Why It's OK to Love Bad Movies
by Matt Strohl
(Routledge, 2021, 218 pages)

One of the many terrific passages in this book involves a denunciation of Rotten Tomatoes – the online review aggregator – and its baleful effects on global film culture. What’s wrong with that supposedly democratic forum in which anyone accepted into its data-fold (the acceptance process is quite an ordeal, I assure you) can give a score and link to their review of a movie?

For Matt Strohl, the problem, in a nutshell, is that it establishes a consensus, and hence an “official opinion” on any given film. And this consensus runs on the “received norms” of a “mainstream critical discourse”.

In practice, we all know what this means. Films are deemed good if they meet specific, and ultimately quite rigid, criteria: if they have believable plots, three-dimensional characters, and coherent fictional worlds; if they are well written, well-acted and well made; if they are uplifting, affirmative and socially progressive (without, of course, becoming too extremist).

Most of the time, these norms – changing from country to country, and era to era – are not acknowledged or recognised as such; they are assumed as a universal common sense, and thus rarely opened to question. And, as Strohl shows, these assumptions can creep in anywhere and everywhere – from the tweets of rabid movie fans to the aesthetic theories of a highbrow philosopher such as Noël Carroll.

Strohl concurs that “conventional standards have a positive role to play in our aesthetic lives”, but “narrow adherence to them is a quick route to a stagnant film culture”. What we need, he argues, “is a way of rebelling against aesthetic homogenization, and I submit that such rebellion is badly needed”.

The burning crucible of Strohl’s argument is the contested status of the great mass of stuff excluded from the canons of good taste: so-called bad movies. He disapprovingly cites Carroll’s throwaway judgments on Edward D. Wood Jr.’s classic Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957): a piece of incompetent schlock, “a botched and virtually incoherent atrocity”. Strohl counters with a more positive response: what if we took Plan 9 not just as a bit of camp fun, but also inventive, surreal, surprising, sincere and bewildering in the best way?

Strohl teaches Philosophy of Art at University of Montana. As a film critic, he may not yet be known to the majority of cinephiles, but he is, in his own way, prolific: he maintains a lively online presence with a webpage titled Strohltopia and a Letterboxd page filled with helpful recommendations and sharp capsule reviews.

This book (his first) is one in a series from Routledge, all the titles of which begin with Why It’s OK to … (other entries complete that, variously, with be rich, enjoy the work of immoral artists, eat meat, and be a slacker). The general editorial aim is to pay sympathetic attention to “normalcy”, and “offer compelling arguments for widespread and established human behavior”. This connects with the concerns of an intellectual community of which Strohl is a member, and that I only discovered through reading him: see the intriguing collective website Aesthetics for Birds, subtitled “aesthetics and philosophy of art for everyone”. For the most part, that’s a populist program I can get behind.

Are bad movies for everyone? Probably not, but Strohl aims, with informed fervour, to widen public appreciation of them. The scope of his definition of bad cinema is generous: from Plan 9 to direct-to-video (DTV) action movies, from the notorious The Room (Tommy Wiseau, 2003) to Batman & Robin (Joel Schumacher, 1997).

Strohl tackles the so-bad-it’s-good phenomenon of contemporary audience taste (slightly confusingly shortened to good-bad) in order to carefully distinguish two, opposed tendencies: Bad Movie Ridicule, where the imagined good value of a film lies in its perceived capacity to be “ripe for mockery”; and Bad Movie Love, where the eccentricity or strangeness of a somehow failed movie is approached with respect, tenderness and admiration.

Strohl is betting on the love. To do so he cherry-picks inspiration from Susan Sontag’s 1964 “Notes on ‘Camp’” – although I am not as convinced as he that camp taste, in its widespread social practice, successfully bypasses Bad Movie Ridicule.

When Strohl is really cooking, his prose and his thought-processes are infectious. He revitalises genre criticism when he explicates how we might “engage with the system” of, for instance, watching hundreds of movies that are all variations on the “Die Hard scenario”. He responds well to actors like Dolph Lundgren who “lean in” to their roles (no matter how dodgy the vehicle surrounding them may be), or “give their all”. He defends Plan 9 like a true philosopher by hailing its “absurd point of view”.

He compares the experience of “giving oneself over” to a bad movie with an imaginary encounter: bumping into a “purple dude” who spontaneously offers, to any passing stranger, “his theory that a spaceship shaped like a duck would be far more effective than traditional rocket designs”. Should this character be avoided, or – far worse – openly mocked? Strohl suggests we would do better to uphold “the dignity of our tuxedoed companion” by congratulating his “imagination and creativity”. Amen to that!

While being essentially in sympathy with Strohl’s polemic and the range of films that he champions, I have some fairly fundamental disagreements with his chosen line of philosophical argumentation and justification. (I set aside the aspect of his book devoted to the philosophy of what might constitute a good and useful life, as well as decent community-group relations – intriguing themes, but not my bag.)

Before I get to that, let me make one thing perfectly clear: this is a wonderful book, and it should take pride of place in the libraries (real or virtual, take your pick) of many cinephiles. It’s beautifully written, always clear, lucidly ordered and – something rare in books of film theory, let alone of philosophy – extremely funny.

Strohl has mastered a difficult literary trick: dropping brusque, idiomatic phrases right into the middle of his serious discourse. Among my favourites in this regard is the explanation of Elizabeth Cantalamessa’s notion of “conceptual negotiation”, which is the type of implicit or explicit back-and-forth that takes place when we try, in an exchange, to define our respective standards and criteria. Strohl caps off this passage with: “There’s no way that anyone is defending Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla without engaging in a bit of the ‘ol conceptual negotiation”.

I wish that Strohl had begun his book at the pointy end of his polemic against mainstream taste and judgment, rather than where he does start – at The Core (2003). What does he find to praise in this expensive sci-fi disaster flick directed by Jon Amiel? He enjoys watching it because it’s “silly”, because Aaron Eckhart looks like he’s acting (very intensely) in an entirely different movie, and because “the straight-faced fake science cracks me up”. To me, this is a long way from his stated ideal of Bad Movie Love.

Words like silly, campy, risible, over-the-top, strange, crazy, absurd, eccentric and excessive still concede too much ground to a supposedly reasonable, level-headed aesthetic norm. It’s hard, as a workaday critic, not to casually use such words – even to signal our admiration of an unusual film (I’ve sure done it in the past) – but it’s a prison-house of language (and value) from which we still need to break.

I’ll go further: I strongly doubt that the very premise of a bad movie is the best place to start any spirited, open-minded appreciation of the wide riches of cinema.

As I see it, over the past 50 or so years, there has been a curious shift from vanguard discussions of B cinema, or even just popular cinema, to a more academic discourse on bad cinema (sometimes under the hip contraction of badfilm). Something has been lost in this somewhat odd and irrational move, and it is precisely the attempt to pinpoint a certain kind of cinema – or maybe even an essence of the cinematic medium itself – that is not just a challenge to the aesthetic norm but effectively already beyond it … beyond good and evil, in those immortal words of Nietzsche. And that’s the place to which viewers and critics need to get, as well.

In truth, all these terms I have just listed are misnomers, and none of them will effectively do the trick for Strohl or anyone else: The Core is hardly a B film, and popular cinema, as a concept, is more likely these days to be yoked to Marvel blockbusters than to the films of Blake Edwards or John Ford. But why do we need the word bad at all to help us excavate, define and value a certain strain of cinema? Strohl seems on the point of giving up this designation when he extols the Cannon productions of Sam Firstenberg (Avenging Force, 1986), or the œuvre of Nicolas Cage (which constitutes the book’s finest chapter): these films he finds value in are, surely, quite simply good, even (at times) great!

And that is precisely what, once upon a time in the anthology Kings of the Bs (1975), the canniest authors were reaching for in their exploratory discussions of Thunder Road (1958) or the films of Edgar Ulmer: a way of valuing what is new, intense, unforeseen and surprising in cinema, without falling back into defensive parrying with any assumed, forbidding, middlebrow authority in matters of art and culture. (Jean-François Lyotard made a wonderful reflection, useful for this polemic, on matters of judgement and our relation to assumed authority in his 1978 media-address, “A Podium Without a Podium: Television According to J.-F. Lyotard”, in Political Writings [London: UCL Press, 1993].)

This is why I disagree with Strohl’s methodological principle that he erects into a working definition: “Bad movies have the potential to be good-bad when they violate norms in an exciting, interesting, and/or amusing way”. Such rule-breaking is what, for Strohl, links bad movies with avant-garde cinema (an entirely valid move, although I find his understanding of experimental/avant-garde fairly hazy).

However, this emphasis on rule-breaking still concedes too much ground to the rules, just as Bad Movie Love still acquiesces too much to lousy definitions of good and bad cinema. Sure, Jean-Luc Godard or Gregg Araki have a grand time flagrantly flouting conventions, and want us to notice and applaud that. But such vaunted transgression is not the ground floor of all enlightened pleasure in cinema.

Strohl notes in passing that Wiseau “didn’t need to intend to transgress received norms; he wasn’t acquainted with these norms in the first place”. But that would be just as true, in other ways, of many notable filmmakers who either proceed in a wilfully naïve, untutored manner (such as Werner Herzog), or simply go ahead and create their own game-plan in order to express hitherto unexpressed situations and emotions (John Cassavetes, Elaine May).

When I watch Maurice Pialat’s L’Enfance-nue (1969), for example, am I marvelling at how he rarely matches eyelines, truncates bodies from heads, and refuses to establish the physical dimensions of a room? Yes, but only as the springboard to a more complex goal of understanding and perception. Strohl should be more on the track of what is being built by bad movies, rather than solely what is being broken by them.

A personal note: I have spent most of my adult life (45 years so far) writing about the issues raised in this book. So have many of the critics I most admire: Parker Tyler, Raymond Durgnat, Ronnie Scheib, Manny Farber, Elena Gorfinkel, Bill Krohn. Australia, where I originally hail from, has an especially proud tradition of criticism in this vein, including the collected works of Meaghan Morris, William Routt, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Philip Brophy. In his relatively short, compact book, Strohl gets around to citing none of these names. His bibliographic pickings from film criticism seem, to me, rather slim (not to mention all-American): J. Hoberman, the overrated Pauline Kael, the young-ish Ignatiy Vishnevetsky … among not very many others.

But it was almost 70 years ago that the Greek Resistance fighter and militant surrealist Ado Kyrou exhorted us: “I urge you: Learn to see the ‘worst’ films – they are sometimes sublime”. And it’s been 35 years since Brophy ended an essay on horror films with the splendid flourish: “My writing is impelled by the belief that some of the films mentioned here – for good or for bad – will in the hopeful future be more widely recognised as illustrative of a sublime cinematic invention”.

Both these sublime positions, I believe, are a touch bolder, more advanced and radical than what Matt Strohl dares to declare and explore in Why It’s OK to Love Bad Movies. But I am fully optimistic that, by his next book, Hard to Watch (2024), he’ll get there.

© Adrian Martin October 2022