Paracinema and Internet Culture

I have begun, somewhat systematically, to study my way through the essays and books I’ve collected in response to my interest in camp readings of films. I am reading more or less chronologically the shorter works, for starters, though I’ll circle back to Sontag separately. I’ve read a couple of essays about applying reader response criticism practices to film studies. Reader response, in a nutshell, says that each reader performs the text, to some degree in collaboration with the author, which means that the text does not have a fixed meaning, but shifts in meaning dependent on the reading (performing) process and the reader herself. I found these essays when I learned about reader response (in this book) and became curious about whether teachers were using it with film texts. Short answer; yes. In fact, some think reader response works particularly well with film, because of the “dynamism” of film, its ever-changing nature (given the technology of film, the uses of editing, the multivalent meanings of visual information etc.).

Next, I took another look at Jeffrey Sconce’s mid-nineties exploration of what he calls “paracinema.” It’s a thorough and entertaining description of a cinematic subculture made up of educated viewers who were giving new value to films that were rarely considered in academia. In doing so, such viewers were creating alternative canons and a counter-aesthetic to those that prevailed at the time. This activity was critical of an orthodoxy of “good” and “bad” film categories and often located subversive politics and subcultural identities in the films of the anti-canon. Sconce acknowledges that the celebration of the “badfilm” aesthetic had gone mainstream as he was writing with, for example, Mystery Science Theater 3000 and other projects.

What occurred to me was that the “paracinematic aesthetic,” appreciated by devotees of “bad” movies (and other ephemeral media), forms the basis for a lot of what we recognize today as “Internet culture.” Consider the “reading (performance)” of the trapped audience of MST3K. Their sarcastic commentary and role-play riffing while viewing a stream of terrible films is a performance of the reading/performance enacted by paracinema fans who appreciate the works for their crimes against cinematic norms. There is a throughline from the popularization of this type of “reading” of cinematic/televisual texts to the chaotic non-sequiturs of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, which aired in the late-nineties. That show remixed the cartoon elements of the 1960s Saturday morning superhero series, Space Ghost, into a surreal comedy talk show. This recycling of an older pop culture artifact into a decontextualized ironic object exemplified the kitschy post-modern comedy culture of Generation X, coming of age; and Space Ghost Coast to Coast led directly to the Adult Swim block on the Cartoon Network.

Adult Swim is the mature-themed late-night segment of the Cartoon Network. It’s still running nearly 20 years after its launch (which was in early September, 2001, in retrospect a savagely ironic launch-month for a bizarro laugh factory that would indelibly reshape comedy for an era when all bets were off). The lineup of shows featured on AS has changed over the years, but, to sum up—from Wikipedia:

Adult Swim has frequently aired adult animation features, mockumentaries, sketch comedy, and pilots. The block's shows are known for their sexual themes, frank sexual discussion, nudity, strong language, and graphic violence. Many of its programs are aesthetically experimental, transgressive, improvised, and surrealist in nature. Adult Swim has contracted with various studios known for their productions in absurd and shock comedy.

Adult Swim gave us, to cite one example, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! which

features surreal and often satirical humor (at points anti-humor and cringe comedy), public-access television-style musical acts, bizarre faux-commercials with a unique editing and special effects style by Doug Lussenhop to make the show appear camp.

Naturally, I take some issue with the last phrase here—is “appearing camp” somehow different from “camp?” But the raw material for the show (which ran from 2007-2010) was the type of paracinematic detritus Sconce writes about—or, rather, the imitation of that junk; in other words, the show is stewed in the paracinematic aesthetic.

At the same time, the World Wide Web was evolving into a massive self-publishing platform. The rise of meme culture came about concurrently—Know Your Meme started in 2007 as well—and along with it the creation of new forms of media continued on YouTube and other platforms. Today, when my children show me certain YouTube videos, I can barely comprehend what I’m watching—for example, YTP—but I understand enough to see the paracinematic aesthetic blooming in a new garden.