them think the project is dignified and destined for greatness merely through their sheer presence. And despite everything, the delusion of these stars seems to remain undimmed throughout the otherwise incoherent finished product. All that holds such films together in the end is the stars' unearned self-confidence -- probably we get that quality in a much more concentrated form in dumb movies than in good ones. The earnestness of the marquee names in dumb movies, however, brings them down to our level; the audience can revel in their superiority, fully aware, for once, how dependent the stars are on them, how the fans' indulgence in fact constitutes the stars' talent. So in a sense, we celebrate and appreciate ourselves when we sit through an ego-fest movie like Striptease or Blade 2.

The use of anti-irony (28 August 2006)

I always thought the anti-irony backlash was a matter of fashion cycles on the one hand and commonplace American anti-intellectualism on the other, but maybe it is just another expression of good-old fashioned sexism and bigotry. At Pandagon.net, Amanda Marcotte makes an interesting point about the anti-irony backlash that has been building since the Bush presidency began: "I would also say the rise in irony has a lot to do with the growing mainstream acceptance of diversity and feminism—now methods of humor that were the province of 'losers', aka women, queers, the poor, and people of color—have room to be expressed in the mainstream and that growing power of the disempowered is causing this anti-irony, anti-sarcasm backlash."

This argument is predicated on the idea that irony is disguised rebellion, a way the "disempowered and marginalized" can speak truth to power without being imprisoned. (The nature of Soviet humor bears this out.) This all flies in the face of the assumption typically pedaled by cultural commentators of the David Brooks/Chuck Klosterman ilk, that irony is an expression of smug superiority, not of exclusion. They posit the ironist as an overeducated liberal type who needs to reject what other people do and disdain anything that becomes popular with their snide remarks. Unlike the earnest (the phony opposite of irony), the argument goes that ironic people express nothing "positive" and are too afraid to show any "sincere" interest in anything. Ironists are often depicted as elitist hipsters who think they are better than everyone, better than the rules of mainstream society itself, down to its very syntax and semantics. But this could simply be another instance of the persecution mania cultural conservatives seem to suffer from, in which the behavior of others threatens the putative normality of their own. They long so to be normal, yet the concept of normality is maddeningly in the hands of others, and the median and mean they generate. They sense emerging acceptance for something they find alien, so they ascribe a disproportionate amount of power to its purveyors, imply they are dictatorially imposing these alien ideas (be it irony, or marriage rights, or whatever) on a populace that can't relate to them. So the free expression of non-mainstream ideas is squelched, producing ironic discourse, which is then taken as further proof of the twisted and abnormal and inauthentic (because not "earnest") aims such groups who employ irony are harboring.

The irony Marcotte suggests is on the rise, creating diversity and threatening that vicious cycle, may in fact be the necessary portion required to keep that cycle going. We need token funny minority characters (be they gay, female, or intellectual) to ensure that such groups remain on the margin. Being funny, then, may be a cultural stigma, and when you're making people laugh, they are perhaps laughing at you, to keep you down.