Yes, Virginia, there are bad movies.
(September 21, 2024)
Yes, Virginia, there are bad movies. (September 21, 2024)
Years ago, near the college campus, there was a small movie theatre which played reruns, and the admissions were affordable for students. Oneday, I asked my friends if they wanted to go to the theatre with me. They asked me what was on, and I said “RoboCop 2”. I still remember their reaction. Although they didn’t issue a word, their faces expressed answers clear enough; “Are you serious ?” Maybe, it was a display of sophomoric mentality. You know how some college students are. (Here, I don’t mean to say RoboCop 2 is a bad movie. In fact, it is entertaining and rewards fans with money’s value.)
For many movie fans in prehistoric age, years before multiplexes and Blockbuster Videos, TV was the main source of movies. I took any movies given there. I couldn’t be choosey. (There were no cable-TV channels either.) After watching movies on TV, I never felt I wasted time. For me at that time, there were no bad movies. The experience taught me that there are at least one or two moments of truth in any movie.
Now I am a grown-up, and admit that there are bad movies. There are bad movies because there are good movies, like shadow inevitably means light. Yet, I don’t know any metric system to evaluate movies if they are good or bad. (You may remember John Keating (Robin Williams) explains a metric system for scientific evaluation of poems to his students, then trashes the system in Dead Poets Society (1989).) Even if a movie is destined to be bad by any metric system, I still believe there are at least one or two moments of truth in it. Movies exist because creators want to create. Maybe, bad movies are the ones that fail to establish communications between creators and viewers. In other words, movies fail when the creators fail to send their message to viewers.
In The Producers (1967), why did Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) and Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) fail to create the worst stage ever ?
Hypothesis 1; The stage “Springtime for Hitler” is a story in a story. In the meta-story, Max and Leo are destined to fail despite their hardest effort. So, the stage whatsoever does not matter.
Hypothesis 2; The script of “Springtime for Hitler” is written by a crazed fanatic Franz Liebkind (Kenneth Mars). In Liebkind’s delusion, the Third Reich is still alive and glorious. But to the sober souls in the theatre, the play appears as a comedic and grotesque twist of the events that took over the world in the 1930s and 1940s. The memory of the events must be still fresh to the theatre attendants in 1960s. (The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad was published in 1972. Maybe, Spinrad got the idea from The Producers (1967).)
When reality becomes too grotesque to comprehend, it starts to lose sense to observers and turns into a comedic farce. SNL comedians sometimes mock grave events in real world into sketches. But sometimes, I felt some sketches are not funny because the realities are already funny enough and can’t be made any funnier.
Maybe, the reaction to “Springtime for Hitler” of theatre attendants manifests that laughter is a psychological mechanism which protects us from breakdowns caused by facing atrocities of real world.
Hypothesis 3; Although embezzlement was their primary goal, Max and Leo, in their sub-conscious minds, wanted to create something artistic as stage professionals. Below their tired and frayed appearances lie young Max and Leo, ambitious and full of spirits, want to be great stage artists. Their desires are still afire deep in their hearts.
Since dawn of human civilization, men have been creating arts in many forms and methods to recreate objects, concrete and abstract, which caused emotional reactions in human minds so as to replay and/or to share the emotional experiences with others. We don’t know the creators of the paintings in Lascaux Cave in France and Cueva de Altamira in Spain. Yet, we share the emotions and passions of the creators and the people at the time who admired the paintings thousands of years ago. (Perhaps, the creators of the paintings also created inevitable by-products; the critics. See History of the World: Part I (1981).)
*In RoboCop (1987), the director Paul Verhoeven increased the level of violence to the degree marginally acceptable to MPAA. RoboCop 2 (1990) inherited the trend. Since then, I think the depiction of movie violence changed forever. In this sense, RoboCop (1987) was an epoch- making movie.
References:
Dead Poets Society (1989), directed by Peter Weir, written by Tom Schulmar, distributed by Buena Vista Pictures.
History of the World: Part I (1981), written and directed by Mel Brooks, distributed by 20th Century fox.
The Producers (1967), written and directed by Mel Brooks, distributed by Embassy Pictures.
RoboCop (1987), directed by Paul Verhoeven, written by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner, distributed by Orion Pictures.
Robocop 2 (1990), directed by Irvin Kershner, written by Edward Neumeier, Michael Miner, and Frank Miller, distributed by Orion Pictures.
Spinrad, Norman, The Iron Dream (1972).
