A Dark Obsession

I have a problem.

Inklings of it first crept into my waking mind some months ago, as I slid a copy of “Next” into my DVD player.  It came as a kind of itch, buried in the depths of my brain, a vague sense that something in my life wasn’t right. 

I next felt this sensation while watching “Left Behind.”  The feeling still had no name, and no fixed identity.  It floated freely within me, this nebulous unease, and I had begun to think of it as a newly developed aspect of my personality.

Only a handful of weeks ago I was watching “The Room” when I suddenly perceived a new dimension to this presence.  It had a distinctly puritanical character, by which I mean it was composed largely of the feeling of “wrongness” and the intense desire to set things right.

Then it struck me.  The full force of it exploded in my mind, flooding my consciousness with a wailing, irrefutable truth:

While I was watching “Next” I could have been watching “Touch of Evil.”  While “Left Behind” was vomiting forth from my television in wave after wave of inanity, I could have been bathing myself in the warm, clean waters of “Ikiru.”  While “The Room” was doing things to my mind that could possibly be irreparable, I could have been watching any number of films by Welles, Kurosawa, Bergman, or Truffaut.  I could even have been watching any of the silent classics that sit inert on my shelf, purchased on impulse and then never watched.

I was deliberately watching bad movies, while ignoring ones that I had reason to believe would actually be good.  I had become a cinematic coprophage, gleefully consuming offal, and delighting in the bitter, hateful taste.

The feeling that had plagued me these last months was the very essence of good taste, bursting free from some psychic prison built out of improbable action sequences, shallow characterization, plot stupidity, murky cinematography, and bad writing.  It rose out of me like a fire, and I can feel it battling the dark presence that drives me to fill my eyes with the polluted light of bad cinema.

This monstrous presence has a terrible power, and I am not sure that my better nature will prevail.  I have not seen “Aguirre: the Wrath of God,” but I have seen “Twilight.”  I have watched the entire oeuvre of Uwe Boll, when even the weakest works of Hitchcock would be like dreams made real by comparison.

I haven’t watched “Battleship Potempkin” yet.  It’s only 75 minutes long.

In a few hours I’m going to watch “Push.”  I think it will be awful.  No.  No, I hope it will be awful.  If I have any power over this beast at all, I will watch “The Third Man” instead.  I feel a great heat that threatens to consume my body, and I know that it is born from the fire of conflict between these two aspects.

There must be a balance.  Part of the joy of cinema is, after all, stimulation.  Must every flim experience be an artistic enthusiasmos?  Is there no place for disgust, hatred, or even schaenfreude toward a job poorly done?

God help me, but the trash calls out.  Like a sleazy carnival barker, it offers me access to a world of intellectual outrages that give me every bit as much pleasure as great art.

After all, if you never watch a truly terrible movie, how will you ever recognize a great one?