Plan 9 From Outer Space and Badness in Film
This afternoon I watched Plan 9 From Outer Space – it was on TCM. The 1959 film is widely considered the worst movie ever made. Quentin Tarantino routinely lists it as his favorite ‘comedy,’ and you may remember it from the Seinfeld episode where Jerry puts everything on hold to rush home and watch what turns out to be Larry David dressed in tin-foil screaming pseudo-German babble. It is the brainchild of Edward D. Wood Jr., auteur of the atrocious, who wrote, produced, and directed this travesty. It is not really the worst movie ever made in the same way that Citizen Kane is not really the best. But it is nevertheless terrible. . . just really really bad. For example Ed Wood cast his good friend and long time leading man Bela Lugosi in the lead role, but when Lugosi died after filming the first scene, rather than recasting the role and refilming one scene, Wood hired a man to pretend to be Lugosi and simply had him cover his face with his arm for most of the film. In some scenes it even switches between night and day from cut to cut.
Plan 9 falls into that category of films lampooned by Mystery Science Theatre 3000. These film are so bad they cross back over into ‘good.’ The great thing about these films is their objective badness. Blatant disregard for self-evident lines of sight, rules of composition, lighting, and plausibility make it so that no one can fail to see that Plan 9 From Outer Space is a terrible film. The fact that it is so obviously bad allows us to enjoy the badness more or less guilt free. It would be nice if more movies were more obviously bad. The problem is that so many movies are bad, but the technical elements are more refined, and the badness is therefore submerged. The badness of these films lies in their hollowness, sentimentality, propaganda, or other forms of untruth and emotional manipulation. This makes these movies far more dangerous, because their badness appears subjective. “You might not have liked it but I thought it was awesome,” someone might say. They are bad films nevertheless, and bad for you, but without the obvious markers. This is part of why I think film criticism is a necessary pursuit. Wouldn’t it be nice if every bad movie was as easy to identify as Plan 9 From Outer Space?
