SUNDAY, 27 APRIL 2025

As Art moved into a role that was once the domain of religion, some philosophers, artists and critics began to see it as a way of asking deep, metaphysical questions or as a dose of medicine for the soul. Much of the Art of the 20^th century, especially Modernist painting, literature, music and film, took itself very seriously indeed and we were encouraged to approach it in an austere, reverential state of mind. Films by the likes of Bergman were seen as much more meaningful and worthy than thrillers or westerns or musicals, and ‘literary fiction’ twittered at a higher level than hard-boiled pulp or Mills and Boon romance. However, there was a movement against this earnestness even in the first part of the century, in things like the Dada cabarets, and this rejection of lofty aims and claims grew stronger in the second, spurred on by the social and political problematising of the canon by the Birmingham School and then the theories of postmodernism, and there was increased academic interest in works of art that would once have been dismissed as disposable trash. Plus the internet now makes available a raft of lesser-known work that would once have been lost forever. There is plenty of trash out there.

We all have our favourite trash, of course: mine is 1950s sci-fi movies with their characters wrapped in tin foil, their risible special effects, and their heroines who spend the whole film making coffee until they’re screaming like Fay Wray as the monster carries them off. Then there’s the outrageous camp nonsense of Carmen Miranda in full fruit salad or the dyke drag of Johnny Guitar. And in music, I’ve always had a weakness for silly novelty songs like The Purple People Eater or They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Hahaaa!. The difference these days is that such divertissements are no longer guilty pleasures, shameful moments when we slink off from the heady realms of serious Art and read a comic book under our bedclothes with a torch. Nowadays we glory in our decadence and any opprobrium is reserved for people who enjoy movies like Death in Venice, who are often seen as pretentious poseurs rather than members of an aesthetically sensitive elite.

So what are the attractions of trash? The most important one is obvious: trash is a way we can switch off, relax, and have fun. We aren’t under any pressure to have a meaningful experience or to contemplate the puzzles and bitter twists of an angst-ridden existence. Trash offers us all the fun of the fair with no hard work or responsibility; it is candy floss for the heart and mind and soul.

And let’s face it – sometimes we need that. Life can be hard enough without having to stare into the void each time we step off the treadmill into the welcoming arms of the arts. In that sense, trash performs a similar role in our lives to traditional comedy, with the crucial difference that often the very best trash does not set out to make us laugh; to be laugh-your-ass-off funny, it usually needs to take itself rather too seriously and woefully fail. Nor does it offer laughter only; it sweeps us through a full range of cheap emotions, such as sexual attraction for preppy boys and busty heroines, a frisson of fear when we see them having nookie in their car in the woods and the chords go from major to minor, and relief and joy when the monster is finally destroyed and all is right with the world. Another similarity between trash and comedy is that both work better in front of an audience in collective bursts of laughter. There is little pleasure, for instance, in an ironic reading of Jackie Collins or Jeffrey Archer since this is a solitary activity and offers none of the camaraderie of a Eurovision night or a Rocky Horror party.

Trash also has the appeal of simplicity, of both content and form. Novelty songs, for example, are nearly always musically inane, with silly lyrics (Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini) and moronic, repetitive tunes (Mah Nà Mah Nà). This helps to explain why one person’s gloriously trashy song is another person’s screech of chalky fingers down the blackboard. The morality is equally simple (good versus evil; all-American hero versus people named Boris or Olga). One of the problems I personally have with modern action movies, especially superhero films, is that they now insist that the hero is morally and psychologically complex, and personally I think this muddies the waters and we can’t enjoy cheering for the good guys like we used to. It’s true that I love the moral ambiguity of film noir, but that follows different rules: when film noir is bad, it just becomes plodding and dull, not funny. Bad film noir is generally much worse than bad sci-fi or horror because it never blossoms into trash.

Trash is democratic, especially in comparison with what used to be labelled ‘high culture’. Traditionalists might not see this as a virtue, of course, but as a symptom of decline. What both sides agree on is that we now exist in a world where there is much less confidence about the distinction between high and popular art. Once, perhaps, this was often a gap in quality between the national/international and the local; we couldn’t expect a local orchestra in a small town to be as good as the New York Philharmonic, but we wouldn’t have seen what they created as trash, simply as less professional and accomplished. Once works of art become products, though, which is how most of them are viewed these days, this sense of local pride is generally lost and we judge them much more harshly or even cruelly compared to the more professional stuff that we see online each day. And while we would no more laugh at a local orchestra for their shortcomings than we would at a group of children performing a nativity play, it is much easier to ridicule products which are industrially constructed and of which no single individual claims ownership. (A quick detour here to say how I hate the phrase ‘the culture industries’: this is human beings painting or writing or playing music, not corporations churning out cans of beans.) There is often a cruel element to the mocking of trash and this is made much easier by its anonymity, because generally no one person is the target. Finally, there is simply a lot more art available to us nowadays, so we’re going to see or watch or hear much more z-level stuff which is fair game for ridicule.

Another possible reason for our increase in the love of trash is that aesthetics has been downgraded as a way of evaluating art compared with things like social issues and identity politics, and we tend to care more these days about how works measure up to desired social standards and are acutely aware of the stereotypes which are so prevalent in trash. Thus, we laugh or shake our heads in disbelief when a character says something which is embarrassingly sexist or speaks in an accent like the BBC of old. This is definitely part of my enjoyment of 50s sci-fi and sometimes even work which is definitely not trashy, such as Brief Encounter. As we grow less sensitive to features like beauty and form, we notice only the most gross aesthetic failings or risible special effects, such as a monster that looks like a person under a rug. In contrast, the out-of-date social norms we spot immediately, and we often find them hilarious (perhaps because of an unadmitted social anxiety?).

A couple of months ago, I wrote an essay about camp, and much of what I say about trash here is also true of camp. Often a work of art can be trashy and camp at the same time, and the two identities clearly overlap. Trash offers similar pleasures to camp: a sense of superiority as we look down at what other, less discerning people take seriously. Just as bling is worn to show off wealth, nights spent with other aficionados at Eurovision or Rocky Horror can be critiqued as sly demonstrations of sophistication, but I think this is unfair: mainly they’re just an excuse to party and we don’t need to overthink it. And, as with camp, this ironising gaze has spread out beyond like-minded subcultural cliques into the population at large, so any sense of intellectual superiority from enjoying trash is well and truly gone. We are all devo now.

One field where there is little public enjoyment of trash is contemporary painting, sculpture and art. Many traditionalists, of course, argue that this is because a lot of highly-regarded contemporary art is trash to begin with, and we have been hoodwinked by critics and art dealers into accepting it as meaningful and valuable because this oils the greasy wheels of the art market. Also, very often, as in the work of people like Koons, the Chapman Brothers, and Gilbert and George, the irony and pastiche is built into the artwork, so it becomes almost impossible to ironise it further. Contemporary art is also supported by abstruse and impressive-sounding theory, so many of the people who feel confident about laughing out loud at Plan 9 from Outer Space or Glen or Glenda may not feel the same confidence when looking at Hirst’s spot paintings in a gallery. And even if they do think that his art is grossly overrated, there won’t be the same sense of fun in rejecting it, so I think they’re more likely to categorise it as rubbish (which has no glitter) than trash (which usually has).

Does this mean there is good trash and bad trash? After all, people commonly say that something ‘is so bad that it’s good’, and a cult builds up around it, as happened to the soap opera, Neighbours, on UK university campuses. The aesthetic response becomes ambivalent because there is often a genuine love of the trashy art form, with irony as a way of enjoying it while silencing a feeling deep inside that perhaps one shouldn’t. Plus, of course, there is the simple social pleasure of belonging to a gang of friends having a good time together. As I said earlier about noir, I think the key difference between trash and mediocrity is that the latter is flat and boring whereas the best trash has an outrageous, in-your-face liveliness that is as confident and brash as it is awful.

Personally I have no issue at all with a love of trash and I don’t think we should judge people because they haven’t read Dostoevsky or watched Persona.  Let’s not forget that the theatre which happened in the Globe was generally seen as disposable and who knows how today’s work will be judged in the future? Hard-boiled novels, for example, are now more highly rated than a lot of work which was seen as far more worthy and significant at the time, work which was said to ‘explore the human condition’ while pulp was just about guns and gals and gangsters. I’ll finish by making it clear that I certainly wouldn’t want everything to be trash, and I worry that the commodification of Art is sending us in that direction. I also personally think that a lot of modern art is pretentious rubbish and doesn’t deserve to be classified as trash. But as we open our carton of popcorn and sit back to enjoy The Wasp Woman or The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, let’s celebrate a simple reality: sometimes girls, and even boys, just want to have fun.