Like to watch trashy movies? You might really be smart, says study

If you are someone who loves to gorge on crappy movies, here’s good news for you.

A study, titled ‘Enjoying Trash Films: Underlying features, viewing stances, and experiential response dimensions’ has found that people who like trashy movies are actually smart creatures. 

“Sorry for the interruption. This is only my introduction. During the cross examination, you will see my action-cum-direction, added with perfection. In the name of the witness, you are playing with imitation. That’s my conception!” Tamil actor T. Rajendar delivers this dialogue in a court-room scene that shook the very foundation of advocacy in Chennai in the 1994 release ‘Oru Vasantha Geetham’.

In ‘Gunda’- the 1998 Mithun Chakraborty-starrer said to be B-grade Bollywood's best kept secrets, the character played by Harish Patel famously introduces himself as “Mera naam hai Ibu Hatela, Maa meri chudail ki beti, baap mera shaitan ka chela, khayega kela?” The movie which was generously interspersed with other similar ‘gems’ garnered its own cult following over the years.

Such movies share a similarity in not just their egregious dialogues, but in their overall ‘appalling’ness. These movies are so trashy that in a weird turn of fate, they ironically end up with a devoted fan base.   

The study -published in August through an explorative online survey- found that ‘trash’ films are generally identified as ‘cheap’" and ones that get made on a low-budget. 

"Viewers attribute not just amusing/entertaining qualities to such movies, but also a positive, transgressive deviance from the cinematic mainstream, and their appreciation of these films is coupled with marked preferences for art cinema," the study states.

"The majority of trash-film fans appear to be well-educated cultural ‘omnivores’, and they conceive of their preference for trash films in terms of an ironic viewing stance," it adds. 

Lead author Keyvan Sarkhosh -a post-doctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics- told The Telegraph, "To such viewers, trash films appear as an interesting and welcome deviation from the mainstream fare. We are dealing here with an audience with above-average education that one could describe as 'cultural omnivores'. Such viewers are interested in a broad spectrum of art and media across the traditional boundaries of high and popular culture."

Sarkhosh also named ‘Sharknado’ as a ‘perfect example’ of a trash film.