Rabbit Hole

We say “went down a rabbit hole” when we chase an idea as far as we can, through many twists and turns and sub-topics and related ideas before we look up and realize three hours have passed. The idiom seems to have originated with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), although we have shorn some of the original connotation of chaos and confusion from the usage. Now we talk about Wikipedia rabbit holes—but perhaps we should use the word “warren,” to suggest the multi-path hyperlinked approach to acquiring information familiar in the “Internet Age,” rather than the original idea of falling, falling, falling into some other place.

I have been exploring a warren of ideas this year having to do with my experiences watching films. Movies, for me, are not just entertainment. They are the realm of my greatest curiosity, my lifelong study, and I am interested, more or less, in every aspect of the moving-image media. David Thomson refers to attempting to comprehend the “whole equation” of the movies—aesthetic, historical, industrial considerations; artistic movements, individual and group practitioners, politics; style, meaning, intention, authorship—the whole shebang. This resonates for me because I have many times felt myself reaching for that (not achievable) totality of understanding.

It’s a topic I find inexhaustibly interesting, which is something of a problem when I want to focus on a more narrow, at-least-theoretically comprehensible sub-category. This fall my thoughts have been coalescing around an investigation of how I watch certain horror movies. I want here to begin to summarize my circuitous path so far, in terms of which texts I’ve accumulated, and what I’ve understood to this point.

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When I was in high school, I tried writing a horror spoof I called Slasher Basher Dude. For research, I watched the Friday the 13th movies—at that time, there were 8 of them. It was memorable in the sense that I remember doing it, but many years later I had little specific memory of the individual films. This is not surprising, because they are almost perversely repetitive. So this October, I watched them again. I bought the new 40th Anniversary boxset.

There’s quite a cult around these films, which the series’ longevity nourishes, but they are not “good” movies in the usual way that people mean that (a whole other warren). For a nigh-omnivorous movie nerd, however, “goodness” matters very little. A cultural phenomenon is a cultural phenomenon even if it’s bad, and there are many fractions of that “whole equation” that make it worth watching. As I watched and formed adult-film-professor reactions to each film, I began to think about how to describe the experience of enjoying a low-budget slasher film, particularly after rewatching the fourth movie, called The Final Chapter, which became my personal favorite of the series.

Although I am considering cheap horror films at the moment—and I am well-aware that there are many viewers who steer well-clear of the genre—I also think I’m looking into something with much broader application. The thrust of my investigation is What am I doing when I watch a “bad” movie that contributes to my enjoyment beyond what the movie perhaps “deserves” on its own terms?

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Camp is part of the equation, but that is apparently a famously complex topic. I'm looking at camp, satire, spectatorship; possibly poststructuralism. Just trying to build up some knowledge and inspiration. Read Sontag's essay, Notes on Camp. Everyone refers to it constantly. It's brilliant and useful but also maddeningly inconclusive.

I am trying to understand a viewer's experience, my own, presumably, but maybe it's a larger category. It's about how narratives that are stupid in a particular way, a kind of productive way, work as more sophisticated entertainments than intended (multi-layered), not only in ways that would be considered camp, strictly speaking (though it’s evidently not possible to speak strictly vis-a-vis camp), but in other ways that are more like satire or better understood as pastiche, for example. Adding to that supra-textual layers of meaning, such as production circumstances, the meanings of particular actors and production workers or groups of actors and production workers, as this affects interpretation. An example of this can occur in experiencing Weinstein-related films in the post-MeToo era. There's a whole lot to chew on there already; the real goal of this is to talk about how these intersecting "camps" ("poses"), if you will, relate to the viewer's pleasure and the text's aesthetic success.