Rating Art: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Zardoz

Above you will find the trailer for Zardoz. Go ahead; I'll wait....

Yes, that was Sean Connery in a speedo. Yes, he wears it for the entire film. Yes, Zardoz is a giant floating stone head that pukes guns so that other, all-too-hairy men can pillage what appears to be the Scottish Highlands. And yes, if you were to come over and watch a movie with me right now, this would be my choice...or something very similar.

In the past, people have questioned my unflinching dedication to crap movies. Just the other day, my friend D. was flabbergasted by my insistence that The Room is the single best theater experience devised in the last 20 years. It only got worse when he heard my other recommendations (which included El Topo, Deathbed: The Bed That Eats People, The Impossible Kid, The Happening...). We had a passionate debate on the subject, and I reprint my thoughts here in the interest of expanding some horizons.

Let's pretend you and I are having a science fiction film festival (haha...dweeb); I have to rate the quality of the movies we could watch in order to decide which to screen.

1. Blade Runner=GREAT
2. Moon=Really Good
3. Alien=Good
4. Logan's Run=OK
5. Avatar=Meh
6. Lost in Space=Sucks
7. Zardoz=Absolutely Terrible

So here's the thing: it is not as if I don't realize that Zardoz is terrible, or think that any of the other drek that might replace it constitutes superior film-making. We can both agree that this movie is total crap. In fact, no matter what order I put those first six movies in, or what movies I even include on the list, 99 times out of 100 any sane person in the world is going to put Zardoz last based on the trailer alone.

And I propose that is why we absolutely MUST watch Zardoz.

We don't live in a world of singular production anymore; we aren't viewing a freakin' Matisse painting. Everything(at least in Western culture) is mass-produced and ubiqutously disseminated. So I guess if you'd never seen any science fiction movie ever before, certainly we'd start off on Blade Runner. If you'd never seen a MOVIE before, I'd put in some Chaplin or Arsenic and Old Lace or Throne of Blood. But the thing is, you probably wouldn't be coming to science fiction movie night if either of those were the case.

Great art, in the modern world especially, works on man's capacity for wonder; it rises above the Avatars of the world by sticking in our minds after the entertainment has past. But we, in our mass culture, are surrounded on all sides by entertaining films, and if we try, we could watch nothing but fantastically-crafted cinema for the rest of our lives; there are enough of them out there.

By and large, that's what we should do. And when the fantastic begins to seem mundane, we make our own films and innovate, and the medium moves forward. However, maybe we aren't out to change the world that particular night. Maybe we don't even know each other that well, or our aesthetic organs digest in vastly different ways. Maybe we just want to have fun experiencing that elevator ride away from the mundane.

Zardoz does just that, only this elevator goes down, and we can all agree on how far (i.e. to the very bottom). For anyone who understands good film, or good anything, movies like Zardoz can produce the same sublime wonder as finally crafted work. Only with Zardoz, we aren't quietly delving into our own psyches to ask these probing questions. No, with Zardoz, we can ask those questions collectively as an audience.

AS A COMMUNITY, we ask why in God's name the costume department went with red speedos? What poor bastard paid to see this crap? Or worse, make it? Does Sean Connery wake up in cold sweats, haunted by what the floating stone head could have done to his career? Didn't a single person on the set have any taste?

Zardoz and its ilk bring people together like only terrible art can; it unites us with the only boundless human emotion: scorn. All the ingredients of a great movie will still be there, just negatively defined. Instead of merely recognizing the tenants of good art, we can appreciate and long for them, as it should be.

So if you come over to my house for movie night, bring me some Direct-To-Video crap I've never heard of on a bootlegged DVD. We'll be better friends for it. Popcorn is on me.