Bad movies on my mind

Pauline Kael has been on my mind lately. She came up recently in a conversation with one of my former students. More than that, a trio of strangely related movies I watched last week reminded me that Kael used to write reviews exploring thematic connections between three or four pictures. So out of respect for her excellent work, here’s my poor attempt to follow in her footsteps.

Statistically speaking, the 1899 Cleveland Spiders were the worst team in Major League Baseball history. In the last season of the 19th century, they got off to an 8 - 30 start, lost 40 of their last 41 games and finished the season at 20 - 134. Thanks to changes in the rules, some of the Spiders’ records – such as their 101 road losses – can never be broken. Thus they will forever stand as a shadowy counter-argument against any fan who thinks her team is doing particularly poorly. No matter how bad the Kansas City Royals are, no matter how many times they finish in the cellar of the American League, they’ll never have the honor of being the worst ever.

The word “honor” in that last sentence is only partially ironic. There’s a certain distinction in being the worst ever, in setting the standard for terribleness against which all other awful efforts will be measured. Because if you can’t excel at excellence, at least maybe you can excel at sucking.

The creators of Best Worst Movie recognize the value of being awful; even the documentary’s title sets up the apparent contradiction. When he was 12, director Michael Stephenson appeared in Troll 2, one of those terrible little indie horror pictures that were somewhat common back in 1990 and now clog the “horror” catalogs of outlets from Netflix to whatever remains of local video rental stores. As noted in the review, this is a bad movie. However, its degree of badness isn’t distinct from the legion of other poorly acted, poorly scripted, poorly directed horror movies before or since.

But movies aren’t baseball teams. They don’t have offensive and defensive numbers that admit mathematical evidence into disputes. Even stats such as Rotten Tomatoes ratings quantify subjective opinion and thus don’t measure by objective standards. Enter the connoisseurs, the folks who always know where the best coffee beans come from, which trendy shops stock them for “special customers” and which baristas know just the right proportions for perfect lattés. In movie world, these cineastes know not only the best films by the greatest directors but also what dwells at the opposite end of the scale. They may have seen every movie Werner Herzog ever made. They may have walls bedecked with Jim Jarmusch posters. But they savor low budget horror junk food like Dublin Dr Pepper and Mexican Coke.

A cult of such people developed around Troll 2, clogging art house revival screenings and hosting Troll 2 parties. The documentary makes the whole phenomenon look like a response-line-free version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And at the center of this ersatz adulation is Stephenson’s former co-star, actor-slash-small-town-dentist George Hardy. This guy seems never to have developed beyond a credulous inability to tell when he’s the butt of a joke, a problem compounded by his fans’ inability to figure out whether they love something because it’s genuinely lovable or only because their hipster self-image depends on their ability to savor garbage.

This would seem like the same condescending bad taste that turns the kid with cerebral palsy into the high school football team’s “mascot” except for one part of the picture: Claudio Fragasso, Troll 2’s director. Despite all evidence to the contrary, this guy seems to genuinely believe that he made a good movie. He regards himself as an artist. He regards Troll 2 as a work of art, not in an ironic, poseur way but as something that’s genuinely worth watching.

This takes us to the heart of what we mean by “bad art.” It also takes us across the Atlantic and around 50 years backward in time. In 1940 German director Viet Harlan created one of the most notorious propaganda movies ever made: Jüd Süss. I’ve never seen this vicious piece of anti-Semitic filth, nor do I intend to. But I did recently watch Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss, a documentary about the director. Or to be more precise, it was a documentary about the director’s family (in much the same way that Best Worst Movie was about the cult response rather than the picture itself).

Harlan’s case raises serious questions about the responsibility artists bear for their art. It also forces us to think a little harder about what we mean by “bad movie.” Troll 2 and Jüd Süss are both bad movies. But while the Troll picture was a matter of simple incompetence, Nazi propaganda is infected with a moral rottenness that isn’t likely to amass a cult of ironic fans.

This says nothing good about us as connoisseurs of bad movies. In Fragasso’s case, it shows that we’re not too good to pick on someone for being weak, behavior we should probably have grown out of back in elementary school. Nazis are far more worthy of our scorn. Yet six decades later, we still find ourselves whistling past Harlan’s graveyard.