The other day I was talking to a film major at NC State about the relationship between a movie’s success and its quality. As these types of conversations among film students at NC State tend to go, we all made several objective claims about what makes a movie good and why our view was clearly correct (typically we are aware of our snobbery). But for some reason, I left this conversation feeling like we had missed something and eventually I realized what it was. This is not an apologetic letter for the typical objective weight that film students tend to put on their criticism. I more or less stand by the idea that a film can be objectively judged. However, I realized that there is a great functionality to bad movies that are also successful that film students may not give them enough credit for.
When I think critically about a movie and try to judge it objectively, there are many things that I am trying to consider from technical work, whether the story and characters make sense and most importantly the film’s relationship to society. A lot of the film classes I have taken here at NC State deal with this idea of a film’s relationship to society and this is probably where I formed the idea that this was important. In talking with my fellow film students, I have observed that a lot of their criticisms rely on this concept. When using this idea to evaluate movies, everywhere on the scales of success and quality, our responses are typical.
Good movies, when made simple, come down to good movies that are successful and good movies that are not successful. When it comes to good movies that are successful, film students generally seem to acknowledge their quality but don’t seem to particularly like them. They are not “unique” enough. Where film students seem to think the best movies exist is in the second category of good movies that are unsuccessful. Film students, myself included, love these movies in part because when viewed through the lens of its relationship to society, they seem to have the most interesting and complicated insights.
Admittedly, I think it would be fair to say we also tend to like these movies because of the fact that they are different.
Bad movies, when made simple, come down to bad movies that are unsuccessful and bad movies that are successful, predictably. Bad movies that are unsuccessful tends to be the only category where most people agree with the film students to a significant degree. Everyone just accepts that these movies are bad and that’s the end of story. Bad movies that are successful, however, are where the biggest disagreements between film students and everyone else seem to exist. Film students love to point out the flaws in movies that everyone else enjoys (again, admittedly). Without going into reasons why this may be, if you talk to a film student about a popular movie that they don’t think is very good then you will see that this is true. Bad movies that are successful seem to really bother film students, myself included, and this is what our conversations (including the one referenced to at the beginning of this column) tend to be centered around. I think that this is unfair though, not because we are wrong to try to judge them objectively, but because when viewed through the lens of relationship to society these movies can tell us a lot, even if unintentional. A movie’s monetary success shows whether a group of people is interested in a movie and therefore, that movie’s ideas. Bad movies, just as powerfully as good movies, hold a mirror up to society and show what people want, what they are concerned about and what they think about. This does not mean that these movies are necessarily “good”, but they should at least be given credit for the function they can serve those who study film. This is something that I have never heard talked about in any of my film classes, though it should be. Ultimately, if you want to learn about a society through films, it may be better to pick ones based on success rather than quality.
