Cinema Lessons from a Trash-Movie Auteur

Why do we love trash and hate slop? I worship at the altar of trash, by which I mean that I am one of those cinephiles with a fondness for bad movies. Perhaps I am underselling the corpus I have in mind by calling it merely "bad," and understating my sect's feeling by calling it merely "fondness." The movies my fellow-cultists and I most esteem are not just bad but incredibly, impressively terrible--scrambled, technically maladroit, incomprehensible at the level of basic plotting--and we are not just fond but obsessed, digging through piles of bric-a-brac at thrift stores in hope of uncovering forgotten VHS tapes from the eighties, scrolling to neglected corners of YouTube with the goal of alighting on some near-unwatchable monstrosity with thirty-two views and a handful of affronted comments. But we, too, are discerning; we do not approve of just any bad movie. The train wrecks we love feature amateur actors and dialogue so garbled that it may well have been translated from a foreign language by a non-native speaker (as it probably was in the case of "Troll 2," about which more later). The sound quality is scratchy; the camerawork is nauseating, and not in a chicly experimental way. The movies in the good-because-bad canon are not forgettably bad, like cheesy Hallmark fare or the thousandth predictable sequel in a superhero franchise; they are not skillfully and expensively bad, like botched Oscar bait. Nor are they quite like the gripping yet ultimately shallow entertainments that Pauline Kael defended in her classic 1969 essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies," published in . No, our bad movies are monumental feats of incompetence, inspired in their badness, bad in ways I could never have dreamed a film could be bad, so feverishly and outlandishly bad that they have bodied forth a new aesthetic category. These trash movies, as I have taken to calling them, to distinguish them from prestige failures, do not quite constitute a genre, the way the thriller or the rom-com does. They do not treat any subjects in particular, or hew to any specific conventions, or share any consistent visual signature.