What Makes a Cult Classic?: Trashy Movies and their Gay Fans
FILM1-5a-Tue1
Tyler Clark
This course will take place virtually on Zoom. Participation in this course requires a device (ideally a computer or tablet, rather than a cell phone) with a camera and microphone in good working order and basic familiarity with using Zoom and accessing email.
September 10 - October 8
“This movie is SO bad, it’s good!” A statement such as this usually defines what we refer to as a “cult classic,” or a film that fails to gain traction with wide audiences—but is idolized by an obsessive (and usually queer) fanbase. This course teaches the fundamentals of such films, what they are, and why they should be watched again and again even decades later.
In this course, we will watch three of the greatest cult classics of all time: Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Mommie Dearest in order to relish in all of their absurdist glory. We will discuss how these films gain traction particularly in queer and underground communities, who often go so far as to perform live reenactments in gay clubs and theatres throughout the world. Our goal as a group is to find appreciation for the absurd and the tacky, to understand why these specific films (amongst many others) are adored so vehemently by a select few, and to possibly become fanatics as well. Cult classics range back from the beginning of moving pictures, and these three titles will reflect on the development of film throughout the twentieth century as well. No prior knowledge of these films is required nor expected, but an eye for the peculiar and a love of fun most certainly is.
More lecture than facilitated discussion.
The materials for this course are the three films: Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Mommie Dearest. These films are easy to rent online, and they can possibly also be found for free on the Internet Archive or YouTube (the quality of free streaming may not be very good).
2 hours, give or take, for a film per week.
Tyler Clark earned his BA and MA in English at Northern Arizona University. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst with a concentration in Victorian literature and Queer theory. His focus lies primarily on gender deviance found in the sensational novel genre and its contemporary readership, as well as the homoerotic discourse of the Cambridge Apostles. Currently, he is researching “camp” as an underground, ritual expression of sexual deviance in late-nineteenth-century British men.