The Value of Terrible Media

Often, Kyle and I will have a discussion about Zack Snyder. He sits at a perfect intersection for our interests: movies and comics. We have spent, I would estimate, upwards of 100 hours discussing his films and, specifically, why they are so bad. One day we might focus on a particular scene in Man of Steel, the next on why he would have added the scenes he did to 300, yet another day we may be found trying to put into words how hollow Watchmen was. That’s 100 hours on objectively terrible entertainment.

So today, I read the latest chapter of Tokyo Ghoul, and I was immediately struck with the need to write down my thoughts on how it continues to get worse. How can it be this bad for this long, and yet still find new ways to fail? Why am I still reading this? What hope is there for any of us that this pile of smoldering garbage continues to be published?

It was then that I thought of Zack Snyder, and I had to wonder if I was wasting a significant amount of time discussing something that quite simply did not merit the attention. Wouldn’t it be better for Kyle and I to sit and chat about Francis Ford Coppola? Or what of the other Snyder, Scott? I considered why it is that we are attracted to this garbage, and what it is that makes us fascinated enough with it to go over it again and again.

I think, in the end, it’s simply more valuable to talk about what went wrong than what went right. I often find myself reminding my wife that we don’t learn much when we succeed constantly. If your computer always works for you, you’ll be of no use when it breaks. If you’ve always cooked a roast successfully you’ll probably never learn why it tastes so good. If you’ve always made good movies that were well-received, maybe you’ll never understand why those movies are good to begin with.

Of course, Snyder doesn’t have that problem. By my count he’s never made a single good movie, and he’s not done making bad ones yet. But in discussing Snyder’s failings, in sussing out why his work falls flat or outright provokes anger at its awfulness, it might be possible for a new director, or a new writer, or a new producer, to single out what does not work for movies in general, and then apply them to their work. It may be able to stem the tide early enough that a new director thinks to him or herself “Ah, don’t want to pull a Snyder here, let’s not just take quotes from famous comic books and insert them into this movie without consideration for context.”

On the flip side, what do we learn from discussing great films? Yes, we can talk about why The Godfather works, but do we learn much more than how to emulate the greats? It is a far more difficult task to look at something great, take the lessons from how it was constructed, and create something completely new and useful than to look at something great and simply copy it. The former is the kind of thing you see from Paul Thomas Anderson. The inspirations are there, lurking just beyond the horizon in his films, but they’ve been crafted to his own, unique vision. This is incredibly difficult to pull off. The latter we see much more frequently, even in films from a single director! M. Knight Shyamalan took almost two decades to understand why The Sixth Sense is a great film (hint, it was not the twist). He directed that movie!

(The middle ground here is, of course, Quentin Tarantino)

There are remarkably few PTA’s in this world. There are quite a few kids capable of directing good, fun films, however. And most of these kids will see Snyder’s movies. And then, hopefully, they’ll see the nauseous critical reception and wonder why everyone feels that way. How a person can make something so universally terrible and still release it, confident that it is not. Maybe they’ll stumble across the Red Letter reviews of the Star Wars prequels and enjoy a humorous and thorough dismantling of three impressively terrible movies. And maybe they’ll know, when they get behind the camera, what not to do, so we don’t have to see yet another movie that plays like 30 different 90 second trailers slammed together.

This brings me back to Tokyo Ghoul. Folks, it’s bad. But it’s bad in all these unique ways. It’s bad in new ways quite often, ways that surprise and inspire me to write more about it. This week they managed to avoid a climactic fight altogether, a fight that saw the main character made into a quadruple amputee, and yet ALSO have a ton of incredibly confusing action. They managed to run the “The main character smells something is wrong!” trope right into the “Yes but the bad guy predicted all of this somehow I guess!” trope, head long. They’re killing characters for, I think, funsies. I’m pretty sure next week they’re going to fridge the female lead and her unborn child.

And you know what? I’m here for it. All of it! Bring it on, Tokyo Ghoul. We all have a lot more to learn from you.