I love trash. I don’t love bad movies. I love trash. By which I mean that I have a predilection for certain kinds of stories and certain emotional journeys. On a cynical level, you might say that what I love is what sells, but it’s not just what sells to me, it’s what sells to a large number of people. This is what makes me instinctively good at what I do.
On the most basic level, I love well-written stories.

But one step of complexity above that, I love things like horror, physical comedy, romantic comedy, sports drama, and action adventure. I identify with both the mainstream audience that evaluates films based on a trailer, and the film geek audience that evaluates films based on franchise, actors, source material, writer, director, and sneak reviews.

My definition of trash is literal: it is a movie experience that you can basically throw away afterwards. It may change your mood, but it doesn’t seek to change your mind. It spends slot of time telling you things you either already know or don’t care about. In short, a trash film is one that reaffirms your sense of who you are, and your ideas of right and wrong.

I’ve probably ticked a lot of writers off by revealing that sensibility (though to be honest, it’s pretty prevalent, so you might as well know that a lot of people feel that way). Why don’t I like thoughtful character dramas or intensely personal psychological dramas? It’s not because they don’t sell, it’s because they’re generally intellectual message movies.

I’m not by any means against intellectuals, but intellectuals have the tendency to believe that thought, logic, and (ew) symbolism are a viable way to change how people behave – and that by putting these elements into a film instead of a novel, they will be able to change the behavior of more people.

Having seen a large number of “smart films,” I know that without a doubt, this policy is pretty ineffective. I would love for it to work, but it generally affects only a small number of people in a profound way.

The truth is twofold: 1) the emotional journey is the most important aspect of any film – in that you must arouse your audiences’ emotions and mess them about in order to affect their behavior, 2) the most effective intellectual changes that can be wrought through film are those that go entirely unremarked upon. (This is a form of brainwashing in which you replace the assumptions of an argument with your brainwashing material instead of the conclusion, forcing people to accept the material in order to argue the correctness of the conclusion.)

Let’s look at some big “message movies,” like, for example, “Fahrenheit 9/11.” It made scads of money and had lots of people talking about it – but it contained many “trashy” elements – for one, its message was not one that anyone who enjoyed the film disagreed with going in. So it was telling the audience what it already knew. For another thing, it grabbed the audiences’ emotions more than their intellect – the fact that Moore fabricated or used out of context many of the films “moments,” does not affect the audience the way a more intellectual film would.

Another example is a film like “Crash,” which is a trash film masquerading as a serious drama. Its main message is that racism is all around us, even if you try not to see it – not something many people wouldn’t have already agreed with. But rather than following the sporadic effects of racism on one person, it showed us dozens, so that it could pack the film with emotional moments to make us feel something. Despite having numerous characters, it wasn’t a serious character study – its whole goal was to make us feel.