As some of you might have realized by now I have a certain fascination with things usually considered bad. So I watched Seltzer and Friedbergs "Epic Movie" and "Disaster Movie" and found that despite their reputation they are actually very thoughtful deconstruction of popular culture in the context of... nah, just fucking with you, they're awful. But as the Trump presidency, the Holocaust and Germany's performance in this years soccer world championship have demonstrated, we should take a good, hard look at awful things and consider how exactly they happened and find out how to make sure that they wont happen again.
See, watching a Seltzer and Friedberg movie expecting a comedy is a rather surreal experience. And I don't mean surreal in the sense that something like the comedy of Tim and Eric is surreal but more in the sense that it capures the feeling of a nightmare in a way that Lynch, Merhige or Von Trier couldn't possibly hope to. Because of this I suggest to watch them as horror movies rather than as comedy. Great American author David Foster Wallace once described the trademark style of director David Lynch as a peculiar combination the macabre and the mundane. In this sense I'd say that there is an unmistakeably lynchian element to Disaster Movie and Epic movie as any sense of uneasy mundanity they build up can, at any moment be broken by random outbursts of grotesque absurdity, disgusting body horror or excessive violence, seemingly out of nowhere.
No seriously. This shit is gonna haunt me, moreso than anything I've seen in an intentional horror movie.
That's some Five Nights at Freddy's shit right there.
Watching a Seltzer and Friedberg movie, in a lot of ways, feels like a nightmare and I think that description deserves to be taken rather literally. What is a dream, exactly? It's our subconsciousness trying to make sense of the impressions, images and emotions of our waking life. What is a nightmare? The same, but it's about our fears, anxieties and irrational phobias. In that sense, I am tempted to say, Friedberg and Seltzer are depicting the collective nightmare of the popular zeitgeist, a series of different, unrelated impressions from various movies, currently popular celebrities and cultural memes arranged in a almost random, stream-of-consciousness sort of fashion almost reminiscent of the literary works of William S. Burroughs. No, please, stay with me.
What Burroughs did, in novels like Naked Lunch or Nova Express, was presenting vignettes of his drug fueled hallucinations using a literary technique he called "cut-up", leaving the raw impressions, often unspeakable horror, grotesque sex and violence, but making sure that there'd be no context for them to work out. Seltzer and Friedberg do the same to popular culture. They take the iconography, the catch phrases, the characters of various popular, unpopular and popular at the time but now forgotten entertainment and rob them of their context while disjointing them by adding perverse sexuality, random violence or various bodily fluids, allegedly for the sake of humor.
The plot, if you want to call it that, follows almost a sort of dream logic, comparable, in a way, maybe to something like Alice in Wonderland as that it has a cast of characters as they get from one absurd situation into the next. All these situations are twisted images of pop-cultural iconography. Let's take Disaster movie, for example and follow its basic plotline:
The protagonist, Will, has a dream, where he, as a caveman, is confronted by a grotesque caricature of now deceased soul singer Amy Winehouse who relays an apocalyptic prophecy to him.
Eat your heart out, Bonnie Aarons.
It's followed by him waking up in bed next to his fiance Amy as well as to rapper Flava Flav and a midget named Jojo. We find out that he's about to celebrate his sexteenth birthday despite being 25 (which, for the record, is the closest thing the movie has to a joke that actually works.) At his birthday party we see a serial murderer modelled after Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men, a pregant woman modelled after Juno from... Juno as well as Will's sassy black friend and his girlfriend Lisa who's played by Kim Kardashian. That has no relevance to where I'm going with this, I just want to point out that Kim Kardashian played a leading role in this movie, proving that a sex tape wasn't actually the low point in her career as an actress. During a musical performance a vaguely defined calamity happens, prompting Will, his best friend, Kim Kardashian and the pregnant woman to flee. As they're fleeing they are, among other things, assaulted by Alvin and the Chipmunks, meet a homeless prostitute who dresses and acts like a Disney princess and later turns out to be a trans woman, get assaulted by an anthropomorphic Panda before being rescued by a naked warrior, enter a museum whos exhibitions come to life, see a dying Miley Cyrus and witness cows falling on various superheroes like Iron Man or Hellboy.
If we take a step back and put ourselves in the shoes of a person with no connection to popular culture, all of this would seem like complete gibberish. We recognize these as references (Well, most of these, some of the stuff in the movies is so obscure by now that I have no idea what it was referencing) because we are familiar with the things they're referencing. It begs the question, however, what the purpose of these references is.
If one wanted to put these movies into a genre they would concede that they're trying to be comedies. If one wanted to be more specific, they might say that they are parodies or spoofs. They are, however, not parodying any specific genre or even specific properties. They are just taking context away from them and twisting them to be violent or sexual or otherwise gross. Theodor Adorno, co-founder of the so called Frankfurt School, a collective of marxist philosophers, mostly jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, often lamented the commodification of culture and art, what he called the "culture industry". In a late capitalist society, he claimed, art would lose all of it originality and degenerate into nothing but a sortiment of interchangeable products and... look, this is a really abridged version of of what he actually had to say on the matter but cut me some slack here. If there's a point to be made that Adorno was correct then Seltzer and Friedberg are making it.
Their movies are nothing but vaguely recognizable cultural iconography robbed of their original context, ran through a meatgrinder and smeared onto a canvas to present an apocalyptic postmodernist hellscape where every single image is nothing more than a perverted mockery of another one. Looking at the actual writing of these movies, aside from the phrases they stole from others, one will see that they're rife with homophobia, transphobia and misogyny. Close to the ending of Disaster movie there's an extended scene of Will and his best friend hitting and otherwise physically abusing Will's girlfriend (As part of a joke about "knocking her unconscious that she doesn't feel any pain", you see).
In another scene the pregnant Juno expy gets eaten by the Five Nights at Freddy's Chipmunks.
Like many alleged comedies selling themselves on being offensive, much of Disaster Movies humor comes from implicit and explicit violence against the weak. Our friend Adorno once claimed that one of the consequences of the Culture Industry would be to make it impossible for art to question established power structures. By its apathetic depiction of violence against women and minorities, Disaster Movie seems to reaffirm that claim, showing something deeply dark and cynical behind what is otherwise a thoroughly unfunny comedy.
When conservative talking heads like Jordan Peterson complain about postmodernism they... well, most of the time they have no idea what they're talking about and shouldn't be listened to, but if one really wants to see what negative consequences there are to a media landscape that grows increasingly referential, increasingly devoid of original thought and increasingly submissive towards societies injustices one has to look no further than at the filmography of Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg. It's grotesque, it's ugly and its profusely frightening. Legendary film critic Roger Ebert once said, referring to the movie "Freddy got Fingered" that the day may come when Freddy got Fingered will be considered a milestone of neo-surrealism, but never where it'll be considered funny.
In the same vein I would like to say that they day may come when Disaster Movie will be seen as an unrelenting depiction of the existentialist horrors of a world where popular culture has become nothing but a stagnant, cynical mockery of itself, a dystopian warning of the end of original thought. But it'll always be anything but entertainment.
See, watching a Seltzer and Friedberg movie expecting a comedy is a rather surreal experience. And I don't mean surreal in the sense that something like the comedy of Tim and Eric is surreal but more in the sense that it capures the feeling of a nightmare in a way that Lynch, Merhige or Von Trier couldn't possibly hope to. Because of this I suggest to watch them as horror movies rather than as comedy. Great American author David Foster Wallace once described the trademark style of director David Lynch as a peculiar combination the macabre and the mundane. In this sense I'd say that there is an unmistakeably lynchian element to Disaster Movie and Epic movie as any sense of uneasy mundanity they build up can, at any moment be broken by random outbursts of grotesque absurdity, disgusting body horror or excessive violence, seemingly out of nowhere.
No seriously. This shit is gonna haunt me, moreso than anything I've seen in an intentional horror movie.
That's some Five Nights at Freddy's shit right there.
Watching a Seltzer and Friedberg movie, in a lot of ways, feels like a nightmare and I think that description deserves to be taken rather literally. What is a dream, exactly? It's our subconsciousness trying to make sense of the impressions, images and emotions of our waking life. What is a nightmare? The same, but it's about our fears, anxieties and irrational phobias. In that sense, I am tempted to say, Friedberg and Seltzer are depicting the collective nightmare of the popular zeitgeist, a series of different, unrelated impressions from various movies, currently popular celebrities and cultural memes arranged in a almost random, stream-of-consciousness sort of fashion almost reminiscent of the literary works of William S. Burroughs. No, please, stay with me.
What Burroughs did, in novels like Naked Lunch or Nova Express, was presenting vignettes of his drug fueled hallucinations using a literary technique he called "cut-up", leaving the raw impressions, often unspeakable horror, grotesque sex and violence, but making sure that there'd be no context for them to work out. Seltzer and Friedberg do the same to popular culture. They take the iconography, the catch phrases, the characters of various popular, unpopular and popular at the time but now forgotten entertainment and rob them of their context while disjointing them by adding perverse sexuality, random violence or various bodily fluids, allegedly for the sake of humor.
The plot, if you want to call it that, follows almost a sort of dream logic, comparable, in a way, maybe to something like Alice in Wonderland as that it has a cast of characters as they get from one absurd situation into the next. All these situations are twisted images of pop-cultural iconography. Let's take Disaster movie, for example and follow its basic plotline:
The protagonist, Will, has a dream, where he, as a caveman, is confronted by a grotesque caricature of now deceased soul singer Amy Winehouse who relays an apocalyptic prophecy to him.
Eat your heart out, Bonnie Aarons.
It's followed by him waking up in bed next to his fiance Amy as well as to rapper Flava Flav and a midget named Jojo. We find out that he's about to celebrate his sexteenth birthday despite being 25 (which, for the record, is the closest thing the movie has to a joke that actually works.) At his birthday party we see a serial murderer modelled after Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men, a pregant woman modelled after Juno from... Juno as well as Will's sassy black friend and his girlfriend Lisa who's played by Kim Kardashian. That has no relevance to where I'm going with this, I just want to point out that Kim Kardashian played a leading role in this movie, proving that a sex tape wasn't actually the low point in her career as an actress. During a musical performance a vaguely defined calamity happens, prompting Will, his best friend, Kim Kardashian and the pregnant woman to flee. As they're fleeing they are, among other things, assaulted by Alvin and the Chipmunks, meet a homeless prostitute who dresses and acts like a Disney princess and later turns out to be a trans woman, get assaulted by an anthropomorphic Panda before being rescued by a naked warrior, enter a museum whos exhibitions come to life, see a dying Miley Cyrus and witness cows falling on various superheroes like Iron Man or Hellboy.
If we take a step back and put ourselves in the shoes of a person with no connection to popular culture, all of this would seem like complete gibberish. We recognize these as references (Well, most of these, some of the stuff in the movies is so obscure by now that I have no idea what it was referencing) because we are familiar with the things they're referencing. It begs the question, however, what the purpose of these references is.
If one wanted to put these movies into a genre they would concede that they're trying to be comedies. If one wanted to be more specific, they might say that they are parodies or spoofs. They are, however, not parodying any specific genre or even specific properties. They are just taking context away from them and twisting them to be violent or sexual or otherwise gross. Theodor Adorno, co-founder of the so called Frankfurt School, a collective of marxist philosophers, mostly jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, often lamented the commodification of culture and art, what he called the "culture industry". In a late capitalist society, he claimed, art would lose all of it originality and degenerate into nothing but a sortiment of interchangeable products and... look, this is a really abridged version of of what he actually had to say on the matter but cut me some slack here. If there's a point to be made that Adorno was correct then Seltzer and Friedberg are making it.
Their movies are nothing but vaguely recognizable cultural iconography robbed of their original context, ran through a meatgrinder and smeared onto a canvas to present an apocalyptic postmodernist hellscape where every single image is nothing more than a perverted mockery of another one. Looking at the actual writing of these movies, aside from the phrases they stole from others, one will see that they're rife with homophobia, transphobia and misogyny. Close to the ending of Disaster movie there's an extended scene of Will and his best friend hitting and otherwise physically abusing Will's girlfriend (As part of a joke about "knocking her unconscious that she doesn't feel any pain", you see).
In another scene the pregnant Juno expy gets eaten by the Five Nights at Freddy's Chipmunks.
Like many alleged comedies selling themselves on being offensive, much of Disaster Movies humor comes from implicit and explicit violence against the weak. Our friend Adorno once claimed that one of the consequences of the Culture Industry would be to make it impossible for art to question established power structures. By its apathetic depiction of violence against women and minorities, Disaster Movie seems to reaffirm that claim, showing something deeply dark and cynical behind what is otherwise a thoroughly unfunny comedy.
When conservative talking heads like Jordan Peterson complain about postmodernism they... well, most of the time they have no idea what they're talking about and shouldn't be listened to, but if one really wants to see what negative consequences there are to a media landscape that grows increasingly referential, increasingly devoid of original thought and increasingly submissive towards societies injustices one has to look no further than at the filmography of Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg. It's grotesque, it's ugly and its profusely frightening. Legendary film critic Roger Ebert once said, referring to the movie "Freddy got Fingered" that the day may come when Freddy got Fingered will be considered a milestone of neo-surrealism, but never where it'll be considered funny.
In the same vein I would like to say that they day may come when Disaster Movie will be seen as an unrelenting depiction of the existentialist horrors of a world where popular culture has become nothing but a stagnant, cynical mockery of itself, a dystopian warning of the end of original thought. But it'll always be anything but entertainment.
