It’s Not That Deep – Silliness in Entertainment
Good afterevenmorn, Readers!
I’m here to do something angsty, teenage me would be horrified by – defending “bad” entertainment. You know the ones – bad movies that are just a fun time to sit through, even if the only thing they have going for them is epic fight choreography, pulpy books with lead characters whose names are alliterations, and who rock their way through the pages with naught but their wry grins and cheesy one-liners. Video games that attempt a story, but fall short and yet are still really fun to play by virtue of their mechanics or visuals. All these “bad” movies, books and games, if done right, can actually be just what the doctor ordered.
Sometimes you need RPGs that inexplicably change direction to wallop the bad guys. Sometimes you need heroes with flowing locks and bare chests. Sometimes you need the weirdly gravelly-voiced maniac with a gun fetish who saves the day. Entertainment does not need to be deep. Sometimes, the exact thing it needs to be is silly — “Bad.”
While my favourite entertainment tends towards the serious and thought-provoking (if you manage to make me cry as part of the experience, it’s very nearly always an automatic five stars. Granted, it’s not hard. I am a weepy bean), and I adore grim dark anything, sometimes it’s really nice to turn to something silly and “bad” and just let yourself have fun with it.
Pan’s Labyrinth is, I think, my all-time favourite movie. My comfort watch is Doom.
There are so many “bad” films I adore, knowing full well that they’re pretty terrible, actually. There are so afore-mentioned Doom, the Transformers movies, Mortal Kombat (the recent remakes; most especially Mortal Kombat II)… these movies are not good. They sure are mindless, and quite silly. But they are a whole lot of fun.
Part of what makes them work is the fact that they lean into just how silly they are. They are unapologetic about it. So many movies with ridiculous premises have tried very hard to be very serious art, actually, and that just does not work. That’s why so many releases have been met with eye rolls, complaints, and a really unhappy viewership.
The first of the recent Mortal Kombat movies fell into this trap, inserting a brand new character not in the game, and then some bizarre justification for how champions are selected. The whole dragon mark thing was not the way to go. Only when the second movie course-corrected (sorry, Cole. I wouldn’t have minded having you stick around), and leant hard into the hokiness of the story, and the ridiculousness of the situation did it start to work. In my opinion, at least.
Doom similarly made no apologies. It deviated from the (much more interesting) grim story of the games; it didn’t shy from being very silly sometimes. The final showdown between Karl Urban’s character and Dwayne Johnson’s character was extremely silly. What do you mean you fired your last bullet into the air just so you had no choice but to fight the rapidly transforming enormous man hand to hand?! It was so stupid.
And I ate it up. It was exactly the kind of stupidity I needed. Granted, I don’t really consider it to be a video game adaptation, since the story deviated so very much from the games, so I don’t suffer from the disappointment of a gamer hoping for a faithful adaptation. As a stand-alone, zombie-adjacent pulpy sci fi story, though, it works.
As an aside, I would still love a proper adaptation of Doom. It is a great story.
Not all movies do this well, and there is a vast well of difference between silly and idiotic. Some movies, games and books are so utterly inane that one wonders how they got made/published at all. Which pieces of entertainment those are will likely vary according to the viewer, as ought to be the case. I cannot stand stoner comedies, for example. And I know for a fact that a great many folk are now casting some bombastic side-eye at my enjoyment of Doom.
It’s a little different for books. Books have a great deal more leeway to do ridiculous things. Ridiculous things, if written well enough, with enough heart, humour, and pathos can pull of sillier situations than films, I feel.
Take the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, for example. I’m currently making my way through the series now. The premise is insane — Former coast guard and his talking cat are made to fight their way through a Dungeons and Dragons style competition that is televised throughout the galaxy. What? With that at its core, it could very well have turned out to be one of the few books I could not finish. Lord knows, it’s far outside of my usual reading fare.
And yet, it works.
It works so well. I am absolutely loving this series. I have gotten stupidly attached to Princess Donut and her dinosaur pet Mongo. I eagerly await for the next absolutely crazy scheme of Carl’s, who stubbornly refuses to let this horrific competition break him.
I think it works not just because Matt Dinniman is a very competent writer, but precisely because the characters recognise the absolute insanity of their situation, and because the peril is note reduced at all because of that recognition. It is the earnestness of the characters that makes this insane premise work.
Good writing can make even the craziest ideas work in a way that other media cannot.
And, it’s great fun to write, too. The serial story that was an exclusive for a while for my subscribers was one of those. On the outside, it’s so ridiculous. Basically, it’s zombies… but make them fairies. Please know, that there is a great deal of affection behind my words when I say that it is so damned dumb. Honestly, I was giggling like a maniacal gremlin writing so much of this. I hope it works. I hope I managed to achieve that delicate balance of a very silly story that’s still really fun, instead of painful.
I am very fond of this story for the same reason I’m fond of the Transformers movies. It’s not because it’s good, but because it was really fun (to write, rather than view in this case). I enjoyed it, at least. Whether other folks will is entirely out of my hands.
So, if you’re a writer who has a work out in the world, and feel paralysed about creating the next one, please know that it doesn’t have to be that deep. It doesn’t have to be worthy of scholarly dissection to be of value. There is plenty of value in just being fun. Silly premises, even the really dumb ones, if done well, can make for some of the best reading. Bad stories can, in fact and quite paradoxically, be very good.
Go out there and write your bad stories. Someone will love them, and even if you’re the only one who does, there’s value in that, too.
So, what are some of your favourite stupid stories; film, games or books? Give me all the terrible stories you love.
Oh, I suppose I should let you know that my very dumb story The Timbercreek Incident is available as an eBook (for free if you get it from my Ko-Fi or from Itch.io), and the paperback is available for pre-order from Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org. All the links are here if you want. Look at me. Marketing like a grown up author. Ugh. I have to go shower.
When S.M. Carrière isn’t brutally killing your favorite characters, she spends her time teaching martial arts, live streaming video games, and sometimes painting. In other words, she spends her time teaching others to kill, streaming her digital kills, and sometimes relaxing. Her most recent titles include Skylark, Human and The Timbercreek Incident.
OK, either people don’t want to risk calling anything a “stupid” story and hurting the creators, or they don’t want to admit to liking “stupid” stories. X) Here goes nothing: “stupid”-story writers, if you wrote something in this list, I love it and don’t think it’s stupid at all, even if the rest of the world does.
Games:
–Kabuki Fighter (Kabuki Combat? Something like that) is a game that deeefinitely needed more time in the incubator. It’s got this premise that you’re running a kabuki theater troupe sometime in Japanese history, and your troupe specializes in choreographed combat. The idea is to earn as much money as possible per performance before knocking one of the combatants out. There is no storyline, other than that, and it’s a button-mashing extravaganza. I think game reviewers have given it a 0-star rating on average. Still, it’s one of those $5-bin finds that I pull out on a night when everyone who plays videogames is bored, but we don’t want to turn into mortal enemies over MarioKart. Unfailingly, we love it.
–Splatoon 2… the single-player extended campaign is about a nineties-/noughties-culture-obsessed squid-kid or octopus-kid in a post-apocalyptic world who ultimately has to fight a mechanized version of the Statue of Liberty. What kind of storyline is that?! But still, it works, and I will keep returning to it. (Side Bar: Don’t knock chargers. I will nail you to the frickin’ wall.)
–StarTropics was developed in some sort of connection to Earthbound, and everyone says it’s the worst. For my money, Earthbound can shovel it: a combat yo-yo only belongs in the hands of Mike Jones.
–Global Pursuit is a map-building trivia game that NatGeo released sometime in the early ’80s. They never released an update. All of the trivia questions are wildly out of date, the map tiles still have the USSR/CCCP on them, and the map sometimes sprawls widely enough that the tiles fall off the table. But my house is not Risk/Monopoly territory: if you want to play a boardgame, you get a choice of Scrabble, Candyland, Bible Trivia, “It Was A Dark And Stormy Night,” or Global Pursuit.
Movies/Shows:
–GunShy (Liam Neeson version) is a mobster-therapy-heist-spy-romance-comedy that gets bad reviews and doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be, but it has some of the most surprising and uproarious humor I’ve ever found, a perfect Rob Schneider soundtrack, and a stellar cast. It’s my favorite movie, and I watch it at least once a year.
–TRON. I don’t know why people continue to pan that one.
–The first two Mortal Kombats (not such a fan of the recent ones).
–Bloodsport. JCVD put everything into “selling” the story, though I don’t know if he believed it was true or not, at the time.
–The American Rabbit was a not-quite-anime movie about the regular old pianist rabbit Rob, who could secretly turn into a roller-skating, red-white-and-blue-adorned superhero, and he saves the world’s chocolate supply (again, somehow involving the Statue of Liberty– why doesn’t anyone ever try to blow up the Grand Canyon, or something?) and prevents the enslavement of all talking animals. It’s a good “stupid” movie, and I will die on that hill.
–Any of the Schwarzenegger Conans, and probably the newer one with what’s-his-face, too.
–Demolition Man is probably the one I get the most “why do you like this” questions about. Usually from people who don’t know how to use the three seashells.
–No Escape. Completely ridiculous premise about a prison island, but somehow Ray Liotta made it work.
–Milo and Otis. Go crawl into a hole, if you want to argue that the Homeward Bounds are better.
–Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang
–KnightRider (Chitty paved the way for K.I.T.T., alright?)
–CATS, Starlight Express, JatATDC, and just about anything Andrew Lloyd Webber that isn’t Jesus Christ: Superstar. In fact, let me define how “stupid” I like my CATS: I liked it best when Growl Tiger’s aria wasn’t that dumb Italian opera thing, but when it was the Ballad of Billy Macaw in English.
–Chess. I mean, c’mon, they made an amazingly catchy stage musical about CHESS.
Books:
–“The Rogue” by Lindsay McKenna was something I read when I was trying to understand the appeal of mildly-explicit romance novels. I read it before reading Jennifer Crusie’s “Welcome to Temptation” set the genre’s bar so high that nothing else comes close. Somehow, that didn’t diminish the charm of “The Rogue,” which is about an ex-French Foreign Legion mercenary getting assigned to bodyguard a special education art teacher and positively hating it, but ending up falling in love instead. “Stupid” to the nth, but I still re-read it a few times a decade.
–“A Point of Honor” by Dorothy J. Heydt is from before the great GameLit/LitRPG genre split by over a decade. It’s set in an overpopulated Earth future (now retro-future) where some people manage to make their livings in full-immersion games. The heroine happens to play as a tourney knight in the game Chivalry, until she wins a forfeit that almost gets her killed several times in real life, because it has connections to a MASSIVE digital security breach and the worst sort of plagiarism in the world. For some reason, the book didn’t catch on with the crowd that liked full-immersion game stories at the time, so it tends to be shoved into the “stupid” category, unfairly. This one, I read often enough that my parrot takes pains to find my current copy and chew on it… resulting in yet another run to AbeBooks, because DJH’s free e-book copy just doesn’t appeal as much as the solid book.
–“Restoree” by Anne McCaffrey, her first and her parody of science fiction at the time. That and “The City Who Fought” are the only McCaffrey-involved books I routinely re-read, and “Restoree” is critically panned as McCaffrey worst on the regular.
–“Tales from the Couch” and “The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head” are both collections of anecdotes by psychological therapists. For some reason, I get the “you’re an idiot” look when people ask what I’m reading and I describe them.
–“Hacking the Human” is a reference book about no-tech scamming practices in the digital age. People complain that it’s critically out of date now, and so “stupid”… right up until I show them that they’re still vulnerable to the exploits it discusses. I’ll probably keep reading that one until I die, unless I find another excellent treatment of the topic.
That is an incredible list! As a writer of sometimes very stupid stories, I thank you for giving them a chance!
As you said: any “stupid” story is going to land for someone. Story-wise, it generally pays off to be willing to try anything once (within reason; “illegal” and “immoral” are off the table, but “fattening” is still within the bounds), to enrich the flavor of life.
Nothing says you have to try it again, or even finish it, if you don’t like it, after all.
I don’t usually enjoy that sort of thing, so I don’t often watch it. On the other hand, I’ve never regretted seeing League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, especially the scene where the Nautilus cruises along the canal of Venice!
Oh, that one’s sheer wish-fulfillment. Great choice!
My biggest problem with the court of public opinion post social media regarding culture, particularly pop culture, is that it has strangled balanced critical thinking. Everything everyone likes (especially from their youth) is great, perfect and unassailable. That means we’ve lost the concept of guilty pleasures, one of lives great joys.
Indulging in a smallish amount of junk (especially self-aware junk) creates a healthy intellectual balance and can actually increase one’s appetite and appreciation for art and well-crafted entertainment.
There’s nothing more annoying than a “prestige TV” bore or an insufferable (and typically pretty dumb) A24 cultist. I miss trashy matinee summer movies and trashy TV in the background. I do draw the line at music though but probably only because pop music of the last 30 years is so awful and soullessm
I’m in two minds about the music. Bad music does hurt the soul. But sometimes it’s about whether or not it gets you up to dance, so even really awful music can achieve something of value.
“Boom Boom Boom Boom” by the Vengaboys (1998) falls into the “uh?”-but-get-up-and-dance category. Deeply catchy EuroPop dance hit. The lyrics are mild but would get a person written up by HR for singing/playing at work, and the original music video is definitely NSFW. HOWEVER, it was apparently a school dance song and a sleepover party anthem for anyone 12 or under at the time it came out.
No matter what streaming platform anyone listens to it on, now, the comment section is going to be filled with admissions along the line of, “I didn’t understand what this song was talking about, at the time, and now I can’t believe my parents let me sing it at the top of my lungs. Now that I get it, I feel… shame, but I’m still going to keep dancing to it because I love it so much!”
“Stupid” song, but accomplishes a great deal of good.
I can’t think of a novel or short story that would fit but I’ve read plenty of comics that are spot on.
Shirtless Bearfighter by Sebastian Girner.
Shirtless… Bearfighter. Okay, now that sounds really fun, though.
I wonder if some of the reason we feel the need to defend our enjoyment of “bad” entertainment is the myriad of places where they are judged/rated (rotten tomatoes, goodreads, etc). It seems like every aspect is parsed and critiqued. I also think that there is so much more discussion of entertainment – online and in person. My sons would regularly get together and watch films with friends and critique them as they go along (oh my gosh! looked at that lens flare!). I tend to read/watch things that are fun and perhaps a bit silly (I get realism and angst from the newspaper). That’s why I’ll skip most of the oscar nominees and watch (and rewatch) “Ready Player One” or “Honor Among Thieves” or the new “Masters of the Universe”. I’ll be more likely to pick up one of Edmond Hamilton’s Captain Future books, than any of the recent 600+ page books. Entertainment for me should be entertaining. When I would ask a friend how a movie was, he’d reply, “I laughed, I cried, I kissed 10 bucks goodbye.” I’ll settle for entertaining for 2 hours.
That’s a good point about the proliferation of analysis/critique locations. It’s a pity we can’t go back in time and survey our predecessors to see if they felt as much social pressure about passion plays vs. mummery vs. theater vs. evening tale-telling, or about preferring to listen to one saga-singer with one style vs. another saga-singer with a different style.
Just got to see the new Masters of the Universe, today. Great fun! Worth the rewatch, for sure.