So Bad It’s Good
The one kind of movie i love… are shitty so bad its good movies.
I fucking love neil breen. Hes amazing.
Twisted Pair is a dumb movie, but its so surreal. The confusion, the repetition, and the bizarre atmosphere just makes it a completely unique experience. and its hilarious too because its so fucking stupid. But at the same time, it also (attempts) to touch upon many of the themes that you see with the post modernists, about technological control, virtual reality, ect. along with religious themes such as those of cleansing the earth of evil from a foreign powerful god. But the assembly of these parts is hysterical and total madness. Its like a bizarre dream.
On top of this, so bad its good movies have the social connection. You aren’t just thinking of the movie as a separate universe but also the story of the people who produced it. it queers the boundary between movie and production.
When we watch a movie like District 9, everything is so carefully designed to make you think, oh yeah, this is the real world but with this and that. And so it opens the door to nitpicking, destroying the universe one board at a time to reveal its breakdown point. This is why things like Cinemasins are so popular with people, because this mode of interaction with film makes us so alienated from the actual art of it itself. The film is a UI hierarchy.
However, a movie like Plan 9 from Outer Space is so haphazard, that the audience is forced to interact with the media in a way that is not just channeled into their brains. They have to think, wait, why is any of this happening? Did they forget to shoot at night? For real? Ed Wood, what are you doing?
Think of the movie Glen or Glenda by Ed Wood. Haven’t seen this one, but I’ve heard its bizarrely bad. But at the same time, it also expresses Ed Wood’s homosexual and transgender desires quite blatantly on film, in the fucking 50’s! and even though it makes no sense, you have to start thinking about Wood as a person! It again, queers the boundary between production and film, while being queer itself!
So, A Love of UIQ is an interesting case because its not really “bad” its just goofy. and i think to myself, that its something precious, because like the so bad its good movies, it captures the writer so perfectly - even though its corny. Unlike any piece of his theoretical writing, Guattari suddenly becomes a human rather than an abstraction.
In some sense, I just want to see it. Imagine Red Letter Media reacting to it or something! But at the same time I’m glad it wasn’t, because look at our own response - people expected it to be realistic! I bet it was because of the high standards presented from elsewhere.
but at the same time, after you finish the screenplay, you now get it, don’t you. And somehow it transcends words.
I can get through it all on the condition that it keeps working beyond me,
I'm supported by someone who types, corrects, reads, waits. I will keep
giving these texts to Fanny and, at the end of the chain, Gilles. I can
tell they don't mean anything to him. The ideas, sure. But the trace, the
continuous-discontinuous text flow that guarantees my continuance,
obviously he doesn't see it like that. Or he does, but he's not interested.
He always has the oeuvre in mind. And for him this is all just notes, raw
material that disappears into the final assemblage. That's how I feel a
bit overcoded by Anti-Oedipus...You need support. Writing to Gilles is good
when it enters into the finality of the common project. But for me, what
matters, really, is not that. The energy source is in the whatever, the
mess. The ideas come after.
When it works I have a ton to spare, I don't give a shit, I lose it as fast
as it comes, and I get more. Active forgetting! What matters is interceding
when it doesn't work, when it spins off course, and the sentences are
fucked up, and the words disintegrate, and the spelling is total mayhem.
Strange feeling, when I was small, with some words. Their meaning would
disappear all of a sudden. Panic. And I have to make a text out of that
mess and it has to hold up: that is my fundamental schizo-analytic project.
Reconstruct myself in the artifice of the text. Amont other things, escape
the multiple incessant dependencies on images incarnating the "that's
how it goes!"
- Félix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus Papers
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