There’s a reason why the box office has been struggling this summer, relying on yet more comic book cliche and Disney remakes to get people off the sofa and into those painfully uncomfortable seats, surrounded by people who can’t go without eating something for two hours (and therefore must eat nachos and hot dogs or, in the especially genteel picture houses, burgers and pizza in a darkened, sense-heightening room), or checking their phones for ten minutes. That these people and places exist suggests that those of us who just want to watch a film for its own sake are the minority. No, the issue, it would seem, is one of content.
George Orwell once wrote of “a type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days”, namely the “good bad book”, a term he attributes to G. K. Chesterton in his essay A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls. That is, a book “that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished.” This is not an attempt to continue or undermine this argument: Orwell acknowledges in his essay (1945) that those were “bookless days”, and if that was the case then what days are these now? Less than bookless. This is probably true to many of those ‘digital natives’, and the fact is that these days people who read don’t even read (ask anyone browsing in a bookstore about their favourite Dickens novel, for example). They buy books, and then listen to podcasts. At any rate, the argument still holds today, even if nobody reads them – good bad books are dead, good good books are moribund, leaving largely a glut of stuff so mediocre that nobody cares – but what needs updating is the medium. Anyone who has toyed with the nostalgic idea of going to the cinema recently has probably had the same thought: Where are all the good bad films?
Good bad films
To paraphrase the definition of Orwell: a film that has no artistic pretensions but which remains watchable when more serious productions have perished. The type of thing you go to the cinema to see when you don’t want to confront the reality of the world. This is not the same as ‘escapism’, which just means 120 minutes of CGI and ‘action’, equivalent to the ‘escapism’ of LSD or passing out drunk, or in a more suggestive analogy, to the soma of Huxley’s Brave New World. Much of modern cinema has slipped into this similar but unrelated junk-food category, and the confusion between the two is the fatal issue.
There is no specific genre linking the good bad films, nor any style, theme or actor; you just know them when you see them. And while there is no feeling that the universe looks any different once the credits roll, there is a sense that what you saw and felt will continue to influence you more in the long run than any Citizen Kane ever could. “Yo, Adrian, I did it!”, will forever mean more, and to many more people, than “Rosebud”, and especially more than anything you can pluck from a Marvel film. A brief list to emphasise the variety and lasting influence of the genre, and perhaps help explain what connects the members of this group, would include: Back to the Future, Tremors, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Twister, Volcano, Men In Black, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Beverly Hills Cop, Lethal Weapon, The Predator, Jaws, Notting Hill, E.T., Titanic, White Men Can’t Jump, Indiana Jones. You can think of your own examples.
So, what has changed? As with any scientific enterprise, case studies can be enlightening. Thankfully, history has thrown up a few for us. The modern fascination with reanimating the corpses of dead films (a result of the above issue, not a cause) means it is possible to compare once good bad films with their modern equivalent in something like a movie ‘twin study’. Compare, for example, the original Rocky movies with their 21st century Creed siblings. It’s the same thing: same story, same characters, same everything, just shifted slightly. And yet, where’s the charm? Where’s the warmth, the love, the “Hey fool” and the Italian-American man fighting the Cold War by himself? Or take the modern Terminator films. How many times now has it been attempted to resuscitate the cold dead corpse, even going so far as to bring back James Cameron and effectively remake the second film (lazily using the ‘time-travel timelines’ fudge and CGI to wedge an ageing, sagging Schwarzenegger into it, as if that was the reason)? And yet… same thing. Same Terminator, same story: same result. The list of defective clone films is only increasing (this was even unironically the plot of the very bad film Alien: Resurrection), and with startling speed – there’s a sequel to Gladiator for God’s sake (not a good film, certainly a good bad film at best).
Originality and emotion
A crucial factor, then, seems to be originality. In just about all examples, a good bad film is, in some sense, original. Almost all sequels of such films are failures precisely because they lose this quality. And within the boundaries of the original idea (or, better, the original expression of an idea), it is practically impossible to recreate the very same feelings and connections that were invoked in the first film. Where would the suspense come from in Jaws 2,3 or 4? Either they know they need a bigger boat or they are just stupid – and this makes it impossible to empathise with the characters in any meaningful way. And in cases where the sequel is successful, it is almost certainly just an inversion of the same idea: The Terminator becomes the protector; Rocky is the hero; there are lots of Aliens. When the capacity to do this is exhausted the sequels descend into mediocrity and parody. Or in modern parlance: it becomes a franchise, a ‘universe’.
But it is more than just originality. If it were not then Sharknado would be at least as successful as Jaws. Steven Spielberg is perhaps the most effective popular artist of all time, the Shakespeare of the good bad film. Martin Amis wrote way back in 1982 that “his films beam down on an emotion and then subject it to two hours of muscular titillation. In Jaws the emotion was terror; in Close Encounters it was wonder; in Raiders of the Lost Ark it was exhilaration; in Poltergeist it was anxiety; and now in ET – which looks set to outdo them all – it is love.” It certainly did outdo them all, because emotion is the heart of the good bad film, and love is the most universal of them all.
Therein lies the fundamental problem.
Crucial to these films is the universality of human emotion and the serious treatment of this fact. In the same article Amis wrote that, “towards the end of ET, barely able to support my own grief and bewilderment, I turned and looked down the aisle at my fellow sufferers: executive, black dude, Japanese businessman, punk, hippie, mother, teenager, child. Each face was a mask of tears.
Staggering out, through a tundra of sodden hankies, I felt drained, pooped, squeezed dry; I felt as though I had lived out a year-long love affair – complete with desire and despair, passion and prostration – in the space of 120 minutes.” It isn’t high art. It doesn’t require a companion guide to explain the cinematic techniques. There is no recommended reading. No analysis is needed. But this is what makes these films so good. And when they are done well, they can tell us something, however fleeting and superficial it may be, about what it is to be human.
Sequels, remakes and adaptations
The neoliberal market is one of extremes; and this is no less true in the world of film. Enormous conglomerates like Disney and Warner Bros control much of the mainstream movie-making industry, leaving almost no room for anything that couldn’t be outsourced and churned out on a conveyor belt for an eager army of semi-illiterate consumers whose attention span is measured in seconds. It is no surprise that the list of cinema releases in 2024 is a list of sequels, remakes and adaptations: Deadpool; Lord of the Rings; Mufasa; Wicked; Beetlejuice; Gladiator II; Alien: Romulus; The Joker sequel; Venom. It benefits everyone involved to simply remake a previous film or make a sequel: most of the work has already been done: the director knows how it must look; the writers know the cliche will write itself; the marketing team knows the lines (no one can hear you scream in space, you know?). Even the audience doesn’t have to pay attention or actually think about what’s happening because they’ve seen it before, and can readily tune back in if something explodes or when the main character does the thing they’re supposed to do. This is what fast-forward buttons and mobile phones were created for. Why go to the cinema?
Thus we are offered empty imitations of films created, essentially, by a highly efficient bureaucracy and an army of staff – the never-ending movie franchises and the theme park amusements of Marvel et al, that either make a billion dollars or lose a couple hundred million. But either way they keep on coming, using the Monte Carlo method to making a decent film rather than, to quote Martin Scorsese, simply “trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being” and seeing what happens.
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