The Loving Ironic Cutification of Bad Movies through Ridicule
It might be thought that the many ridiculing jokes directed against a bad movie can only count as protest or rebellion, but—as paradoxical as it may sound—ridicule can actually be a way to soften our negative attitude toward the movie. Through ridicule, the bad movie becomes pitiable, and thus cutified, arousing affection for all of the movie’s quirks, defects, and imperfections. This would help explain the odd phenomenon of liking bad movies. It’s not only that we enjoy taking an ironic attitude toward a bad movie, but that the movie actually becomes more lovable through an ironic stance. The movie is demoted from “high art” status so that we can affectionately appreciate it as something flawed.
Even if the maker of bad movie wasn’t aspiring to high art, there are those who would not appreciate their movie being ridiculed (the star of Mitchell issued threats against MST3K, although the director of Hobgoblins is ultimately grateful for the attention). Regardless, the riffing can actively enhance the “charm” of the movie, as observed by David Ray Carter in his reflections on MST3K and cinemasochism. Carter also suggests that loving bad movies can be a form of protest against mainstream tastes, or that MST3K’s riffing effectively transforms the bad movie into a good comedy. This sounds right, but exploring the cutification of a bad movie through ridicule can do more to explain the special charm that emerges. So what does it mean for a bad movie to be cute, or for anything to be cute?
Academic analysis of cuteness has grown dramatically in recent decades, contemplating the smallness, vulnerability, imperfection, and baby-like features of that which is cute, such as Hello Kitty, teddy bears, or even Smart cars. Ethologist Konrad Lorenz traces the evolution of cuteness to the kindenschema (or baby schema) that inspires parents to take care of their helpless babies. That same sensitivity can be applied to other animals, adults, machines, and all kinds of everyday objects, from staplers that look like sweet, grinning alligators to pastel-colored tennis shoes. Daniel Harris and Sianne Ngai warn of the narcissistic and sadistic aspects of cutification that promote an “aestheticization of powerlessness,” but others reject an entirely negative assessment. Joshua Paul Dale highlights the sense of social affinity that cuteness generates. Also, Simon May emphasizes an absurd uncanniness of cuteness that is ambiguously endearing and transgressive by merging “two seemingly familiar realms—such as the masculine and the feminine, the child and the adult, the animal and the human, the menacing and the gentle” (102).
Some movies intentionally aim for cuteness (such as romances or animated movies for children), but just as animals in pet fail videos aren’t trying to be cute, bad movies such as Ed Wood, Jr.’s Plan 9 from Outer Space do not typically intend cuteness through aesthetic failure. The cuteness emerges in the audience realization that the movie cannot be taken entirely seriously. This by itself does not mean that the experience of the movie is intolerable. A distanced highbrow approach to aesthetic evaluation can instead be displaced by a more endearing attachment to the movie that lowers expectation and invites affectionate critique. MST3K achieves this through riffing. With a cutifying reorientation, we transition from the more stressful arena of serious art into the cozier, relaxed environment of play and fun. Susan Sontag, in her classic essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” detects a similar reorientation of taste in the “failed seriousness” of campy aesthetics, declaring that bad movies are “the greatest popularizer of Camp taste today.”
This cutification sets up an ambiguous relationship with the bad movie, allowing us to take it more seriously than we otherwise could have. Even though the movie is being exposed to a bombardment of ridicule through riffing, we also have to attend much more closely to the movie in order to identify all those specific funny aesthetic absurdities that merit irony, which shows care and concern. In his discussion of existential absurdity, Thomas Nagel also observes that an ironic stance toward our absurd lives is not a complete rejection of life, but rather an ambivalent attitude. Nagel would liken an ironic stance to the partial acceptance of someone as a friend even if you don’t entirely approve of their character. Similarly, if we learn that life is ultimately pointless, and thus absurd, we can still accept life through irony, while acknowledging the existential failure of meaning.
This raises another question about the parallel between the existential absurdities of life and the aesthetic absurdities of bad movies. If irony can be a way of cutifying aesthetic failures so that they are more lovable, can irony toward a flawed life have a similar endearing effect that confers positive value onto life? Samantha Vice suggests that Nagel’s ironic stance toward life actually signals a failure in virtue. She concludes that, if an absence of existential meaning in life is not being mourned, then this exhibits an improper relationship with value. But, contra Vice, Nagel’s irony doesn’t completely suppress appreciation of value. Instead, a clear-eyed view of life and its flaws promotes ambivalence rather than full-on pessimism. The seriousness of life gets demoted in our eyes because of its existential flaws, just as a bad movie gets demoted owing to its aesthetic flaws.
As a result, this diminution of the value of life can amount to existential cutification, freeing us from the stress of overly high standards while dampening the disappointment resulting from high expectations (for more on accepting existential imperfection through humor, see my paper “I’m Only Human”). Simon May observes that cute characters such as Hello Kitty or Winnie the Pooh are often aimless wanderers unconcerned about ultimate purpose and achievement. In this, we can see a close relationship between Pooh and Daoism, which was famously explored by Benjamin Hoff in The Tao of Pooh. Cutifying life can make life more loveable, inspiring much closer attention to the precious details of everyday existence. Watching MST3Kriff bad movies can then be seen as the cultivation of a properly ironic orientation toward life. Humor and cutification helps us to both endure absurdity and celebrate it at the same time.
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