A few weeks ago, a few friends and I were hanging out and playing video games. We'd been at it for a while, we were a little drunk, and the hour was getting late. The only one of us who was any good at Smash kept winning which, while charming at first, was rapidly losing its appeal. Eventually, someone suggested we watch a movie instead. This was, by all available logics, a good move. Given that we needed something to do and video games were no longer working.
This was where the difficulties started.
Indecisive people are fun because deciding on what to watch or where to eat or whatever will often take longer than the activity itself would. That was not what happened. This group was occasionally prone to indecisiveness, sure. But for once the issue was too much decisiveness.
The crux of the matter was this: two of us wanted to watch something garbage and awful and one of us wanted to watch genuine art. As I kept scrolling through the multiple streaming services hoping for a compromise option everyone could agree on, tensions rose.
But rather than rehash (in a rather petty manner) an old argument, I want to take a moment to write out the thoughts I was too intoxicated to express. I want to walk through the case for and logic behind watching bad movies. Why watch bad movies when good movies exist?
I was once told to never go to a movie on a first date. The goal of a first date is to get to know someone. A 2 hour movie, during which you are discouraged from talking, is very preventative on that point. The flip side, however, is that you also don't want to do any date activity that lives or dies on conversation alone, like a dinner date. If the conversation starts to ebb, there will be nothing to rejuvenate it. This is pretty reliable in my expirience for optimizing first dates: go somewhere with things you can look at and do, but can still talk easily.
Like any good autistic person, I frequently take simple social rules and attempt to apply them blindly to as many contexts as possible.
Thus, I often use the same criteria when evaluating potential group events. Is conversation possible? If so, is there something that can inspire conversation should it get awkward? Perhaps this is an introvert's way of looking at the world, but I find it helpful. Whenever I host, I try to make sure there is some activity that can inspire conversation, whether it is playing a board game, playing video games, or preparing powerpoints.
Movies and television break this golden rule. No conversation is possible. While watching a movie together can certainly be fun, the fun is almost always the thrill of talking about it immediately afterwards. There definitely are contexts where watching something together is more fun during (who doesn't love cuddling up to a partner and watching something), but for a larger group setting it doesn't hold up. There is little benefit to watching a movie in a group compared to watching individually in terms of interaction.
So how do you make movie watching a social activity? The answer, of course, is to talk about the movie, during the movie. But if the movie is good, then interrupting will break the flow and ruin the tension. It will cause missed dialogue, confusion about the plot, and a general lack of immersion.
But if the movie is bad...
There is no tension to break, no flow to ruin. Missing any given plot point has no bearing on the overall enjoyment of the piece. If we get distracted and spend 30 minutes discussing the ethics of AI and miss 30 minutes of the movie, we will have missed nothing of relevance. Our lives will not be impacted, we won't become uncultured because no one wanted to see this movie anyway, and if it's the right kind of bad movie, we'll still roughly be able to follow it.
Bad movies turn movie watching into a social activity by inviting you to ignore them. By adding "snark the movie" to the discussion options, they provide a topic should the conversation lull. And, they can easily be watched at 1 am while drunk without missing out on understanding any complex plots (shoutout to that time we tried to watch Tenet while hammered).
This also lays out a criteria for assessing if a given bad movie is fun or just bad. A bad movie shouldn't require too much attention, having a fairly simple or derivative plot. It should be at least a little interesting to watch, implying a lot of cool stunts, pretty colours, or action sequences. It should match the vibe of the room (usually funny in my expirience). Therefore, my ideal bad movies are action movies or comedies, although sometimes serious lines delivered badly can push dramas into unintentional comedy territory (shoutout to Morbius, #morbsweep).
Of course, this isn't to say that a good movie isn't well worth your time. Good movies are great! I love good movies! A good movie can power significantly more conversation after the movie ends than a bad one ever will. If I'm on my own, I would choose a good movie every time.
But if you come over to my place late on a Saturday night and take a couple shots, I will be putting the original Dune on, we will mock it mercilessly, and it will be the best damn time of your life.