Screen Machine

Feature: In defence of bad films

If the Sex and the City TV series represented an interesting (though limited) liberation of feminine desire in the pop-cultural landscape, then Sex and the City 2 – the second movie adaptation of the HBO series – represents the very ease with which capitalism manoeuvres to suppress and circumscribe that desire. The women we were introduced to in the television series in the lates nineties once seemed radical in their pursuit of pleasure in the face of society’s expectations. Now, the gals of Sex and the City 2 represent the oppressive yardstick by which all other femininities are measured and judged. Hence we are meant to cheer when the four gal pals stumble across a group of Oppressed Muslim Women who shed their burqas to reveal underneath gaudy haute couture and we are meant to accept the absurdly ironic happy ending in which Big forces Carrie to wear a huge diamond ring (Haneke’s White Ribbon comes to mind) to constantly remind her that her desires must be subjugated to the authority of the marriage contract binding her to him. (“How’s that for a little sparkle?”)

So Sex and the City 2 is a “bad” film, sure. Yet there was something disturbing about the excessive vitriol aimed at the film by reviewers, bloggers, Twitter users, Facebook group administrators and whatnot. What disturbed me was not its connection to an old familiar phenomenon, latent misogyny (though that was undoubtedly one element of the vitriol), but its connection to a newer phenomenon: meme addiction. The Internet may have brought us a proliferation of independent voices offering their individual points of view, but it has also brought a certain homogenisation of discourse. There is less energy exerted in pursuing individual interests and more energy exerted in pulling out tired ironic witticisms on the lolcat du jour, the most happening video of Mr. T, the latest hilarious right-wing pundit on Q and A. The Internet pulled out all the stops to condemn Sex and the City 2 but much of this energy was not so much a case of genuinely wanting to critique culture in any serious kind of way, as it was a case of people wanting to be seen to be hating the right thing at the right time, to get that much lusted-after object of desire – the @reply – and, in doing so, to feel alive.

But after all the performative outrage, (“If this is what modern womanhood means, then just fucking veil me and sew up all my holes,’ wrote Lindy West for The Stranger), when you finally watch Sex and the City 2, it seems clear to me that there’s not that much to get worked up over. This is because Sex and the City 2 is not just a bad film: it’s a very clearly bad film. I’ve titled this post “In defence of bad films” but I’m really talking about a certain category of bad film that Sex and the City falls into. This is a category that includes Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen and Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End. These are films I am lumping together not because they are franchises but because they are all gaudy, excessive, bloated events assembled by a schizophrenic capitalist desire. Each scene of these films strives to top the spectacle of the last, each affect tweaked to eleven, each moment primed for the Big Sell, coherence be damned. There is usually some kind of conventional narrative device (most reliably a sexual coupling) but from moment to moment the narrative is commonly exploding in frighteningly random directions. Without warning, the spectator will suddenly fall into a black hole and find themselves with a pantsless Liza Minnelli singing Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” or with Megan Fox being leg-humped by a demonic canine robot. French film critic Serge Daney described the critic’s job as an intervention, to uncover how ideology is working in all films, but the schizophrenic blockbuster I am describing is a kind of self-intervening beast. Its excesses cause its skin to burst at the seams, revealing the artifice of its construction, a blessing of sorts as ideology is always more insidious when we are convinced there is no ideology. What I’m saying is, when Carrie and her gal pals are saved by a group of liberated Muslim women whose enlightenment is illustrated by the fact that their book club is reading Suzanne Somers’ “Breakthrough”, a self help guide to staving off death with expensive drugs, can this be read other than as a nightmarish joke? This is why bad films need defending: on their face they reveal capitalism as the chaos it truly is.

It is the film whose reality is not so easily questioned, whose construction is more seamlessly designed to trigger conventional pleasures, that deserve more critical energy. An example of this is An Education, easily as abominable as Sex and the City 2: a film that presented us with a charming, intelligent and independent girl whose hard-earned life lessons were that your parents are right to force you into university (tertiary education is the only path to becoming a normally socialised adult) and people’s prejudices about Jews are always completely founded (Jewish men will try to penetrate you with a banana and then lie to you about not being married). But An Education received almost unanimous praise from reviewers, its revolting ideology mystified by the Charming Performance of Carey Mulligan, the Wonderful Screenplay by Acclaimed Novelist Nick Hornby, the all-round generally tasteful construction of the whole number. Writers don’t need to be mock-infuriated at obviously bad films. They need to be more alert to the oppressive signifying regimes of the art-house-movies, the kids-movies-that-can-even-be-enjoyed-by-adults, the movies-from-the-imaginative-mind-of _____, the movies-that-are-subtlely-effective. In general, movies that the collective have decided are in good taste.

Doing so, however, might be fraught with danger. Just as the collective neurosis powered by the Internet has driven the masses into ritualistic slaughter of bad movies, a regime of consensus has developed in the culture around movies deemed in good taste so that one can’t even criticise certain movies without being branded a lunatic. When Armond White recently had the audacity to write a negative review of a children’s cartoon, major film pundits quickly branded White a troll.

From Slash Film:

With 147 100% positive reviews, Toy Story 2 has held the coveted top slot for eleven years and counting. The film to come closest was the 2008 documentary Man On Wire — 100% fresh with 142 reviews, six short of the #1 slot. And how fitting would it have been to have the Pixar’s latest film, the third film in the trilogy, knock Toy Story 2 from the top of the mountain.

What happened? You guessed it. Armond White — the notorious contrarian movie reviewer for the alt-weekly New York Press. You might recall that White was the first critic to give Pixar’s last film Up a negative review. Whats worse, he gave Jonah Hex a positive review, a film which has been panned by critics and moviegoers (12% on Rotten Tomatoes with almost 90 reviews).

From CHUD:

White is a critic at The New York Press, an alt-weekly that a few years ago I thought was going to become the new Village Voice. It never quite happened, and White, who was always a little… off, seems to have slowly drifted into sheer insanity. According to Rotten Tomatoes he agrees with the Tomatometer 52% of the time, which is I’m sure meaningful to someone who thinks statistics has a place in the discussion of art. The fact of the matter is that White seems to embrace movies that most folks hate while shitting on movies most folks love; this week he trashed Toy Story 3, as mentioned, and gave the awful Jonah Hex a glowing review.

So here’s the thing about White: either he has awful, crazy taste or he’s just fucking with you. Either way, there’s a question that must be answered:

Who gives a shit about Armond White?

And finally our favourite #twitterclown (after Lynden Barber):

The idea behind all this is that disliking Toy Story 3 is not a position that a reasonable person could possibly entertain and that, as such, Armond White must be an insane person.

So in our culture of consensus, we have become critically blind to certain protected films and then descend like zombies upon movies that the “cultural commentators” can easily identify as terrible movies. But the real tragedy of all this is that the zombies (whose actions are rooted in the pleasure of positioning one’s self as culturally superior) are letting Sex and the City 2 dominate filmic discourse (you are either for us or against us) at the expense of more interesting films that really do challenge the status quo, that really do innovate aesthetically. There’s something to be said for taking the time to absorb a difficult film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul or to tease out the thematic threads of a Terrence Malick film. But most cultural commentators would rather find the next freak of popular culture to poke a stick at, and as a result, really interesting filmmaker’s voices are being drowned out. To participate in filmic culture (or at least the popular blogosphere version of it) seems to require taking one of a limited number of uninspired positions on an inane corporate product. The question to be asked is: What is the real value of taking an easy position against a dumb film?

Brad Nguyen is a co-editor of Screen Machine. He studied Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, was the film reviewer for Triple R Breakfasters and has written for Senses of Cinema.

→ more articles by Brad Nguyen