The irresistible appeal of bad movies is the joy of being in on the joke. It is what makes them relevant. It makes you part of a community of like-minded souls who understand that the bad movie is so bad you can have fun with it together.
This is the dynamic behind the current explosion of bad movie podcasts and websites — new media outlets devoted to helping people laugh at the ways filmmakers often trip over themselves in attempting to tell their stories.
Although not the first “bad movie” compiler, certainly granddaddy of them all was Mystery Science Theater 3000, still an amazingly funny show, which began in 1988 on local TV in Minneapolis/St. Paul before a decade on Comedy Central and the Sci Fi Channel.
Bad movies are as addictive in their own way as the Donald Trump show is in its way . . . and perhaps by way of many of the same mechanisms. A mediocre movie simply fails to connect at all. You get the feeling of a director or production company “phoning it in,” offering up something bland and ordinary simply to create a product. The vast majority of films (like political candidates) are not really “bad” enough to be “bad.”
But every once in a while, a film is so horrible in every way, that its horribleness becomes a kind of magnificence. It goes from being a bland waste of time to being an iconic (and deeply relevant) must-see that draws viewers with extraordinary power.
Such a film is the 2003 masterpiece, The Room by writer/actor/producer/director Tommy Wiseau. It is a film so bad in all its particulars, that it has become a beloved cultural emblem, showing to packed houses on college campuses and on the midnight movie circuit around the country.
The phenomenon of The Room is summarized brilliantly in the 2013 memoir The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero (a member of the film’s cast) and co-author Tom Bissell. At one point, Sestero discusses one of the movie’s more well-known takes and the reaction to it from future audiences:
One of The Room’s more amusing audience rituals concerns this scene. There’s a moment right before Johnny makes his announcement in which he seems to look down and to the right and wave at someone. Consequently, some audiences send a small gaggle of people to converge in the bottom right-hand corner of the movie screen, where they gleefully return Johnny’s wave. So what’s really going on here? Well, after so many blown takes, Tommy is signaling to the cameraman that he’s ready, he’s got it, let’s roll film, motherfuckers. And yes, a take in which Tommy annihilates the fourth wall by motioning to the cameraman was the best take they got.
In other words, watching The Room has become one of those movie watching experiences (like The Rocky Horror Picture Show before it), where people literally get out of their seats to interact with the film, throw things at the screen, cheer at and mimic iconic lines. Citizen Kane never did that.
Near the end of The Disaster Artist, Sestero recounts showing The Room to his family for the first time during a private viewing in their living room:
With popcorn popped, my family and I settled in to watch the film. Within the first few minutes, everyone was laughing so hard they could barely breathe. . . . . My father — a dear, restrained, altogether good-hearted man who enjoys the daily newspaper’s crossword puzzle, Seinfeld, and going to bed at 9:00 p.m. as laughing so hard he had to take off his glasses every few minutes to wipe the tears from his eyes. . . . It was striking to see my family loving this cinematic abomination as much as they were. The room was filled with laughter from beginning to end — huge, bright, joyful laughter. We finished watching it at 1:00 a.m. Our cheeks hurt, our stomachs ached, and we felt closer to one another than we had in a long time.
To some people, The Room is just a really bad movie. Why would you waste your time with it? How could you possibly have fun with it, engage with it, enjoy it? Are you stupid?
But to certain slices of our culture, it is intensely fun, relevant, interesting and engaging. This slice tends to be the group that enjoy the fun of seeing how cultural sausage is made and find it exciting when it’s made badly precisely because you can see the way the strings are being pulled (or, rather, how someone is attempting but failing to pull them) and the way the gears are turning (or, rather, how someone is attempting but failing to turn them). To some of us, this is really fun and relevant.
Maybe this is the Trump story. To some of us, you would have to be a complete idiot to find anything Trump says or does to connect properly to what a United States president is or does or should be. To this group, you would have to be a clueless fool to find Trump relevant to that narrative.
But to others, maybe, there is a kind of connection that creates pleasure and even passion in imagining Trump in that role — a completely disruptive and unorthodox force calling attention to the arbitrariness and artificiality of stings and gears while every candidate is somehow working to pretend they’re not there.
To some of us, given the choice between watching a mediocre movie and The Room, picking the mediocre film seems like the obvious, sensible lesser of two evils. But others of us will pick The Room every time. It makes us laugh. It brings us together. It connects us to a common point of view about movies. It's more relevant to us because it makes us feel a little smarter and a little less cheated than a mediocre movie would leave us feeling.