Trash and Treasure at the Razzies

To many people now reading this article, a 99-cent double feature of Can’t Stop the Music and Xanadu, in the last summer before the CDC took notice of the disease that would soon be named AIDS, might sound like a lost paradise—a Xanadu! Sensual and tacky Edenic yearning is very much the vibe of Greenwald’s film, in which one of the Olympian muses, played by Olivia Newton-John, opens a roller disco with Gene Kelly. Kelly dances in a film for the last time, invited into a pas de deux with star-of-the-moment Newton-John in a double-exposure sequence bridging past and present with in-camera movie magic. Beneath the guileless razzle-dazzle and instantly dated fads in dance music, fashion, and wipe transitions, Kelly’s heavy feet are a weighty presence, a reminder of pleasure’s ephemerality. The Razzies’ reflexive rejection of such tender flamboyance suggests a latent disco-demolition-night homophobia, as do the multiple nominations, a couple years later, for Peer Raban’s music for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle.

The first Razzies also acknowledged Cruising (1980), William Friedkin’s return to the policier genre nearly a decade after The French Connection (1971). Like that film, Cruising, which follows NYPD officer Al Pacino’s undercover descent into the gay leather scene, is a portrait of pathological law-enforcement obsessiveness, one steeped in the subcultural funk that distinguished many seventies classics. It is hardly more murky and abrasive than the earlier Best Picture winner, but its unhappier reception indicates how the zeitgeist for which Friedkin had been a standard-bearer had flagged by the dawn of the Reagan eighties.

The Razzies emerged at the twilight of the New Hollywood; as the balance of power in the film industry shifted from directors back to studios, arbiters of taste were sensitive to displays of perceived artistic decadence. A shot I’ve always remembered from the archetypically improvident, inevitably Razzie-dishonored Heaven’s Gate (1980) comes early in the film, as immigrant homesteaders butcher a stolen cow behind a curtain of bedsheets hung up around a frontier cabin. As a mother and child enter the sanctum, the curtains part and flutter, offering a privileged glimpse inside, but instead of following his characters into the scene, Cimino’s camera cranes upward to an overhead perspective, viewing it not as a voyeur but as a god. It’s an emblematic gesture of hubris from a filmmaker who made himself an irresistible target with an over-budget, over-schedule confrontation with the classical Hollywood western and the settler-capitalist ethos it mythologized.

Elaine May’s Ishtar (1987) is another notorious folly—quantifiably a bomb and therefore, by the logic of its time, self-evidently a bad movie, an immediate punchline and staple of “worst” lists. But it is the victims of an old consensus to whom hindsight is often kindest; today, of course, Ishtar needs no defending. May, subsequently exiled from the director’s chair for squandering the investment of studio bean counters, is revered as an iconoclastic truth-teller unappreciated in her time, and Ishtar, a spiritual sequel to Mikey and Nicky (1976) that travesties America’s Middle East policy, has an obvious appeal to younger viewers valuing auteurism, left-leaning geopolitics, and masculine codependency.

Parallel to the impulse to discipline overambitious artists, the Razzies indulged in the impulse to discipline underambitious audiences. Cocktail, the eighth-highest-grossing film of 1988, was received as formulaic, synthetic junk-food pandering. Tom Cruise’s alarmingly high-wattage sincerity and entrepreneurial bluster convey unearned arrogance, especially given the corporate-rock-soundtracked milieu of yuppie nightlife. His eagerness leaves him vulnerable to appearing, as we would now say, “cringe.” In its story of a young hopeful who comes from out of nowhere to learn from, and then surpass, his grizzled mentor, within a world of glamor, ambition, and betrayal, Cocktail is essentially a backstage musical, with Cruise’s boy-toy mixologist shaking his little tush behind a bar instead of a proscenium. Like Xanadu, it exists at a heightened register of make-believe that audiences later feel weird and guilty for having committed to.

No one has any true idea what “bad acting” means, except to say that it’s simply the kind of acting that one can’t buy—or, in some cases, that one petulantly won’t. Cruise was a new star, an unpolished teen idol, with no serious credentials that could protect him from the Razzies (which have also honored a high number of child stars over the years). And some of the more surprising choices made by Worst Actor nominee Nicolas Cage in the CG-marred and gynophobic The Wicker Man (2006) remake became defining memes of the early online-video era, coinciding with tabloid stories of the actor’s personal eccentricities and financial misadventures that one could substitute for a fair assessment of his unconventional expressiveness.

Pop stars are another frequent target of derision; a resistant viewer might complain of having, say, Prince, foisted on them. If you’re looking for reasons to, you could describe Under the Cherry Moon (1986) as a vanity project—it is, but it’s also a greater film than Purple Rain (1984): a shimmering black-and-white screwball with eighties fashion-spread gloss, a mix of the Jazz Age and MTV age, its style akin to the cocaine deco of Patrick Nagel and Miami Vice. It also features a swoony and hip-thrustingly literal deployment of the greatest pop song of the twentieth century.

Prince’s eighties chart rival Madonna was a frequent Razzie winner, notably for Swept Away (2002), a faithful but frothier remake of Lina Wertmüller’s report from the front lines of the class war and the battle of the sexes. Madonna’s marriage to her director, Guy Ritchie, drew the entire film into the orbit of her celebrity and cast the shadow of folie à deux over Ritchie’s alternately knowing and deferential treatment of her Material Girl image. The film has improved with age: Ritchie’s sentimental softening of Wertmüller’s unhappy ending now reads as the bittersweet rationalization of a Guy soon enough to be divorced from his more famous Wife. Likewise, Bennifer’s sweetly hammy role-play is the best part of Gigli (2003), but the film was a bomb that landed on an audience already braced for impact through both paparazzi snaps of the “overexposed” couple and reports of disastrous test screenings and desperate reshoots.

Alongside Razzie winners condemned for stylistic overreach, industry misbehavior, pleasure-center pandering, and celebrity folly, another strand of bad movies are those that stray from norms around sex and vulgarity: the year after Showgirls, Pamela Anderson won Worst New Star for Barb Wire; her “Impressive Enhancements” were nominated for Worst Screen Couple. The film plays like the domestic version of an Italian Mad Max knockoff, updated for the age of cyberpunk aesthetics and post-grunge bands signed to major labels. From a retrospective distance, it’s a reminder that the American studio system of the nineties still reliably churned out B movies; its analog world-building and competent three-point lighting make it harder to dismiss in this century.

In more recent years, as the domestic film industry fractures across multiple lines—between the art house and the multiplex, streaming and theatrical, IP and original stories, genre films and “movies for adults”—the Razzies find themselves on one of many ice floes broken off from a former monoculture. That the awards joined a 1999 backlash against The Blair Witch Project could be read as prescient panic at the cultural impact of a premiered-at-Sundance genre hit, one shot partly on consumer-grade video and ugly to look at by conventional cinematic beauty standards. Familiar equivalencies of good taste and industry prestige were becoming harder to parse.

In the 1980s, most mid-sized American cities had a print newspaper that ran film reviews with star ratings: a consumer guide, so you wouldn’t feel buyer’s remorse after paying someone to watch the kids while you saw a dog. The Razzies, for all their quasi-irreverence, served as another link in this chain of elite signaling. In the streaming era we are, at least in theory, freer in our choices as consumers. No longer must we plan a theater outing well in advance, or linger in the aisles of a video-rental place, agonizing over our evening’s viewing, before driving off, weighed down by the finality of our decision. Given the slow death of the review format, we are also freer (again, at least in theory) from a critical discourse largely preoccupied with manufacturing conventional wisdom—a standard of quality meant to keep viewers from making the wrong choice.

And yet. If the joke of the Razzies has gotten stale, the ethos of this institution founded by a gig worker in the marketing industry has also thoroughly permeated a cultural moment defined in large part by precarity and self-branding. Despite the promise of the internet’s “long tail” to sustain niche interests, digital subcultures are instantaneously coopted by conglomerate-owned platforms. Audiences seem to enjoy cosplaying as bosses: counting box-office receipts to win arguments, review-bombing to build up a favored artist or undercut a rival, speaking of “supporting” an artist by buying tickets or streaming a song or posting ten thousand times a day.

The overall impression is of “cultural consumption,” to use Bourdieu’s phrase, driven by a desperate desire to back a winner, which is hardly different from the old censoriousness that rejected a movie like Showgirls. In the vacuum left by Hollywood’s fading dominance, it’s as if individual actors are hoping to summon a new leviathan to once again validate their preferences and, by extension, themselves. Bourdieu wrote of conditions under which “ordinary people are reduced to the role of the ‘fan,’ the militant ‘supporter’ locked in a passionate, even chauvinistic, but passive and spurious participation which is merely an illusory compensation for dispossession by experts.” As long as questions of taste are also competitions over status, cultural participation will continue to be passive and spurious.

“What was that?,” rather than a snarky rhetorical question, a way of “legitimating social differences,” should be an expression of genuine curiosity at a film that sends up flares from beyond the border of our preconceptions. If a movie is freed from the expectation that it be either good or good or bad, it can instead be interesting. The recent announcement of a Criterion Channel series spotlighting Razzie-nominated films was met with an uproar of approval, in which extremely online cinephiles, full of the adrenaline rush that accompanies a shattered taboo, attempted to outdo one another in their claims for the artistic merit of Freddy Got Fingered (2001); this is laudable but ultimately beside the point. Freddy Got Fingered certainly can be considered a greater film than—to pick a Criterion DVD off my shelf at random—Fires on the Plain, if you are a member of a tribe for whom Tom Green’s qualities as an artist are more salient than Kon Ichikawa’s, but it doesn’t have to be the greater film for it to repay your interest in the arrested maturity, wrecked attention spans, and puerile hang-ups of the first generations raised on cable television.

When Freddy Got Fingered came out, I, in my premature middlebrow certitude, disdained Green’s look-at-me antics in Bourdieuian disgust: his modus operandi is to cry out frantically or do something gross whenever he senses the audience’s attention turning from him; early in the film, while handling the erect penis of a stud horse, he literally shouts “look at me, Daddy!” The attention Green succeeded in commanding was indicative of a cultural shift, as rival media emerged to challenge Hollywood’s cultural dominance and rival sensibilities emerged to defy the distinctions of taste.

Like his MTV stablemates from Jackass (also Razzie winners), Green was incredibly influential on the style of comedy, or anyway the style of being a person in the world, of my teenage peers. I remember a boy named Matt, to whom I haven’t spoken in a quarter-century, using an early digital camcorder to record a series of video interviews in which he messed with his subjects in Green’s style, prodding at his subjects’ mouths with the microphone whenever they began to speak—the kind of youthful prank and stunt videos that, with the advent of streaming video, would soon be uploaded to YouTube in the thousands, a dizzying array of peer-to-peer, direct-address transmissions totally outside of any established hierarchies of taste, art, and sensibility—a prism taking the place of the monolith. Freddy Got Fingered is so grating, so alienating, that it must be democracy in action. If one man’s trash is another man’s art, then there’s treasure everywhere.