Paracinema

Learned a new word yesterday, though I’m surprised I hadn’t come across it before. I was on Reddit and someone posted a three-year-old video from Vox about The Room, the 2003 cult film made by Tommy Wiseau that has played in theaters as a midnight movie to ironic audiences for many years. The Room has been referred to as “trash cinema” (see, for example, K. Sarkhosh, W. Menninghaus, Enjoying trash films: Underlying features, viewing stances, and experiential response dimensions, Poetics (2016)), a term which is not well-defined but generally refers to low budget films that are also amateurishly made. Low-budget is one thing; amateurish is another. The Room has been described, by Tom Bissell, cowriter of The Disaster Artist, an account of its creation, in this way (in the Vox video):

It is like a movie made by an alien who has never seen a movie, but has had movies thoroughly explained to him. There's not often that a work of film has every creative decision that's made in it on a moment-by-moment basis seemingly be the wrong one.

I take some issue with the word “thoroughly” here, but never mind. The Room is such garbage I don’t even particularly find it enjoyable except in bits and pieces—but it is a fascinating and inexplicable disaster. If one set out, on purpose, to make the worst film ever made it would be impossible to do it as well (badly) as Tommy Wiseau did.

But my new word wasn’t trash cinema but paracinema. Paracinema is a term that came from an article in the journal Screen by Jeffrey Sconce, in which he describes the term like this:

As a most elastic textual category, paracinema would include entries from such seemingly disparate subgenres as ‘badfilm’, splatterpunk, ‘mondo’ films, sword and sandal epics, Elvis flicks, government hygiene films, Japanese monster movies, beach-party musicals, and just about every other historical manifestation of exploitation cinema from juvenile delinquency documentaries to soft-core pornography. Paracinema is thus less a distinct group of films than a particular reading protocol, a counter-aesthetic turned subcultural sensibility devoted to all manner of cultural detritus. In short, the explicit manifesto of paracinematic culture is to valorize all forms of cinematic ‘trash’, whether such films have been either explicitly rejected or simply ignored by legitimate film culture. In doing so, paracinema represents the most developed and dedicated of cinephilic subcultures ever to worship at ‘the temple of schlock’.

(Sconce, Jeffrey. "‘Trashing’ the academy: taste, excess, and an emerging politics of cinematic style." Screen 36.4 (1995): 371-393.)

As you can see, this explanation is from 1995, whereas The Room and YouTube appeared in the following decade, so Sconce is doing a summing up of a previous era of “cinephilic subculture,” but the term is still relevant. He would probably put The Room in the subcategory of “badfilm,” which includes films made so ineptly as to be entertaining (“so bad it’s good”). Badfilm, though, has an Urban Dictionary definition that uses the term in reference to Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn (1987), which is obviously an insane misuse of the word. That film is a fucking masterpiece.

Given that the partial list of paracinematic forms in Sconce is explicitly incomplete, and must be, since new forms emerge regularly, one might ask if it wouldn’t be easier to simply list the cinematic forms, since so many types of moving image media can be considered para-, that is, beyond or alongside or irregular. But then, a number of generic forms of cinema (horror, beach party, Elvis, daikaiju) seem to be considerable as paracinema, too. Thus "paracinema” as a “reading protocol” rather than a “distinct group of films.” That protocol, though, is not limited to camp readings—it’s not just about movies that are so bad they’re good—but also includes art films that stand apart from mainstream cinematic norms and many other forms that might be successful on their own terms, but can be considered a “counter-cinema” in some way.

Once again, we’ve returned to the topic of the way we read films. Regarding paracinema, it seems as though we’re talking about a political stance—that is, to read a text as though it were outside of whatever the cinematic norms or tastes of the day happen to be. Given how popular culture has reprocessed many of these hitherto outré objects as texts for ironic enjoyment, the very idea of norms is hard to grasp.