Cinema Lessons from a Trash-Movie Auteur
I worship at the altar of trash, by which I mean that I am one of those cinephiles with a fondness for bad movies. Perhaps I am underselling the corpus I have in mind by calling it merely “bad,” and understating my sect’s feeling by calling it merely “fondness.” The movies my fellow-cultists and I most esteem are not just bad but incredibly, impressively terrible—scrambled, technically maladroit, incomprehensible at the level of basic plotting—and we are not just fond but obsessed, digging through piles of bric-a-brac at thrift stores in hope of uncovering forgotten VHS tapes from the eighties, scrolling to neglected corners of YouTube with the goal of alighting on some near-unwatchable monstrosity with thirty-two views and a handful of affronted comments.
But we, too, are discerning; we do not approve of just any bad movie. The train wrecks we love feature amateur actors and dialogue so garbled that it may well have been translated from a foreign language by a non-native speaker (as it probably was in the case of “Troll 2,” about which more later). The sound quality is scratchy; the camerawork is nauseating, and not in a chicly experimental way. The movies in the good-because-bad canon are not forgettably bad, like cheesy Hallmark fare or the thousandth predictable sequel in a superhero franchise; they are not skillfully and expensively bad, like botched Oscar bait. Nor are they quite like the gripping yet ultimately shallow entertainments that Pauline Kael defended in her classic 1969 essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” published in Harper’s. No, our bad movies are monumental feats of incompetence, inspired in their badness, bad in ways I could never have dreamed a film could be bad, so feverishly and outlandishly bad that they have bodied forth a new aesthetic category.
These trash movies, as I have taken to calling them, to distinguish them from prestige failures, do not quite constitute a genre, the way the thriller or the rom-com does. They do not treat any subjects in particular, or hew to any specific conventions, or share any consistent visual signature. The trash movie is more a matter of sensibility than it is of thematic preoccupation or stylistic continuity. It is difficult to pin down its hallmarks, except to insist that it would find even the smallest dose of self-awareness fatal. “Intending to be campy is always harmful,” Susan Sontag wrote, in 1964, of the exaggerated and mannered affect called camp. Intending to be trash is even more dangerous. When it comes to the singular alchemy that transforms garden-variety badness into sublime disastrousness, earnest attempts at capital-“S” seriousness are best. But, beyond emphasizing that trash thrives in the chasm between ambition and accomplishment, I struggle to generalize.
It helps, of course, if a movie is a sequel, preferably one that has little or nothing to do with its predecessor, like the 1990 masterpiece “Troll 2” (which is completely unrelated to “Troll,” an innocuous 1986 flick about a little girl terrorized by a troll, and which features no trolls, only goblins). It also helps if a film was made on a shoestring budget, for which reason there is a large margin of overlap between trash and pulpy B movies. But it would be a mistake to presume that the difference between rote badness and delicious catastrophe is just the difference between the highbrow and the low, or the difference between the well-funded and the cheap. Costly movies like “Cats” (2019) and “Megalopolis” (2024) contrive to qualify as trash, and B movies with no funding to speak of often manage to evince real merit. I would defend the 1989 extravaganza “Society” (a film that defies ready summary but which features at least one literal butt-head—that is, a butt with a face on it) as an actual good movie with eccentric charm.
Still, for every resourceful, imaginative low-budget success, there is a bungled movie that aspires, if not to quality, then at least to financial viability, but instead achieves legendary ineptitude. Unsurprisingly, many of the films in this last category are trash classics: in the grand tradition inaugurated by “Plan 9 from Outer Space” (1958), one of the first movies to be celebrated for being so bad that it’s perversely captivating, are “Manos: The Hands of Fate” (1966), “Space Mutiny” (1988), “Miami Connection” (1988), “Hard Ticket to Hawaii” (1987), “Samurai Cop” (1991), “Sister Sensei” (1994), and many more.
I am a friend to all improvidently bad movies, and I would never turn up a chance to watch a samurai-themed obscurity from the eighties, but my absolute favorite kind of trash is the vanity project. Movies in this class are, paradigmatically, produced, written, and directed by the same person, who generally also plays the devastatingly handsome romantic lead (and often funds the proceedings with money earned in some unrelated capacity). The most famous bad movie of all time, and the first one I ever watched, “The Room” (2003), stars the man who wrote, directed, produced, and bankrolled it: the incorrigible Tommy Wiseau, a mysterious figure with a vampiric mien who wears sunglasses inside. Another celebrated example, “Birdemic: Shock and Terror” (2010), was produced, written, and directed by the tech salesman James Nguyen, who did not star in his opus but did drive around the Sundance Film Festival in a minivan with what looked like a taxidermic bird affixed to the antenna, handing out flyers to promote a screening at a local bar.
But it must be conceded that Nguyen and even Wiseau are lesser talents. To understand bad movies, it is crucial to understand their most distinguished representative, the ultimate trash auteur: an enigmatic man named Neil Breen.
If Wiseau is the Steven Spielberg of bad movies, Breen is the Ingmar Bergman. His œuvre encompasses seven feature films, the first of which, “Double Down,” was released in 2005, and the most recent of which, “Dire Duplicity,” came out just this spring. These masterpieces are more esoteric than “The Room,” but widely recognized by connoisseurs as the weirdest of the weird, the trashiest of the trashy.
Breen enthusiasts, myself among them, often find themselves asking: what is this man’s deal? The answer is: no one knows, and everyone enjoys not knowing. Breen claims to have funded his first couple of movies with income he earned as an architect and financed his later movies with the proceeds from the earlier ones. At one point he had a real-estate license, though whether he has ever sold a house is anybody’s guess. Even his age is disputed: according to IMDb, he is sixty-seven, and obsessives who managed to dig up an old yearbook photo of one Cornelius Francis Breen allege that he graduated from high school in 1964 and that his birth year is most likely 1946, which would put him at seventy-nine. For his part, Breen says that both dates are false and that the yearbook picture (which bears a striking resemblance to him) is a different person. When pressed about his age, he said only that he is “a young man.”
It is impossible to date Breen just by looking at him; his face has the inelastic, ageless quality of a synthetic substance. When the character that he plays in his 2016 film “Pass Thru” explains that he is an alien who moves from one “time plane” to another, he is more right than he seems to know. All things considered, it is appropriate that Breen is, somehow, simultaneously sixty-seven, seventy-nine, and a “young man”: the strangeness of his work and its accoutrements warps the very fabric of space-time. The websites for each of his movies have plain backgrounds and unfussy font choices that put me in mind of pages coded in HTML and accessed on a desktop with a gurgling internet connection in the family study circa 2003. Each site features a low-res photograph of a film cover that appears to have been designed on early-two-thousands Photoshop. The associated e-mail addresses are all, appropriately, AOL. His frame of reference is a mystery: when asked about his favorite directors in Q. & A.s, he habitually dismisses the question, leading some fans to speculate that he has never seen a movie that he did not direct. “I feel like Neil never actually watched any movies,” wrote the top commenter on a popular YouTube video about Breen. “He just heard what they were and tried it for himself.”
Even if Breen has, in fact, seen a movie, he is such a sui-generis phenomenon that he may as well not have. The facts of his biography, no matter how outrageous, could not possibly explain the sheer derangement of his output. It is hard to say what, exactly, happens in any of his movies, each of which is a convoluted farrago of espionage, deceit, villainy, and futuristic imagery that makes heavy use of green screen and that—not to put too fine a point on it—makes absolutely no sense. Nonetheless, his corpus boasts certain continuities and several recurring motifs. He is fond of technobabble, and phrases like “programmable virtual reality” are often bandied about without much clarification. He stars in every movie he directs, playing a glamorous figure fighting a shadowy cabal of nefarious élites. He is, variously, a hacker (“Double Down,” “Fateful Findings”), a vigilante with superpowers (“Twisted Pair,” “Cade: The Tortured Crossing,” and somehow also “Fateful Findings”), and an alien or an A.I.-augmented warrior who hopes to purify humanity of its lesser elements (“Twisted Pair,” “Cade: The Tortured Crossing,” “Pass Thru,” “I Am Here. . . . Now”). Perhaps inadvertently, his movies tend to thematize his outsider position: in all of them, he is a savior approaching humanity from beyond its mores, with some degree of confusion. In several, he is literally from outer space.
Breen’s gestures toward political grievance never coalesce into coherent complaints—who would want them to?—but they have a vaguely libertarian flavor. His enemies are named with both absolute specificity and absolute generality in close to every film. They include “the stockbrokers,” “the C.E.O.s,” “the bankers” (sometimes also “the international bankers”), “the insurance companies,” and, especially, “the politicians.” In a notorious and oft-memed scene at the end of “Fateful Findings,” the character that Breen plays announces that he has hacked “into government and corporate systems all over the country,” uncovering what he earlier described as “national and international corruption,” and prompting the criminals he has unmasked to kill themselves onscreen. “I resign today as president of the bank,” a sallow man proclaims, as if there were just one bank in the world, before shooting himself in the head. The moment sounds darker than it is, largely because the gun looks plastic, and the explosion is obviously C.G.I. A montage with a similarly unsubtle message in “Pass Thru” has attained an exalted status among Breen devotees. This time, his character materializes at a series of gatherings where lawyers, politicians, and bankers (sometimes played by confusingly overlapping actors) nurse cocktails and amiably confess to manipulating the public. “Isn’t that corrupt?,” Breen intones. “Isn’t that corrupt?” has since become a catchphrase.
Breen’s films are a curious blend of unintelligibility and over-explication. In one characteristic sequence (which I confess to quoting at every opportunity), a character tells her travelling companion, apropos of nothing, “Your mother is my sister! She was murdered! I swore to God I’d take care of you! You’re my niece!” Expository voice-overs are common. “We were subjected to reprogramming of our D.N.A. and cells, making us more humanoid, with superior powers,” booms the voice of Breen’s character at the start of “Twisted Pair.” But, above all, what makes a Breen movie a Breen movie is that it is a one-man show. Fans have designed T-shirts that lovingly mock the credit sequences: “Written, directed, produced, casted, starring, lighting design, financed, catered, and makeup by NEIL BREEN” [sic]. Many are shot, at least in part, at his house in Nevada, and feature his pool, his Rolls-Royce, and his Ferrari (which sports a license plate that reads, incredibly, “FARRARI”). Some are filmed in the nearby desert, and at least two include scenes shot at the Nevada State University campus, which is supposed to stand in for an operational headquarters (though signs designating a computer lab and a study room are clearly legible on the walls). The special effects are jerkily unrealistic, resembling the graphics in The Sims. It is not unusual for a Breen film to recycle the same sequence of stock footage several times.
Breen has found his actors, some of them virtual amateurs, by advertising on Craigslist, the now defunct Backpage, and “a couple of those kinds of things,” as he put it at a recent event. Cast members are not given full scripts, and several claim they were told what to say on the spot, which would account for their deer-in-headlights delivery. (Breen said that he gives actors the sections that relate to their characters ahead of time.) One wonders, however, how the auteur himself manages to seem so extraterrestrial when he recites the lines that he himself wrote. My friend Austin, who has impeccable taste in bad movies and other internet esoterica, reflected on Breen’s uncanny charisma during a recent phone call. “Breen is completely wooden, with the strangest expressions on his face all the time,” he said. Then he added wonderingly, almost tenderly, “It’s strangely magnetic.” So it is.
Breen claims that his films are profitable, and I believe him. Whenever he announces, often in an impromptu X post, that he has a new movie screening in cinemas around the country, hundreds flock to see the latest work of “the Breenius.” Since 2020, when a friend introduced me to the delirium of Breen’s filmography, I had been anxiously awaiting my own chance to watch his bafflements on the big screen. So, when Breen revealed, with his customary abruptness, that his seventh feature film, “Dire Duplicity,” would première at the Independent Filmmakers Showcase’s L.A. Film Festival on May 15th, I knew that I had to go. If Breen’s avatars could travel from the future or the furthest reaches of the galaxy to search out the corrupt politicians, I could travel two thousand miles to ask my fellow-fanatics what distinguished our hero’s work from the bad movies that normal people came across in the course of their normal lives, what differentiated it from Christmas specials and stale action flicks, what made it a flare from another universe.
Everyone in Los Angeles apologized to me about the weather, which was warm, breezy, and ever so slightly overcast—in short, perfect. The jacarandas were in full effusion, stately and fragrant, tilting over the streets and scattering petals on the sidewalks. The natives went about their business wearing sweatshirts.
I was staying with a friend in Westwood, near the campus of U.C.L.A. At the coffee shop where I beat a retreat to charge my phone, students sat barricaded behind their laptops, typing furiously. On the street outside, I was nearly run down by a food-delivery robot that bore a screen with its name, Truman. But I didn’t have time to contemplate my brush with death: I had a première to attend. “Dire Duplicity” was playing downtown at a Regal Cinema, the kind of place with giant, flashing screens advertising the next installment of “Star Wars.” I had shaken Truman only to end up in a theatre that was the height of corporate impersonality, in the heart of corporate Hollywood. Breen would have said that it was corrupt, and perhaps he would have been right.
But I did not have to speculate about what he would have said, because, suddenly, there he was, an apparition from another time plane, awkward and incongruous in the conspicuously forgettable atmosphere of the Regal. He was milling around in the hallway, clutching a plastic bottle of water, dressed in a dark blazer and jeans. I asked if I could take a picture with him. “No,” he said flatly, but he was only kidding. In the resultant shot, I am beaming in amazement, and he is staring ahead with his mouth parted in what might conceivably be a proto-smile, as if he were imitating an expression that someone once described to him but that he was only now attempting for himself.
The festival worker who had taken the picture handed me back my phone and ushered me into the long line of fans amassed at the entrance to the theatre. The first screening of “Dire Duplicity” had sold out almost instantaneously, and the second screening later that day sold out promptly, too. One woman told me that she had driven an hour and a half from the Valley to be there. A software engineer had come from San Diego, a math researcher from Berkeley. A man with dark hair and wire-rimmed glasses was sporting a T-shirt with a picture of Breen’s face on it and BREEN emblazoned across it. When the Breenius himself walked past us, the crowd erupted into cheers of “Breen! Breen! Breen!”
The tagline of “Dire Duplicity” is “Every betrayal begins with trust.” “Remember,” Breen said repeatedly in his prescreening remarks, “every betrayal begins with trust.” We could hardly forget it. Breen also emphasized that Heath, the film’s protagonist, is different from his other heroes, who tend to have superhuman abilities. This time, Breen told us, he plays an unaugmented human being who is, nonetheless, the best agent at what Breen described in an e-mail as a “secret international agency” in direct contact with the President. Heath pilots a fighter jet, deploys bombs in foreign countries, and thwarts cyberattacks, all after remarkably cursory and casual conversations with a government official.
All the telltale signs of a Breen creation are in evidence. There is the muddled terrorist plot, the corrupt politician, the love interest who looks thirty to fifty years Breen’s junior; in fact, there are arguably two of them, and at least one is responsible for the betrayal . . . that begins with trust. There is also, of course, a Ferrari, though this time it’s a newer model with a different license plate. The audience whooped in appreciation when the same stock footage of a complex of office buildings appeared for the third and then the fourth time. There are the usual confusions: twice, we see a man gunned down on the sidewalk. His death is never explained and appears to have no bearing on the rest of the plot.
Despite these gaffes—or, more likely, because of them—we gave Breen a standing ovation when he walked stiffly to the front of the room for a post-film Q. & A. He held the microphone inexpertly, raising it up toward his mouth, then forgetting that he was holding it and letting it dip down again. His voice seemed to warble as it grew alternately louder and softer. When someone asked about the symbolic significance of an older character’s oxygen tank, he replied, matter-of-factly, “He’s an elderly man. You know, when you’re over forty, you need oxygen,” which is undeniably true. I thought of a screening of “The Room” that I had attended in high school, featuring a Q. & A. with Wiseau. I remember probing him about the thematic import of a particularly baffling part of the story line. “Why does Claudette get cancer?” I asked. “Why is the sky blue?” he replied, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. This answer still delights me.
After the “Dire Duplicity” screening, I ran into its stars on the street outside the cinema. Kansas Bowling, one of the film’s two romantic leads, told me wistfully, and maybe not entirely seriously, “It’s kind of bittersweet, because I know I’ll never be in a better movie than this.” Her father, William Preston Bowling, who plays the elderly cowboy with the oxygen tank, was with her. He was smoking a spliff, which he agreed to let me mention only when I assured him that it was legal to possess marijuana in California. His character, he said, was cast on the phone, despite a possible hiccup: he and Breen would have to share a pair of cowboy boots on set, and Bowling, it turned out, has smaller feet than Breen. (Bowling headed off possible concerns by proposing to pad the boots with extra socks.) He joked that he had been typecast: in real life, he plays in a spaghetti Western-themed band called The Band with No Name. When asked how it felt to appear in a Breen film, he took a drag and exulted, “It’s a total dream, and I feel high as a kite right now.”
But the real action was in line for the Breen meet and greet, which snaked across the lobby of the Regal’s mezzanine level after the second screening. When I landed in Los Angeles, I was under the impression that I was a trash-cinema buff, but, talking to the aficionados in the Breen line, I was humbled. I knew about “ThanksKilling,” a film about a homicidal turkey that terrorizes a group of college students on Thanksgiving break, but a man in a pink polo shirt knew that it was just one installment in an underground franchise. “I’ve seen one and three because there’s not a two, and I’ve also seen the musical,” he said, putting me to shame. Then he told me where I could find a YouTube link to the stage production. A man with wild hair volunteered a title I had never even heard of, the Japanese musical “The Legend of the Stardust Brothers,” and explained that he had searched for a DVD of the sequel in Japan and ultimately located one online with the help of a friend. Tragically, it didn’t have subtitles. He was considering hiring a translator, he said, but he hadn’t entirely ruled out learning the language himself.
A wide range of professions were represented in the Breen line. An asbestos inspector stood behind a public insurance adjuster (who did not comment on Breen’s antipathy toward “the insurance companies”). Several professional YouTubers were in attendance, including Adam Johnston, the man behind the popular channel “YMS” (“Your Movie Sucks”) and one of the first influencers to post about Breen. “If you look at the Google Search trends for Neil Breen, I’m pretty sure I’m what caused the jump,” he said with quiet pride.
Many people confirmed that they had discovered Breen through shows like YMS. Several mentioned RedLetterMedia’s “Best of the Worst” series, in which the hosts sit around a table and good-naturedly rag on the worst movies they can find. Others recalled growing up watching “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” a beloved television series in which a janitor-cum-inventor and his robot companions are forced by a group of mad scientists to watch bad movies. It is not an accident that these shows tend to have a social, even communal, character. “Watch it with other people!,” said the woman who had told me she had driven down from the Valley, glancing at her partner, who agreed that watching trash without friends could not compare. “We love watching good bad movies,” one man told me, waving at the semicircle of friends around him. “I mean, we hang out and regularly just put on whatever thing we find.” The philosopher Ted Cohen defines art as the locus of “an affective community, a group whose intimacy is underwritten by their conviction that they feel the same about something, and that that thing—the art—is their bond.” By this measure, Breen’s films are most certainly art.
One group dawdling at the end of the line explained that much of their personal lore was bound up with trash cinema, and with Breen in particular. When the film editor and screenwriter Steven Markowitz introduced his now wife, the photographer Rebecca Grant, to his friend Wesley Knapp, who directs an online show starring the comedian Tim Heidecker, he invited her to a screening of a Breen movie at Wesley’s house. “It was, like, ‘Welcome to my universe,’ ” he recollected. But Wesley was worried: “I texted him, like, “Are you sure? I like you as a friend—don’t do this!’ ” Happily, Rebecca got Breen’s whole deal, which was how Steven knew she was right for him. Now, the group calls it a Breen mitzvah when they manage to watch a Breen movie thirteen times.
“I knew I had to stop watching ‘Fateful Findings’ when it made sense,” Steven told me. “I turned to them all and I said, ‘I have a theory about what the weird green-screen fart effect is. I think it made sense to me this time.’ And then I was, like, ‘I have to stop watching this movie.’ ” Wesley shook his head. “But that’s the magic of the Breen mitzvah. . . . You push past that feeling,” he told Steven. Then, gesturing at my phone, which was recording a voice memo, he said, “I hope you enjoy listening back to this.” The group laughed as they embarked on a debate about the best trash films they had watched together.
I did enjoy listening back to it. The way they talked over one another, lovingly interrupting, bespoke the hundred late nights they had spent shooting the shit and marvelling at the majestic ridiculousness of films like “Miami Connection.” They could so easily have been the people with whom I had watched “The Room” at 2 A.M. in high school, hopped up on candy we bought at the all-night drugstore and devoured by the pound. “When I got here, and I saw these people, I was, like, ‘Oh, my God, these are my friends,’ ” one woman told me in the theatre, right before “Dire Duplicity” started. And she was right! They were my friends! Like Breen, I found myself aging in reverse, back into a state of primal innocence.
Many have remarked that there is something touchingly infantile in both the watching and the making of a trash movie. In a wonderful essay about what he calls “the cinema of inadvertence,” the writer Phil Christman recalls watching “Plan 9 from Outer Space” in his youth and regarding it as a reprieve from the relentless proficiency of the grownups around him. “To a child, the adult world is oppressive in part because of its apparent competence, its air of knowing what ought to be done and when and what to call everything,” he writes. “The unending, dogged, elaborate, even painstaking failure of Plan 9—the way it seems to go out of its way to fail—was tonic to the imagination.”
At the Breen screening, veterans of the film industry explained that trash cinema served to remind them of the lively amateurism of their first efforts. “I think there’s a lot of filmmakers at this screening,” the producer and screenwriter Joe Carnegie told me, over tacos, after the first showing of “Dire Duplicity.” When I asked him why Breen might attract professionals in Los Angeles, of all cities, he reflected, “We all started at this place where we were making movies with a camcorder in our house, and, when we needed a girl, our mom played the girl, and when we needed a doctor it was our grandpa. And I’m so reminded of that, watching these movies.” My friend Austin reported that, when he sits down to write, he tries to emulate Breen, to enter a “childlike state” in which he is “not worried about the discourse, about history.” He added, a moment later, “Breen is unblemished.”
That Breen is unblemished is essential to his appeal. There was widespread agreement among attendees at the screening that what is unique about him is that he has remained, improbably, impervious to the corrupting effects of cult celebrity. Unlike Wiseau and Nguyen, both of whom sold out and seemingly tried to make bad sequels on purpose, Breen has continued to insist that he does not make “midnight movies.” “When somebody makes an attempt at comedy and pretends they’re in on the joke, it’s not interesting,” Johnston, of YMS, told me. “It’s interesting when we see some form of sincerity. Sincerity is what sells.” Then he corrected himself: “Not just sells but what makes it art.”
Part of what makes it art, of course, is its singularity of vision. Every trash movie has two associated dramas: the drama of the (often incomprehensible) plot, and the equally engrossing drama of the film’s production. To enjoy watching trash is to take an almost novelistic interest in the kind of personality that could have conceived it, which is why there is so often media about its making—the book “The Disaster Artist,” about “The Room”; the documentary “Best Worst Movie,” about “Troll 2”; the podcast “My Scene with Breen,” featuring actors who appear in Breen’s films. At the Regal, listening to the Breen cognoscenti theorize about their hero’s motivations, I thought of a more elevated hymn to monomania, “Burden of Dreams,” a 1982 documentary about Werner Herzog’s almost pathological dedication to making his near-unfilmable masterpiece “Fitzcarraldo” in the remote Amazon. To watch someone toiling away in the service of something great is not, in the end, so very different from watching someone toiling away in the service of something terrible. In either case, the toil is what captivates. It is so ridiculously, pitifully, sublimely human.
The laughter at the “Dire Duplicity” screening—and there was a lot of it—was somewhere between laughter at and laughter with. Devotees of trash movies do not love them with an entirely straight face, but our appreciation is not simply ironic, either. It rests on real affection for the author’s corpus, and the mind behind it. Wesley, of the Breen mitzvahs, told me, “There’s no A.I. slop, which is amazing. I dare you to try and predict where his movies are going. I dare you. I bet you can call the next ‘Avengers’ from a mile away.” Marvel movies are bad because they resemble other movies. Trash movies are bad because they do not resemble other movies, or anything else you’ve ever seen. And, in that respect, they are a hair’s breadth away from great movies.
We love trash, in the end, because it offers an implicit rebuke to its opposite: slop, the scourge of our era. Slop is formulaic and impersonal, the aggregate of everything that is already imitating everything else. Trash, by contrast, is jarringly personal. Its failures are human failures, its shoddiness human shoddiness. It is strikingly, often excruciatingly, singular, like a child’s ugly drawing or a ramshackle D.I.Y. project. To paraphrase Tolstoy, all slop is alike, but every piece of trash is trashy in its own oddball way.
Slop also happens to be everywhere, assimilating everything. I had just barely dodged it as I moved through Los Angeles, skirting robots with human names and frequenting cafés where students were probably churning out identical papers that a large language model had smoothed and perfected. The truth, though, is that slop predated A.I. by a good decade or more. Long before it existed in its final and most flattening form, its preconditions were well established. When the slop machines arrived, we were already in the practice of letting that all-powerful mystification, the algorithm, select the next song or YouTube video for us; we already found ourselves watching big-budget movies that had been audience-tested, consultant-vetted, all but constructed by committee. They were sleek, adept, and mediocre, destined to sell lots of tickets and, better yet, lots of branded merchandise. Anyone could have made these films; anyone did. The individual sensibilities of people who directed them were subordinated to dictates of the franchise. They were an amalgamation of movies we had already watched, in exactly the same way that the trivialities A.I. regurgitates are an amalgamation of the mostly banal remarks that people have already made.
What the word “slop” connotes is the way in which badness has been not intensified (intensity, at least, is interesting) but liquefied, blended up into a smoothie, the hard edges pulverized. Slopification funnels the rich ecosystem of cranks that used to flourish online (and, of course, offline) into recognized and standardized channels of badness, into the same five conspiracy theories and the same ten podcast audiences. A.I., which is the culmination of a logic of production and consumption that has long been inescapable, insures that even the lowest-budget media need never again have the lovably lo-fi quality of late-night television snowed with static. Henceforth, all badness will be homogenized. There will be no poorly formatted websites. There will be no B-movie monsters wearing terrible prosthetics, no scripts full of non sequiturs, no glitchy graphics. The world will become tragically, unbearably competent, a surface without a seam.
Is it any wonder that trash is such a balm? It is the last bastion of something cracked and precious. “Dire Duplicity” is an elegy for a kind of ineptitude that will soon disappear. Watching it, I thought of the passage in “The Great Gatsby” in which the narrator speculates about the feelings of Dutch explorers confronting the New World: “For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” So I felt at the Breen screening. For a transitory enchanted moment, I was face to face, for perhaps the last time in history, with the inimitably human badness of trash. I could have wept. ♦