Abstract
In this introductory chapter, the authors conceptualize what the “stupid” means, and its relation to media. The stupid generally refers to things that fail to meet existing categorization (e.g., storytelling conventions, genres). An encounter with media that does not fit into established regimes of knowledge, might be characterized as stupid. The stupid should not be confused with the “bad object.” Rather the stupid often emerges in narrative forms, and finds affinities with the “cinematic attraction.” Storytelling forms evolve, and these changes might be prompted by creative innovations or technological developments. The authors argue that the paradigms of assessment in media studies largely address narrative, however, innovations in storytelling (particularly more recent developments) are not necessarily invested in novelistic or cinematic storytelling as conventionally conceived.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University, 2002), 77. In an email exchange with Lechte, Kristeva’s former student, he notes that he would translate, “plus c’est bête, c’est mieux,” as “‘the sillier the better.’ However, a case could be made for the fact that ‘stupider’ is a more direct opposite of ‘intelligent,’ which is the basis of the contrast Kristeva is trying to make.” Burdick’s translation also gives this phrase as “the sillier the better.” Julia Kristeva, “Ellipsis on Dread and the Specular Seduction,” trans. Dolores Burdick, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, Philip Rosen ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 239.
- 2.
David Bordwell, “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film,” Film Quarterly vol. 55, no. 3 (Spring 2002), 16.
- 3.
Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (London: British Film Institute, 2011), 123.
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
Bordwell, 25.
- 6.
Ibid., 23.
- 7.
Ibid., 24.
- 8.
Lisa Purse, “Affective Trajectories: Locating Diegetic Velocity in the Cinema Experience,” Cinema Journal vol. 55, no. 2 (Winter, 2016), 156.
- 9.
See the documentary on editing: The Cutting Edge: the magic of movie editing, Wendy Apple, 2004.
- 10.
Matthias Stork, “CHAOS CINEMA: The decline and fall of action filmmaking,” IndieWire, August 22, 2011, accessed November 10, 2018, http://www.indiewire.com/2011/08/video-essay-chaos-cinema-the-decline-and-fall-of-action-filmmaking-132832/. Bold text in original.
- 11.
Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 385.
- 12.
Ibid., 384.
- 13.
Ibid., 387. Elsewhere Gunning writes, “There are many ways of telling a story in film, and some of them (particularly in cinema before the twenties or, obviously, in avant-garde work) are clearly non-classical. In some genres (musicals, crazy comedies) the attractions actually threaten to mutiny. By describing narrative as a dominant in the classical film I wish to indicate a potentially dynamic relation to non-narrative material. Attractions are not abolished by the classical paradigm, they simply find their place within it.” Tom Gunning, “‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions,” The Velvet Light Trap 32 (Fall, 1993): 4.
- 14.
Gunning, “‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t,’” 5.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Ibid., 6.
- 17.
Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect, 127.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
Ibid., 128.
- 20.
Gunning, “‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t,’” 6.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Ibid., 7.
- 23.
Ibid., 9.
- 24.
Ibid., 10.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
Martine Beugnet, “Introduction,” to Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty, Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron, and Arild Fetveit eds. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 6–7. In her excellent book Cinema of Sensations Beugnet likewise invites us, in the face of post-millennial trends, to recalibrate our “critical and theoretical approaches and, possibly, [adopt] different viewing habits.” Martine Beugnet, Cinema of Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), 32.
- 27.
Gerry Canavan, “Why the Marvel Cinematic Universe Can Show Us a Story, But Can’t Tell Us a Plot,” Frieze (blog), May 3, 2018, accessed March 12, 2019. https://frieze.com/article/why-marvel-cinematic-universe-can-show-us-story-cant-tell-us-plot.
- 28.
Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 14.
- 29.
Aaron Kerner and Jonathan Knapp, Extreme Cinema: Affective Strategies in Transnational Media (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 12–14.
- 30.
Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Anchor Books and Doubleday, 1990), 275.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
Ibid., 276–277.
- 33.
Ibid., 277.
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
Ibid., 278.
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
Stephen Holden, “Ogled and Threatened on a Journey to Womanhood,” New York Times, October 28, 2010, accessed November 10, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/29/movies/29amer.html. Robert Musil locates affinities between kitsch and the stupid: “Since throwaway goods, junk, enter into the word kitsch principally through their associated meaning of unfit, useless wares, but incapability and uselessness also form the basis for our use of the term stupid, it is hardly an exaggeration to maintain that we tend to address everything we don’t agree with—especially when, apart from that, we pretend to respect it as intellectual or aesthetic!—as ‘somehow stupid.’ And in determining what this ‘somehow’ means, it is significant that the use of expressions for stupidity is shot through and through with a second usage, which embraces the equally imperfect expressions for what is vulgar and morally repellent and leads one’s attention back to something it had already once noticed, the fateful conjoining of the notions ‘stupid’ and ‘indecent.’ For not only ‘kitsch,’ which is the aesthetic expression of intellectual origin, but also the moral words ‘filth!’ ‘repulsive!’ ‘horrid!’ ‘sick!’ and ‘insolent!’ are undeveloped kernels of art criticism and judgments about life.” Robert Musil, “On Stupidity,” in Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, eds. and trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 277–278.
- 38.
Sontag, 282.
- 39.
Ibid., 283.
- 40.
Ibid., 284.
- 41.
Ibid., 291.
- 42.
Greg Taylor also positions camp in relation to “reading” or “interpretation,” and consequently to the re-contextualization of a cultural production: “The critic thus liberated the movie behind the movie; it was not the movie everyone else saw, the one Hollywood technicians thought they had made. That film was terrible; it was worth watching only because it might be remade into something much more interesting, aesthetic even.” While our mobilization of the stupid invites the spectator to “reconsider” stupid media, we are not necessarily making value judgments. Stupid media very well might be idiotic, or crass. Furthermore, Taylor’s positioning of the camp critic (Taylor is specifically addressing the poet and film critic Parker Tyler here), is still fundamentally adjacent to the “stupid critic.” Identifying the stupid is not an exercise in demonstrating “superior powers of discernment and connoisseurship,” as Taylor says elsewhere, but rather point to the sometimes-uneasy integration of innovative storytelling devices. Greg Taylor, Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 53; 64.
- 43.
Sontag, 284–285.
- 44.
Mike Fahey, “Stupidity Escalates Exquisitely In Earth Defense Force 5,” Kotaku, December 11, 2018, accessed April 20, 2019. https://kotaku.com/stupidity-escalates-exquisitely-in-earth-defense-force-1831004222.
- 45.
Ibid.
- 46.
Speaking to the tradition of cult cinema, Mark Jancovich notes, “These films showings began in New York and brought together an eclectic series of movies from excessively gorey art movies such as El Topo, horror classics such as Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and the 3D version of Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon, to movies such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show or John Waters’ Pink Flamingos , both of which were self consciously designed as cult movies.” Mark Jancovich, “Cult Fictions: Cult Movies, Subcultural Capital and the Production of Cultural Distinctions,” in The Cult Film Reader, eds. Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (New York: McGraw Hill and Open University Press, 2008), 159.
- 47.
For a fuller discussion of gross-out comedy see, inter alia, Geoff King, Film Comedy (New York: Wallflower Press, 2002).
- 48.
Brinkema, 42.
- 49.
Beugnet, “Introduction,” 10.
- 50.
Another potential way to think about the stupid is awkwardness. Adam Kotsko specifically positions awkwardness in relation to the violation of norms. See Adam Kotsko, Awkwardness (Washington, Zero Books, 2010), 17.
- 51.
Ronell similarly compares “stupidity” to the foreigner, “… stupidity as a foreign body that can be neither fully repelled nor successfully assimilated.” Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 12.
- 52.
Ibid., 3.
- 53.
Ibid.
- 54.
Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (eds.), First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004), 124.
- 55.
Donn Cambern in the documentary, The Cutting Edge : The Magic of Movie Editing (Wendy Apple, 2004). Emphasis added. Along similar lines, Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was not immediately embraced by critics. On March 16th, at the 2019 annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Janet Staiger presented a paper entitled, “2001 as the Ultimate Trip: Exposing Altered Spectatorship.” In this presentation Staiger surveyed the initial lukewarm response to Kubrick’s film. Repeatedly, film critics characterized the film as a “trip,” “psychedelic,” or “surreal.” Staiger observes that the “non-typical aesthetic features of 2001 facilitated the linkages between the movie and a drug trip. Amongst these are the minimal dialogue, an oddly mixed soundtrack, the ‘slow’ pace, and visual novelties.” Staiger drawing from Harry Benshoff, notes that he suggests that “a film good for watching while stoned or tripping is one which ‘regularly eschews or modifies classical Hollywood narrative form’ and has a ‘focus on spectacular aural and visual effects’; it is ‘often episodic or nonnarrative’ or is a ‘anthology concert film’ (Benshoff ). David Church concurs, the ‘psychedelic film proper devotes extended sequences to dazzling effects which audiovisually recall hallucinogenic experiences, often through avant-garde (or avant-garde-inspired) techniques’” (Church ). Staiger adds that 2001 was treated “as a new kind of cinema,” from which debates emerged “whether or not films should have ‘meanings,’ whether the ending of the film is ‘worth the deadly boredom of the rest of [the] film,’ (Spinrad) whether this is a step forward in science fiction, and whether the reason youth like this film so much is because they have grown up in the visual environment of television.” From the psychedelic and surreal, to the emphasis on “visual novelties,” to the eschewing of “classical Hollywood narrative form,” to the “episodic or nonnarrative,” to the “meaningless” all these things point to what we are calling the stupid. See Harry M. Benshoff, “The Short-Lived Life of the Hollywood LSD Film,” Velvet Light Trap 47 (2001), 31; Mark Gallagher, “Tripped Out: The Psychedelic Film and Masculinity,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video vol. 21, no. 3 (2003–04), 163; David Church, “The Doors of Reception: Notes Toward a Psychedelic Film Investigation,” Senses of Cinema 37 (June 2018), http://sensesofcinema.com/2018/feature-articles/the-doors-of-reception-notes-toward-a-psychedelic-film-investigation/; and Norman Spinrad, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Cinema vol. 4, no. 2 (Summer, 1968), 58.
- 56.
Rajinder Dudrah interviewed by Scott Simon, “World’s Most Popular Film Industry Turns 100,” Weekend Edition Saturday, NPR (December 21, 2013): http://www.npr.org/2013/12/21/256003573/worlds-most-popular-film-industry-turns-100.
- 57.
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Michael Holquist ed., and trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84.
References
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Beugnet, Martine. “Introduction.” In Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty, eds. Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron, and Arild Fetveit, 1–13. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
Bordwell, David. “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film.” Film Quarterly vol. 55, no. 3 (Spring, 2002): 16–28.
Brinkema, Eugenie. The Forms of the Affects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Canavan, Gerry. “Why the Marvel Cinematic Universe Can Show Us a Story, But Can’t Tell Us a Plot.” Frieze (blog). May 3, 2018. Accessed March 12, 2019. https://frieze.com/article/why-marvel-cinematic-universe-can-show-us-story-cant-tell-us-plot.
Church, David. “The Doors of Reception: Notes Toward a Psychedelic Film Investigation.” Senses of Cinema 37 (June 2018): http://sensesofcinema.com/2018/feature-articles/the-doors-of-reception-notes-toward-a-psychedelic-film-investigation/.
Dudrah, Rajinder. Interviewed by Scott Simon, “World’s Most Popular Film Industry Turns 100.” Weekend Edition Saturday, NPR, December 21, 2013. Accessed November 10, 2018. http://www.npr.org/2013/12/21/256003573/worlds-most-popular-film-industry-turns-100.
Edelstein, David. “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn.” New York Magazine, February 6, 2006. Accessed November 10, 2018. http://nymag.com/movies/features/15622/.
Fahey, Mike. “Stupidity Escalates Exquisitely In Earth Defense Force 5.” Kotaku, December 11, 2018. Accessed April 20, 2019. https://kotaku.com/stupidity-escalates-exquisitely-in-earth-defense-force-1831004222.
Gunning, Tom. “‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions.” The Velvet Light Trap 32 (Fall, 1993): 3–12.
Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” In The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven, 381–388. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006.
Holden, Stephen. “Ogled and Threatened on a Journey to Womanhood.” New York Times, October 28, 2010. Accessed November 10, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/29/movies/29amer.html.
Jancovich, Mark. “Cult Fictions: Cult Movies, Subcultural Capital and the Production of Cultural Distinctions.” In The Cult Film Reader, eds. Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik, 149–162. New York: McGraw Hill and Open University Press, 2008.
Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 118–130. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004.
Kerner, Aaron and Knapp, Jonathan. Extreme Cinema: Affective Strategies in Transnational Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
Kotsko, Adam. Awkwardness. Washington, Zero Books, 2010.
Kristeva, Julia. “Ellipse sur la frayer et la seduction spéculaire.” Communications 23 (1975): 73–78.
Kristeva, Julia. “Ellipsis on Dread and the Specular Seduction.” Translated by Dolores Burdick. Wide Angle vol. 3, no. 3 (1979): 42–47.
Kristeva, Julia. “Ellipsis on Dread and the Specular Seduction.” Translated by Dolores Burdick. In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen, 236–243. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Kristeva, Julia. Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University, 2002.
Musil, Robert. “On Stupidity.” In Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, ed. and translated by Burton Pike and David S. Luft, 268–286. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Plantinga, Carl. Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Purse, Lisa. “Affective Trajectories: Locating Diegetic Velocity in the Cinema Experience.” Cinema Journal vol. 55, no. 2 (Winter, 2016): 151–157.
Ronell, Avital. Stupidity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
Shaviro, Steven. Post-Cinematic Affect. London: British Film Institute, 2011.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Anchor Books and Doubleday, 1990.
Staiger, Janet. “2001 as the Ultimate Trip: Exposing Altered Spectatorship.” Annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Seattle, March 16, 2019.
Stork, Matthias. “CHAOS CINEMA: The Decline and Fall of Action Filmmaking.” IndieWire, August 22, 2011. Accessed November 10, 2018. http://www.indiewire.com/2011/08/video-essay-chaos-cinema-the-decline-and-fall-of-action-filmmaking-132832/.
Taylor, Greg. Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kerner, A., Hoxter, J. (2019). The Stupider the Better. In: Theorizing Stupid Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28176-2_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28176-2_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-28175-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-28176-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)