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What makes a movie bad? When does badness happen? What happens when it does? Cinephiles—including auteurists—have long held a special key to cinematic enjoyment: the films that are the most fun to watch are often those deemed least in conformity to conventional conceptions of quality. For example , a well-known secret of cinephilia is that the films most deemed bad by tastemakers are often good viewing experiences. Take, for instance, Leonard Maltin’s vastly popular Movies on TV and Movie &Video Guide. Anyone who uses these volumes, with their reduction of film evaluation to rankings that go from “Bomb” to four stars, quickly learns a trick: anything rated “Bomb” has a good chance of being a lot more enjoyable than anything given one-and-ahalf stars or, even worse, two-and-a-half stars. Bombs have the possibility, at least, to come off as excessive, extravagant, and outlandish in their blend of pretension and failure, whereas the midrange rankings tend to indicate films that are dull, affectless, unengaging, and forgettable in their uninspiring anonymity. An interesting reversal, then: that which is all the more striking in its “badness” offers a less bad experience than that which is better made. It would seem that there are multiple ways in which badness (and goodness) operate as evaluative forces. C H A P T E R T H I R T E E N On the Bad Goodness of Born to Be Bad: Auteurism, Evaluation, and Nicholas Ray’s Outsider Cinema DANA POLAN 201 In the cinema (and obviously beyond it), the concept of badness covers at least two ideas. On the one hand, there is the notion of moral badness. In this perspective, the cinema is interrogated for the ethics of its representations and their imputed effects; some films will be seen to have unethical and improper themes or characters or situations or whatever, and this will lead to moral critique and even condemnation. There is in this moral perspective on film an understanding of badness as that which reaches beyond the content of the film itself to have a potentially contagious, deleterious effect on spectators (or on some classes of spectators, as in cases of moral panic around what children should or should not see). On the other hand, there is a notion of aesthetic badness. Here, cinema is judged for artistic quality: some films will be seen to offer unsuccessful style and will be found to be bereft of beauty or related values. Such films look, feel, and are . . . bad. As different as these understandings of badness are, they are sometimes conjoined so that an ostensibly immoral film is also declared to be one that is thereby lacking in artistry. Some will even make the assumption that an immoral work must of necessity be lacking in aesthetic value. For instance, when it came out in 1967, Bonnie & Clyde was subject to much criticism that seemed to assume that the film’s concern with, and perhaps valorization of, a criminal life somehow had an intimate connection to what the critics perceived as the film’s supposed aesthetic failures (for example, moral condemnations of the film would sometimes single out Michael J. Pollard’s acting style, deemed to be cretinous). Obviously, there is no transcendental guarantee to attributions of moral and aesthetic badness (or goodness, for that matter). Examples of the moral and the artistic, as well as the very notion of what these terms refer to, are fully historical. We have only to look at the changing reputation of Bonnie & Clyde from sleazy exploitation to a classic of cinema to see one immediate case of the revision of values (this is a case, moreover, where the change occurs almost instantaneously in 1967 as some originally condemnatory critics go back to the film and begin to appreciate what they now see as positive values). Auteurism would be one of those conditions that enable a revision of prior aesthetic categories. In auteurism, precisely those films that a mass public or a certain criticism has condemned as rough, raunchy, unpolished, or schlocky—in other words, as aesthetically “bad”—now often receive valorization : think, for example, of the auteurist defenses of Sam Fuller, a cinematic primitive whose films become for the auteurist a site of value to the extent that they depart from the tedium of standard Hollywood fare. In auteurism, what others take to be bad is now assumed to be good in a special way. Thus, to take another example, whereas mainstream criticism would...

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