The Twinkie Offense
Update: a few weeks back I mentioned my ambition to watch every single entry in the now disturbingly expansive Land Before Time series. I’ve started the effort in earnest, and now can happily (?) report making it to #4 — “Journey Through the Mists.” It’s painful, but I do what I must. Will be blogging it in a weekly feature soon, stay tuned.
After a brief hiatus from the blogmines, I’m happy to say that the Bureau has finally gotten back to crawling the Information Superhighway and being massively and fabulously informed about things. One particular article, “The Twinkie Defense” authored by the lovely and talented Allie Pape of Biggest Mirror, is worth a read.
Pape’s defense of bad media is elegant: that like a terribly cooked meal, bad media lets you appreciate the heights and subtleties of truly great media. Like Batman and Joker locked in endless combat, “Jules and Jim” isn’t truly great without the presence of Ecks vs Sever to lend a little contrast.
But beyond lending a welcome contrast to the usual high culture tomfoolery, there’s another angle to take this in. Like the late-night post-drinking pound of dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets that you shovel into your mouth — let’s face it: bad is beautiful. Even if there was nothing to contrast it with, bad media stands on its own. It’s great in of itself.
There’s gadzillions in this vein. These movies are poorly shot, the characters poorly concieved, and sometimes they reach into the realm of near incoherence. But it’s all still extraordinarily enjoyable. Why?
I think it’d be wrong to understand all this as just the smug joy of seeing someone else fail. Good media convincingly suspends our pessmistic suspicion that life is actually more full of boring than anyone would care to admit. We like the good media universe because even when the chips are down and things are crappy for the characters, everything is still so freakin’ interesting and deep all the time.
And I think bad media is great for doing the exact opposite — like the cockeyed world of the internet celebrity, bad media reminds us of ourselves. It’s a little reenactment of the actual imperfect world of real people and situations unmediated by incredibly talented moviemakers. The ecstatic hubris and resulting failure that ends up seeming to motivate a truly great B-movie careening out of control is just the usual stuff of screw-ups, half-starts, and misguided plans that fill the 80% of life which doesn’t end up being all that deep or interesting.
I think great media is kind of like the cool kid you always wanted to be in high school, bad media is like those weird kids that you ended up hanging out with anyways. And it has all the same connotations: you can chill and grab a crispy Stella with bad media — because they’re your friends. Great media is just that: always admired, always at a distance, always giving you jitters of inadequacy.
Glycemic shock, now — that’s the life for me.
