Angelenos, did you know you can take classes at Vidiots in Santa Monica? It's true! You can! And you should! The cinetrix would say so even if her left-brain compatriot Anthony Miller wasn't one of the instructors. But he is, lucky for you. Do take the remainder of his What Is a Cult Film? class. [I wish I could.] Meetings tonight and the next two Mondays, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., cover transgressive, sociopolitical, and "oc-"cult movies, respectively.
Nobody likes movies like Teenagers from Outer Space or Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy save any loon sane enough to realize that the whole concept of Good Taste is concocted to keep people from having a good time, from reveling in a crassness that passeth all understanding. — "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies or, The Day the Airwaves Erupted," Creem (March, 1973), in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.
Would Lester Bangs steer you wrong? No. No he would not.
The boilerplate:
The "cult" movie is a peculiarly elusive and elastic category. Any genre which includes such films as Freaks, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Putney Swope, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Equinox, Performance, Two-Lane Blacktop, Harold and Maude, Pink Flamingos, The Holy Mountain, Phantom of the Paradise, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Eraserhead, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, Xanadu, The Evil Dead, Forbidden Zone, Liquid Sky, Repo Man, Heathers, They Live, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Wax, The Big Lebowski, Donnie Darko, and The Happiness of the Katakuris would seem to be an unclassifiable cinematic menagerie. What all these movies share is an audience willing to embrace them in ways that transform them into the stuff of the codes and talismans of secret moviegoing societies. "The work must be loved, obviously, but this is not enough," writes Umberto Eco of cult movies. "It must provide a completely furnished world, so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were part of the beliefs of a particular sect, a private world of their own, a world about which they can play puzzle games and trivia contests, and whose adepts recognize each other through a common competence." This class infiltrates some of these hermetic celluloid worlds and explores what makes them worthy of repeated screenings, fervent discussions, and obsessive veneration.
There is no secret formula for concocting a cult movie; some films are born cult, some achieve cult-ness, and some have cult-ness thrust upon them. The phrase "cult movie" can imbue a film with subcultural glamour, but it can also make a viewer wonder if there isn't something that he or she might be missing. Claims made for these films blur the boundary between metaphysical and nonsensical: "If you're great, El Topo is great," Alejandro Jodorowsky explained of his phantasmagoric Western. "If you're limited, El Topo is limited." Although we may not delve further into Jodorowsky's particular claim, we will investigate how cult films alter our perception of film totems and taboos. We will also consider cult movies in relation to B-movies and midnight movies and other categories (exploitation, grindhouse, psychotronic, "so-bad-they're-good").
Still undecided? Here's a taste of what you missed in weeks one and two:
From the psychedelic cult movie:
Desert Solitaires: Psychedelic Voices Crying Out in the Wilderness
Selected freak-outs from Altered States (Ken Russell, 1980), Renegade (original title: Blueberry: L'experiénce secrète) (Jan Kounen, 2004), and Beavis and Butt-head Do America (Mike Judge, 1996)
From the musical cult movie:
Intro: A Battle of the (All-Girl) Bands The Carrie Nations in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (written by Roger Ebert, directed by Russ Meyer, 1970)
Vs.
The Stains in Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (written by Nancy Dowd, directed by Lou Adler, 1982)
...
Rock Opera(tion)from Hedwig and the Angry Inch (music & lyrics by Stephen Trask, adapted for the screen and directed by John Cameron Mitchell, 2001)
Hip-Hopera from Trapped in the Closet (R. Kelly, 2005 - )
Outro: "Superhero-pera" (?) from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (Joss Whedon, 2008)
Not feeling the cult thing? S'OK. We can still be pals. Note, too, there are other classes at Vidiots on genre, anime, auteurs, and censorship in cinema.
