Fun with a Purpose
I watched Delta Farce. That's the movie starring Larry the Cable Guy. That's the movie known for being an irredeemable collection of crude slapstick, bodily function gags, and gay stereotypes. It has a 3% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Not only that, I own Delta Farce. I spent a whole five dollars on it. I saw it sitting on the discount rack at Blockbuster and, giddy with the heady power of consumer choice, I purchased it.
Having now seen it, I think I can say with only a slight amount of disingenuousness that it's one of the most provocative films I've seen this year. The film does not, of course, provide enlightening discourse or set forth any new ideas. It does not shake the foundations of cinema or provide probing insight into the human condition. It is by any reasonable standard a terrible film, and I would be surprised if anybody remembered the movie in ten years - even myself, and I'm writing a fucking essay about it.
The film is, however, almost disturbingly meaningless. It is Absurd. There is no point, from conception to final product, that this film was justified. It is an artistic, critical, and financial failure. It's only arguable worth is as a film that is "so bad it's good," but even that claim is dubious as bad comedy is far less tolerable than bad drama. And so, having lost five dollars and 90 minutes of my time, I was left with the nagging question: why? Why did I watch that? What did I gain? What did I lose?
This is hardly the first bad movie I've ever seen, or even watched on purpose. I've seen the classic Plan 9 from Outer Space. I've seen both Dungeons & Dragons movies. I've seen Spider-Man 3. Most people at some point sit down to watch a bad movie, if only to participate in the millennia-old tradition of heckling. And, in the past, I could buy that. That was the only excuse I needed whenever I felt like feeling superior to something else. But Delta Farce, for whatever reason, defied that justification. I did not walk away feeling better about myself. I walked away feeling strangely unsettled. I found myself unable to reconcile my Delta Farce experience.
It felt like a waste of time in the truest sense, and it raised the larger question: are all such movies wastes of time? When I walk out of a theatre after a one-star experience, can I say that I have learned anything? Did the movie have any sort of value? Am I a better person having seen that? Or was it a couple of hours that I will never get back - hours that would have been more productive doing anything else, hours that I will regret on my deathbed, cursing God and saying, "If only I had spent more time with my family instead of watching In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale!"
Such is the existential crisis Delta Farce inflicted upon me. All of a sudden I found myself trying to justify the intentional viewing of the worst movies I've ever seen, something which nobody ought to have to do. Such viewings should be little more than the temporary lapse of judgment and taste - a brief excursion into the heart and mind of an antigenius. You shouldn't have to justify this; it should just happen. Afterwards, you do not wonder why that movie exists or how it exists - it just does. You accept it and move on.
Unable to move on, however, I tried to rationalize why an otherwise rational being would purchase and watch Delta Farce. Three answers immediately came to mind.
The first answer: comedy. It is fun to make fun of a bad movie. For most people, this might be all of the justification they need. But does this really answer any questions? Why am I watching this instead of a real comedy? What unique experience does Delta Farce bring to the table?
The second: morbid curiosity. One sees a film like Delta Farce and the mind boggles. What is this film? Where did it come from? What in this film could possibly occupy ninety minutes? Much as a young child learns that fire is hot by unknowingly approaching an open flame, so too was I entranced by this DVD case.
The third: perspective. One can't understand a critical scale without experiencing the one-star movies in addition to the five-stars. This seems the most rational answer so far, but also insincere. This never entered my mind when I bought the movie; it never entered my mind while I was watching; and now, afterwards, I cannot truly say that Delta Farce provided any sort of meaningful perspective. I don't know any more about film than I did before. Arguably, I know less.
In addition to the above three items, there is still the possibility that there is no "rational" explanation for why I would watch Delta Farce. Perhaps this is a problem without a solution. Perhaps we have to accept Delta Farce as nothing more than a great cinematic injustice: shameful and inexplicable. Of course, this could arguably be the film's value: as a primer in nihilism.
Thankfully, I was allowed to reject nihilism for the time being and instead embrace an answer brought to me by Highlights for Children. For those unfamiliar, Highlights is an educational magazine designed for boys and girls, and is perhaps most notably the birthplace of Goofus & Gallant. In particular, though, Highlights had a recurring feature where the back cover would be a near copy of the front cover, but with a number of small adjustments. Elements of the front cover would be twisted or changed and readers were encouraged to spot the differences. It was a puzzle of sorts, designed to give bored youths something to do while sitting in the waiting room at the dentist.
More than anything, this is what Delta Farce and other such movies are to me: they are cruel parodies of film. It is as if someone took a normal movie and shifted everything, tweaking dialogue, recasting key characters. Like the back of a Highlights magazine, we are invited to identify what is different and what has gone wrong. You are not supposed to judge this movie on its own merits; rather, it is a test designed to see whether you know what a real movie looks like, to see how well you can remember all of the elements of film that have been so grossly misused.
Consider this scene from Delta Farce: Larry and his pals are trying to sleep in a military plane headed for Iraq, but are having difficultly falling asleep amongst all of the other soldiers. They make their way to the rear of the plane and all squeeze into a Humvee, which appears to suit their needs. However, a moment later, one of them farts, and Larry the Cable Guy exclaims, "Who farted?"
End scene.
It hardly needs to be said that fart jokes are very, very rarely funny, but beyond that there is even something more fundamentally wrong with this scene: there is no joke. "Who farted?" is not a punchline. In fact, it is so not a punchline that I was genuinely confused when the scene ended. I thought, "Hold on! Surely that scene didn't end there? Nobody had even made a joke! This purports to be a comedy, right?" Unfortunately, I was left to conclude that the writers had actually gotten to that point in their writing and stopped. It was as if they had taken a fart joke from some other, slightly superior film, and merely snipped a bit of dialogue.
There are moments like that throughout the film, and throughout many such films, if "films" they can be called. I prefer the term "challenge," as that is I how I feel: challenged. Challenged first to endure the entire film, and challenged by any given scene to find out exactly what went wrong. And like the back of a Highlights, there is not just one thing wrong, there are many; and the more you can identify, the better, because it really is like a test, and this is a test you really, really want to pass.
Not to belabor the Highlights comparison, but I should mention that the magazine's slogan - "Fun with a purpose" - fits here too. Let's not forget that these movies are fun, if unintentionally. I certainly don't want to suck what enjoyment someone can actually find out of Delta Farce. But it also has a purpose. It's good to sit down and watch one of these movies every now and then. Treat it like a pop quiz, something to keep you on your toes, to make sure that all of that Truffaut hasn't made you lazy.
Not only that, I own Delta Farce. I spent a whole five dollars on it. I saw it sitting on the discount rack at Blockbuster and, giddy with the heady power of consumer choice, I purchased it.
Having now seen it, I think I can say with only a slight amount of disingenuousness that it's one of the most provocative films I've seen this year. The film does not, of course, provide enlightening discourse or set forth any new ideas. It does not shake the foundations of cinema or provide probing insight into the human condition. It is by any reasonable standard a terrible film, and I would be surprised if anybody remembered the movie in ten years - even myself, and I'm writing a fucking essay about it.
The film is, however, almost disturbingly meaningless. It is Absurd. There is no point, from conception to final product, that this film was justified. It is an artistic, critical, and financial failure. It's only arguable worth is as a film that is "so bad it's good," but even that claim is dubious as bad comedy is far less tolerable than bad drama. And so, having lost five dollars and 90 minutes of my time, I was left with the nagging question: why? Why did I watch that? What did I gain? What did I lose?
This is hardly the first bad movie I've ever seen, or even watched on purpose. I've seen the classic Plan 9 from Outer Space. I've seen both Dungeons & Dragons movies. I've seen Spider-Man 3. Most people at some point sit down to watch a bad movie, if only to participate in the millennia-old tradition of heckling. And, in the past, I could buy that. That was the only excuse I needed whenever I felt like feeling superior to something else. But Delta Farce, for whatever reason, defied that justification. I did not walk away feeling better about myself. I walked away feeling strangely unsettled. I found myself unable to reconcile my Delta Farce experience.
It felt like a waste of time in the truest sense, and it raised the larger question: are all such movies wastes of time? When I walk out of a theatre after a one-star experience, can I say that I have learned anything? Did the movie have any sort of value? Am I a better person having seen that? Or was it a couple of hours that I will never get back - hours that would have been more productive doing anything else, hours that I will regret on my deathbed, cursing God and saying, "If only I had spent more time with my family instead of watching In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale!"
Such is the existential crisis Delta Farce inflicted upon me. All of a sudden I found myself trying to justify the intentional viewing of the worst movies I've ever seen, something which nobody ought to have to do. Such viewings should be little more than the temporary lapse of judgment and taste - a brief excursion into the heart and mind of an antigenius. You shouldn't have to justify this; it should just happen. Afterwards, you do not wonder why that movie exists or how it exists - it just does. You accept it and move on.
Unable to move on, however, I tried to rationalize why an otherwise rational being would purchase and watch Delta Farce. Three answers immediately came to mind.
The first answer: comedy. It is fun to make fun of a bad movie. For most people, this might be all of the justification they need. But does this really answer any questions? Why am I watching this instead of a real comedy? What unique experience does Delta Farce bring to the table?
The second: morbid curiosity. One sees a film like Delta Farce and the mind boggles. What is this film? Where did it come from? What in this film could possibly occupy ninety minutes? Much as a young child learns that fire is hot by unknowingly approaching an open flame, so too was I entranced by this DVD case.
The third: perspective. One can't understand a critical scale without experiencing the one-star movies in addition to the five-stars. This seems the most rational answer so far, but also insincere. This never entered my mind when I bought the movie; it never entered my mind while I was watching; and now, afterwards, I cannot truly say that Delta Farce provided any sort of meaningful perspective. I don't know any more about film than I did before. Arguably, I know less.
In addition to the above three items, there is still the possibility that there is no "rational" explanation for why I would watch Delta Farce. Perhaps this is a problem without a solution. Perhaps we have to accept Delta Farce as nothing more than a great cinematic injustice: shameful and inexplicable. Of course, this could arguably be the film's value: as a primer in nihilism.
Thankfully, I was allowed to reject nihilism for the time being and instead embrace an answer brought to me by Highlights for Children. For those unfamiliar, Highlights is an educational magazine designed for boys and girls, and is perhaps most notably the birthplace of Goofus & Gallant. In particular, though, Highlights had a recurring feature where the back cover would be a near copy of the front cover, but with a number of small adjustments. Elements of the front cover would be twisted or changed and readers were encouraged to spot the differences. It was a puzzle of sorts, designed to give bored youths something to do while sitting in the waiting room at the dentist.
More than anything, this is what Delta Farce and other such movies are to me: they are cruel parodies of film. It is as if someone took a normal movie and shifted everything, tweaking dialogue, recasting key characters. Like the back of a Highlights magazine, we are invited to identify what is different and what has gone wrong. You are not supposed to judge this movie on its own merits; rather, it is a test designed to see whether you know what a real movie looks like, to see how well you can remember all of the elements of film that have been so grossly misused.
Consider this scene from Delta Farce: Larry and his pals are trying to sleep in a military plane headed for Iraq, but are having difficultly falling asleep amongst all of the other soldiers. They make their way to the rear of the plane and all squeeze into a Humvee, which appears to suit their needs. However, a moment later, one of them farts, and Larry the Cable Guy exclaims, "Who farted?"
End scene.
It hardly needs to be said that fart jokes are very, very rarely funny, but beyond that there is even something more fundamentally wrong with this scene: there is no joke. "Who farted?" is not a punchline. In fact, it is so not a punchline that I was genuinely confused when the scene ended. I thought, "Hold on! Surely that scene didn't end there? Nobody had even made a joke! This purports to be a comedy, right?" Unfortunately, I was left to conclude that the writers had actually gotten to that point in their writing and stopped. It was as if they had taken a fart joke from some other, slightly superior film, and merely snipped a bit of dialogue.
There are moments like that throughout the film, and throughout many such films, if "films" they can be called. I prefer the term "challenge," as that is I how I feel: challenged. Challenged first to endure the entire film, and challenged by any given scene to find out exactly what went wrong. And like the back of a Highlights, there is not just one thing wrong, there are many; and the more you can identify, the better, because it really is like a test, and this is a test you really, really want to pass.
Not to belabor the Highlights comparison, but I should mention that the magazine's slogan - "Fun with a purpose" - fits here too. Let's not forget that these movies are fun, if unintentionally. I certainly don't want to suck what enjoyment someone can actually find out of Delta Farce. But it also has a purpose. It's good to sit down and watch one of these movies every now and then. Treat it like a pop quiz, something to keep you on your toes, to make sure that all of that Truffaut hasn't made you lazy.