Good Bad Taste, Bad Good Taste

Lately, I’ve been consuming a lot of “bad” media. Films, books, television shows considered flops or failures. I can’t really determine why I’m doing this. It might have something to do with finishing off another manuscript, and not wanting to be influenced by someone else’s brilliance, so instead I’ve defaulted to stuff that’s not great. Or maybe cultural detritus is all I’m able to let in at the moment. Whatever the reason, I’ve been thinking about taste a lot.

I think I have good taste. Others do too, if feedback on the pod and my writing is to be believed. The only book of Pierre Bourdieu’s I’ve read is Distinction, and in it he suggests that taste, judgement, and appreciation of art aren’t just about aesthetic objects, they’re about the person considering them. Artistic evaluation “classifies the classifier.” Accumulate enough “cultural capital” and you will be well-versed in what people in your society have decided is aesthetically worthy. This process is stratified along class lines: for example, the theatricality of monster trucks might be appreciated by a working class person while considered vulgar by an upper class person.

Bourdieu’s work is interesting but it’s too French and too pre-internet. As a result, it doesn’t really account for having “good bad taste,” as John Waters called it:

To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about. If someone vomits watching one of my films, it's like getting a standing ovation. But one must remember that there is such a thing as good bad taste and bad bad taste. it's easy to disgust someone; I could make a ninety-minute film of people getting their limbs hacked off, but this would only be bad bad taste and not very stylish or original. To understand bad taste one must have very good taste. Good bad taste can be creatively nauseating but must, at the same time, appeal to the especially twisted sense of humor, which is anything but universal.  

Ironic enjoyment of things that are overwrought, undercooked, campy or schlocky became a cool form of signalling around the 1960s and has only accelerated since. One shows they have good taste in their knowing revelry of bad taste.   This mainstreaming of "good bad taste," for which Waters could be said to be partially responsible, is all throughout culture now. Memes being a predominant example.

You can either appreciate the badness of something in this ironic, knowing way, or you can appreciate it in a “pedagogical” way. This is something writers and artists tend to do: we can “learn things” through abject aesthetic failures. Identifying and unpacking the terrible artistic decisions of others not only helps to refine our own taste, it also reveals to us common defects in thinking and creating that we might want to avoid. This seems more generous and generative, and it can be valuable. But this approach does have a tendency to sap out the joy of art, makes even fun stuff seem like homework.

So we’ve got ironic appreciation and didactic appreciation of “the bad.” But I’d like to suggest a third way: encounter the piece of art on your own terms. I don’t mean some vulgar sort of poptimism—ie “let people enjoy things!” More like resisting the evaluative frame others have made for you. When you sit down to watch a “bad” film, for example, you only know it is bad from reputation, not experience. And while reputation might tell you something about a work, you shouldn’t let the reputation precede your aesthetic entanglement with it.

Case in point: I recently rewatched Zardoz. If you haven’t heard of it, you’ve probably seen it in memes: the giant floating head saying penises are evil, Sean Connery in a red nappy and so on. I first saw this film at a friend’s “bad movie night.” Such events are always about ironic appreciation and there were lots of laughs that night about all the random shit that happens in the film. It was fun. But stepping back, discarding irony and just luxuriating in this film allows you to see its weird brilliance.

The film overwhelms you with so much idiosyncratic, phantasmagoric imagery and esoteric philosophising, a clear testament to how good the drugs were in Hollywood in the mid-seventies. Director John Boorman openly admitted he was under the influence while making the film: “I was doing a lot of drugs. Frankly, even I’m not entirely sure what parts of the movie are about.”

Two years prior, he’d made the critically and commercially successful film Deliverance. Famous for its malevolent banjo playing hicks and graphic scenes of male-on-male rape, it conjures the sort of realistic dread that’s absent from Zardoz. This film is much more ungrounded, spiralling off into ruminations on immortality, sex, and the universe. It is probably best if I don't give away too many plot details, mostly because the plot is not readily describable. The joy of this film is the pomposity of its dialogue and the surreality of its imagery. A gigantic floating head lectures barbarians wearing red nappies about the evils of sex and the virtues of firearms.   

The gun is good! The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life, and poisons the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals.  

Evidently, that 1970s cocaine makes you an uber-Freudian. Sean Connery plays our main character, one of the red-diapered barbarians. Later in the film, he infiltrates a compound of effete immortals, and looks into one of their magical crystals. "I sshee nothing inshide excshept my own perplexshity," he says, explaining the experience of watching this wonderfully bizarre film.   

It’s clear the drugs are doing a lot of the talking, but this unmoored, disembodied weirdness is its singular charm. It took me a good decade to really get everything I could out of this film, because I’d imbibed a critical consensus that was inaccurate. This is not an argument against criticism, it is an argument against imbibing too much of it. Take a sip of the critic’s cup, but chug the work of art. The arbiters of what’s good are often wrong, and their wrongess can infect the way you view things. Good bad taste is fun, but only if the work of art is genuinely bad.

Good art is always completely itself. Good taste must be the same.