(Like everyone else, I review the films I see on Letterboxd, but I write about movies as a general idea here.)
Zach Cregger has made a Resident Evil movie and it looks awesome. I’m a big fan of both Barbarian and Weapons and have always enjoyed the games when I’ve played them, so I’m pretty stoked on this. Will it win Best Picture? No. Will it be fun as hell? Probably.
Here’s the kicker, though: I love Resident Evil. I don’t mean the IP or any of the specific games. I mean the original movie from 2002 starring Milla Jovovich. I enjoy all of its 100-minute runtime. I can totally admit it’s 100% a bad movie. It’s a bad script with terrible acting and some really awful special effects. Yet still, I love it. It’s a guilty pleasure.
There’s been online discourse of late saying there’s ‘no such thing‘ as a guilty pleasure, or we need to take away the shame of it. (NPR even took a look at the brain science behind the concept.) I would argue the middle ground is where we should land as a society—yes, there are guilty pleasures, but we should also not fear any kind of public shame for indulging in them.
The innocence of guilt
I think a person should be proud to admit they have a guilty pleasure in art or culture because at least they’re admitting to understanding the idea that there are echelons of these things produced in terms of meaning and substance. If you say a Marvel movie is a guilty pleasure, you’re admitting you understand that it’s corporate franchise slop written at a fifth-grade level designed for nothing more than a dopamine rush, but you just don’t care. And that’s fine. It’s the understanding that matters.
I’m not always watching arthouse films. Hell, Bad Boys II is a piece of capitalist copganda and I love the shit out of it. But I know that Michael Bay wasn’t setting out to ask societal questions when he had Will Smith dodging boats in a Ferrari while speeding across a Miami bridge. He just wanted to throw boats at a car on a freeway.
However, I can say that movie, or Resident Evil, is a guilty pleasure because I know there are arthouse movies out there that Ask Serious Questions About Life, that exist because a filmmaker wanted to make us leave a theater with a new thought or idea about the world around us. I know that, while entertainment can be fun and relaxing, art and the concepts that creatives process during crafting a film or writing a novel is where we actually discover things about our humanity. Any moral quandary posed by a Marvel movie has been vetted by the CIA, while a David Lynch film will leave a person wondering what morality originates from.
Go for it
I have a friend here who is a very good, serious artist. I was at her place once staring at this massive painting of a tree she had splayed out across the floor of her entire apartment. In the corner, her television showed one of her streaming accounts and all of the ‘Recently Played’ section was filled with episodes of one reality show or another. I asked about it and she proudly said she loved it all—she could work with them on in the background, not having to worry about her attention being distracted by something heavy or some plot point she had to pay attention to. Also, they were just entertaining. It made sense.
She and I both know plenty about Serious Art, but also that there’s plenty of reasonable occasions to indulge in whatever bullshit might exist for the sole purpose of vapid entertainment. I tend to think the issue of American culture is that we’re increasingly being pushed in the direction of that void of uncaring, incompetent slop. Stephen Spielberg and John Williams teamed up to create one of the most iconic films ever made in Jurassic Park, which is now just a recurring CGI-fest of absurdity and nonsensical plot lines. Our entertainment is getting dumber, and our society is culturally worse for it.
I think the danger of a guilty pleasure lies in not knowing that it is one, or why it is one. To not understand that the new Avengers movie and Zodiac might both star Robert Downey Jr but the latter is a significantly different type of film is a kind of cultural illiteracy that I think we’ve generally waded into as a society, and instead of trying to right that wrong, we’re trying to take away any stigma about the shame of preference—even though that preference is nothing to be guilty about, but understanding the holistic nature of why culture matters to humanity is an inherently important and valuable part of life experience.
