Opinion Piece - Does Pretentiousness Have a Place in Cinema?

I will start with a claim. This claim will, I am sure, shock many of you to your core, but that's why I'm warning you first. What it is is: sometimes, people accuse me of having pretentious taste in films. I know, right? What an absolute shocker! What with it being a quiet week though (with apologies to The Rock, I'm not rushing out to see his new Jumanji reboot sequel), I figured I might dedicate some time to that claim. Do I have pretentious taste in film? Does that matter? And finally, should pretentiousness have a place in cinema and cinema criticism? There it is, there's your road map, we call that a thesis statement in the biz. Now we can start.

Let's begin with a complete defence of pretentiousness because films that are really wanky can be pretty excellent too. Much as the favourite film conversation often stumbles when people ask "I'm sorry, I've never heard of Mulholland Drive, what is that?", it's still a film I'm proud to have as my favourite film. It is weird in awesome ways, rewriting all the things I thought were inherent to cinema and being both funny and suspenseful at the same time. Sure, most people haven't heard of it but there's a chance that after hearing me jabber on about it, they might check it out and again, maybe they won't like it but at least they've pushed themselves out of their cinematic comfort zone. Because that's exactly it, the worst thing that can happen is either that they don't like it but tried or they just think I'm pretentious which, hey, I am a little bit. After all, my favourite film of last year was a remake of a seventies Italian Giallo film, which deviated from the original by draining much of the colour, making it slower and stretching it over two and a half hours. That sounds like a pretentious film and it is, but it's also a film with real merit. When I recommend these kinds of films to people who don't watch as many films as I do, I don't do it to show off; I do it because sometimes challenging yourself can be rewarding. There's so much more that cinema has to offer than just whatever plays at your multiplex, looking a little closer doesn't hurt.

Famously though, I'm also an absolute trash hound and here is where we get into the abandonment of pretentiousness. Films like The Room, Miami Connection and Showgirls have a special place in my heart because they are just awful. In a funny way, these films are pretentious too. Famously, Tommy Wiseau intended The Room as a Tennessee Williams-esque tragedy and in Greg Sestero's book about the making of the film, he goes into how incredibly seriously Wiseau took all of it. Similarly, Showgirls was meant to be a satirical look at the filth and squalor of the life of Las Vegas showgirls, but it became a hysterical mess of humping, awful dialogue and more humping. Both of these films had very serious intentions and so while I maybe don't view them pretentiously (because it's impossible to take dialogue about how delicious dog food is seriously), they come from a place of pretension. This gets into the meat of the argument though, as, in a very post-structuralist way, all that truly matters is how we the audience respond. These filmmakers were allowed to have pretentious intentions when making their films, which is fine because it makes them so much funnier. Films made serious that are read as comedies are amazing, a genre I am constantly preaching, so I do not mind when bad filmmakers make pretentious movies.

At this point though, we approach the middle ground, of films that are neither artistic masterpieces nor unprecedented failures. Essentially, we reach the films that most of you reading this actually watch in your spare time and for that, I can think of no better place to look than Mamma Mia. Now, Mamma Mia is a culturally beloved artifact at this point but I think we can agree that it is also kind of bad. WAIT WAIT WAIT, don't leave! I love it, maybe not as much as the sequel, but I too fell in love with it. No one better exemplifies this bizarre rise and fall of watching the film than Mark Kermode, in his now infamous review. The review is about ten minutes long, of which the first 7 minutes is just him talking about how awful the film is. How it's pretty poorly filmed, how the singing is generally bad, how the plot might as well not exist... And then he snaps. Suddenly, the man is ranting about how much he loves this film and that's pretty much how I felt about it. Most of the time watching it, I was largely uninterested and being very cynical when suddenly, "Slipping Through My Fingers" plays and I'm crying. I realised my guard had been broken and I relented and leaned into all the nonsense that was happening. Going in, I was being very sniffy and pretentious but a magic was cast and by lowering my guard, I had a great time. What I am saying is not to turn your brain off while watching films. That's a defence many people give of stuff like Pirates of the Caribbean and Transformers, films I actively hate and when people say "oh, just turn your brain off", they mean ignore the poor quality. That's kind of what I did with Mamma Mia, sure, but there is a genuine uncynical joy at the heart of it. Transformers is nasty and cynical, so turning your brain off can expose you to toxicity. With Mamma Mia or films of a similar ilk like Legally Blonde or To All The Boys I've Loved Before, they're not high art but they're so full of joy that I don't feel like it's a mistake to turn off my cynicism.

Even having written this, I know I will still be accused of being a massively pretentious dickhead and that's okay. I love weird films, art films, foreign films and you can't shame me not to. But with that said, sometimes I am more than happy to disarm myself of my critical perspective and just enjoy myself, when the film provides the atmosphere for it. When I am almost certainly dragged to the new Bad Boys film by my flatmates, I will not be disarmed, I will be going in guns drawn but with films like Mamma Mia? Knowing me, knowing you, loving it is the best I can do (I'm so sorry, I've been searching for a pun this whole time, that was the best I could do).