"Lindsay [Lohan] topless and looking uncomfortable, real life porn actor James Deen frontless and pantless and unable to perform (I mean act)..."

"... added up to a disaster of a film that shouldn’t have been made in the first place."

The movie "The Canyons” — directed by Paul Schrader directed and written by Bret Easton Ellis — makes only $30,100. That's quite a feat, making that little, with that many elements that might draw the curious. In the old days, something that bad would attract some so-bad-it's-good attention. I'm thinking that, these days, there's so much bad that we've become immune to the so-bad-it's-good effect. When's the last time anyone said "So bad it's good"?

My preliminary efforts to answer that question fixes on the February 10, 2011, the day "Friday," by Rebecca Black was uploaded to YouTube. You have to go to Rebecca Black's official YouTube page, here, and endure a commercial if you want to see the video that was originally uploaded and derided.

I suspect "So bad, it's good" isn't a viable concept anymore. I looked for the phrase in Wikipedia and got taken to a subsection of the article "Cult film." I note that the article at the first link to this blog posts says that IFC Films released the film, for which it paid "nothing," in the hope that it would become "a cult film." "So bad it's good" is one way films in the past have arrived at "cult" status. Wikipedia's analysis of the phenomenon reveals emergent skepticism:

Jacob deNobel states that films can be perceived as nonsensical or inept when audiences misunderstand avant-garde filmmaking or misinterpret parody. Films such as Rocky Horror can be misinterpreted as "weird for weirdness sake" by people unfamiliar with the cult films that it parodies. deNoble ultimately rejects the use of the label "so bad it's good" as mean-spirited and often misapplied. Alamo Drafthouse programmer Zack Carlson has further argued that any film which succeeds in entertaining an audience is good regardless of irony. The rise of the Internet and on-demand films has led critics to question whether "so bad it's good" films have a future now that people have such diverse options in both availability and catalog, though fans eager to experience the worst films ever made can lead to lucrative showings for local theaters and merchandisers.

Maybe "So bad it's good" was never an accurate explanation of what was happening. Maybe somehow only the old "So bad it's good" stuff — like "Plan 9 From Outer Space" — is still amusing. But I do think it has something to do with all that crap on YouTube. There's so much bad that making it through badness is no longer a concept.

The trick now would be to make something actually good. But I suspect we've lost the knack for that too.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lauderdale Vet correctly notes that "So bad, it's good" was said frequently about last month's "Sharknado." My perception that the end had come was false. It's like that scene in a bad monster movie where you think the monster is dead, and — suddenly! — he attacks.

Frankenstein and the mermaid.

In Hollywood, 1948.

Is government an "impetuous vortex" or a "hideous monster [with] devouring jaws"?

Reading the Obamacare case in class preparation today, I notice those 2 metaphors, both taken from the Federalist Papers, both used in the process of saying that the Commerce Power doesn't support the requirement that everyone buy health insurance. "Impetuous vortex" — from The Federalist No. 48, written by James Madison — is quoted in  Chief Justice Roberts's opinion:

The Government’s theory [of the scope of the commerce power] would erode those limits, permitting Congress to reach beyond the natural extent of its authority, “everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.”

The "hideous monster [with] devouring jaws" — written by Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist No. 33 — appears in Justice Scalia's opinion:

If Congress can reach out and command even those furthest removed from an interstate market to participate in the market, then the Commerce Clause becomes a font of unlimited power, or in Hamilton’s words, “the hideous monster whose devouring jaws... spare neither sex nor age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor profane.” The Federalist No. 33, p. 202 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961).

Many have noted that Scalia (joined by Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito) did not join the Roberts opinion on the Commerce Clause, even though they said basically the same thing about it. Their spirit of resistance shows even through their choice of a different Federalist Paper with a different author and a different metaphor for government's voracious maw.

The monster in Peggy Noonan's childhood closet was... Abraham Lincoln!

Writing about childhood fears (post-Newtown), she reveals:

One night when the moon was bright and the wind was moving the trees, I looked from my bed into the shadowed closet . . . and suddenly the clothes and the things on the shelf above had transformed themselves into Abraham Lincoln, in top hat and shawl, staring at me and waiting to be shot. That fear came every night for years. At some point a neighbor saw my nervousness or overheard my obsession, asked what was wrong, came to my house, opened my closet and announced triumphantly "See? Lincoln isn't there!" I knew she meant well, but how dumb can you get? Lincoln only came at night.

She also talks about a child who was afraid of ET, so I was expecting a parade of Spielberg characters tormenting kids: the "Jaws" shark, a T-Rex, TinTin, Oskar Schindler... But here's where she's going with this:

Newtown, like 9/11, reminds us of "the mystery of being alone in the world as it is and as we are." The world is imperfect, broken, "with cracks running through it." A central fact of our lives... is that "We are all vulnerable. Anything can happen to anybody at any time."...

We attempt to respond to tragedies politically.... But there is no security from existence itself. The only answer is to "plunge into" life. "We have to engage in life and take it on with all the risks it entails, or we won't be alive at all."