ABSTRACT
Recent discussions of ‘paracinema’ have highlighted the re-appraisal of so-called ‘cinematic trash’. This article addresses the theme of ‘badfilm’ by contrasting films from two of the most well-known purveyors of ‘cinematic trash’: Roger Corman’s X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963) and John Carpenter’s They Live (1988). In X, a scientist develops X-ray vision, seeing into the fourth dimension and witnessing something so shocking he rips his eyes out. This act is analogous with Corman’s career as purveyor of trash cinema: refraining from pushing badfilm’s power to the absolute limit; foregoing the gift of ‘second sight’; and content to exist on a marginalized, second-tier, parallel reality to the Hollywood mainstream. In They Live, Carpenter re-empowers the thesis: the hero stumbles on a secret society that has developed sunglasses to see through the real to the alien-generated subliminal messages in advertising and politics. Rather than withdrawal, Carpenter’s hero declares: ‘I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass – and I’m all out of bubblegum.’ Unabashed, glorying in his outsider status, Carpenter reappropriates Hollywood values in a cheap ‘bubblegum’ universe, deploying trash culture as a smart bomb that aims to prise apart not only cinematic convention but also reality itself. Ultimately, both films, in very different historical specificities, offer up the B-movie as a response to the gathering global and economic forces of late capitalism, signified by what Slavoj Žižek identifies as the ‘ideological state apparatus’ of the Hollywood movie-making machine.
