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- Commentary by Tara Kaye Judah

Midnight Movies and Me: Confessions of My Pathological Episode

One of the greatest problems of existing in an era plagued with postmodernism is the unnerving feeling of nostalgia one such as myself attaches to cult movements in cinema that happened, in the grand scheme of things and certainly in cinema’s history, both shortly after and yet somehow synonymously long before my time. Bound up with that nostalgia is an intense melancholia, in the Freudian sense of the word: basically, I am in the constant and unending process of having a pathological episode whereby I mourn the loss of something I never actually had. What’s more, this is an internal issue in which I have impoverished my ego to the point where I lack shame and take satisfaction in self-exposure as a petty, egotistic, insincere and dependent individual. Brilliant.

So, this is all being true (so far as I can see at least) I began to wonder what these shameless and self-indulgent feelings could perhaps usefully tell me (and maybe even someone else) about the position of cult cinema in the contemporary cinematic playing field. And, dear reader, this is what I propose: just as the sufferance of my pathological episode meant that melancholia appeared where nostalgia once reigned, so too has the object of the cult movement become dethroned, or, more fancifully, temporally and anthropologically displaced, and in its once prominent position presides a newcomer. In essence, I posit that contemporary documentation of and reflection upon the ‘lost’ event stands in for the event itself. By way of example, I will now discuss this idea through the guise of my own viewing experiences in relation to the phenomenon that was ‘Midnight Movies’.

Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream (2005) is a splendid documentary that does all the work when it comes to explaining what a midnight movie was, which ones stood out and why, what they achieved, and how they dialectically created the cult audiences who in turn created them. It features interviews with each of the six big directors associated with midnight movie ‘hits’ – Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo), George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead), John Waters (Pink Flamingos), Perry Henzel (The Harder They Come), Richard O’Brian (The Rocky Horror Picture Show), and David Lynch (Eraserhead) and three of their most important critics; Roger Ebert, J. Hoberman, and Jonathan Rosenbaum. Because the film does such an excellent job in conveying everything you could ever possibly want to know about these movies and how they came to create the cult following that they did, I’m not going to write about that, you should really just make sure you see it (plus the film is based on the book edited by J.Hoberman & Jonathan Rosenbaum whose writing is, alas, far superior to my own).

So content aside, Midnight Movies is fascinating and has demanded my undivided attention on more than one occasion precisely because in a time when midnight movies are all but over, where video, politics and culture have all drastically changed, where postmodernism has just about vomited all over the concept of cult, it seems all that is left in their place is the documentation of the events that now seem so distant they resemble (for me at least) an exclusive gentlemen’s club. Just as my nostalgia has given life to the melancholy that usurped it, the absent event has given rise to a lively reflection upon itself; the closest thing to a midnight movie experience that someone not of its original generation could ever really hope to have.

Of course, the films themselves are still available to see but it is not the product of the event that I mourn; it is the moment that has irrefutably passed. The theatre that housed the original audience has closed down so the space itself is gone, and in a space where apparently ‘pot was like apple pie’ something has undoubtedly been lost. And even though you can still go to pokey little theatres at midnight (in some parts of the world anyway) and you can certainly hold your own midnight movie screenings at home with so much ready available pot as you like, there is still something I mourn. That the politics of the time has gone; being angry in the 70s about what the 60s didn’t achieve seems so distant now in our apathetic or at least disparate and fragmented society more interested in the indulgence of identity politics than any collective or communal concerns, speaks loudly. The subversive nature of the culture that surrounded these movies has undeniably become an absent in terms of experience. In our present state, mediated experiences are often solitary and at a remove. The Internet is the greatest example of this; its immediacy and sprawling infinity renders us isolated receptors in contrast to our predecessors’ collective and active subversive status. But where there is nothing shared about the new viewing experience, there is a great deal of sharing to be done in terms of information about and contemporary reflection upon those original experiences, even if we have not personally been party to them.

So what Midnight Movies does is allow some of the seminal people involved in the movement to tell us their story. And, much like all historical events, mythology and folklore, information is passed on to future generations through a process of retelling, and in that process the original event is somehow altered. Roger Ebert suggests the problem is now that it is impossible to be ironic because everything is ironic, which is clearly the contemporary effect of postmodernism on cultural studies if you ask me (not that anyone did). But it sure as hell makes it difficult to find a contemporary midnight movie. John Waters says in the documentary “people laughed in every midnight movie.” Well, I watched Midnight Movies a couple of times and I always laughed, even if I were alone. This is by no means definitive, and that the films were also supposedly ‘parties for neurotic insomniacs’ works counter to my point. I’m not a neurotic insomniac (yet), although I do seem to suffer is a pathological episode and even though many of you probably think Freud defunct, the man certainly has my number.

I’d like to suggest that in writing about it, even in thinking about it, that we are contributing to the idea that the counter-culture and the concept of something aside from the mainstream is not completely lost, that we aren’t mourning the absent because it has actually died, just that our melancholia exists because it has become a little displaced is all. But then I would say that for I lack shame and take satisfaction in self-exposure as a petty, egotistic, insincere and dependent individual.

Tara Kaye Judah

Tara Judah is a film librarian at 20th Century Flicks in Bristol, UK and is also the author of an online blog called The Midnight Movie Review.

She holds a BA in English Literature & Film Studies and a Masters degree in Contemporary Cinema Cultures (both from Kings’ College London). Prior to entering the world of academia she tried her hand at acting and has appeared in a small number of shorts, features and television, details of which can be found at: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0431818/

Click here to visit Tara's Website, The Midnight Movie Review!