Subversive documentaries disquised as cheesy comedies

Rod Serling commented that creating a dramatic tv show that dealt realistically with social problems was very difficult, yet if you disguised it as "science fiction", you could get away with most anything - hence the creation of The Twilight Zone. Unfortunately, things haven't really changed much in fifty years. But the principle remains the same; these days, some of the more profound social observations are coming from cheap and cheesy teen comedies!

One of my favorite social documentaries is Mike Judge's Idiocracy, on the surface a brain-dead teen exploitation flick. Pretty subversive, though; Fox had to release it because of contractual obligations, but refused to market it. Amazing that they ever let it get made. The thesis is that as the more intelligent part of the population delays having children and have smaller families, the Beavis and Butthead part of society would become dominant, resulting in a totally superfluous consumer culture controlled by mega-corporations and devoid of science, appealing only to the reptile brain (hey, it works for Fox News). Imagine a world with Costcos the size of a small city, and the English language reduced to a weird patois of hip-hop, "hillbilly", and assorted grunts. Hmmm, sounds like daytime TV.

Here's another inexplicable film - Josie and the Pussycats. Even the Onion had little good to say about it. On the surface, it's just another vapid teen comedy about manufactured MTV type music acts, and was based on a cheesy Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon, based on a comic book spinoff of Archie, with dubious acting talent. Not very good credentials. But taken as a surreal critique of consumer culture, it is magnificent. One of its aspects is ubiquitous product placement, almost every scene if full of corporate sponsorship tie-ins of one sort or another. But according to Wikipedia, no money changed hands; it was strictly a plot device, probably to the chagrin of many of the corporations that were mocked. The plot revolved around a government-corporate conspiracy to use subliminal messages in pop records to sell worthless products. Even though in real life the whole "subliminal advertising" business has been disproven as an effective means of brainwashing and is mostly urban legend, there are plenty of people who believe the government must be up to something, True or not, it would certainly explain our fascination with "designer" brands and crappy pop music. Plus, it has Parker Posey in it (even if her character is a bit over the top), and she has never appeared in a film I didn't enjoy.

Cheesy films have often been at our cultural vanguard; Roger Corman's B movies of the late fifties and early sixties were the spawning ground of artists like Francis Ford Coppola, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson. He didn't care what went in to them, if they could be filmed in five days for a hundred grand and make a profit.

The only other medium that has been allowed to get away with this has been comics. Some of the best social satire and commentary of the last sixty years has been from Mad (originally a comic book that satirized other comics). Harvey Kurtzman and Bill Elder were great radicals who had a profound effect on my generation; he evolution from Starchie to Goodman Beaver was quite remarkable.

Kind of weird how Archie seems to be a common thread here - a seemingly innocent ripoff of Andy Hardy and Henry Aldrich, published by a lawsuit-happy ultra-conservative who latger came out with a series of Christian-themed Archie mags (pretty bizarre). What differentiated Archie was the way he had to choose between two girlfriends, instead of the single airhead love interest that most comics of the late forties had. Betty and Veronica (who, as Starchie pointed out, were essentially clones physically), represented a kind of yin-yang swing from a wholesome "girl next door" to a superficial capitalist type who valued money and style above ethics. Hmm, maybe it wasn't so different than the above films, even if the publisher didn't quite understand.