Episode 76 - Bad Movies with Matthew Strohl Transcript

Ellie: 0:12

Hello and welcome to Overthink.

David: 0:14

The podcast where we talk about all things that are good and bad in the world.

Ellie: 0:20

And sometimes in between or neither good nor bad. I'm your co-host, Dr. Ellie Anderson,

David: 0:25

And I am your co-host, Dr. David Peña-Guzmán.

Ellie: 0:29

And today, indeed we are talking about the bad or the good bad because we are talking about why it's okay to love bad movies. David, would you consider yourself a bad movie lover?

David: 0:40

I'm not, I am a good movie lover. I'm actually very bougie and extremely unbearable in my, uh, movie taste. But occasionally I run into a movie that is just so bad that it's good, but I wait for that judgment to be made for me by time. So I will, I'll like show down with a cult classic people agree is bad by conventional standards.

Ellie: 1:02

Okay. And I wouldn't actually even consider you a bougie movie lover. I would consider you a pretentious, you're like more of an art house type of guy. Right. And this is, I mean, anytime you're recommending a movie, to me it's like the new Kronenberg film.

David: 1:14

This ah,

Ellie: 1:15

I would say I have much more liberal movie taste. Like I'm for a Criterion collection night. But I basically was raised on

David: 1:25

Ashley and whatever her name is, like the twins.

Ellie: 1:28

Yeah, Mary-Kate and Ashley, but I was also raised on like kind of B movies from the forties to sixties. My mom and I loved TCM, the Turner Classic Movie channel growing up, and one of the things that I really like about TCM is you just like turn it on back in the day, I know now we're streaming most things, but you just turn it on. And sometimes the movie would be an incredible Oscar winner, and other times it would be just like a really crappy noir. Um, and those are sometimes more fun to watch. I especially love cheesy sci-fi movies from the, let's say, maybe the sixties. Ugh, such a jam.

David: 2:04

Well, I wonder whether people's relationship to this good movie, bad movie distinction and our habits of consuming film are almost entirely determined by early childhood and familial experiences in relationship to film. Because grew up in a family where we never watched movies, and so for me growing up, if I was going to watch a movie, it would have to be at the movie theater, and it was an outing and it required planning and it was an event. And so for that, I had to be much more discerning in terms of what movie I actually wanted to spend, what little money my mom gave me to go see it at the theater. So it was not as if we just had this oasis of films to choose from in my small Mexican town where there was one movie theater that only played like one movie per month.

Ellie: 2:49

But you did like campy stuff on TV because I remember you telling me how much you loved Walter Mercado, the Mexican astrologer, who was like super campy and kind of queer coded, right.

David: 3:02

Oh yeah. I mean, I like queer crazy characters, but you know, like a guy that comes and tells you, I love you, con mucho mucho amor, for like 10 seconds at the end of the news segment. Not the same as like a film.

Ellie: 3:14

Yeah. Yeah. There, there's a certain, I think like ironic distance that I have seen you sometimes take paired with an actual passion. For instance, for Walter Mercado, this, um, nineties Mexican astrologer.

David: 3:27

Yeah. And so that would be particularly true for television for that I, I take guilty pleasure in watching crap television, including crap television from my childhood, 20, like 30 years later.

Ellie: 3:43

Oh, I can totally relate to that too. Although, as you know, I also watch crap television from today.

David: 3:48

Yes, so, but let's talk a little bit about the good bad in connection to movies specifically. I recently watched one of these, it's so bad that it's good movies, and my friends told me that they wanted to know what a philosopher would think about this movie. I never seen it. It's called Showgirls from 1995.

Ellie: 4:08

I actually haven't seen it either.

David: 4:09

Okay. Um, by Paul, uh, Verhoeven. And if you look up Showgirls on Wikipedia, it is described as an erotic drama thriller. There's just like a lot of categories put together and it stars Elizabeth Berkeley, who was in Saved by the Bell. She was that blonde, kind of like cute girl in Saved by the Bell. Do you know, did you watch that?

Ellie: 4:33

Yeah, but I was like five years old, so I don't really remember.

David: 4:36

People in the US that are roughly our age know her. So she came of age in Saved by the Bell, and then she did this movie that was supposed to be a new Fatal Attraction like film with like brutality and eroticism and sex altogether. But the movie came out and it's reception was horrific. People hated the movie almost universally, and there is pretty wide consensus that this movie single-handedly killed Elizabeth Berkeley's career. She got humiliated. She was mocked and ridiculed in the press, in the news, and in cinephile circles. And it's because the movie's combination of eroticism, thriller and drama just didn't seem to work for pretty much anybody. So for those of you who haven't seen it, it's a movie about this young hot woman who arrives in Las Vegas and doesn't have any money and sort of takes Vegas by storm. She becomes a dancer on the Vegas strip and that it's a story about her ascension to being the lead dancer on a Vegas strip Showgirl show. Yes. And so she starts like having sex with the boss. She starts doing all these things to, to ascend. The movie honestly was a little bit shocking because it has very campy elements of performance. It has a very serious tone at times that is almost at odds with the ridiculousness of the things that are happening. Also, they show full frontal nudity, so you just see her full naked body sort of like dancing and kicking the leg up, and so it was very graphic, very campy, very serious at the same time. But in the last 20 years, it then shifted from being just a bad movie. To being perceived as a good, bad movie. So it's become a cult classic.

Ellie: 6:35

Yeah, so I have, I have thoughts on this in relation to our topic for the day. David, one thing I'll note now is that I think what you're pointing to as a dissonance in tone is something that's very characteristic of a lot of bad movies, some that are actually just like bad, bad movies, right? some that are kind of good, bad. But you started the story by saying that your friends wanted to know what you thought of it. So what was your philosophical take on it?

David: 6:59

Yes, they wanted to know what I thought of it in my capacity as a professional philosopher. So my experience of the film was filtered by the fact that I already knew that it had become a cult classic. And so, you know, my pretentious self to use your phrase was already like, oh, I think I'm gonna like it. And indeed, I did like it. I'm not gonna say that it was amazing. I also, I'm not somebody dies for cold classics or good bad movies. So spoiler alert, I didn't really have any amazing philosophical conclusions at the end of the film, although I did appreciate the sense of ambitiousness in the making of the film combined with the ridiculousness of various scenes that I just couldn't quite make sense of other than just by appreciating the ridiculous as something that is part of the ambitious, but in general, I would say that it was a fine movie, but then that's where I would put all cult classics for the most part.

Ellie: 7:59

So in order to make sense of your claims, I would argue you needed the help of the book that we are going to be talking about today. We're interviewing the author of it shortly because I think this idea is something that he really gets at well in the book. And, um, you know, I mentioned the, the dissonance and tone a bit earlier. He talks about this specifically with respect to an Aaron Eckhart movie called The Core, where Aaron Eckhart is just like really hardcore, acting serious, but all of the other actors seem to realize that this movie is absurd because something that Strohl points out is that it's not simply the case that if a movie is so, so bad it's like worse than most bad movies, it suddenly becomes good, right? It's not a matter of degree of badness that somehow transforms it into good. There's something particular that makes certain bad movies fun, exciting to watch, lovable cult classics, and something that makes other movies just bad, and you really don't wanna watch it again, right? And so Showgirls, like for many people, is a good, bad movie rather than an actual bad movie. Here is where he introduces the idea of what a bad movie. He says a movie is bad, in the relevant sense that he's talking about here, if it violates received norms in a way that is not perceived as artistically serious. And so in the case of Showgirls, you have, like you said, a sort of weird combination of elements. You have full frontal nudity. You have this kind of serious story and some serious acting by the protagonist or by the lead actor that somehow doesn't really resonate with the story of her rise to Vegas and maybe there is like some kind of cringe moments of the narrative as well and the like, the production value isn't quite right. So Strohl really wants to emphasize the fact that bad movies violate received norms. They go against what we think makes a movie good, but they do so in a way that is not perceived as truly avant-garde. It's perceived as artistically unserious, although he definitely notes in the movie that there is a fine line and sometimes an indistinct line, which means there is no line at

David: 10:06

No line at all.

Ellie: 10:07

between the avant-garde and bad movies.

David: 10:12

And in thinking about the avant-garde experimentation versus the experimentation that you get with just bad movies, it's Strohl's position that there is a difference between two ways in which we use the term bad when it comes to a film, right? So, A film can be bad, he says, in the conventional sense, when again, it just breaches received norms of what is good in film, like, oh, the narrative doesn't make any sense. The linear structure is hard to follow. The characters are underdeveloped, so on and so forth. All those are things that make a movie bad in a conventional sense. But then there is what Strohl calls good or bad in the final sense, which is our ultimate judgment about the value that that movie adds to our life as viewers independently of whether it is good or bad in the conventional sense. And so this distinction is what allows us to talk about movies that are. Just bad by which we would mean bad in the conventional sense and also in the final sense. So they're bad in execution and they're also not aesthetically pleasing or enjoyable.

Ellie: 11:19

Or, or valuable? I would say the enjoyable and pleasing I would. I would just say as an aesthetics point, we can have aesthetic value. That's not a matter of enjoyment or pleasure.

David: 11:28

Yeah. But then the best way to define movies that are so bad that they're good is to say that they might be bad in a conventional sense because

Ellie: 11:37

They are.

David: 11:38

Yeah, well, they might be, people can disagree about that. Let's just say that there's agreement that they are bad in a conventional sense, but somehow there is something about them that actually makes them good in a final sense, where we want them in our lives. We wanna watch them, we wanna share them with others, which is precisely what happened with my friends. My friends told me, Hey, this movie is ridiculous. It is absurd. It fails even to do what it sets out to do. And yet it is an amazing movie and we want to hear what you have to say much to their disappointment, as I said, I had nothing smart to contribute.

Ellie: 12:13

But hey, it was a social form of bonding.

David: 12:20

Today we're talking about bad movies.

Ellie: 12:24

What makes a movie bad and yet also somehow good?

David: 12:28

What value do bad movies add to our individual and collective lives?

Ellie: 12:33

We speak with Dr. Matthew Strohl, an expert on this area. For more clarification, Matthew Strohl is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Montana and the author of the book, Why It's Okay to Love Bad Movies. A specialist in aesthetics and ancient philosophy, Strohl has also written a number of other articles, including on culinary authenticity and cultural appropriation, and the intimacy of groups with C. Thi Nguyen, which we recently discussed on another episode. Matt, we are so excited to have you on Overthink today. Welcome.

Matthew: 13:09

Very, happy to be here.

Ellie: 13:11

We absolutely loved your book, Matt, and we are really excited to share your ideas with our listeners today. I feel like a good place to begin is trying to get clear on what we even mean when we talk about a bad movie or more specifically a good, bad movie because they're not always the same thing. You talk in your book about how when we consider movies bad, we're often doing so because we violate the conventional norms that we have around what makes a movie good. For instance, having a plot without major holes or having performances that are realistic. The way you talk about received norms as changeable from culture to culture or era to era makes them sound somewhat arbitrary. But I would counter that many of our norms are norms for good reason. Aristotle has these claims, for instance, about what makes a good plot, Teora Adorno talks about artworks having a special wholeness unto themselves, and these ideas suggest to me that there are norms for good artworks that aren't just arbitrary, such that in violating them bad movies might be bad in the deeper sense of not being aesthetically valuable. What do you think about this? And I know that was like a lot of ideas to just put out there, but how can we think about good, bad movies in terms of conventional norms or potentially other norms that are more substantive?

Matthew: 14:25

That's a great question, and I absolutely agree with you that the norms of an art form are not arbitrary and that they have a positive role to play. So like for instance, When a story doesn't have any plot holes and when things are well explained, that can make the story more dripping to us because we can become sort of more absorbed in the movie's world and we're not distracted by questioning the ways in which it doesn't make sense, right? So I completely agree with that, but what I wanna say is that the norms are constructive rather than constraining. So in other words, the sort of conventional way to make a dramatic movie, or the conventional way to make an action movie that's a sort of recipe for something that's typically gonna work out well for the audience. Those norms, however, do not have a monopoly on all the possible ways of being valuable, and, and I think we're very much used to this idea, it's just that we don't always see that bad movies can function in the same way. So here's what I mean by that. Take the example of food, right? There's a set of norms for what makes for eggs benedict, right? You gotta have an English muffin, you gotta have, you know, a poached egg, um, hollandaise sauce, Canadian bacon there. And there's certain ways that it can go wrong. So, for example, if you didn't toast the English muffin enough, that could be bad. Or if, like the hollandaise sauce were split, that could be bad cause it's breaking, right? So consider, for example, the version of Eggs Benedict that was served at the restaurant WD 50 in New York City before it closed. So this is a famous dish. So the, the version of this dish, You would get a cylinder of congealed yolk, you would get a cube of hollandaise sauce that is coated in English muffin crumbs and fried, and then like a wisp of Canadian bacon that's like paper thin, right? So the point is that that it has all of the essential ingredients with eggs benedict, but the texture and the proportions are completely different. I'd encourage you to Google this and look at a picture what it looks like. Cause it's really cool, right? But the idea is that like, that's what's exciting about the dish is the ways that it breaks convention, the ways in which it's not the way it's supposed to be, the ways in which it plays with your expectations. And I think we're familiar with the idea of movies doing this, right? So like you mentioned, Aristotle's Norms for a story, Aristotle said that a good story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end in that order, right? But course we know all kinds of stories where the, we like Pulp Fiction, where we start with the middle and then the beginning comes later. When stories like that were first introduced, they were breaking with norms and conventions. But then over time, I mean now for example, you get a million movies that are structured like Pulp Fiction, they have that kind of non-linear structure and that becomes like a new norm. But the point was that, that the art form could never have evolved if nobody challenged it in the first place. And, and what I'm trying to, part of what I'm trying to do in the book is it's like, okay, we already, we already accept that way of violating the norms can be interesting. But what about violating the norms in ways that. That lack the appearance of artistic seriousness. So for example, instead of breaking the norms as like a concerted gesture, they're broken out of haphazardness. I wanna think about ways in which that can also be interesting.

Ellie: 17:23

Mm-hmm. Also that WD 50 Eggs Benedict look tasty, but like so astronomically forward that I would need about 10 of them in order to be full.

Matthew: 17:32

Amen to that. Yeah.

David: 17:33

I mean, uh, but Matt, your comment about whether or not the rules are broken haphazardly as opposed to with a kind of serious, considered judgment and assessment. Makes me wonder just how we tell the difference between those two. Because you know, two people can watch a movie. One of the people sees a kind of intentional revolution in cinema, and another person just sees a gigantic failure. So can you help us think through this distinction between what is intentionally and unintentionally bad?

Matthew: 18:02

Well, that's what I think is often, so those kinds of judgments are where I think things often get arbitrary. It's very often the case that when an avant-garde film or a film that is somehow starkly, unconventional, is released. A lot of people bulk at it. A lot of people, you know. Question whether there's anything interesting going on or whether it's just bullshit, right? So it's, it's like, so the way that people react, like a tonal music, it's just noise where other people is like, no, no, no trust me, it's interesting. Often what's happening is that the assumptions and expectations that people bring to art appreciation are being interrogated, and I think. Often it is hard to tell the difference between something that's sort of bad and the way that we're discussing and the something that is experimental. So I give an example in the book of the Tom Green movie, Freddy Got Fingered, right, which I think is a good example of something where it blurs that line. On the one hand, it's it's bad, right? By this conventional standard, certainly at the time when it was made, right? But the other hand, it's doing something bold and purposeful, right? It's like Freddy Got Fingered is not the kind of thing you slip on a banana peel and you accidentally screw up and make that movie. It's, it's, it was made by Tom Green, Tom Green was trying to shock and offend in a certain way. But then there's a like, are, is his aim and shocking and offending a worthy aim? Or is this adolescent and juvenile? And I think that's the kind of thing that's often really hard to evaluate in the moment and then becomes clearer over time. And if you look now, this is also in the book, but if you, if you were to Google, you know, Freddy Got Fingered masterpiece or Freddy Got Fingered great movie, you'll find tons and tons of examples of, of down the road people arguing, hey, everybody missed the boat when this is first release, this is actually a really interesting movie. So like, part of what I'm trying to show in the book is that, Assumptions and expectations and conventions and norms, they're highly pliable. And part of what we're doing when we celebrate bad movies is contesting and problematizing them in various ways. And so I wanna say that like, look, the goal is not for everybody to get on the same page here. Part of what makes this aesthetic realm of movies interesting is the, the huge diversity of viewpoints. And I think that if, if you wanna cultivate a lively, diverse film culture, then one of the things that you can do is like, take seriously the artistry of movies that you're not supposed to take seriously. And like, think about what ways there are of looking at them that are sort of outside of, of expectations.

Ellie: 20:34

Yeah, and I wanna ask you a little bit about how we as viewers engage in that kind of process of trying to figure out if a movie is bad in a good way, or just bad in a bad way. You set up a distinction between love of bad movies and ridiculing bad movies in the book, you say in the book, that bad movie ridicule is enjoying a movie at its own expense, by mocking it for how it violates conventional norms. Whereas bad movie love is precisely appreciating a movie because it violates conventional norm. And I was thinking a lot about this distinction because for me personally, I feel like they're not as distinct as you suggest in the book, and you know that they do often overlap in practice, but you think that they are in principle, distinct attitudes toward bad movies. I watched the movie Logan's Run last weekend, the 1976, uh, sci-fi film, which is absolutely bonkers. So many incredible costumes and truly hilarious set design where you can tell when they're showing you this futuristic city, it's actually just like a tiny diorama and it looks totally unrealistic. And then you zoom in and it's even more bonkers architecture, and I loved this movie. It was so entertaining to watch, but I don't feel like my love of it was actually distinct from ridiculing it. What do you think about this personal experience of feeling like love and ridicule are not very distinct?

Matthew: 22:03

Yeah, so I, but I think there's something that is like ridicule adjacent that's not ridicule, right. is a kind of like rhetorical game of playful mockery, right? So I think that like often, often, that's a way to point. Out something that's interesting or admirable. Let's say I just watched, uh, I was visiting a friend in Chicago and I got stuck there by the, the snowstorm, and we watched Showgirls 2, which is two and a half, two and a half hours long. Um, and as we're, as we're watching, we watched it together. There's like all kinds of stuff going wrong in the movie, in this conventional sense, right? So for example, like there are scenes in this movie that go on, it's two and a half hours long. So the scenes in this movie that go on like so much longer than they need to, and we're sitting there watching it and part of what we're doing of course, is pointing this out like, I cannot believe the scene is still happening. Now. That's the kind of thing you might point out as a part of ridiculing and making fun of a movie. Right? But there's like also a way of pointing out just how ridiculous it is so that you and your friend who are watching it together can kinda like mutually grasp that you're both having the same experience of, oh my God, so weird. Right? So I think that like when you're playing that game, you're actually pointing out things that are admirable. And like the way I put it is that like the artist who made these movies, right? So in this case, the artist who made Showgirls 2 is the professional exotic dancer who wrote, directed, edited, and stars in the movie. And like the idea is that she, she's expressing something of herself with this. This is, this is her being sincere. And I think that like, that, even if what she's doing is far outside of expectations for what a good movie's supposed to be like, that we can admire the spirit that she brings to it and we can admire her sort of outsider creative sensibility. Right. So it's like ridicule is instead of trying to find out what's interesting about the movie, trying to uncover what's outside of the bounds of convention we can find admirable about this. It's rather starts from a presumed superiority. Starts from a, like, this woman has no idea what she's doing. Let's like, have a laugh at all the ways she's failed here. And I think that like when you, when you adopt that, perspective, it can block you from seeing what actually is interesting about the thing. So for example, there's this wonderful movie that you can stream, uh, at least right now on Amazon Prime.

It's called, uh, Dancin': 24:15

It's On! And I discovered this movie late at night one night. Cause I, it has like a professional kickboxer as plays the dad character. And I like the movies that this guy action movies. So I cha- I'm like, what is this dance movie with Gary Daniels in it? So I watched it and it blew my mind. I like, I, I watched it again the next day. And then the day after that, my wife came home and she's like, you're watching this again. And then she sat down and watched it with me. Um, and then I got on Twitter and I said, everybody, you've gotta see Dancin' It's On! It's amazing, right? But then I, I was like, wait a minute, what are people gonna find if they Google this? Right. Are there people gonna able to find this movie or do I need to provide a link? So I googled the movie and the first thing I found was a RiffTrax about this movie. Right? So, um, so it's like, what the riff tracks is, is while you're watching the movie, there are a couple comedians, Bill Corbit, and somebody else making fun of the movie for you as you're watching and I realized that like, this is the default way that people have been watching this movie. This actually comes up first when you search for it. So I tweeted again, don't watch the riff tracks, gotta watch the regular version. It's gonna ruin it. It's gonna completely ruin it. If you watch the RiffTrax you gotta watch it. The on its own. Well fast forward one month, I come outta class and I check my phone and I have like 97 Twitter notifications. It turns out that Bill Corbit, the comedian, has found my tweet and has now broadcasted this to his 100,000 followers. And he said, oh, this guy has figured out our secret plan to ruin things for you. So I then, I, I muted everything as quickly as I could, but I then spent the next like week getting like angry messages from RiffTrax fans who are making this exact point. They're saying, look at, like, we love these movies, like blah, you know, like making the same point that ridiculing these. But the thing is, here's the thing, they never watched the movie without the RiffTrax. And I just don't believe you that you love this movie. I do not believe you. If you can't, if you haven't watched it, you can't watch it without somebody making fun of it the whole time. Cracking jokes about it. Right. And I think that like the, the part of what I love about the movie is again, like the sincerity of it. The fact that the people making the silly movie really believed in it and they really put everything they had into it. And it's like, as a result, I believe it as a result. Like I get drawn into the emotions of the story despite how silly it is. And I think you could never appreciate it that way. If you watched it in the tone of like, this is fodder for a comedian.

David: 26:30

Mm. Yeah. Like raw material. Well, and I love this language that you use of sort of abandoning yourself to the movie or letting yourself be taken over by the film. And I think that's a good way of capturing the difference between these two attitudes that you write about in the book, right? Where sometimes we love a movie because we love to ridicule it, and that does seem to be kind of the attitude of the, of the movie snob. Whereas the movie lover is the one who cherishes the quirky aspects of a film and, uh, is more experimental in their cinematic tastes. And, uh, one thing that I really loved speaking about love versus ridicule about your book now, not that there is anything to ridicule there. Uh, one thing that I really loved is just that you give a lot of concrete examples of movies and actors, even film critics, and you devote a whole chapter to Nicholas Cage.

Ellie: 27:22

And I, it might be the longest chapter in the book too. That chapter was like 40 pages.

Matthew: 27:27

It is. It is by far the longest chapter. Yeah.

David: 27:30

Um, and fair warning for this question, I am not familiar with Nicholas Cage's career beyond the National Treasure Series. As a lot of people know, Nicholas Cage has become, uh, the whipping boy of movie critics for the most part. So he sort of embodies the object of ridicule, especially when you're thinking about quote unquote high art cinema. But you argue that the general consensus that we have that his movies are basically crap misses something really important about his contributions to the world of cinema. And so I want you to talk to us a little bit about your interpretation of Nicholas Cage and what it is that movie snobs get wrong about him.

Matthew: 28:13

Great question. So, um, you know, Nicholas Cage, the early part of his career and the period where he was a big movie star is widely beloved, right? People like when they talk about loving Nicholas Cage, they made movies like Face Off or Moonstruck, you know, from from that old era. And then more recently since I wrote the book, like the last couple years, he's seen a little bit of a resurgence. Like, oh, Nicholas Cage is good. Nicholas Cage is good again, all of a sudden. So what I think actually that, that in between period where what he was doing was primarily like direct to video. Extremely low budget movies where the basic idea was we, we don't have much of a budget, but if we get Nicholas Cage, we can make some kind of a profit on this. So he is just doing these small time movies that really only exist because he's in it. And generally these movies, a lot of people didn't watch them, but also they were sort of like, always held up as an object of ridicule where people like, look like, people love to gloat about how far he had fallen, and love to say like, which next piece of crap will be. And the, what I wanna say is that that is the, the most interesting phase of his career by far, and also the most interesting cycle of performances, maybe by any actor of his generation.

David: 29:19

That's, that's a big crowning achievement to give him.

Matthew: 29:23

The reason I say that is because in those movies, right, very little, very little is at stake. There's not much money being invested and there's not much money is going to be made. Right? And the thing about Nicholas Cages that he is an experimentalist. But when he is in like a big budget movie, you know, he always says, I, I, I try to deliver the director's vision. I try to do what they want me to do. But when he is making this tiny little direct to video movies, those are like a experimental laboratory where, um, he's free to do whatever he wants. And I think that like if you, if you were to take all those performances that he did, 20 some movies that he did over that period of time, you'll find an incredible range of experimental acting that you're just, you're not gonna find anything comparable from anybody as famous as him. Right. Because it, it is like everybody's sort of turning in, like George Clooney or whatever, roll after roll after roll, delivering a sort of high class George Clooney performance. You got some of these Nicholas Cage movies. There's, there's like one movie, for example, that I really love. Called Army of one, where he like travels to Pakistan to single-handedly hunt down Osama bin Laden, um, with a samurai sword. You know, you're these like completely oddball performances where, um, again, he treated them as a kind of laboratory. And what you'll find in these movies is a kind exploration of a huge range of styles of acting. It's sort of like a study of human gestures, both exaggerated and minimal. It's not all like hand bone over the top cage rage. A lot of it is at the far limit of, you know, like, how little can I do and still sketch a character, right? And so what I wanna say is just when you take that body of work all together, you have a, a bravely experimental, immensely talented actor who operated under conditions of like profound freedom for a number of years, right? Where again, like these movies only exist because he is in them and the idea is that he's what everything is centered around and he's in a way free to do what he wants. And again, like not a lot of people watch those movies. I kept up with every single one of them as they were coming out. I mean, I was on top of it that whole time. And like for me, for me now, I've been really disappointed lately because we used to get a Nicholas Cage movie every few months and now they're like barely coming out and they're like, they're in the movie theater. I have to go pay to see them.

Ellie: 31:33

To see cage on cage whatever.

David: 31:35

Ooo.

Matthew: 31:35

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I guess the, the, the sort of big headline is though that, like those direct to video, under the radar, cheap, low budget movies, instead of focusing on what they're missing, what they lack focus on, like what they enable, right? Which is again, they enable freedom for the actor. They enable him to experiment towards the limits of the craft, to, um, expand the range of what's possible for, um, an actor in this kind of movie. So one of the movies that I highlight in the book is Looking Glass, right? And like Looking Glass, Nicholas Cage plays a character who is a voyeur, who he owns a hotel, and he's able to hide behind the mirrors of this guest and spy on them. And like what, what's interesting to me about the movie, for instance, is the, um, Huge number of shots that we get of him simply reacting to what he's watching where the i the, again, like he, he, it's wordless. He has no way to express what he's feeling or thinking. Um, with dialogue, it's all gesture, it's all manner, it's all body language and you can sort of, All of the emotions involved with voyeurism, right? The excitement, the thrill, the arousal, but also the shame, right? All also the, um, the sense of wrongness, right? That, so that that's all captured as well. And it's all done without saying anything. And again, when people reviewed that movie, they were like, Nicholas Cage turns in another crap. Movie. Right? But like, I'm like, did you even try, was my question like, did you, did you decide that before you watched it? Did you, you know, when you, when those scenes that I found so interesting were playing, were you looking at them? Were you, you know, so I, I tend to think that, that with someone like Nicolas Cage, people enjoy so much to beat up on him and to sort of have this, you know, famous movie star who is now a laughing stock, that they were not able to see the interest in what he was doing. And that's, you're right, that is the longest chapter in the book. That's part of a joke for me was like, watch how concise I'd be until I get to Nicholas Cage then, and then we'll, um, um, go on for a while. Um, but that's what I wanted to try to convince readers, right is precisely the period of his career that's the most easy to make fun of is precisely the most interesting because it was the space in his career we had the most, where he had the most freedom.

Ellie: 33:45

You definitely made me wanna watch Vampire's Kiss, which I have never seen, but I will say your account of Cage was challenging for me in a good way because I tend, as I think David knows to, to lean into the art is separate from the artist viewpoint and to think that art, if it's good, should have some some wholeness unto itself to, to kind of echo some of the language I used in a previous question, such that it is intelligible on its own terms without you having to know about the artist's intentions and your account of Cage made me think. I don't, I don't know if you've convinced me of your own view over and against my own, but it did at least challenge me to think that I'm really missing a lot about Cage's performances by not having the relevant background context of his intentions. I have often thought Nicholas Cage is an absolutely awful actor. Why is he so famous? And you point out, for instance, that he really sees acting almost as a pop art type of experience. Like he not only is very well-read, uh, on Stanislavsky and other acting theorists, but he also is really interested in doing a sort of Warhol factory-like thing where he's creating collage performances that take found elements from other actors, whether from commercials or Gumby the TV show the character pokey, he adopts his, you know, accent in one film. And so it did make me think that there. Has been something missing in my own interpretation of Cage as just what is on the screen rather than taking into account the broader context of his own intentions as an artist.

Matthew: 35:20

You're, you're, I mean, you're not the only one, right? So I mean, I think if you go back and look at some of those performances now, like the Wicker Man is one I spent a lot of time talking about. It kind of boggles. That anybody would think that he would sort of accidentally give a performance like that. And I think that it's not so much knowledge of his intentions that helps so much as a broad view of the shape of his career and just seeing the way that he would, he's never even at his most famous, he's never been content to simply sort of repeat himself or do what's expected. He's always found ways to, to surprise us. And I mean, I think that at the height of his stardom, that's what we loved about him, right? Was that, for example, that movie Moonstruck, that if you watch that movie now, there's like a sort of baseline tone of the movie and then Cage is at like quadruple the level of everybody else. Way out of proportion. And that like, people are so excited by the passion that he brought to movies. And I think that like wh when you sort of see the way that he carries that same attitude and that same sort of artistic personality into his more disreputable work, you start to see it all as a continuum. Right. And I definitely, and it's true, like it's because, it's because I'm watching every single Nicholas Cage movie that these random direct to video movies are so interesting to me. And I think that's also part of, part of what I'm trying to show in the book is that like, you know, when you dabble in these things, they might look one way, but when you get immersed in them, they look quite different.

David: 36:44

Yeah, and that notion of immersion of being immersed in the movie, I think at raises questions about our application of the principle of charity in the context of movie interpretation, because of course when you. Are presented with two movies, then you know something about them, about who the actors are, who the directors are. Sometimes we withhold the principle of charity and we are already from the beginning, sort of close-minded about what we might find there. And even just, for example, your discussion of this Nicholas Cage film through the, is it Through the Glass, through the Looking Glass? Looking Glass, okay, I am here getting my literary references all mixed up. But you, you point out that one way to interpret Nicholas Cage is us trying to inject a dose of German expressionism into cinema. And one of the things that German expressionism underscores again, is the importance of inner feeling. And you can very easily see that when you cut out dialogue and focus on gestures, reactions, bodily movements of, uh, voyeur. But again, in order for you to get there, you actually have to begin from the assumption that you might find there's something more than just Nicholas Cage's fall from fame or you know, what's the next shittiest movie that we're gonna get out of him? And so I like thinking about which movies get this, open-mindedness and which ones don't. Now I wanna pan out a little bit here and ask you a question about the role that good bad movies play in our conception of the good life. And so I just wanna ask straight up, what does a good, bad movie add to my life to make my life better?

Matthew: 38:27

That's a great question. Um, so I mean, I'm coming at this from the perspective of a cinephile, right? I, I watch a, I watch a lot of movies and so like one reaction that I got, to this book was, do you think that you just watched too many movies? And so therefore you've gotta to the point where in order to like excite yourself, you need to just be watching bad ones, like anything, anything different. Um, and, and, and I think that's a, it's a good question, but my answer is it's kind of backwards. It's that bad movies enable me to watch so many movies. It's imagine if my, my whole approach to cinema as an art form were to try to sort of find the best possible movies and appreciate them in the in the most astute possible way. The problem is that I very quickly paint myself into a corner, right? I very quickly was like, okay, I've gotten to the great movies and I've gotten to a sophisticated understanding of them, like, where do I go from here? Right? And, um, you, you get to the, like, I know, I know a lot of people like this who are like, where they go from there is, they hate almost every movie. Like they're people for whom nothing is good enough. And they hate, like 90% of the movies they watch, but they just keep watching them. And like every now and then they, something is good enough for their approval. Um, and for me that's like, what a frustrated, miserable life that would be, you know, like I, I I, I like more like 90% of the movies I watch, right? And it's not that like, oh, we're hedonists so we wanna stack on as much pleasure as possible. It's rather broadening our way, our perspective on the kinds of things that are interesting and finding interest in places where we don't expect it. For me, what bad movies or what good bad movies add to the good life is that they, they help to make our relationship with art more playful. More exploratory. They help to get us out of ruts, they help to get us out of sort of default assumptions about what people like us are supposed to be like. Right. You know, I'm a 40 year old male, straight academic guy, and like, I'm not supposed to like Twilight, right? That's just not the kind of thing I'm supposed to be interested. I'm also not supposed to be interested in Dancin' It's On! I'm not, you know, these, these are things that just don't sort of fit with my social position. It's just sort of not kind of thing I'm supposed to be interested in. But for me, like getting outside of that and having this kind of playful relationship with cinema where, um, you know, I, I'm just as likely to find interest in something that's supposed to be terrible, as in something that is sort of critically sanctioned. That for me, makes cinema exciting. Instead of just trying to track all of the sort of best values, I get to be creative and inventive and sort of come up with different new ways of seeing things that nobody else has suggested to me. I love to, you know, pick out a movie that is just, Like, what is this random movie? Um, why would anybody like this? And just give it a try, you know? And I think that like having this kind of playful, open attitude where, um, I'm not just limiting myself to the standard rage of ways that things are able to be good, but rather I'm open to surprises that I, again, that I think that that's kept my relationship with cinema vital and vigorous. And it's, and, and as a result, like it's something that brings me a lot of joy instead of a lot of frustration as it were. And it also unites me with a lot of people that I otherwise wouldn't have anything to talk about with, right? So it's like the fact that I have an open mind about, say, Twilight opens up a whole huge group of people that I can talk to about something sincerely, who I otherwise wouldn't have much in common.

Ellie: 41:45

I really resonated with the account that of how watching bad movies brings people together because this is so true in my experience and was a really crucial form of bonding for me with my mom growing up. We would, we loved to watch B movies from the 1960s, especially like Barbella and that type of thing, and. I wonder though whether this makes movies different in kind from other forms of art because for instance, I don't think that reading a bad novel is a good use of my time, and I don't think that looking at bad paintings is a good use of my time. But I do agree with you that watching bad movies is a good use of my time, and I would chalk that up to precisely the community that I can develop around bad movies. What do what you think about?

Matthew: 42:28

I think. Part of what's special about movies is that there's a very unique balance between how incredibly expensive and difficult they are to make and how incredibly cheap and easy they are to consume. Right? So it's like you mentioned like a, a novel that's like a week of your life or whatever, like, but then, or like paintings or music are just too easy to produce. There are too many bad paintings and there's too much bad music. Right. Whereas a movie. Is like a monument of effort. Any feature film, a group of people poured themselves into this. There's no other way to make a movie. And I think that like part of the reason that movies can form community so readily is so it's not very likely that like me and some random person from like, you know, Seattle have seen the same play or that we listen to the same music, but like, we've probably both seen Top Gun Maverick. Right. So it's like the fact that there are like relatively few movies, they're, they're hard to make is part of what helps movies create a context where people can come together. The fact that we can also appreciate movies together in a way. So it's like, I guess we can all read a book aloud or right. But it's like we're all seated together in a dark theater ready to have, uh, experience together and like, feed off of each other's energy. Right. And so it's like, I often have the experience when I'm watching a bad movie or so bad, it's a good movie with some, with other people that like, I don't recognize something as being funny or interesting until other people react to it. And I'm like, oh wow, you're, wow. Yeah, I didn't, didn't see it that way. And I think that like, that's part of why it's so exciting to watch bad movies with other people is that like we don't have a script to appreciate. Right. Like we're having to make this up as we go along. It's not like, uh, watching a conventional drama or something where're like, we know how, okay, we're supposed to feel sad now, and now we're supposed to reflect on the themes. It's not like that. Like we have to make up how to watch these movies. We have to invent a way to appreciate them. And I think like other people's reactions are forms of creativity that we can feed off of and admire. So it's like when somebody else finds something funny, it's their insight, what we're reacting to every bit as much as the movie.

David: 44:27

Well, I love this final note on, uh, community building and, uh, learning from others on how to enjoy a bad movie while it's happening. And so with that, Matt, thank you so much for coming and chatting with us about your book.

Ellie: 44:41

Thank you so much, and listeners, just get to watching Nicholas Cage movies right when, as soon as you turn this off.

Matthew: 44:48

Thank you for having me. I had a great time.

Ellie: 44:59

Enjoying Overthink. Please consider supporting the podcast by joining our Patreon. We are an independent, self-supporting podcast, and as a subscriber, you can help us cover key production costs as well as gaining access to an exclude. Digital library of bonus content and more. David, this was such a great conversation and the book is so fun.

David: 45:23

The book is a really easy read, and it has some funny little bites. Um, sometimes I felt like it was written in the style of those film critics or who just like have a really biting of a movie or a really like pithy, uh, expression of, of praise for So I like those one-liners.

Ellie: 45:42

This is fully not a paid promotion, but like I am actually gonna buy this book for friends who are interested in film for like gifts. It's really good for that. But I did want to press a little bit on one of the distinctions that comes up in the book, which we just talked to Strohl about, and that's the distinction between ridicule and love. As you know from our discussion, I have questions about whether we can really draw the line there. I think in my case, my bad movie love is also bad movie ridicule, and I wanna test out an alternative hypothesis and see what you think. My sense is that what Strohl calls the ridicule love distinction might better be tracked as a distinction between enjoyment and appreciation. Or maybe it's actually not the same distinction. Maybe it's not tracking the same thing. But for me, this is a way that resonates a little bit more with my experience of bad movies, uh, getting at sort of like two hats that I'm wearing anytime I watch a bad movie. So when I watch a bad movie, a bad good movie, am enjoying the hell out of it. It is so fun. I am loving it. I watched horrible sixties B movie recently called Nude on the Moon, that is about two space or two like astronauts from the US.

David: 47:01

Astronauts.

Ellie: 47:03

See, and it's just like a bunch of hot, naked people on the moon that they run into. I was loving all hour and 12 minutes of this movie, but from an appreciation standpoint, I can appreciate that. It is a terrible movie, and so in that sense, I am ridiculing it, but I'm also loving it. At the same time, I have my critic hat and my enjoyer hat on.

David: 47:25

Okay, so let me ask you a couple of questions about this, because you alluded to this being a slightly different position than the one Strohl takes. Now, Strohl does say that there are two ways of loving a bad movie. You can love it positively like you enjoy it. You appreciate what it adds to your life in all of its bizarreness. Or you can love it in this kind of bitchy way where you're ridiculing it at all times.

Ellie: 47:49

No, but, but he doesn't, he doesn't say those are two forms of love. He says that one is love and one is ridicule, and he's really strongly distinguishing between love and ridicule as attitudes for experiencing bad movies.

David: 48:00

Yeah, you're right. So maybe two ways of enjoying, or two reasons for enjoying bad movie. Right. So one would be really loving it and the other one is ridiculing it. So is your argument here that we always do both when we appreciate a movie so bad that it's good and just that we can't separate them? Is that it?

Ellie: 48:19

Yeah. Yeah, that, that is my view. So yeah, there would be two different versions of this view. One is that both are going on simultaneously, but they're in principle distinct. And the other is that, yeah, love and ridicule are actually not distinct at all. They are the same thing, and.

David: 48:34

In all areas of life, we're just in connection to movies?

Ellie: 48:36

Oh, just, just in connect, connection to bad movies specifically. And I don't know which of those I would necessarily fall down on the side of, but I definitely would fall down on one of the two sides, means that I'm differing from Strohl's position because his view is that we can either watch a movie and ridicule it, or we can watch a bad movie and love it and love is the better approach. And I, I, I wanna hold a place for ridiculing bad movies as a way of loving bad movies.

David: 49:05

Well, honestly, me too. And the reason for this is because although ridicule can be a very negative emotion, especially when it has a clear target and that target becomes aware of being the object of ridicule, I think with bad movies, there is such a huge distance between actors and directors on the one hand, and then movie watchers on the other. I will never run into Elizabeth Berkeley. I will never run into Paul Verhoeven. I don't think it's the worst thing for me to ridicule the movie in the presence of my friends, and so there's a difference between that and me ridiculing, let's say an artist who is right next to their painting and you know, there is a kind of proximity and so it seems like a crime without a victim where I think similar to what we've said about gossip in our episode, about gossip, I think ridiculing something. Together can be a really powerful form of social bonding, um, and of the expression of friendship too. You know, like you and your friends wanna shit on things together sometimes, and it doesn't mean that you think that the object being shadow upon doesn't have a right to exist.

Ellie: 50:16

Totally. And on that note, I just wanna mention a quote from the book where he writes that throwing plastic spoons at the screen while watching the known bad movie, the Room is a way for audience members to express their shared love for the movie. It's a way for everyone to say to one another. Seriously, how hilarious is it that they left that spoon picture in the frame? So hilarious. Let's throw spoons that he says is an example of movie. I would say that's an example of bad movie ridicule that is also loving at the same time. That said, I agree with like a lot of Strohl's analysis here. That's just like something I wanna press on a little bit, but I, I really enjoy this book and I think it's like such a cool way of thinking about something is actually a pretty big part of my life.

David: 51:01

Yeah, I think the lesson here is that I need to beef up my expertise in the bad movie domain.

Ellie: 51:07

Get on that enjoyment.

David: 51:12

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 51:19

You can subscribe to our Patreon for exclusive access to bonus videos, live Q and As and more.

David: 51:25

To reach out to us and find episode info, go to overthinkpodcast.com and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram @overthink_pod.

Ellie: 51:35

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Clare A'Hearn and Samuel PK Smith for the original music.

David: 51:42

And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.