If you’re constantly getting abuse from your friends about your taste in films, Neil Calloway says help may be at hand from a recent study…
In what appears to be the cinematic equivalent of those studies that receive an inordinate amount of publicity when they trumpet the fact that gorging yourself on chocolate and red wine makes your healthier,“Enjoying trash films: Underlying features, viewing stances, and experiential response dimensions” from the Max Planck Society argues that more intelligent people enjoy bad films. Now you have an excuse for your collection of Uwe Boll and WWE movies; you watch them because you’re intelligent.
Of course, correlation does not mean causation (the more films Nicolas Cage appears in in a given year, the more people drown in swimming pools); watching Roger Corman and Troma Movies doesn’t make you smarter, it’s just more intelligent people are more like to enjoy trashier films. However, I do imagine some Scientologists believe repeated viewings of Battlefield Earth are beneficial. The study states that the sort of people who watch trashy films are the sort of people who watch lots of films; good and bad, and ironically enjoy the bad while appreciating the good.7
There is some anecdotal evidence from Hollywood that directors who make upmarket films enjoy trashier fare during their downtime. Terrence Malick, director of increasingly impenetrable filmic tone poems, is a huge fan of Zoolander, with Ben Stiller making a video in character for his birthday one year. Zoolander isn’t exactly trashy, but it’s not exactly high art either, it didn’t win awards at Venice, Berlin or Cannes. No film studies books have been written about it.
Oliver Stone apparently loved the Razzie Award winning, Madonna starring Basic Instinct knock off Body of Evidence, Quentin Tarantino has made a career stealing bits from the exploitation movies he watched during the seventies, none of which were showered with awards or exactly set the box office alight. Liking trashy films still means you can have a successful career as a director.
The truth is that after a hard searching for the Higgs-Boson at CERN or looking for a cure for heart disease at the Mayo Clinic, you probably don’t want to get into some Tarkovsky or Chris Marker; you want to relax and be entertained.
Robert Pattinson – a man who knows a thing or two about trashy movies, but who has also worked with David Cronenberg (twice), Werner Herzog and Anton Corbijn, recently decried “guilty pleasures”, stating in an interview “they’re just your pleasures”. He’s right, of course, and you shouldn’t be ashamed of watching trashy films; it just means you’re smarter than everyone else because you know they’re trashy. Now, who fancies a double bill of The Room and Showgirls?
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future instalments.
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