MAC AND ME and the Prism of “Badness” (Patreon)

There are infinite ways you can enjoy a movie. You can watch stone cold classics that exude technical confidence in every moment, movies with endless inventive dare that reach incredible highs, or even movies that reach down into our personal experiences and resonate so deeply that they unleash a bevy of emotions...

You can also enjoy “bad” movies.

I put that term in quotes because it’s not really a term of designation I believe in all that much. It’s not just part of the old never-hate-a-movie mantra, but because it’s a reductive term of appraisal (and if we’re being strident, one that often indicates a facile approach of the user). There are just so many better words. And so often there’s all these interesting ways a movie can fail to work on us, many of which need a bigger internal examination from us other than a simple chiding away of the film all together. All movies, even so-called bad ones, are complex objects. And we are always at our best when we understand the deeper “whys” at play. Even the commonly used “so bad it’s good” mantra is a simplification of what’s actually happening in that process. Especially because a “bad” movie often contains so many varying degrees of relative badness, from the off kilter, to the amusing, to the mind-numbing. And sometimes they’re not even all that far away from working well! Which is why, so often, looking at how we enjoy something goes beyond the layers of irony and right into a deeper prism of story construction, along with our own appreciation.

Which somehow brings us to MAC AND ME.

Perhaps fittingly, the film is best known for its long running-bit where Paul Rudd goes on Conan O’Brien’s various talk shows, promises he’ll show a clip from his latest project and then instead shows the same exact (insane) clip of the film’s main character going off a cliff in his wheelchair, falling into a pond, and then a weird looking Alien pops out his head with confusion ​. This is all many know of the film. And it’s all I had ever seen of the film, too… That is until last Friday. You see, I’ve been doing these twitch streams for a couple months now and I’ve realized the 2am slot is best when the film has some kind of unhinged element to it. Again, it’s not necessarily for “bad” movies, but the kind of movies that have some measure of weirdness or feel transfixing even if you are in a confused sleepy trance. I forget what prompted the idea for MAC AND ME, but I decided it was time to finally watch the whole thing… and I was deeply unprepared. But I’m very glad because it actually provides a great lens for discussing the three distinct kinds of relative “badness.”

ONE - DIS-ENGAGE-MENT

The worst kind of “bad” movie is a boring one.

But one of the filmmaking beliefs that bothers me most is the conventional wisdom that viewer boredom has to do with pace of the edit. It does not. It never has. Instead, a viewer’s boredom is much more about their relative engagement / investment with the conflict on screen. That is to say if they care about the conflict between the characters on screen - meaning if they care about the stakes of what they want - then they’ll happily watch a slow zoom with gentle stillness till the cows come home. In fact, things like fast-paced editing / constant threats of physical danger are often just distractions from those very character-based conflicts. And more likely, they are the textural dressing of a storyteller who doesn’t really know how to construct those conflicts at all. And with that understanding I have to say… after all these years of writing about drama I’ve come to realize it’s the number one sign of a storyteller who doesn’t understand conflict is…

When a movie runs away from its own conceit.

At the time of release, much of the popular lashing of MAC AND ME was that it was “just an E.T. rip-off.” For it is also about an alien coming to earth, getting separated, and befriending a child, etc. But they could not be more different when it comes to intra-scene structure and effectiveness. To wit, in E.T. Elliot begins developing the relationship with the alien about 17 minutes in. But here, they play the endless games of delay and preventing us from starting that relationship journey. Seriously, for a film called MAC AND ME, but the film spends AN HOUR, repeat, one whole dang ass hour having the alien show up, do something to mess up the house or whatnot, then run away. They do this FIVE times. And when the Alien finally does stay, there’s no character work and they just rush right into a largely extended and weird dance sequence (I’ll get to that later) before trying to get him back with family. Meaning there is no real relationship between “Mac” and the lead whatsoever. In fact, there is just one scene of big family interaction before the weird ass hell final ending (which I’ll also get to). We’re told movies are about relationships, and this film takes the time to barely develop a single one.

Remember, development is not about “spending time” with characters. It’s about what happens in those scenes where the time is spent. It’s about finding a simple, often human conflict between them, like the old mamet rules state: 1. Who wants what? 2. What happens if they don’t get it? 3. Why now? From there it’s about creating synthesis points and changes and allowing the nature (and goals) of a conflict to evolve, all en route into larger arcs. No matter how intense or life-threatening to intimate and personal, these dynamics are the core of any story really. And you can just tell when you see a movie that seems unaware of how to do any of this. Which is why they often resort to all the surface-level tricks or running away from the core conflicts. This includes cryptically teasing the nature of the conflict for scenes on end. Or constantly having “bad guys rush in” to give the allusion of danger without a sense of what people are really fighting over. Or constantly abandoning plots (without resolution) in the aim of some new plot that will likely be abandoned just the same. Again, I cannot overstate how often a movie’s engagement with its own conflicts is the signifier of overall quality.

And yet, I can’t tell you how often a movie will put such avoidance of story development right into its DNA by engaging in prequel-itis. I wrote about this fairly recently in the newest Mortal Kombat movie. The original Paul WS Anderson film is a fun lark with moments of absurdity. It happily wears its absurdity on its sleeve. But the new one? The filmmakers took all these steps to reassure us they were telling a REAL story that would honor the characters. But instead it was just the point-by-point logical “building” of how characters became who they were at the start of the story and never actually engaging the conflicts between them on a meaningful level. I mean, they don’t even do the much-promised tournament in the film! But what’s so funny to me is that there is an uncanny similarity to other fighting-based-video-game duology of the Street Fighter series. Similarly, the first film was a cocaine-addled mess of confusion and gaudy costumes, but it has a perfect Raul Julia performance and some monster lines. But then there was the “more serious” and gritty remake of Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li whose entire prequelitis plot is about Chun-Li building up to doing a fireball (aka her basic move). I am not kidding. That’s what it’s about. The instincts behind both follow-up films was to “correct” the perceived silliness of the first, but they had no idea how to engineer a meaningful story from the context at hand. They ran away from their conceits.

And they are indicative of this larger epidemic. It is the number one path to disengagement in the viewer. The number one thing that feels “slow” to viewing eyeballs. And thus it is the number one thing that has to be reckoned with. But while we are here, keep in mind it is also a close cousin of “plot-blocking” which is when a movie introduces a clear conflict early on, but doesn’t know how to change or evolve it so they constantly delay it all the same. For instance, they’ll have characters about to fight / address what’s really bothering them, but then a phone rings or a character interrupts or it pulls them away. Or they’ll just repeat a stalemate confrontation about these issues again and again without any redirection (these plot-blocking things have been massive problems with even well-liked shows like Stranger Things). And I talk about them so much because they are the mechanics under the surface that tell us so much about our own level of disengagement and what really drives our relative estimation of “badness.” Meanwhile, there are the tangible details that are so much more noticeable. But I admit…

Those can also be far more entertaining…

TWO - BEWILDERMENT A.K.A. WHAT AM I WATCHING???

I believe this is often the thing we crave from the prism of badness.

To use the Nicole Kidman voice, “We come to AMC theaters to laugh, to cry, to care…” but sometimes we go to the movies to see things we’ve never seen before. But it’s not just the sheer out-of-this-world adventures or space battles or the crazy conceits of cowboys fighting aliens or something. Sometimes we WANT to enjoy the bizarre constructions of scenes and behaviors that just plain don’t make real-world sense. Sometimes it's the beautiful flourish of a dance scene, or a fourth-wall breaking joke, or even the coked out energy of the Whalberg’s zone out in Boogie Nights or something. Because sometimes it’s about what jars us, from the infamous tonal whiplash of the Wonka boat ride, to a girl suddenly turning into a Transformer, to the sheer chutzpah of having a teen werewolf fall in love with a baby. But hey, sometimes it’s less about construction and more the sheer delight of an actor kicking it up to 11. Like how we’ve been gifted many a glorious hammy Nic Cage performances (along with beautifully subtle ones), but it’s also Chris Klein making the best of the aforementioned Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. The point is that sudden bewilderment of the viewer is actually a powerful, fascinating tool. And there are so many movies built off the sheer audacity of some gonzo filmmaker who was somehow given money to make a bizarre fever dream.

Which can go quite well actually! We have amazing abstract storytellers like David Lynch and Jonathan Glazer who can turn the surreal into hypnotic, horrifying films that nest right into your stomach and soul (all while holding true to the lessons of semiotics). But then there’s equally-entertaining, but misguided souls like Tommy Wiseau who can accidentally throw themselves headlong into a work of ironic joy like The Room. And then there’s the very specific kinds of artistic hubris that can bring us works like Tom Hooper’s CATS - a film that is both right in line with the delirium of the original show and yet thwumps you right into the uncanny valley of garishness. And then… there are films with kids in wheelchairs who go careening off cliffs into the ponds below.

Look, when all you know of MAC AND ME is the clip (as I did), it’s easy to expect this sort of absurdity to be the tone of the whole film. Alas, that’s what you end up wishing for. Instead you have to spend much of the first hour in the conceit-avoiding tedium I mentioned above. There, you mostly spent your time recoiling at the bizarre alien design (we’ll come back to this) and wondering all sorts of questions, like why does their van have venetian blinds in it? But once you get well past the cliff and get an hour in, the bewilderment finally (and thankfully) sets in. That’s because there’s a full on dance sequence / birthday party in McDonalds, complete with Mac dressed hideously as a “cute” Teddy Bear and he even magically floats at one point. This is to say nothing of the scene where the kid at the end dies for a few seconds in a stand-off with the police. For all the delay, it ends up feeling like one of the most surreal experiences ever.

Because of this there were numerous times in the chat where we all remarked that we were having feelings of “disassociation” while watching the most bizarre events unfold. To be clear, this is NOT to compare to the very real and scary psychological effect (which I’ve experienced before) where your brain breaks from how it’s handling information and thus you experience disconnection “from your thoughts, feelings, memories, and surroundings. It can affect your sense of identity and your perception of time.” That is NOT what is actually happening to you. Technically, you are physically fine. Instead, that disconnect only feels like it's happening because 1) movies are powerful and 2) the movie itself is “breaking” in its own way of reality. Perhaps because the movie is diving away from cause and effect or its own established rules or tonal capacity, leaving us only with our confused bewilderment. But it is right at this stage we suddenly fill our mind with a whole series of questions.

And it is this wonderful space where we examine the third form of “badness.”

THREE - CONTEXT OF CONSTRUCTION

Many of you have likely heard of or listened to the podcast “How Did This Get Made?” and it’s tremendously funny, if sometimes a little harsh on things I actually like. But what I really adore is the framework of the podcast’s central titular question. HOW did this all happen?! Because so often the real fascination is in the hypothetical examination of the series of decisions that led up to the movie in question.

A film like 1992’s Toys is a perfect example. Director Barry Levinson had made a huge series of hits and was an accomplished filmmaker. Same goes for the film’s star Robin Williams. But perhaps assured by this very success, this “dream project” is trying to make a big statement about innocence and fun, but ends up making every bewildering choice in the process. The dreamy production design is meant to invoke a fairy tale, but it also plays with a battered seriousness whose juxtapositions never create a baseline of reality. Not helping is the fact that Willams is all over the place, but unlike the films where his chaotic, wise-cracking antics play up the fuddy duddies of the serious environment around him, this twee world only doubles down on it in turn. It’s ALL chaos. And this is to say nothing of the eventual robot reveals. Point is, it’s utterly anchorless. But oddly, the film also ended up being a deeply prescient movie about the video game industry’s relationship to the American military / drone warfare??? Which weirdly makes it all the more fascinating. Again, all films are complex objects. And those questions of “why” behind every bewildering choice create the most fascinating part of the conjecture. And the why applies here so clearly because…

Paul Rudd bits aside, MAC AND ME always weirdly famous for being a film partially funded by McDonalds. Yes, that is correct. Reports collide, so I’ll go write to wikipedia:

“Some have reported that the film was—at least partially—financed by McDonald's,[8][9][10] which Louis denies.[7] However, he did receive funding from Golden State Foods, a food service distributor closely associated with McDonald's; Louis had encountered its CEO in his efforts to pitch the film and was attracted by its charitable goals.[7] Despite McDonald's specifying that they did not want Ronald McDonald to appear in the film, he nonetheless appeared in a scene set at a McDonald's which featured an extended dance sequence.[7] The character also appeared in the theatrical trailer.[11] Louis noted that he was one of the first to leverage the chain as a platform for promoting films (Disney would later enter into a long-term deal with McDonald's to cross-promote properties including their classic films through in-store campaigns such as Happy Meals, although that relationship ended in May 2006, amid pressure to reduce the promotion of junk food to children).[12] Despite this, Louis remarked that he was "still the only person in the universe that ever had the exclusive motion picture rights to the McDonald's trademark, their actors, their characters and the whole company.”[7]"

The truth is debating the degree to which it was sponsored by McDonald’s is not as interesting as the decisions involved in the end result, especially the party scene. I mean, I STILL can’t shake the image of the weird floating teddy bear. Why is everyone going along with this? Why is this normal to them? Why those dance moves? And while we are at, why is Coke also the drink that magically fuels the aliens beyond the obvious payment? Th same questions go for the design of the aliens themselves. Where ET’s design is meant to feel scary before it feels beautifully touching and humanistic, the design and movements of the aliens in this feels… unconscionable?! As we watched, we were full of conjecture: did the production designer hate the director? Or vice versa? Moreover, I was immediately struck by the fact the film has surprisingly good production values and, in fact, had a 13 million dollar budget compared to E.T.’s 10 million dollar budget (which goes to show you how much success rarely has to do with that statistic). Again, I cannot get over the design choices. Everything that’s called “cute” feels like an irony laden dare to say that to the most hideous thing. And it is that incredible disconnect that fuels our very ability to sit “outside” the movie and comment inward.

But the thing I want to advocate, time and time again, is that no matter how many jokes one makes or wonders with confusion, the movie itself is never an object of pure ridicule. Yes, even the ones that waste time running from their own conceits. Because movies are incredibly difficult to make. And even the best can fail. But many of those failures can end up being weird gifts of entertainment. Bewilderment is endearing in its own sort of way. And best of all, it’s a key part of the methods of learning. Because it’s easy to point at E.T. and just be like “hey, make a perfect movie like that! Just have John Williams do an all-time score! Etc!” It’s so hard. And while I could echo some things about that film’s use of set-up and pay off, shot choice, and executing the moments of transcendence, there is just as much you can learn in the opposite direction from MAC AND ME. That’s the fun thing about the prism of badness.

It’s all about how you shine the light on it.

<3HULK