Bad

Awesome 1 1 1 4 1 3 6 2 6 6 10 4 26 1 21 3 5 1 1 Lame

Good

As you can see, it is quite linear. That this would be the case is not too surprising, given that I started off by saying that I didn't really get the distinction between the two axes; when I inquired about it, I was told flat-out that it wouldn't be meaningful to me. And sure enough, with a couple of exceptions (the big outlier is Tron), when I asked myself questions such as, "Now I gave this a three, but what is it really?", the answer was that, well, it was a three! Which is why I gave it a three! I generally don't disagree with my own internal critic very much. In the immortal words of Butt-head, I don't like stuff that sucks.

But though that is meant to be a tautology, it often seems like a minority opinion! As a member of Generation X, I am intimately familiar with Fonzie lunchboxes and William Shatner covers of Elton John songs and all the other cultural detritus that's supposed to be so much fun — I still know some people who seem incapable of enjoying things other than ironically. Me, I'm with this guy: unintentional comedy just doesn't do it for me, not anymore. But recently I have learned that there is another side to this phenomenon I hadn't considered.

Vern writes some of the most insightful and (intentionally) hilarious political screeds and movie reviews I've ever read. Unfortunately, most of his reviews are of obscure blaxploitation and horror and martial arts movies in which I have no interest. A while back he reviewed Snakes on a Plane. In his review, he says that the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon was distressing to him because the Internet buzz suggested that people were going to go see it in order to laugh at how stupid it was. Vern, in a revelation to me, said that, on the contrary, he and his friends were excited about the movie because it sounded like a genuinely fun premise. I could quote the whole thing, but here's the key line: "To me alot of times what society calls 'so bad it's good' I just call 'good.'" I too disdain the "so bad it's good" category, but I would just use "bad." And I am guessing that the scatterplot enthusiasts would say we're both wrong and that the proper word is "awesome": not good, or bad, but orthogonal to traditional notions of quality.

Now here's the part I find most interesting. When I asked about the meaning of "awesome," the quick answer I received was, "Zombie armies. Stupid fun." Vern would probably argue that zombie armies are fun but not stupid; I find them stupid but not fun. Where did we pick up our opinions?

I don't like zombie armies. I like a quality narrative. Appreciating one does not preclude appreciating the other; one reason I read Vern is that he appreciates both. But I didn't always appreciate quality — I had to learn how, in school and elsewhere. I had to learn how to pick up on subtle character touches. I had to learn what differentiates the right word in a joke from its second cousin. I had to learn enough about the wider world and gather enough life experience for the themes in literature to mean something to me. And it worked — in high school I read books such as The Great Gatsby and White Noise and they did absolutely nothing for me, but when I read them again as an adult I genuinely found them hugely enjoyable. (I say "genuinely" because of course there's always the issue of cultural capital at work here. I had a Shakespeare prof once who was endlessly irked when he'd go to a play and hear audience members chuckling at every mention of "horns." "Great," he'd grumble in class, "so you took an undergrad course and learned that 'horns' mean cuckoldry. So what? You weren't born in the sixteenth century — do you actually find this amusing? Really? Seriously, find me someone who thinks that 'he has horns because his wife is cheating on him' is funny. Stop laughing just to show off!" The problem is that there are a lot of people who take this a step further and assume that anyone who likes highbrow material must be showing off. They're wrong.)

I would submit that a love of zombie armies and kung fu and unironic snakes on an unironic plane is also learned. I mean, whenever I find myself liking something that I know is basically stupid, figuring out why tends to become the focus of my writeup. In the case of Tron, for instance, I liked it not because Recognizers are intrinsically "awesome" — they're not — but because the dawn of the computer age is where I spent my childhood. Playing Marble Madness is where I learned to love landscapes composed of meshes of squares. So those of you whose scatterplots are not straight lines, those of you for whom the appearance of a zombie army is a reason to hit VOLUME ⇑ instead of POWER... where did you learn to stop worrying about quality and love these bombs?

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