I had wanted to return to you with something more substantial than a listicle, but sometimes a big idea puts up a wall (or is crowded out by other professional commitments), and other inspiration (not to mention an easier engagement throughway) intercedes; such as that which comes from going unthinkingly onto Gawker.
I can’t say for certain that red flags actually exist. If so, I’m tempted to add “sensitivity to red flags” to the ever-increasing Excel spreadsheet of them. No human is truly absent of them; and even the more typical ones can be overlooked if the primary witness or recipient so judges. Red-flagged cultural ephemera is also highly suspect. (If Infinite Jest fans are often self-aggrandizing “literary” men, what does it say about my literary manhood that the majority of my recommenders of that novel have been women?) Anyway, Gawker’s improved list of “red flag movies” over Buzzfeed’s is correct enough. But it goes only so far as to congratulate their readership’s limited imagination. Seldom, it seems, do they stop and appreciate how freely and versatilely red flags fly within our species, in ways far subtler but no less ominous.
In that spirit, provided here is a list of films with overlooked, prestige red flag constituencies. They cover a wide array of psychological defects that know no gender limitation, and indeed stretch out to omens tied as much to class and generation. But in compiling this list, I wanted to avoid what is so often the reflex of films that inspire easy invective. So while In Bruges, Moonstruck, and Metropolitan are just as deserving as the following, I found the thrills too much to handle at a healthy pace, and looked for greater challenges. But rest assured, the time in which you find yourself waving the red flag is a matter of when rather than if. Enjoy your moral high-ground before I or someone else pushes you off of it.
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)—Nothing has instilled greater empathy in me for H.P. Lovecraft’s legions of haters more than Roman Polanski’s apparent classic. Like Lovecraft’s stories, Rosemary’s Baby is an interesting work with obvious flaws that has impressed itself upon the ambitions of many subsequent artists to replicate and, with great ease, improve upon. It seems that at some point someone made a mistake and declared that this was the greatest horror film ever made and no one saw fit to correct it. Maybe that was almost right at one point, but I can’t separate my viewing experience from that of Deliverance. Both were filmed as intense, frightening thrillers; both, as it happens, also have “iconic” rape scenes. Yet both have lost much of their impact in the ensuing years, rendering the terror in a nauseatingly comical tint. But unless you can afford to clear an entire afternoon of your schedule in order to be “taken to school,” you take this truth to your tomb.
Grease 2 (1982)—The burgeoning cult of Grease 2 is what happens when people fall in love with a film they haven’t seen. There’s much that’s conceptually compelling about it. But then there’s much that’s conceptually compelling about Spiderland and The Recognitions but that doesn’t mean they can also be enjoyed as, say, something from Arby’s can be enjoyed. Grease 2 is nearly a carbon copy of its predecessor, only the Travolta role is now a woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) and the Olivia Newton-John role is now a man (the Rex Manning guy). And despite its diminished resemblance to Scorpio Rising compared to the proto-Grease 2, it is somewhat more out of the closet. It exists as a kind of fever dream for fans of camp and/or campy trope-subversion who wish that Hairspray and Cry-Baby hadn’t been so dirtied by John Waters’s Baltimore exceptionalism.
Johnny Dangerously (1984)—Gangster movies, like jazz, are an integral part of America’s cultural psyche. To deride them as trash or as indulgent is to express anti-American sentiment. Simple as. Johnny Dangerously is like all good parody films in that it is a loving mockery of that hallowed genre and some of its finest examples. Though that doesn’t mean that those tropes haven’t attained a tinned-eared echo since their peak. Even recently made ones suffer from an antiquated sensibility. I don’t think even the Coen brothers have seen Miller’s Crossing. As such, our most singular and vibrant contributions to popular art become, in a sense, entweeded. Johnny Dangerously is a spoof film for NPR listeners.
Braveheart (1995)—It would be wrong to ascribe Britain’s mid-‘90s devolution fever to a Mel Gibson movie. Rather, the desire on the part of the Scottish people for some manner of self-governance has a lot of overlap with the desire on the part of the Scottish people to see themselves as gallant, hockey-haired, and badly accented men of the people, seducing French royalty while impaling mean, rapist, yet also ineffectual and effete, Englishman on pointy sticks. I’m sure it was fun in the moment. But soberer heads (Trainspotting) prevailed to remind Scotland that all they really have to show for themselves at the turn of the millennium is Belle and Sebastian. Rough.
Empire Records (1995)—I first saw Empire Records in 1998 en route to my eighth grade graduation trip to the Poconos. I’d never heard of it before, quite unlike apparently everyone else on the bus. I found it sort of dull, as most ‘90s youth films were, but admired the committed production design with all the posters bearing clearly made-up bands like “Pavement.” But at the same time, on that rainy day in the Pennsylvania woods, a kind of generational awareness started to sink in. The Empire Records cult, I’m fairly confident, rests squarely on “elder millennials.” It does not make much sense to Gen Xers, who have plenty of more compelling options (like Pump Up the Volume and Cool as Ice); while it rings falsely to younger millennials and absurdly to zoomers. To watch Empire Records is to look into the soul of this curious cohort, to see into their tarnished dreams, to assess their untethered cultural sensibility, and to understand the root of their exceptionally cloying personality. In that sense, Empire Records, to use an irritating modern critical cliché, is a horror film. Certainly no one outside of people with media jobs who were born in the mid-1980s finds “Rex Manning Day” funny.
Rules of Attraction (2002)—America’s canon of “campus novels” seems, at least in quality, to be quite paltry against that of Britain’s. While they have Lucky Jim, all we have is Stoner, possibly Pictures From an Institution, and Bret Easton Ellis’s sophomore slump between Less Than Zero and American Psycho. Though it does not scan as well as its predecessor, the harsh critical consensus of its 1987 release has done it an injustice. Rules of Attraction, probably owing to the fact that Ellis was still in college when he wrote it, captures as best as any literary work can those aspects of American college life that refuse to change so long as “college” exists. That doesn’t mean it was worthy of film adaptation, let alone so faithful an adaptation as the one Roger Avery gave it. With few liberties taken beyond temporal updates, which were unobtrusively few at the time, Rules of Attraction makes for boring viewing. That is, unless you were in college when the film came out, which I happened to be! My small liberal arts alma mater lacked the prestige of Ellis’s Bennington stand-in, but that probably made it all the more likely to find it beaming across dorm rooms and off-campus houses like a cultural tanning bed. Its most nefarious effect could be seen on me, when during a fiction writing class I made an attempt at a combination “campus” and “home for break story” that earned me maybe a B but which I still plan to ceremonially burn once I find it.
Lola Versus (2012)—This movie has only one fan that I’m aware of who had cogent, eloquent justifications for its merits; none of which I found reason to contradict after watching it myself. We are now deadly enemies, alas, and so the film by no fault of its own has fallen into disrepute. But God is good, because Band Aid is slightly better.
Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures (2016)—This random arts documentary probably doesn’t have “fans” in the sense that these other films do. But the audience it was meant to attract—educated, likely affluent heterosexuals—comes with its own deplorable baggage. The film takes its subtitle from Jesse Helms’s senate floor speech decrying the public funding of the famously deviant photographer, all the while waving one of his photos (Man in Polyester Suit) around for our most august deliberative body to see. It’s very comical and psychologically suggestive, setting the moral and critical tone going forward. In its framing, Robert Mapplethorpe becomes a kind of Horatio Alger hero, one albeit with a taste for water sports and aggressive blasphemy, who hustled his way to fame and notoriety through a visual medium few took seriously at the time. This comes at the expense of assessing Mapplethorpe as an artist, taking only the most indirect critical positions, less they take on dangerously Helms-like cadences. It dances around his technical limitations, such has his reliance on studio assistants; the easy replication of his style by other, cheaper photographers; and the fact that he was actually kind of racist. It becomes apparent that this chronicler of pre-AIDS gay culture and pre-Giuliani New York City, and a bunch of fancy flowers, has second billing to its audience in desperate need of both progressive bona fides and transgressive thrills. The scene that complements the Helms footage is the one in which politely attired and articulated archivists huddle over Mapplethorpe’s whip-in-backside self-portrait like boys at a sleepover looking at porn for the first time.
Woodstock ’99: Peace, Love, and Rage (2021)—The Bill Simmons-produced HBO documentary on the notorious festival already has a disadvantage against the subsequent three-episode Netflix series on the same subject due to its reduced runtime and shallow reporting of the actual on-the-ground details. But it is all of a piece with its broader aim, in the classic Michael Moore style, of polemicizing to the thoroughly polemicized. Some of the most annoying people in America—people who know they aren’t racist or sexist and would never storm the Capitol building and who want everyone else to know it—enjoyed this film the most. They hung on Wesley Morris’s every prefabricated truism, and nodded politely to Moby’s condescending vacuity about the merits of “progressive” hip-hop. It is a signal of collective intelligence; but that intelligence had limits. In seeking to dispel the myths of one generation, it only reinforced the myths of the next. When you make Chuck Klosterman look worldly-wise, you know you’ve fucked up.
Barbarian (2022)—It may be true that Zach Cregger’s breakout film is the most unrelenting horror film in the last half-decade, as if that means something. But who needs that when the collective howl of its numberless stans echoes so deeply into your consciousness that it creates, in effect, a horror film unto itself? A horror film where you are the unfortunate antagonist, living with a curse in which loved ones at your dinner table or strangers at the train station take on the soy-facing countenance of people who act as if no horror film has ever existed before this one, and any horror film that happens to predate it or follow it is steaming shit when standing within range of its unquestioned resplendence. It makes you want to turn to these abominable manifestations and scream “For fuck sake: shut up. Shut. The. Fuck. Up. Please.” Such will be its intensity that lobotomies will likely have a renewed vogue in the coming years in order to cure Barbarian delirium.