 A pirate impression that's so bad it's good? Hold on, I got this. NINAR METE! In this PBS Idea Channel episode, Mike Rugnetta, who's probably who I'd send to meet an alien species as ambassador of the human race, speculates on the nature of movies so bad that they're good. Cultural touchstones like The Room and Plan 9 from Outer Space, collectively known as NINAR from French. He asks, is it possible to deliberately create such a film, as in the case of Sharknado or Snakes on a Plane, or does the fundamental nature of NINAR require a sort of ignorance and hubris on the part of the creator to be truly great? It's an interesting question, and he does it better justice than I could. Requests applied for reasonably sound goes here, but I want to answer it by way of addressing the more general concept of so bad it's good. There's a particular sort of aesthetic appreciation for things that are good because they are so bad, because they are somehow exemplary of exactly how not to do something. The Darwin Awards, the DIY subreddit, the whole pantheon of NINAR films skewered by Mystery Science Theater 3000. These all tap into the same vein of aesthetic delight at creations that miss their intended mark by a wide margin. There's something seemingly paradoxical about that mode of thought. It's not ironic appreciation, a theatrical performance of enjoying something awful, something to get pleasure out of trolling pretentious people. There's a genuine sense of joy that we get from watching an utter disaster of human failure in a way that seems to clash with how we normally think of aesthetic excellence. How is it even possible for a work to be so bad that it's good? Isn't that a total contradiction? One of the best descriptions of the phenomenon was Susan Sontag's 1964 essay, Notes on Camp, written as a series of numbered paragraphs clearly intended to parody trendy academic papers of the time. Sontag pulls together numerous ideas related to the aesthetic appreciation of bad stuff under the heading of camp. Many of her examples are relics of her time, you probably wouldn't think of Art Nouveau as campy, but she really nails her characterization of the idea and sketches an insightful framework for interpreting the practice as detached aesthetic hedonism, a playful indulgence in style divorced from substance, enjoyed purely for the sake of enjoyment. Sontag argues that the usual high-brow appreciation of art incorporates some sort of moralizing aspect. As in, good art isn't just enjoyable, it does certain things that are morally good with the quality of its content. It elevates the art form. It demonstrates new heights of technical mastery or genius. It deliberately achieves a particular goal of expression or audacious excellence. As she puts it, truth, beauty, and seriousness. That rubric can be intentionally subverted as with punk music or postmodern art, but there is always some reference to a moralistic underpinning of what the artist is choosing not to do. Rather than playing to these moral touchstones or trying to invert them in some fashion, camp creates an entirely new standard of appreciation, a gleeful, sensuous celebration of style. Traditionally, good art has a sort of fractal quality, where close examination and thought is rewarded, where peeling back layers reveals more of the same underneath. You can dissect Macbeth as a beautiful poem, or a political commentary, or a moneymaker designed to sell seats. And at every level, you can see a sort of design and consideration for detail that's really impressive, as though Shakespeare is peering back at you from the depths of your analysis and saying, yeah, I thought of that too. That is coherence of style, a harmonious resonance of the elements that make up a work of art. And while it's a feature of great works, those characterized as camp also have it. Every single aspect of the room screams of total movie making incompetence. The script, the pacing, the plot, the cinematography, the music, every which way you turn it, it is a total failure of a movie, all the way down. That harmony includes the sincerity of its creator. If Tommy Wiseau had set out to make a terrible movie, it wouldn't resonate in the same way as the perfect dumpster fire of a film, a staggering awe-inspiring mistake. For Sontag, traditional measures of artistic merit are frequently used as a lead disjustification for dismissing things as not fit for appreciation, as a filter for fun. She invokes an analogy of an overbred aristocratic 19th century dandy, whose sensibilities are so refined that he's disdainful or bored by anything that isn't the absolute best. Oh, you're drinking that? I'm sorry, I simply can't force myself to choke down anything that hasn't been aged for more than a decade or so in oak. But you enjoy. Of course, although it's a different flavor, there's an element of aesthetic elitism in the recognition of camp, too. It's not just a matter of rejecting the whole idea of good art and bad art, far from it. The ability to distinguish good camp from simply not great art is still a sign of refined judgment and aesthetic sensitivity. But she notes that while the traditional framework looks for reasons not to enjoy something, a fan of camp is always searching for something amusing in everything, regardless of its quality. While a dandy would storm out of a screening of the room and ask for his money back, a person who is a connoisseur of camp who can appreciate the sort of internal harmony, even in awful things, might cover their mouth in awe and whisper, oh god, it's so beautiful. That same appreciation of coherence of style, divorced from moral considerations, can be seen as the driving force behind our love of these other things that might not be thought of as art per se. The Darwin Awards aren't celebrating human stupidity as such. I think just about anyone would agree that the depths and implications of it are terrifying, not hilarious. But they do celebrate just how perfectly these individuals captured the essence of that stupidity. DIY's horrifying craft projects are wasteful and ugly and uninspired and useless, and fantastic examples of that paradigm. So, if she were to answer the original question from PBS Idea Channel's episode five years ago, Sontag would draw a clear distinction between films created with the intent to mimic bad movies and Nenar themselves, because although they can both be stylistically coherent in their own ways, they can never be stylistically resonant in the same way. In her essay, she actually makes a distinction between self-aware and pure camp, saying, in naive or pure camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Sharknado has many things, but that isn't one of them. What do you think? Is the coherence of style a good explanation for what makes something camp instead of just bad? What's the best example you can think of for a thing that's so bad that it's good? Does Sontag's criterion fit? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to ball ball subscribe, like, share, and don't stop dunking.