Considering B Movies

The other day I found myself attempting to explain to a friend the difference between bad movies, obscure movies, and real B movies – for as you may have noticed, B movies fuel the flames that cook my artistic stew.  Intuitively I had always known the difference between these categories – it is how one ugly painting at a garage sale can be ugly but brilliant while another is only awful, or how a mustache can be hipster-chic on one person but antiquated (or molester-creepy) on the next.  Yet while beauty and “bad” are relative, a “B” is not in the eye of the beholder – it exists  independently of the viewer, if not in spite of her. 

Our Lord Wikipedia defines “B Movie” as a “low-budget commercial motion picture that is not definitively an art-house or pornographic film”.  It also states that it is a “genre film with minimal artistic ambitions” but then, curiously, explains that B movies do not have the same artistic limitations that “indie” and other similar genres self-impose.  Essentially, B movies occupy a place between and outside of these other genres.  So, with such a broad and compounded definition, what is the unifying element that makes these movies B?

For me, a true B movie has to fail at a number of essential elements (plot, narrative, effects, acting, etc.)- whether by aiming too high relative to its means or by a commercial disregard for craft- but in the process gains for itself an unintended and alternative beauty, as well as entertainment value.  This is different from, say, the seamless manufactured reality of a high-budget Hollywood “block-buster”.  This is different than a movie designed to be bad for purposes of nostalgia or comedic value (which often only delivers on the “bad”).  It’s different than a decent movie no one’s ever heard of or an art-house film that has succeeded, by sheer earnestness, in becoming “art”.  The B movie is its own mutant spectacle of intentions gone awry and desires gone amuck.

There is a wonderful moment in Slavoj Zizek’s Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, where he uses an attack scene from the movie The Birds to reveal how horror manifests in a movie.  In this scene, an attractive, upper-class woman walks unassumingly into a comfortable, well decorated room of her house only to find that a windy horde of thrashing, pecking birds has invaded the place. Zizek identifies this as reality disintegrated –  an abrupt collapse of a taken for granted reality caused by something that is supposed to remain silent in the background.  But B movies defy Zizek’s understanding of what horror is. In a B movie, an alternative reality is never allowed to manifest in the first place and thus cannot be destroyed.  Bad acting, script or effects constantly remind the viewer of its “moviness”.  The B movie blurs the artificial boundary separating the cinematic from the everyday, and there is something enjoyable and perhaps even a little perverse in this comingling.  This is partly why most of these movies are also called “exploitation films” – they expropriate and make use of the "reality" the viewer brings with them into the film.

More than this, the B movie gives us a pure vision of the underbelly of reality: a grotesque id-paradise of lust, chaos, failure, and self-undoing.  It is this multiplicity that interests me – how something can be everything and nothing at once, falling between the cracks but standing alone as its own unique, untouchable thing.  It is the inimitable failing that interests me, and the fun-house mirror effect that such movies bring to everyday life.