Before
class let out last Tuesday, I ended my class discussion with a question about
the (dubious) art of watching bad movies for enjoyment, and how it fit in to
the different humor theories we’re beginning to discuss. Sometimes I think I
enjoy watching quote-unquote bad movies more than I do good ones. I’ve been to my fair share of midnight Rocky Horror screenings, watch Tommy
Wiseau’s infamous The Room (also
brought up in class) on a monthly basis with my roommates, and spend every
holiday season laughing at the incomparably cliché and saccharine Hallmark
original Christmas movies. (It’s truly astounding just how many ways they can
rework the same plot—not to mention the channel’s bizarre grudge against real
estate developers.) Over this past summer, a girl I barely spoke to in high
school texted me for bad movie recommendations; I felt as though I had achieved
eternal peace.
My
favorite television channel is Comet, a relatively new one that plays mostly
reruns of The Outer Limits and Stargate Atlantis during the week, and all my favorite 1980's b-list
horror movies back-to-back on Saturday nights. But this past Sunday (in honor
of the Superbowl), they played a Mystery
Science Theater 3000 marathon—something extraordinarily timely, taking into
account last Tuesday’s class. For the unaware, the basic plot of Mystery Science Theater 3000 is (through
handwavey science) a handful of characters are held captive (in space) and forced
to watch terrible movies, but spend the time making snarky commentary, with
occasional interludes with the “plot” of the episode. I grew up watching Mystery Science Theater on movie nights
with my parents and uncles, so watching them now is equal part childhood nostalgia
and part enjoyment of the jokes.
There
was a particularly unbearable one on called Robot
Holocaust—imagine Star Wars, but
the characters are running around in underwear, have some serious 80's hair, and
all sound like they’re partially overdubbed. I never quite understood what the
plot was, but I gathered that the scrappy band of rebels and their high-voiced
robot sidekick had to break into a castle, where the villain (a vaguely
Russian-accented woman in robes, who was a worse actress than myself in my high
school production of Our Town) had
someone’s father captive. There were some bizarre male-dominating gender
dynamics thrown in as well. Halfway through the movie was when I started to
think about why I thought it was so
funny. I was watching the marathon alone, and I realized that if it wasn’t for
the running commentary the basic MST3K layout provided, Robot Holocaust would’ve been totally unwatchable; if had aired in
its original, non-MST3K form, I would’ve shut it off the second the rebels were
attacked by sock puppets masquerading as worms.
 |
| the screencap doesn't do their hair enough justice |
Consequently, I
realized that bad movies are pretty much only
fun when you’re watching then with other
people. People shout the dialogue along at midnight screenings of cult
classics; my friends and I make a night out of pointing out consistency errors
and bad special effects in Sci-Fy originals; the Hallmark channel has to be
watched with my mom. Part of the enjoyment, I feel, comes from having other people there. It could be a
certain aspect of we’re in this together,
or even personal validation when your own jokes are laughed at. I think there’s
also a sense of being amused at other
people’s reactions, however. I laugh at Mystery
Science Theater because the characters are making witty jokes about the
movie they’re watching (and I’m watching them watch), or at Hallmark movies
because my mom was able to predict an entire chunk of dialogue. I even listened
to a podcast with a similar idea; two friends watched Grown Ups 2 together once a week, every week, for an entire year,
and then reviewed it differently after each viewing (thus the podcast). I
wasn’t watching the movie with them, but gaining joy at their reactions to it.
(Plato and Hobbes may shine through in their superiority theory here—that movie
is truly awful, as I learned when a friend and I eventually watched it, and I
had a little comfort in that I didn’t have to watch it for an entire year, but
they did.)
We talked about humor in
regard to superiority and contradiction, but I think that Descartes and Freud have
the most relevance to my minute revelation. First, there is Descartes’s idea of
the relationship between humor and scorn. Descartes, similar to Hobbes,
primarily thought that humor (and laughter) was rooted in scorn. To Descartes,
scorn comes from seeing a fault in someone (or something) we think deserves it,
and thus, we “have hatred for this [fault], we have joy in seeing it in him who
is deserving of it; and when that comes upon us unexpectedly, the surprise of
wonder is the cause of our bursting into laughter” (24). This, essentially,
tackles the first part of what I called the
dubious art of bad movie watching. You are watching, primarily, not for the
plot, but for the things wrong with the plot. Bad movies typically have bad
plots, and we laugh when it becomes glaringly obvious just how bad it is; in
short, the fact that it’s bad makes us feel it deserves our ridicule.
Then, there is the
second aspect: laughing at the remarks of others. Descartes discusses this as
well, in relation to his concept of humor and scorn: “and it is not wrong to
laugh when we hear the jests of another; these jests may even be such that it
would be difficult not to laugh at them” (25). He then proceeds to basically
say don’t laugh at your own jokes. That
is to say—following Descartes’s line of thinking, other’s scornful remarks at
something’s expense are usually funny,
and it is better to laugh at then than at your own. (Or, watch a bad movie with
friends than alone in your living room.) Freud discusses the act of making
jokes as well, though in typical Freud fashion, his theory of humor is more
rooted in the repressed subconscious than in Descartes’s scorn. My
understanding of bad movies is indeed still applicable, though, in one of Freud’s
theories of the way the humor process works: “one person may himself adopt a
humorous attitude, while a second person acts a spectator, and derives
enjoyment from the attitude of the first” (112). To Freud, we find joy in and laugh
at the amusement of others. In the context of my idea, I find humor in laughing
at the reactions, scornful or otherwise, of others to bad movies, whether it’s
as small as a movie night with friends or TV show like Mystery Science Theater. I’m an amused “spectator” to these
reactions—and I think it’s a lot of fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment