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Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever
It clutters our inboxes. It fills our Facebook feeds. It keeps afloat a whole armada of late-night comedians, YouTube auteurs, and twitter wits … an endless stream of "Worst Things Ever." Recall, if you will, Rebecca Black's chart-topping disasterpiece, "Friday." Or “The Room”, Tommy Wiseau's cinematic tragedy turned cult farce. Or the devout Spanish septuagenarian who produced an infamously botched, and now stunningly ubiquitous, retouching of a 19th-century fresco of her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The Internet era has fueled an obsession with these and other acts of cultural cluelessness. Hardly a week goes by, it seems, without some new aesthetic travesty spreading across the globe in the form of ones and zeros, spawning countless remixes and riffs, like the world's biggest inside joke. And once more the cry goes up: Fail! Epic Fail!
But what, exactly, draws us to these futile attempts at making songs, movies, and art? What are the essential ingredients that render a ridiculous failure sublime? More important, what does our seemingly insatiable appetite for the "succès d'incompetence" say about our aesthetic impulses? Our ethical ones? Is our laughter all in good fun or is something more sinister at work?
But what, exactly, draws us to these futile attempts at making songs, movies, and art? What are the essential ingredients that render a ridiculous failure sublime? More important, what does our seemingly insatiable appetite for the "succès d'incompetence" say about our aesthetic impulses? Our ethical ones? Is our laughter all in good fun or is something more sinister at work?
47 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 15, 2013
10 people are currently reading
246 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
July 1, 2013
This was surprisingly insightful, all the more so for being both extremely short, and for being about irony, which is a tricky subject to handle even for a talented writer.
What makes people laugh at terrible things? Your Tommy Wiseau movies, your Rebecca Black videos, etc. O'Connell discusses the psychological roots of this particular kind of humor, examples from throughout history, and what it says about human nature that people keep returning to "so bad it's good" artworks. As he says:
"We don't just want to look at the horribly disfigured Jesus fresco or listen to the horribly misfired effort at a pop song; we want to look at the person who thought they were talented enough to pull these things off in the first place. And I think part of our perverse attraction to these people and to the bad art they make is a particular sort of authenticity."
There's a passage in there about his own shame as pulling a prank on an aspiring Irish rap artist that is worth the price of the essay itself. If you've ever watched a bad movie solely because it's bad (and of course you have), or you find yourself curious about why people are addicted to Buzzfeed articles about "omg must-see #epicfail", then this is definitely worth a read.
What makes people laugh at terrible things? Your Tommy Wiseau movies, your Rebecca Black videos, etc. O'Connell discusses the psychological roots of this particular kind of humor, examples from throughout history, and what it says about human nature that people keep returning to "so bad it's good" artworks. As he says:
"We don't just want to look at the horribly disfigured Jesus fresco or listen to the horribly misfired effort at a pop song; we want to look at the person who thought they were talented enough to pull these things off in the first place. And I think part of our perverse attraction to these people and to the bad art they make is a particular sort of authenticity."
There's a passage in there about his own shame as pulling a prank on an aspiring Irish rap artist that is worth the price of the essay itself. If you've ever watched a bad movie solely because it's bad (and of course you have), or you find yourself curious about why people are addicted to Buzzfeed articles about "omg must-see #epicfail", then this is definitely worth a read.
December 12, 2013
My first taste of a "kindle single".
Maybe if I like it I can convince them to change that name.
--After reading--
Enjoyed this quite a bit. Funny, interesting, and relatively insightful. It's less a history of 'The Worst Thing Ever', than it is a sort-of academic look at the most popular 'memes' of the last decade.
That's it's main weakness. More time should have been spent on broad-strokes, rather than specific focuses on individual memes.
But worth a read.
Maybe if I like it I can convince them to change that name.
--After reading--
Enjoyed this quite a bit. Funny, interesting, and relatively insightful. It's less a history of 'The Worst Thing Ever', than it is a sort-of academic look at the most popular 'memes' of the last decade.
That's it's main weakness. More time should have been spent on broad-strokes, rather than specific focuses on individual memes.
But worth a read.
February 28, 2021
Oggi si dice "cringe", l'altro ieri si diceva "epic fail", chi vuole darsi un tono dirà sempre e solo "Schadenfreude", ovvero il piacere provocato dalla sfortuna altrui. A partire da alcuni celebri disastri della cultura popolare recente (o quasi: il libro è del 2013), come la settantenne in Spagna che restaurò malamente l'affresco di una chiesa o il film "The Room” di Tommy Wiseau (definito da qualcuno il "Quarto potere" dei film brutti), Mark O'Connel indaga sulla nostra ossessione verso gli incapaci conclamati che si traduce in meme, parodie, etc.
Il cosiddetto "epic fail" non è semplicemente un prodotto che per una serie di circostanze fatali è venuto male: deve esserci autoconvinzione dietro al gesto, ci deve essere fiducia nel proprio genio.
“We don’t just want to look at the horribly disfigured Jesus fresco or listen to the horribly misfired effort at a pop song; we want to look at the person who thought they were talented enough to pull these things off in the first place.”
Ma c'è un lato inquietante in questa forma di masochismo culturale. Sì, è vero, ne ridiamo, ma la risata diventa cattiva e non basta più, ci vuole l'umiliazione, ci vuole la gogna. Come diceva Elias Canetti "chi ride spalanca la bocca e sfodera i denti". Acuto, triste e divertente, ha l'unico difetto di essere troppo breve.
Il cosiddetto "epic fail" non è semplicemente un prodotto che per una serie di circostanze fatali è venuto male: deve esserci autoconvinzione dietro al gesto, ci deve essere fiducia nel proprio genio.
“We don’t just want to look at the horribly disfigured Jesus fresco or listen to the horribly misfired effort at a pop song; we want to look at the person who thought they were talented enough to pull these things off in the first place.”
Ma c'è un lato inquietante in questa forma di masochismo culturale. Sì, è vero, ne ridiamo, ma la risata diventa cattiva e non basta più, ci vuole l'umiliazione, ci vuole la gogna. Come diceva Elias Canetti "chi ride spalanca la bocca e sfodera i denti". Acuto, triste e divertente, ha l'unico difetto di essere troppo breve.
February 3, 2015
Funny and sad
If you've ever laughed at an awkward amateur performance on YouTube, or felt smug self-satisfaction while reading some poorly written Goodreads review (maybe this one), you've participated in the culture of Epic Fail. This ebook is for you. And me.
If you've ever laughed at an awkward amateur performance on YouTube, or felt smug self-satisfaction while reading some poorly written Goodreads review (maybe this one), you've participated in the culture of Epic Fail. This ebook is for you. And me.
February 7, 2013
Fun. Could give a higher rating, but it's not a must-read or anything. Kindle quotes:
Chances are you’ve seen the result of her work, in which Martínez’s Christ is transfigured into what looks like a beady-eyed baboon wearing an ushanka. It very quickly became an iconic image; the Spanish took to calling it Ecce Mono (Behold the Monkey), - location 30
here was the poor woman herself, grilled by television journalists, poignantly insisting that she had the full permission of the parish priest and that, anyway, she hadn’t finished the retouch yet; she had been called away mid-job to go on a trip with her son. (“When I got back, the whole village was there, and I couldn’t defend myself! I said, ‘Let me finish it,’ and they said not to touch it!”). More than 23,000 people signed an online petition to have the piece preserved in its current, profanely post-Giménez form. In a more or less textbook illustration of postmodern irony, the Church of the Face-palm Fresco became a site of tourist pilgrimage, a sacred location beyond the event horizon where ridicule becomes veneration. “The truth,” as one local small-business owner put it in a television-news interview, “is that we should be thanking her because of how much it has helped catering trade in the town. We were having economic problems, and now, thanks to this woman, we are recovering.” - location 38
In the epigrammatically deadpan idiom of DeLillo’s characters, Murray refers to the scene as “a religious experience in a way, like all tourism.” They are, as he puts it, “taking pictures of taking pictures.” - location 48
I suspect that had the Spanish fresco simply been the anonymous work of an unknown guerrilla retoucher—if there wasn’t a body to be seen to undergo the indignity of the slapstick—the story would not have been nearly as compelling to nearly as many people. The personal element is crucial, and this is what accounts for the paradoxically humanistic and cruel constitution of the Epic Fail. It is predicated not just on the appreciation of the failed artwork but also on the aesthetic fetish for a particular misalignment of confidence and competence. - location 63
We don’t just want to look at the horribly disfigured Jesus fresco or listen to the horribly misfired effort at a pop song; we want to look at the person who thought they were talented enough to pull these things off in the first place. And I think part of our perverse attraction to these people and to the bad art they make is a particular sort of authenticity. - location 67
And so the Epic Fail is, among other things, a paradoxical ritual whereby a pure strain of un-self-consciousness is globally venerated and ridiculed. - location 72
the technologically shrunken world that Marshall McLuhan famously referred to (30 years before the Web) as the Global Village now anoints a new Global Village Idiot every other week. - location 130
I never actually found out what they sounded like (this was well before the YouTube genie materialized to grant all our audiovisual wishes), - location 138
impossible not to feel for them, in their weirdly poignant predicament of having achieved fame for precisely the wrong reasons. What must it be like to know that you are famous for being bad at what you do? What, for that matter, must it be like not to know? - location 154
She failed. She tried again. She failed again. She failed worse. But—and this is the crucial point—her failure was a form of success. And so she serves as an emblem, as a tutelary spirit, for the wider and more contemporary phenomenon of cultural masochism. - location 163
Huxley acknowledges the extreme unlikelihood of Ros ever having read Lyly but is nonetheless struck by the strange resemblance in their approaches to language. “In Mrs. Ros,” he writes, “we see, as we see in the Elizabethan novelists, the result of the discovery of art by an unsophisticated mind and of its first conscious attempt to produce the artistic. It is remarkable how late in the history of every literature simplicity is invented. The first attempts of any people to be consciously literary are always productive of the most elaborate artificiality.” - location 182
This stuff is, in lowish doses, quite entertaining, but if you read enough of it, its absurdity seems to spread outward to the whole of literature, like a particularly contagious airborne virus. Read a few chapters of one of her books and then pick up a book by, say, Marilynne Robinson (one of contemporary literature’s truly great prose stylists), and even Robinson’s flawless sentences start to seem slightly contrived. Ros’s writing is not just bad, in other words; its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavor of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent—and, even worse, silly. - location 197
In O Rare Amanda!, his 1954 biography of Ros, Jack Loudan mentions that she considered it an act of bad manners to write about a book without having been invited to do so by its author. Criticism, in her view, was a form of meddling in other people’s business. She seems genuinely not to have understood (or at least never come near to acknowledging) that her fame was due to the fact that almost all her readers were essentially critics, in that their harsh judgment of her work was a prerequisite for their reading it. She imagined a division between her publishers and the general readership of her novels on one side and, on the other, those critics like Pain who were openly amused by those novels’ failings. Such a division never really existed. The success that she never tired of bragging about (“the congratulations of crown heads”) was due entirely to the majestic scale of her artistic failure. There were Amanda McKittric Ros societies at Oxford and Cambridge. C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their fellow Inklings were largely responsible for this enthusiasm: the informal Oxford literary group held sporadic Ros reading competitions, in which the winner was the member who could read from one of her novels for the longest without breaking into laughter. Delina Delaney dinners became a fad on the London social scene, and there was an Amanda Game, made popular by the members of the London Amanda Ros Club, in which one diner would put a question to another, who then had to answer it in the style and spirit of Ros’s writing. Lines from her books were commonly quoted in the hallways of the House of Commons. She was a sort of Bizarro World Oscar Wilde: an Irish author who became a London cause célèbre for the complete witlessness of her writing. Her fame even reached the shores of the New World, with no less a figure than Mark Twain crowning her “Queen & Empress of the Hogwash Guild.” - location 234
In 1930, she wrote to her publisher Stanley T. Mercer, asking him what he thought about her chances of winning the Nobel Prize for literature. - location 267
Darwin’s remark about “ignorance more frequently begetting confidence than knowledge.” - location 279
The real centerpiece of the film’s buffet of absurdity, though, is Wiseau himself. He’s a fascinatingly indeterminate figure. For one thing, he could be anywhere between 35 and 60. With his long, lank raven’s-wing hair, his deathly pallor, and his curiously asymmetrical face, he has the look of a Tim Burton character who never quite made the cut (although, as the film’s numerous, extensive, and punishingly unerotic sex scenes establish, he’s in exceptionally good physical nick). His accent, too, is impossible to place; it’s clearly not that of a native English speaker, but it sounds oddly stagey, as though he were actually an English speaker attempting to pass himself off as someone who grew up somewhere east of the Danube.[5] He slurs his words frequently, as though undergoing a stroke too mild to justify interrupting a film shoot. One of the film’s most indelible moments—recipient of no less a certification of cultural currency than a reference in The Simpsons—comes when Johnny, having been accused of hitting his fiancée, roars, “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” while making a histrionic power-ballad-style fist-pumping gesture. It is impossible to do justice in prose to the line-reading here—both vocal and physical. Suffice it to say that, for some time after you’ve seen it, it’s difficult to take any actor seriously. Wiseau acts so hard that he risks irreparable damage to his entire profession. (Try watching this scene and then Brando’s “Stella!” scene in A Streetcar Named Desire or Klaus Kinski in Aguirre, the Wrath of God or Nicholas Cage in anything at all and you’ll see what I mean.) Much like Ros’s novels, then, The Room is remarkable for the way it seems to expose the absurd artifices of its form by getting everything about that form so flagrantly wrong. - location 340
In a 2010 Harper’s profile of Wiseau, Tom Bissell writes that what makes Wiseau so intriguing “is the degree to which his art becomes a funhouse-mirror version, an inadvertent exposé, of a traditional film. He shows, however accidentally, that the devices and conventions we have learned to respond to do not necessarily solve or even do anything. More than any artist I can think of, Wiseau proves Northrop Frye’s belief that all conventions are, at heart, insane.” - location 354
A fair amount of online discussion about the film turns on this central question of authenticity. There’s a flurry of defensive reaction whenever someone suggests that it must be some kind of put-on, that Wiseau must have been deliberately dialing up the WTF levels. - location 376
this is true of the Epic Fail more broadly. As playful and ironic as this form of cultural masochism is, the idea of authorial intention is always central. We ourselves must be the subjects of irony, never the objects. - location 387
The result, entitled “Friday,” was a substandard entry in the bubblegum canon, but what’s interesting about it, in contrast to The Room, is how close it gets to being perfectly passable. Its effect is, in this sense, analogous to the so-called “uncanny valley” phenomenon in robotics and 3-D animation. The uncanny valley is the vast drop-off in the graph of emotional reactions—from positive to positively creeped out—that occurs at a point where artificial representations approach, but fall crucially short of, passable resemblance to real human beings. - location 450
Most of these parodies were entirely redundant. It isn’t that “Friday” is “beyond parody.” It’s that, like The Room, it already functions, in its own perfectly oblivious way, as a sophisticated parody of an entire genre, as well as of itself. Any attempt to engage with it ironically tends to backfire on the would-be parodist. Time magazine introduced the video, on its Web site, as a “trainwreck,” as “hilariously dreadful” and “a whole new level of bad” (demonstrating a much more serious lack of self-awareness than that of the 13-year-old girl it was having a go at). - location 484
About Byliner Byliner commissions and publishes original stories written to be read in two hours or less. These “e-short” stories are available on phone, tablet, or computer as part of the Byliner subscription service, and can also be purchased individually through all the major digital bookstores. Bestselling Byliner titles include Amy Tan’s Rules for Virgins, Margaret Atwood’s Positron, Jon Krakauer’s Three Cups of Deceit, Ann Patchett’s The Getaway Car, Nick Hornby’s Everyone’s Reading Bastard, and Buzz Bissinger’s After Friday Night Lights. On Byliner.com, readers get personalized access to an unmatched library of more than 20,000 fiction and nonfiction stories by the world’s best writers, allowing them to easily find, read, save, and share new and classic stories by their favorite authors. - location 669
Chances are you’ve seen the result of her work, in which Martínez’s Christ is transfigured into what looks like a beady-eyed baboon wearing an ushanka. It very quickly became an iconic image; the Spanish took to calling it Ecce Mono (Behold the Monkey), - location 30
here was the poor woman herself, grilled by television journalists, poignantly insisting that she had the full permission of the parish priest and that, anyway, she hadn’t finished the retouch yet; she had been called away mid-job to go on a trip with her son. (“When I got back, the whole village was there, and I couldn’t defend myself! I said, ‘Let me finish it,’ and they said not to touch it!”). More than 23,000 people signed an online petition to have the piece preserved in its current, profanely post-Giménez form. In a more or less textbook illustration of postmodern irony, the Church of the Face-palm Fresco became a site of tourist pilgrimage, a sacred location beyond the event horizon where ridicule becomes veneration. “The truth,” as one local small-business owner put it in a television-news interview, “is that we should be thanking her because of how much it has helped catering trade in the town. We were having economic problems, and now, thanks to this woman, we are recovering.” - location 38
In the epigrammatically deadpan idiom of DeLillo’s characters, Murray refers to the scene as “a religious experience in a way, like all tourism.” They are, as he puts it, “taking pictures of taking pictures.” - location 48
I suspect that had the Spanish fresco simply been the anonymous work of an unknown guerrilla retoucher—if there wasn’t a body to be seen to undergo the indignity of the slapstick—the story would not have been nearly as compelling to nearly as many people. The personal element is crucial, and this is what accounts for the paradoxically humanistic and cruel constitution of the Epic Fail. It is predicated not just on the appreciation of the failed artwork but also on the aesthetic fetish for a particular misalignment of confidence and competence. - location 63
We don’t just want to look at the horribly disfigured Jesus fresco or listen to the horribly misfired effort at a pop song; we want to look at the person who thought they were talented enough to pull these things off in the first place. And I think part of our perverse attraction to these people and to the bad art they make is a particular sort of authenticity. - location 67
And so the Epic Fail is, among other things, a paradoxical ritual whereby a pure strain of un-self-consciousness is globally venerated and ridiculed. - location 72
the technologically shrunken world that Marshall McLuhan famously referred to (30 years before the Web) as the Global Village now anoints a new Global Village Idiot every other week. - location 130
I never actually found out what they sounded like (this was well before the YouTube genie materialized to grant all our audiovisual wishes), - location 138
impossible not to feel for them, in their weirdly poignant predicament of having achieved fame for precisely the wrong reasons. What must it be like to know that you are famous for being bad at what you do? What, for that matter, must it be like not to know? - location 154
She failed. She tried again. She failed again. She failed worse. But—and this is the crucial point—her failure was a form of success. And so she serves as an emblem, as a tutelary spirit, for the wider and more contemporary phenomenon of cultural masochism. - location 163
Huxley acknowledges the extreme unlikelihood of Ros ever having read Lyly but is nonetheless struck by the strange resemblance in their approaches to language. “In Mrs. Ros,” he writes, “we see, as we see in the Elizabethan novelists, the result of the discovery of art by an unsophisticated mind and of its first conscious attempt to produce the artistic. It is remarkable how late in the history of every literature simplicity is invented. The first attempts of any people to be consciously literary are always productive of the most elaborate artificiality.” - location 182
This stuff is, in lowish doses, quite entertaining, but if you read enough of it, its absurdity seems to spread outward to the whole of literature, like a particularly contagious airborne virus. Read a few chapters of one of her books and then pick up a book by, say, Marilynne Robinson (one of contemporary literature’s truly great prose stylists), and even Robinson’s flawless sentences start to seem slightly contrived. Ros’s writing is not just bad, in other words; its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavor of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent—and, even worse, silly. - location 197
In O Rare Amanda!, his 1954 biography of Ros, Jack Loudan mentions that she considered it an act of bad manners to write about a book without having been invited to do so by its author. Criticism, in her view, was a form of meddling in other people’s business. She seems genuinely not to have understood (or at least never come near to acknowledging) that her fame was due to the fact that almost all her readers were essentially critics, in that their harsh judgment of her work was a prerequisite for their reading it. She imagined a division between her publishers and the general readership of her novels on one side and, on the other, those critics like Pain who were openly amused by those novels’ failings. Such a division never really existed. The success that she never tired of bragging about (“the congratulations of crown heads”) was due entirely to the majestic scale of her artistic failure. There were Amanda McKittric Ros societies at Oxford and Cambridge. C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their fellow Inklings were largely responsible for this enthusiasm: the informal Oxford literary group held sporadic Ros reading competitions, in which the winner was the member who could read from one of her novels for the longest without breaking into laughter. Delina Delaney dinners became a fad on the London social scene, and there was an Amanda Game, made popular by the members of the London Amanda Ros Club, in which one diner would put a question to another, who then had to answer it in the style and spirit of Ros’s writing. Lines from her books were commonly quoted in the hallways of the House of Commons. She was a sort of Bizarro World Oscar Wilde: an Irish author who became a London cause célèbre for the complete witlessness of her writing. Her fame even reached the shores of the New World, with no less a figure than Mark Twain crowning her “Queen & Empress of the Hogwash Guild.” - location 234
In 1930, she wrote to her publisher Stanley T. Mercer, asking him what he thought about her chances of winning the Nobel Prize for literature. - location 267
Darwin’s remark about “ignorance more frequently begetting confidence than knowledge.” - location 279
The real centerpiece of the film’s buffet of absurdity, though, is Wiseau himself. He’s a fascinatingly indeterminate figure. For one thing, he could be anywhere between 35 and 60. With his long, lank raven’s-wing hair, his deathly pallor, and his curiously asymmetrical face, he has the look of a Tim Burton character who never quite made the cut (although, as the film’s numerous, extensive, and punishingly unerotic sex scenes establish, he’s in exceptionally good physical nick). His accent, too, is impossible to place; it’s clearly not that of a native English speaker, but it sounds oddly stagey, as though he were actually an English speaker attempting to pass himself off as someone who grew up somewhere east of the Danube.[5] He slurs his words frequently, as though undergoing a stroke too mild to justify interrupting a film shoot. One of the film’s most indelible moments—recipient of no less a certification of cultural currency than a reference in The Simpsons—comes when Johnny, having been accused of hitting his fiancée, roars, “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” while making a histrionic power-ballad-style fist-pumping gesture. It is impossible to do justice in prose to the line-reading here—both vocal and physical. Suffice it to say that, for some time after you’ve seen it, it’s difficult to take any actor seriously. Wiseau acts so hard that he risks irreparable damage to his entire profession. (Try watching this scene and then Brando’s “Stella!” scene in A Streetcar Named Desire or Klaus Kinski in Aguirre, the Wrath of God or Nicholas Cage in anything at all and you’ll see what I mean.) Much like Ros’s novels, then, The Room is remarkable for the way it seems to expose the absurd artifices of its form by getting everything about that form so flagrantly wrong. - location 340
In a 2010 Harper’s profile of Wiseau, Tom Bissell writes that what makes Wiseau so intriguing “is the degree to which his art becomes a funhouse-mirror version, an inadvertent exposé, of a traditional film. He shows, however accidentally, that the devices and conventions we have learned to respond to do not necessarily solve or even do anything. More than any artist I can think of, Wiseau proves Northrop Frye’s belief that all conventions are, at heart, insane.” - location 354
A fair amount of online discussion about the film turns on this central question of authenticity. There’s a flurry of defensive reaction whenever someone suggests that it must be some kind of put-on, that Wiseau must have been deliberately dialing up the WTF levels. - location 376
this is true of the Epic Fail more broadly. As playful and ironic as this form of cultural masochism is, the idea of authorial intention is always central. We ourselves must be the subjects of irony, never the objects. - location 387
The result, entitled “Friday,” was a substandard entry in the bubblegum canon, but what’s interesting about it, in contrast to The Room, is how close it gets to being perfectly passable. Its effect is, in this sense, analogous to the so-called “uncanny valley” phenomenon in robotics and 3-D animation. The uncanny valley is the vast drop-off in the graph of emotional reactions—from positive to positively creeped out—that occurs at a point where artificial representations approach, but fall crucially short of, passable resemblance to real human beings. - location 450
Most of these parodies were entirely redundant. It isn’t that “Friday” is “beyond parody.” It’s that, like The Room, it already functions, in its own perfectly oblivious way, as a sophisticated parody of an entire genre, as well as of itself. Any attempt to engage with it ironically tends to backfire on the would-be parodist. Time magazine introduced the video, on its Web site, as a “trainwreck,” as “hilariously dreadful” and “a whole new level of bad” (demonstrating a much more serious lack of self-awareness than that of the 13-year-old girl it was having a go at). - location 484
About Byliner Byliner commissions and publishes original stories written to be read in two hours or less. These “e-short” stories are available on phone, tablet, or computer as part of the Byliner subscription service, and can also be purchased individually through all the major digital bookstores. Bestselling Byliner titles include Amy Tan’s Rules for Virgins, Margaret Atwood’s Positron, Jon Krakauer’s Three Cups of Deceit, Ann Patchett’s The Getaway Car, Nick Hornby’s Everyone’s Reading Bastard, and Buzz Bissinger’s After Friday Night Lights. On Byliner.com, readers get personalized access to an unmatched library of more than 20,000 fiction and nonfiction stories by the world’s best writers, allowing them to easily find, read, save, and share new and classic stories by their favorite authors. - location 669
March 11, 2013
Good stuff. These are issues I think about kind of a lot, since I myself am an avid consumer of camp and bad art. I think this story is a good exploration of an interesting topic. Like... is it mean-spirited to watch and heckle bad movies? Who does it hurt? I personally think there's a line between thinking Rebecca Black's song Friday is hilarious and leaving Rebecca Black hateful YouTube comments. (For the record: I did the former but not the latter). I guess the problem with the internet is that it's become a very thin line between content and creator. On the other hand, people ARE putting this stuff out here for people to consume, and they don't really get to control how people respond to it. It's not like we hacked into Tommy Wiseau's computer and found The Room. He bought a billboard for it.
Like... I don't want to hurt Tommy Wiseau's feelings, I guess. But I enjoy the SHIT out of The Room. I enjoy it more than most things that are "good," like, whoever gets to define good.
I find it pretty reassuring that there are hundreds of years of precedence for love-hating bad art.
Umm anyway, I'd recommend checking this out if you like camp/bad art. (It also references Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp, which like...... it pretty much has to. Though O'Connell is arguing that we've moved beyond camp and into something else entirely, which perhaps we have.)
Like... I don't want to hurt Tommy Wiseau's feelings, I guess. But I enjoy the SHIT out of The Room. I enjoy it more than most things that are "good," like, whoever gets to define good.
I find it pretty reassuring that there are hundreds of years of precedence for love-hating bad art.
Umm anyway, I'd recommend checking this out if you like camp/bad art. (It also references Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp, which like...... it pretty much has to. Though O'Connell is arguing that we've moved beyond camp and into something else entirely, which perhaps we have.)
October 17, 2016
This is a look into the art that gets famous because it's so bad, yes, but at its heart it's a missive to implore compassion for the souls who make this art without realizing its inherent poor quality. An expected discussion about the Dunning-Kruger effect is intertwined with a paean for empathy: for those who create art for their own pleasure and are obstinately unself-conscious about it; the heartfelt attempts to make art in the image of actually great art (or at least "art" as pop culture identifies it); and the children who are simply having fun and not trying to impress anyone. None of these people deserve the ridicule they get, and while some people get non-harmful enjoyment out of these creations, there are those who turn laughter into bullying, damaging mockery, and even violence. Is there an "effect" diagnosable for the people who dish up this disdain? An effect that describes that some people lack empathy to such a degree that they cannot distinguish delight from derision?
January 24, 2021
Much like Ros’s novels, then, "The Room" is remarkable for the way it seems to expose the absurd artifices of its form by getting everything about that form so flagrantly wrong. Wiseau’s failure to achieve the clichés he seems to aim for at the level of plot, dialogue, and performance eventually starts to look like aesthetic subversion.
Just great. Just read it. I just wish it was avalaible in paperback. Too good for an ebook, but it makes sense in this case (modern cultural references to check on Google or YouTube).
Ok, things I didn't like:
1) He scorns the pop gem I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, foolishly.
2) He doesn't realise one nuclear thing behind the attraction for epic failed artists: their narcissism, megalomania, self-importance, faux sense of superiority... makes people mad at them, naturally enough, hence why the public laughs so hard at them and put them down as a reaction to those prima donnas and their diva personas.
Just great. Just read it. I just wish it was avalaible in paperback. Too good for an ebook, but it makes sense in this case (modern cultural references to check on Google or YouTube).
Ok, things I didn't like:
1) He scorns the pop gem I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, foolishly.
2) He doesn't realise one nuclear thing behind the attraction for epic failed artists: their narcissism, megalomania, self-importance, faux sense of superiority... makes people mad at them, naturally enough, hence why the public laughs so hard at them and put them down as a reaction to those prima donnas and their diva personas.
February 27, 2013
Mark O'Connell offers a historical, literary and personal context for the modern fascination with the unintentionally awful. His arguments are convincing and the evidence he offers enlightening. Particularly affecting is his critique of the scaled cruelty behind such mockery: from the callousness of laughing at someone who doesn't realise they are the joke, through to the potentially scarring attacks on people who never sought public recognition in the first place. That these examples are counterpointed by O'Connell's own eloquent prose highlights the difference between critical analysis and global bullying.
June 29, 2013
Why read Epic Fail? I could cite the chapter on Tommy Wiseau's The Room, or O'Connell's spot-on analysis of the Rebecca Black "Friday" phenomenon, but really it comes down to the hyper-disturbing final chapter that leaves us with this thought: "Laughter is our physical reaction to the escape of potential food."
Epic is a smart, scary examination of celebrity and schadenfreude that is an absolute must for any pop-culture fiend.
Epic is a smart, scary examination of celebrity and schadenfreude that is an absolute must for any pop-culture fiend.
February 2, 2013
I really enjoyed this (what I would call a long-form essay) Kindle single. It's witty and playful throughout, while still examining some trenchant ideas about human nature and our online social culture so filled with irony and ridicule. O'Connell examines both our baser and better natures, knowing that you don't get one without the other.
January 14, 2014
A short kindle book - essay really - that gets at something really true. It's about things being so awful they are amazing, how often what makes them so amazing is how oblivious their authors are to their awfulness. How that compels our fascination but sometimes also our callous cruelty toward those just trying to create something valuable.
February 18, 2013
This is good enough that it both is short and feels short, unlike much bad art. If you know who Tommy Wiseau is, this gives a pleasing historical context. The section reprinted on Slate might be the best part in terms of writing, but lovers of bad things will want to know about more than just bad novels.
February 7, 2013
I always enjoy Mark O'Connell's writing and I loved how this was both entertaining but also a searing examination of why we participate in the celebration/mockery of bad art. Quick and easy, I read it on my phone!
February 10, 2013
A very thpught-provoking piece about the social response to "epic fails." It makes me think about the idea that laughter at a bad artist or poet or singer might really be the "sublimation of a primary predatory impulse."
November 14, 2013
A thoughtful meditation on why we take such glee in epic failure. The little article/book had the unnerving ability of making me question myself, my self-perception and my blind spots. The truth is that we are social animals in the most positive and negative sense of the word -- animal.
January 28, 2013
Awesome.
February 12, 2013
Fun and interesting discussion of the psychology/sociology of bad art and its 'appreciation' by the masses, both from the artists' and the crowd's perspectives.
June 19, 2013
A great essay, really well written, really interesting. Well worth your time.
April 8, 2014
Thoughtful
March 13, 2013
A verrry long, sometimes amusing and educational blog entry about the Dunning-Kruger effect.
June 2, 2013
Excellent.
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