Double Flee A

I have been trying to figure out, for YEARS, why it is that I am attracted to bad media. Especially video. My two brothers share the fascination. I never get tired of seeing things that are really honestly bad, that is, not trying to be bad on purpose. I like things that make you shake your head and wonder after them, and how they came to be.

Brief aside: when songs are written to be sweet, that is, when they aren't but they were obviously supposed to be, they come off cloying. In fact, when any action is performed with the goal of producing a certain feeling in another individual, you get other results than what you intended.
With clowns you get... well, not exactly happiness.
When a black guy makes a joke about his being black in a movie, I don't laugh.
When a rap guy makes some song about some whores bouncing their big round asses on the dance flo', I don't bob my head and think "Yeah!"
When some country singer makes yet another song about the U.S. of A., I don't feel a surge of patriotism.*
When the guy gets the girl in the movie, a tear fails to come to my eye.
When people talk about the feeling they get when god shows up in their heart, I want to puke. I don't think that was the intended effect, either.

Here are some examples of what I mean by bad media which I am attracted to:
The dancing outlaw
The Bubb Rubb whistle-tip video
Eegah!
Yor, hunter from the future
Viva and Jerry's country videos

And that's not even scratching the surface. There is more and more bad, bad, terrible stuff being made every day.

There is terrible music out there, too, which fascinates me, like Buck Truck, the rapping trucker.

It isn't just me, in fact, most people, to varying degrees, enjoy "the bad". That's because understanding the bad stuff from the outside means you're in on the joke, and everybody likes to feel that way. What good would it be to be "us" if "them" didn't suck? (This is, incidentally, why evil will never be defeated, and why the entire concept of good and evil is, essentially, a crock. When all the bad guys are dead, what's left to do?) Paranoia for the sake of argument: how, for that matter, do I know you aren't reading this because you feel sorry for me, or take me as some animated curio? I don't, and on some level, that probably makes me (at least potentially) "the bad" as well.

Tangent: I once saw a dog that was ready to kill me. It was a doberman on a leash. I could see a certain look in his big, glassy black eyes that made me very uneasy. In those eyes it was the doberman's version of the future, and in that future I was a lifeless, bloody mass. The dog wasn't agitated but the leash was completely taut. It was waiting.

Back to the thing: It's just that I think I've identified something about all this bad shit. Something that holds it all together, finally, something that makes it an actual category. It is this: all this bad stuff can't be mocked. It can't be made fun or belittled any more than simply by letting it play. These things are their own best parodies all by themselves in their naked honesty. Anybody can make fun of mediocre things, like I do here, but the real craziness, of which the internet is full, has to be set aside. The characters in these bad media are the extremes; when we partake in the viewing of these things we are having a vicarious experience from a different (social?) dimension, where the exhibitor has no grasp on self-awareness.

Here are two of those:
Ted Jesus Christ God for president of USA
and still my all time favorite,
TIME CUBE!!

With things that are genuinely bad, what we're seeing is someone who doesn't get what we and everyone else gets; it's a freak show. I'm sure there's more I could think of to say about this, but that covers my revelation.

*With Chely Wright and the bumper of my SUV country song, you get a dust-up over the sham that it was. And man oh man did I get a kick out of that. High five, me.

posted by dale @ 11:18 PM