We three sat on a couch in a darkened room, the Jock stood awkwardly by the door. On the television screen a she-male wearing a crown and cape decapitated a doe-eyed gigolo dressed in nothing by a cheetah-skin man-thong. The Jock shifted his weight and announced: “this movie is too weird, I have to go”. We flashed annoyed glances at the door as slammed shut, and then returned back to the screen to re-immerse ourselves in the world of Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
* * *
The events of September 11th, 2001 gave us a new method of categorizing people: there are those who watch videos of the World trade Center collapsing with a hand over their gasping mouth and tears in their eyes, and those who watch the video with their eyes wide and their hands on the replay button, absolutely amazed by the morbid awesomeness of watching a Government institution being leveled to the ground. In the above mentioned dorm-room scenario, the couch potato trio are no doubt part of the latter categorization. And while it may seem like an easy task of identifying these cult cinemaphiles, it does not answer the question that has plagued critics and compulsive categorizers for decades: who are these cult fans, and why are they so unusual? Jeffrey Sconce attempts to answer this question in his essay ‘Trashing’ the Academy; he writes
“Despite such efforts at generating counter-distinction within the shared cultural project of attacking ‘high-brow’ cinema, the discourses characteristically employed by paracinematic culture in its valorization of ‘low-brow’ artifacts indicate that this audience, like the film elite…is particularly rich with ‘cultural’ capital and thus possesses a level of textual/critical sophistication similar to the cineastes they construct as their nemesis” (537).
Sconce points out the intrinsic irony of the cult fan’s rebellion against ‘high-brow’ cinema. however his conjecture that a ‘paracinema’ fan is of a specific ‘cultural pedigree’ simply limits the cult fan base to too small a size; for every trio of students sitting on a couch at a liberal arts college, there is most likely a similar trio sitting in a basement or garage in middle-America, watching the exact same movie. The cult cinema fan doesn’t descend from a cultural pedigree, but rather a countercultural mentality developed by exposure to a postmodern world.
Post-Structuralism doctrine dictates that ‘Truth’ and ‘Meaning’ are merely constructs whose interpretation depends wholly on perspective. The same doctrine criticizes the traditionally Western system of breaking down the world into binary oppositions (Class notes, AT-110). These two philosophies of post-structuralism and postmodern thought are dominantly present, though possibly unconscious, in the minds of the paracinemaphile. Just as Marcel Duchamp dared put a urinal on display and call it art, the paracinemaphile dares reject ‘art house’ cinema and a film school education, outraging the public and choosing to degrade ritualized bourgeois values. By embracing films such as Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Meyer, 1970) and Bad Girls Go to Hell (Wishman, 1965), these cult fans are rejecting the ‘good movie / bad movie’ binary of the mainstream film society and silently announcing to the world that they will judge these films for themselves through their own perspectives.
The postmodern world is one of quick cuts, juxtapositions, self-reflexivity and an overflow of information. It’s no coincidence that the MTV generation of the 80’s and 90’s, raised on a constant influx of ‘Breaking News’, Care Bears and cereal mascots would readily embrace the avant-garde directing styles of the aforementioned cult directors, who’s work is both parody and pastiche, drama and camp, and most importantly, contains transgressive themes that work to break down cultural barriers. John Water’s camp creation Divine, along with the androgynous Z-Man of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls served to ignite a trend of transgender/queer discourse within the cult circuit that rapidly spread into the mainstream via the late 70’s, early 80’s Glam Rock movement, culminating together in Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto in which she describe the postmodern cyborg as:
“a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense” (Haraway, 150)
In a sense, cult films themselves are cyborgs – post-structural pastiches containing elements of every genre, horror, comedy, and romance; often containing a confusing mixture of counter-cultural leanings, subversive queer agendas, and Reagan era / ‘Leave it to Beaver’ optimism.
The directors of these films are often strange characters themselves, and among fans they have reached an auteur like status by creating unique films that tend to promote the director’s own personality or opinion. Doris Wishman is a female director of nudie and roughy flicks, yet her use of the camera as the viewer’s gaze serves to subvert the lewd and lustful intentions of the male spectator. A director like Edward D. Wood Jr., the ‘worst director ever’, imbues messages of change, acceptance and freedom of expression in his films as he was a transvestite in real life.
These directors become post-structuralist heroes in the eyes of their fans as they go against mainstream cinema, completely ignoring the standard conventions of cinematic discourse. Instead of focusing their talents on the rigid construction of a film, they instead highlight the films’ deconstruction, allowing the audience to see the strings. Gary Hentzi comments on this imbued self-awareness by the directors in relation to cult film titles in his essay Little Cinema of Horrors: “the studied goofiness of [these] titles…evidences a certain level of awareness on the part of the directors, who have accepted the unlikelihood of their making a good film and so are aiming for a campy one instead” (Hentzi, 24).
Some directors, such as Ed Wood, never intended to be ‘bad’ directors. The tragedy of Wood lies in the fact that his life long struggle was for acceptance, but it was only after his death that his work was embraced by cult fans. Like his loyal cinemaphiles, Wood observed the world as a place with possibilities more numerous than ones and zeroes; his own auteur style – a collage of stock footage, exploitation leanings, Atomic Age dialogue, and transgressive transvestism – can be seen as a direct influence of the ‘bad’ film directors to follow in his footsteps, his reach traveling as far as mainstream Hollywood with directors like Tim Burton.
The analogy can be made that Ed Wood is to paracinema as Nietzsche is to postmodern thought: Both heralded in a new age of reasoning straying away from a faith based school of thought (Wood strays away from Classic Hollywood Cinema, which is analogous to classic ‘faith’). In Plan 9 from Outer Space (Wood, 1959) the alien visitors criticize the vanity and stupidity of humanity (“All you of earth are idiots!” [Wood, 1959]), while promoting their own advanced alien race, much like Zarathustra criticizes the faults of humanity while promoting the Ubermensch in Also Sprach Zarathustra (Nietzsche, 1883): “What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the Ubermensch: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment” (Nietzsche, 9).
Wood, a transvestite, cast John Breckinridge, a transsexual, as the ruler of the alien planet in Plan 9. In the world of Ed Wood the Ubermensch is the androgynous cyborg - a post-gendered creation birthed from a postmodern world. The paracinemaphile, be they lounging around a liberal arts college or kicking back in a Kentucky garage, rejects popular cinema not because of ‘cultural capital’, but because of a shared identity with this cyborg mentality, and, possibly, on the grounds that popular cinema is stupid, stupid, stupid!
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A Few Citations:
Bibliography
Hentzi, Gary, “Little Cinema of Horrors”, Film Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3. (Spring, 1993), pp. 22-27
Sconce, Jeffrey, “’Trashing’ The Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style”, Braudy, Leo and Marshall Cohen, eds. Film Theory and Criticism, 6th Edition. (New York, Oxford University Press, 2004); 534-553
Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Barnes and Noble Classics, New York (2005)
Plan 9 from Outer Space, Dir. Wood Jr., Edward D., Reynold Pictures, 1959
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