It May Be Trash, but It’s Not Garbage

The youth-trash conquest of summer moviegoing became complete in 1981. That’s when it was decided that comic-book movies, coming-of-age comedies and shoot-’em-ups would constitute the daily bread of film fans from May to mid-September.

Think back to the dark spring of 1981. One highly touted film after another, pushed out of its studio nest, swiftly flops. Paul Newman can’t save “Fort Apache, the Bronx.” Sigourney Weaver and William Hurt go down with “Eyewitness.” The Jack Nicholson-Jessica Lange “Postman Always Rings Twice” fails to ring a bell at the box office. Pundits again predict the death of movies as we know them. The only notable commercial success is “Excalibur,” with reports of juvenile fans dressing up like King Arthur to attend repeat showings.

Then comes the deluge. With the advent of summer, “Superman II” opens to record-breaking business; “Raiders of the Lost Ark” starts slower but lasts longer; and “Stripes” turns Bill Murray into a new idol. The marketplace booms as kids turn out in unprecedented numbers. Unhip adults scratch their heads. Hipper adults recognize that each was a better movie than the spring’s more pretentious and prestigious fare.

The box-office results, if not the quality, have been duplicated every summer since, with an unrelenting parade of superheroes, teen idols, rejuvenated idols like John Travolta, and comedy mavericks like Murray.

It’s possible to enjoy this. In fact, while watching torpid cultural relics like Merchant Ivory’s desecration of Henry James’ “The Golden Bowl,” or pseudo-sophisticated genre films such as “With a Friend Like Harry,” I find myself looking forward to big-budget Hollywood monkeyshines--specifically, Tim Burton’s new version of “Planet of the Apes.”

And even if “Jurassic Park III” turns out to be just another sequel, will anyone feel had? The disposability of trash is one of its pleasures. It invites you to forget your learnings and return to the untutored deviltry of puberty.

“Adult” or “intellectual” trash is almost a contradiction in terms. When a crime story or romance or small-town soap opera contains sex or violence or perversion, it becomes trash only when the emotional content is simplified, so you can get it all down in one gulp. When the emotional content is complicated, it becomes greater than the sum of its ingredients: maybe something as great as “Blue Velvet,” which is crime story, romance and small-town soap opera rolled into one.

Immediacy is one of the lures of trash. Bad ideas and purple feelings come at you so quickly that you can enjoy their silliness as they zip by, and later savor the good parts.

Camp is always trash. But trash isn’t always camp. Trash needn’t have the frivolous knowingness, the corrupt sophistication that distinguishes high camp, or the febrile high spirits that distinguish the low. Trash can be simple; trash can be robust. It’s everything you always wanted to know about popular culture but were afraid to ask.

Scratch a great artist and you often find a trash lover. The poet Wallace Stevens delighted in Rafael Sabatini, author of “Scaramouche” and “Captain Blood.” Fellini was a huge comic-book fan. But why look to immortals for certification? I don’t have a single friend who can’t own up to some trash fixation from childhood.

As a boy, I whiled away sleepless nights reading comic books by the dozens and absorbing hundreds of heroic fantasies. In adolescence, my world was dominated by such dazzling and disreputable secret-agent role models as James Bond and Matt Helm, who on the wide screen or in well-worn paperbacks were as deft at women-handling as they were at manhandling, and equally capable of uncorking champagne and defusing nuclear bombs.

Did these fantasies have any wicked side effects? They might have fed into juvenile notions of male and Anglo American supremacy, but current events quickly obliterated my adolescent fascism. And these days, even such PG cartoons as “Shrek” and “Atlantis” have wised up in their sexual and cultural politics.

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Trash has inspired lasting tributes, such as Pauline Kael’s “Trash, Art and the Movies,” Graham Greene’s “The Lost Childhood” and Jules Feiffer’s “The Great Comic Book Heroes.” Indeed, when it comes to trash, no one has covered the waterfront like Kael. What matters to her is “the human material . . . the art of the performers.” She gives us trash moviegoing as a terrific surprise party, sometimes rowdy, sometimes glamorous, where you can meet the most simpatico people.

No one has matched novelist Greene at describing the early allure of trash literature: “. . . in childhood, all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water, they influence the future. I suppose that is why books excited us so much. What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first 14 years?

“Of course, I should be interested to hear that a new novel by Mr. E.M. Forster was going to appear this spring, but I could never compare that mild expectation of civilized pleasure with the missed heartbeat, the appalled glee I felt when I found on a library shelf a novel by H. Rider Haggard. . . .”

One of Greene’s favorite books was Haggard’s “King Solomon’s Mines,” for it mirrored the “jungle” of boyhood emotions and imagination, “the region of uncertainty, of not knowing the way out.”

“King Solomon’s Mines” has been filmed four times. Not surprisingly, the lavish MGM version was a key influence on writer-director Philip Kaufman, who co-wrote the original story for “Raiders of the Lost Ark” with George Lucas.

Feiffer writes about a similar anxious thrill in reading comic books. But he also articulates a primal wish fulfillment peculiar to Americans: “If there were no Clark Kents, only lots of glasses and cheap suits, which, when removed, revealed all of us in our true identities--what a hell of an improved world it would have been!”

The problem with a lot of trash is that the people behind it don’t understand the assumptions of their form. Nothing turns me off a rabble-rouser of a film like “15 Minutes” quicker than the fetid whiff of self-importance--as if an exploitation piece about serial killers and TV also could satirize TV’s exploitation of serial killers.

I vastly prefer movies like Jonathan Mostow’s “Breakdown” or “U-571,” which stay within their movie-fantasy realm and remain true to their convictions. They bring you back to a time of youth when you fantasize about dispelling your nightmares with vivid, slashing action.

Mostow is now set to make “Terminator 3.” I wish it were coming out this summer.